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Politics and Society in the Developing World by Peter Calvert


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Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics


Yochai Benkler - 2018
    It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.Is social media destroying democracy? Are Russian propaganda or "Fake news" entrepreneurs on Facebook undermining our sense of a shared reality? A conventional wisdom has emerged since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that new technologies and their manipulation by foreign actors played a decisive role in his victory and are responsible for the sense of a "post-truth" moment in which disinformation and propaganda thrives.Network Propaganda challenges that received wisdom through the most comprehensive study yet published on media coverage of American presidential politics from the start of the election cycle in April 2015 to the one year anniversary of the Trump presidency. Analysing millions of news stories together with Twitter and Facebook shares, broadcast television and YouTube, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the architecture of contemporary American political communications. Through data analysis and detailed qualitative case studies of coverage of immigration, Clinton scandals, and the Trump Russia investigation, the book finds that the right-wing media ecosystem operates fundamentally differently than the rest of the media environment.The authors argue that longstanding institutional, political, and cultural patterns in American politics interacted with technological change since the 1970s to create a propaganda feedback loop in American conservative media. This dynamic has marginalized centre-right media and politicians, radicalized the right wing ecosystem, and rendered it susceptible to propaganda efforts, foreign and domestic. For readers outside the United States, the book offers a new perspective and methods for diagnosing the sources of, and potential solutions for, the perceived global crisis of democratic politics.

The Passage to Europe


Luuk van Middelaar - 2009
    

Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History


James A. Morone - 2003
    Mr. Morone has a knack for peeling off veneers, for locating the surprising fact, for adopting the unexpected and illuminating slant. He is a rarity, a scholar who is never boring.”—Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Soul of a New Machine“Hellfire Nation [places] much of our public life in its proper soul-searching context—and its careful anatomy of the hand-in-glove relations between the American state and the American faithful is both welcome and illuminating.”—Chris Lehmann, Washington Post Book World

None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture


Joshua E.S. Phillips - 2010
    For more than three years, reporter Joshua E. S. Phillips—with the support of Adam’s mother and several of his Army buddies—investigated Adam’s death. What Phillips uncovered was a story of American veterans psychologically scarred by the abuse they had meted out to Iraqi prisoners. How did US forces turn to torture? Phillips’s narrative recounts the journey of a tank battalion—trained for conventional combat—as its focus switches to guerrilla war and prisoner detention. It tells of how a group of ordinary soldiers, ill trained for the responsibilities foisted upon them, descended into the degradation of abuse. The location is far from CIA prisons and Guantanamo, but the story captures the widespread use and nature of torture in the US armed forces. Based on firsthand reporting from the Middle East, as well as interviews with soldiers, their families and friends, military officials, and the victims of torture, None of Us Were Like This Before reveals how soldiers, senior officials, and the US public came to believe that torture was both effective and necessary. The book illustrates that the damaging legacy of torture is not only borne by the detainees, but also by American soldiers and the country to which they’ve returned.

Western Political Thought


O.P. Gauba
    

The Red Kayak


John R. Weber - 2006
    Fortunately, he meets Nick Dietrich, the waterfront director, who helps him overcome his fears and eventually have enough confidence to pass his swimming test and learn to kayak. Jordan's first relationship with Nick is that of hero-worship. When Jordan helps Nick rescue two of Jordan's friends from the lake at night, Jordan's hero-worship turns into a deep friendship. Later, Nick takes Jordan on his first whitewater kayak trip in northern Wisconsin on the Wolf River. Jordan discovers that it's much harder to kayak on a moving river than on a lake and he is terrified of the rushing water. Early in the trip, Nick is seriously injured in an accident that Jordan thinks he caused. Since Nick can no longer paddle, Jordan must overcome his fears of the water and paddle by himself almost twenty miles to the take-out point to get help to rescue Nick. After Nick is rescued, Jordan must confront his guilt and somehow maintain his friendship with Nick.

The McDonaldization of Society


George Ritzer - 1995
    The McDonaldization of Society, Revised New Century Edition discusses how McDonaldization and the broader process of globalization (in a new Chapter 8), are spreading more widely and more deeply into various social institutions such as education, medicine, the criminal justice system, and more. This Revised New Century Edition provides many new, relevant examples from recent events and contemporary popular culture, including the ever-increasing global proliferation of McDonald′s and other fast food franchises, shopping malls, and similar commercial entities. Their impact is examined in the post-September 11, 2001 era.

