Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization


Arjun Appadurai - 1996
    Every day we hear this idea expressed and witness its reality in our lives-through the people we meet, the products we buy, the foods we eat, and the movies we watch. In this bold look at the cultural effects of a shrinking world, leading cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai places these challenges and pleasures of contemporary life in a broad global perspective.Offering a new framework for the cultural study of globalization, Modernity at Large shows how the imagination works as a social force in today's world, providing new resources for identity and energies for creating alternatives to the nation-state, whose era some see as coming to an end. Appadurai examines the current epoch of globalization, which is characterized by the twin forces of mass migration and electronic mediation, and provides fresh ways of looking at popular consumption patterns, debates about multiculturalism, and ethnic violence. He considers the way images-of lifestyles, popular culture, and self-representation-circulate internationally through the media and are often borrowed in surprising (to their originators) and inventive fashions.Appadurai simultaneously explores and explodes boundaries-between how we imagine the world and how that imagination influences our self-understanding, between social institutions and their effects on the people who participate in them, between nations and peoples that seem to be ever more homogeneous and yet ever more filled with differences. Modernity at Large offers a path to move beyond traditional oppositions between culture and power, tradition and modernity, global and local, pointing out the vital role imagination plays in our construction of the world of today-and tomorrow.

On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life


Sara Ahmed - 2012
    Diversity is an ordinary even unremarkable feature of institutional life. And yet, diversity practitioners often experience institutions as resistant to their work, as captured through their use of the metaphor of the “brick wall.” On Being Included offers an explanation of this apparent paradox. It explores the gap between symbolic commitments to diversity and the experience of those who embody diversity. Commitments to diversity are understood as "non-performatives" that do not bring about what they name. The book provides an account of institutional whiteness and shows how racism can be obscured by the institutionalization of diversity. Diversity is used as evidence that institutions do not have a problem with racism. On Being Included offers a critique of what happens when diversity is offered as a solution. It also shows how diversity workers generate knowledge of institutions in attempting to transform them.

The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color Among African Americans


Kathy Russell - 1992
    A courageous, humane, and provocative examination  of how differences in color and features among  African Americans have played and continue to play a  role in their professional lives, friendships,  romances, and families.

Race in North America: Origins and Evolution of a Worldview


Audrey Smedley - 1993
    In its origin, race was not a product of science but a folk ideology reflecting a new form of social stratification and a rationalization for inequality among the peoples of North America.This third edition incorporates recently published new source materials on the history of race ideology. Because “race” now has global manifestations, it also introduces the work of scholars who are examining the spread of race ideology cross-culturally.The new edition of Race in North America also looks more closely at the positions and arguments of contemporary race scientists. Although objective scientists have shown that any two humans are 99.9% alike genetically, race scientists maintain that the remaining difference of one-tenth of one percent is highly significant, accounting for many biological and behavioral differences that they assume to be hereditary. Race scientists contend, for example, that there are race differences in diseases and responses to medications, along with differences in intellect and in talent and ability in such fields as sports. Thus, they claim, race is a valid biological concept.Smedley argues that no amount of research into biological or genetic differences can help us understand the phenomenon of race in American society. Race can only be understood as a component of the sociocultural domain, not the domain of biology.

Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race


Patrick Wolfe - 2015
    Bringing a historical perspective to bear on the regimes of race that colonizers have sought to impose on Aboriginal people in Australia, on Blacks and Native Americans in the United States, on Ashkenazi Jews in Western Europe, on Arab Jews in Israel/Palestine, and on people of African descent in Brazil, this book shows how race marks and reproduces the different relationships of inequality into which Europeans have coopted subaltern populations: territorial dispossession, enslavement, confinement, assimilation, and removal. Charting the different modes of domination that engender specific regimes of race and the strategies of anti-colonial resistance they entail, the book powerfully argues for cross-racial solidarities that respect these historical differences.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain


Stuart Hall - 1976
    Looking in detail at the wide range of post-war youth subcultures, from teds, mods and skinheads to black Rastafarians, Resistance through Rituals considers how youth culture reflects and reacts to cultural change. This text represents the collective understanding of the leading centre for contemporary culture, and serves to situate some of the most important cultural work of the twentieth century in the new millennium.

Image - Music - Text


Roland Barthes - 1977
    His selection of essays, each important in its own right, also serves as ‘the best... introduction so far to Barthes’ career as the slayer of contemporary myths’. (John Sturrock, New Statesman)

A History of U.S. Feminisms


Rory Dicker - 2008
    Feminism is an introductory text designed to be used as supplementary material for first-year women’s studies students or as a brush-up text for more advanced students. Covering the first, second, and third waves of feminism, The History of U.S. Feminism provides historical context of all the major events and players since the late nineteenth century through today.The chapters cover first-wave feminism, a period of feminist activity during the nineteenth and early twentieth century which focused primarily on gaining women's suffrage; second-wave feminism, which started in the ’60s and lasted through the ’80s and is best understood as emphasizing the connection between the personal and the political; and third-wave feminism, which started in the early ’90s and arose in part from a backlash against the movements propagated by the second wave.

Girls I Know


Douglas Trevor - 2013
    In the aftermath, Walt forms two new relationships: one with Ginger Newton, a privileged, reckless, Harvard undergraduate who is interviewing women about their lives for a book called Girls I Know, and the other with 11-year-old Mercedes Bittles, whose parents were killed in the restaurant. Wounded but resilient, all three must deal with loss and grief and the consequences that come when their lives change in unexpected ways.

Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times


Jasbir K. Puar - 2007
    Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are realigning in relation to contemporary forces of securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism. She examines how liberal politics incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, through developments including the legal recognition inherent in the overturning of anti-sodomy laws and the proliferation of more mainstream representation. These incorporations have shifted many queers from their construction as figures of death (via the AIDS epidemic) to subjects tied to ideas of life and productivity (gay marriage and reproductive kinship). Puar contends, however, that this tenuous inclusion of some queer subjects depends on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. Heteronormative ideologies that the U.S. nation-state has long relied on are now accompanied by homonormative ideologies that replicate narrow racial, class, gender, and national ideals. These “homonationalisms” are deployed to distinguish upright “properly hetero,” and now “properly homo,” U.S. patriots from perversely sexualized and racialized terrorist look-a-likes—especially Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabs—who are cordoned off for detention and deportation. Puar combines transnational feminist and queer theory, Foucauldian biopolitics, Deleuzian philosophy, and technoscience criticism, and draws from an extraordinary range of sources, including governmental texts, legal decisions, films, television, ethnographic data, queer media, and activist organizing materials and manifestos. Looking at various cultural events and phenomena, she highlights troublesome links between terrorism and sexuality: in feminist and queer responses to the Abu Ghraib photographs, in the triumphal responses to the Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision repealing anti-sodomy laws, in the measures Sikh Americans and South Asian diasporic queers take to avoid being profiled as terrorists, and in what Puar argues is a growing Islamophobia within global queer organizing.

No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock


Marina Warner - 1998
    Songs, stories, images, and films about frightening monsters have always been invented to allay the very terrors that our sleep of reason conjures up. Warner shows how these images and stories, while they may unfold along different lines - scaring, lulling, or making mock - have the strategic simultaneous purpose of both arousing and controlling the underlying fear. In analysis of material long overlooked by cultural critics, historians, and even psychologists, Warner revises our understanding of storytelling in our contemporary culture. She asks us to reconsider the unintended consequences of our age-old, outmoded notions about masculine identity and about racial stereotyping, and warns us of the dangerous, unthinking ways we perpetuate the bogeyman.

Learning from Strangers: The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview Studies


Robert Stuart Weiss - 1995
    It draws on Robert Weiss's thirty years of experience in interviewing and teaching others how to do it. The most effective interviews, says Weiss, rely on creating cooperation -- an open and trusting alliance between interviewer and respondent, dedicated to specific and honest accounts of both internal and external events. Against the eclectic background of his work in national sample surveys, studies based on semi-structured interviewing, and participant observation, Weiss walks the reader through the method of qualitative interview studies: sample selection, development of an interview guide, the conduct of the interview, analysis, and preparation of the data. Weiss gives examples of successful and less successful interviews and offers specific techniques and guidelines for the practitioner.

On Critical Pedagogy


Henry A. Giroux - 2011
    This impassioned book starts with the crucial role of pedagogy in schools before extending the notion to the educational force of the wider culture. Giroux focuses on five crucial elements associated with critical pedagogy. First, he presents an overview of the term as it applies to schooling and to larger cultural spheres. Second, he analyzes the increasingly empirical orientation of teaching, focusing on the culture of positivism. Section Three examines some of the major economic, social, and political forces undermining the promise of democratic schooling in both public and higher education. Giroux then outlines increasing attempts by both right wing and liberal interests to reduce schooling to training and students merely to customers. Finally, the book focuses on the legacy of Paulo Freire and issues a fundamental challenge to educators, public intellectuals, and others who believe in the promise of a radical democracy.

Qualitative Data Analysis: A Methods Sourcebook


Matthew B. Miles - 2013
    Several of the data display strategies from previous editions are now presented in re-envisioned and reorganized formats to enhance reader accessibility and comprehension. The Third Edition's presentation of the fundamentals of research design and data management is followed by five distinct methods of analysis: exploring, describing, ordering, explaining, and predicting. Miles and Huberman′s original research studies are profiled and accompanied with new examples from Salda�a′s recent qualitative work. The book′s most celebrated chapter, Drawing and Verifying Conclusions, is retained and revised, and the chapter on report writing has been greatly expanded, and is now called Writing About Qualitative Research. Comprehensive and authoritative, Qualitative Data Analysis has been elegantly revised for a new generation of qualitative researchers.

Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City


St. Clair Drake - 1945
    Based on a mass of research conducted by Works Progress Administration field workers in the late 1930s, it is a historical and sociological account of the people of Chicago's South Side, the classic urban ghetto. Drake and Cayton's findings not only offer a generalized analysis of black migration, settlement, community structure, and black-white race relations in the early part of the twentieth century, but also tell us what has changed in the last hundred years and what has not. This edition includes the original Introduction by Richard Wright and a new Foreword by William Julius Wilson."Black Metropolis is a rare combination of research and synthesis, a book to be deeply pondered. . . . No one who reads it intelligently can ever believe again that our racial dilemma can be solved by pushing buttons, or by gradual processes which may reach four or five hundred years into the future."—Bucklin Moon, The Nation"This volume makes a great contribution to the building of the future American and the free world."—Louis Wirth, New York Times"By virtue of its range, its labor and its insight, the book seems certain to become a landmark not only in race studies but in the broader field of social anthropology."—Thomas Sancton, New Republic