This Won't Hurt Me A Bit: What it's really like to work in health care


Josh McAdams - 2019
    Welcome to laughing until it hurts while covered in bodily fluids. Welcome to simple math at very high stakes. Welcome to an incredibly inappropriate sense of humor. Welcome to serving people on the most stressful days of their lives. Welcome to putting your hands in places you never imagined they'd be. Welcome to your front row seat to the ballad of life and death. That's not the welcome that this nurse was looking for, but that's the one he got. Irreverent and audacious, this brutally honest memoir covers what it’s like to come of age in an American Hospital. Welcome to a rollicking peak behind the curtain to what medical providers, and the health care system, are truly like.

I Hear America Singing


Walt Whitman - 1966
    After a childhood in Brooklyn, he spent many years in and around Manhattan and Washington, where he witnessed troops returning from the Civil War and tended wounded soldiers in the camp hospitals. Whitman's broad humanity, his love of cities (especially Manhattan), his sympathy with all conditions of people, and his visionary - even prophetic - sense of the reality of the American dream make him as much a poet for our time as he was for the time of the American Civil War and its aftermath. This selection of courageous and consoling poems focuses on Whitman's vision of democracy, his love of Manhattan, his sense of the future - and of the community of peoples of this earth.

Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France


Christophe Guilluy - 2016
    The divide between the global economy’s winners and losers in today’s France has replaced the old left‑right split, leaving many on “the periphery.”As Guilluy shows, there is no unified French economy, and those cut off from the country’s new economic citadels suffer disproportionately on both economic and social fronts. In Guilluy’s analysis, the lip service paid to the idea of an “open society” in France is a smoke screen meant to hide the emergence of a closed society, walled off for the benefit of the upper classes. The ruling classes in France are reaching a dangerous stage, he argues; without the stability of a growing economy, the hope for those excluded from growth is extinguished, undermining the legitimacy of a multicultural nation.

Modern Latin America


Thomas E. Skidmore - 1984
    Thoroughly updated and revised, the book includes a new chapter on the history of Colombia from the wars of independence to the violent conflicts of the present day. It also examines such topics as: * the impact of 9/11 on U.S.-Latin American relations * globalization * drug trafficking * women's roles in society and politics * the fragility and uncertainty of democracy in Latin AmericaThe book features sociocultural sections and boxes in nearly every chapter, covering such diverse areas as the psychology of exile, Santer�a in Cuba, baseball in the Dominican Republic, and the popularity of Latin music in the U.S. All political and economic information has been updated. As in earlier editions, the authors use an in-depth case study approach that guides readers through the major countries of Latin America, highlighting central themes including European-New World interaction, racial mixtures, military takeovers, and United States intervention in the area. With an insightful look into the future, Modern Latin America, Sixth Edition, will continue to be an exceptional text for undergraduate courses on contemporary Latin American history, society, and politics.

Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics


Cynthia Enloe - 1990
    Cynthia Enloe pulls back the curtain on the familiar scenes—governments promoting tourism, companies moving their factories overseas, soldiers serving on foreign soil—and shows that the real landscape is not exclusively male. She describes how many women's seemingly personal strategies—in their marriages, in their housework, in their coping with ideals of beauty—are, in reality, the stuff of global politics. In exposing policymakers' reliance on false notions of "femininity" and "masculinity," Enloe dismantles an apparently overwhelming world system, revealing it to be much more fragile and open to change than we think.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: Tennesse Williams (York Notes Advanced)


Steve Roberts - 2007
    One of his best-loved and most famous plays, it exposes the lies plaguing the family of a wealthy Southern planter of humble origins.

Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy


Robert D. Putnam - 1992
    Their focus is on a unique experiment begun in 1970 when Italy created new governments for each of its regions. After spending two decades analyzing the efficacy of these governments in such fields as agriculture, housing, and health services, they reveal patterns of associationism, trust, and cooperation that facilitate good governance and economic prosperity.

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty


Wendy Brown - 2009
    Drawing on classical and contemporary political theories of state sovereignty in order to understand how state power and national identity persist amid its decline, Brown considers both the need of the state for legitimacy and the popular desires that incite the contemporary building of walls. The new walls -- dividing Texas from Mexico, Israel from Palestine, South Africa from Zimbabwe -- consecrate the broken boundaries they would seem to contest and signify the ungovernability of a range of forces unleashed by globalization. Yet these same walls often amount to little more than theatrical props, frequently breached, and blur the distinction between law and lawlessness that they are intended to represent. But if today's walls fail to resolve the conflicts between globalization and national identity, they nonetheless project a stark image of sovereign power. Walls, Brown argues, address human desires for containment and protection in a world increasingly without these provisions. Walls respond to the wish for horizons even as horizons are vanquished.