Multiple Minority Identities by
'[V]ery few texts cover such a broad range of diversity and intersecting identities.'--PsycCRITIQUESThis important volume chronicles a shift from the old multicultural paradigm that depicts members of a minority group as being limited to racial and ethnic categories, to a modern definition of minorities. Moreover, many of these stigmatized individuals belong to more than one minority group, resulting in stigmatization not only outside of their identified primary group, but also within it.Seeking to address the complex problems of individuals who claim more than one minority identification, the volume culls the accumulated wisdom of leaders in the field of minority research and practice and integrates the three major areas of multicultural and diversity studies in a single volume. It addresses social identity, power and privilege, AIDS, multiculturalism as it relates to gender, as well as ethnicity. It also discusses therapeutic approaches, supervisory issues, and interpersonal issues for practitioners. It provides self-administered inventories, to help clinicians assess their need for additional supervision or training.Key Features:Integrates ethnic and racial minority issues, gender and sexual orientation studies, and disability studies, all in one volumeAddresses diversity within and between cultural and minority groupsPresents the latest findings from experts in minority research and practiceEstablishes a new paradigm for understanding the impact of membership in a minority groupOffers practical advice bolstered by case studies
Sociological Trespasses: interrogating sin and flesh by
Racism, collective violence, sickness, environmental catastrophe, body obsession, greed, and accelerated life concern everyone. They are also the subject matter of this book. Here, however, they are not viewed as social problems to be solved by technical experts. Instead, they are viewed as products of the joint transference of aspects of ourselves onto objects independent of ourselves. More specifically, they emerge from conviction there is something "out there"-say, a nation, an enemy, time, money, the environment, a medical cure, a bodily orifice (the mouth or genitals), a significant individual, or an anonymous public, etc.-the advancement of, accumulation of, defeat of, management of, or obeisance to can complete us, secure us, fill us, stabilize us, or in some other way enable us to escape from or deny our "lack": our existential precariousness or death. Sociological Trespasses attempts to disillusion readers of this conviction. This is not done for itself, but to create space for imagining new horizons of lived-possibility, such as tolerance of human difference, simplicity, slowness, care, and wakefulness.
American Grace: how religion divides and unites us by
Unique among nations, America is deeply religious, religiously diverse, and remarkably tolerant. But in recent decades the nation's religious landscape has been reshaped.
America has experienced three seismic shocks, say Robert Putnam and David Campbell. In the 1960s, religious observance plummeted. Then in the 1970s and 1980s, a conservative reaction produced the rise of evangelicalism and the Religious Right. Since the 1990s, however, young people, turned off by that linkage between faith and conservative politics, have abandoned organized religion. The result has been a growing polarization--the ranks of religious conservatives and secular liberals have swelled, leaving a dwindling group of religious moderates in between. At the same time, personal interfaith ties are strengthening. Interfaith marriage has increased while religious identities have become more fluid. Putnam and Campbell show how this denser web of personal ties brings surprising interfaith tolerance, notwithstanding the so-called culture wars.
American Grace is based on two of the most comprehensive surveys ever conducted on religion and public life in America. It includes a dozen in-depth profiles of diverse congregations across the country, which illuminate how the trends described by Putnam and Campbell affect the lives of real Americans.
Religion and Class in America: Culture, History, and Politics by
Drawing on a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches, this book compiles fresh data to revitalize a long overdue discussion about how class matters in the study of religion by examining the many ways class interacts with the theologies, practices, beliefs, and affiliations that constitute American religion, yesterday and today.
Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America by
Leave now, or die!” Those words-or ones just as ominous-have echoed through the past hundred years of American history, heralding a very unnatural disaster-a wave of racial cleansing that wiped out or drove away black populations from counties across the nation. While we have long known about horrific episodes of lynching in the South, this story of racial cleansing has remained almost entirely unknown. These expulsions, always swift and often violent, were extraordinarily widespread in the period between Reconstruction and the Depression era. In the heart of the Midwest and the Deep South, whites rose up in rage, fear, and resentment to lash out at local blacks. They burned and killed indiscriminately, sweeping entire counties clear of blacks to make them racially pure.” Many of these counties remain virtually all-white to this day. In Buried in the Bitter Waters, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Elliot Jaspin exposes a deeply shameful chapter in the nation’s history-and one that continues to shape the geography of race in America.
Color by Number: understanding racism through facts and stats on children by
Many deny that racism remains pervasive in America today. How can we open eyes to the continuing disadvantages that keep many people of color from fulfilling their potential, and having an equal chance to achieve the "American Dream"?
By presenting the impact of racism on the most innocent and powerless members of society- children of color - in the form of statistics, this book aims to change attitudes and perceptions.
Children have no say about where they are born or what school they attend. They have no control over whether or not they get medical treatment when they fall ill. They can't avoid exposure if their home is in a community blighted by pollution. The questions this book poses are: What responsibility do we expect children to take for their life circumstances? Do those conditions blight their futures? If they aren't responsible, who is? Are some in society privileged and complicit in denying people of color the advantages and protections from harm most of us take for granted?
Through the cumulative effect of official statistics rather than the more usual reliance on anecdote - by taking a "show me the numbers!" approach - this book will open minds, start conversations, and even prompt readers to take action.
While the numbers are official they are often hard to find because they are scattered across so many sources. Art Munin has not only done the research, but shows the reader how to locate data on racial and socio-economic disparities, and develop her or his own case or classroom project.
Color by Number takes as its metaphorical point of departure the familiar children's activity of that name. Art Munin has painstakingly researched and gathered the numbers, and has filled in the spaces to reveal the hidden picture of racism in America from the perspectives of health, the environment, the law, and education.
This book is intended as a fact-based, antiracism text for diversity and social justice courses, and as a resource for diversity and social justice educators as they craft their race, racism, and White privilege curricula.
Art Munin's multidisciplinary approach - drawing on scholarly work from medicine, law, sociology, psychology, and education - provides the reader with a comprehensive way to understand the pervasiveness of racism.
Color Matters: skin tone bias and the myth of a post-racial America by
In the United States, as in many parts of the world, people are discriminated against based on the color of their skin. This type of skin tone bias, or colorism, is both related to and distinct from discrimination on the basis of race, with which it is often conflated. Preferential treatment of lighter skin tones over darker occurs within racial and ethnic groups as well as between them. While America has made progress in issues of race over the past decades, discrimination on the basis of color continues to be a constant and often unremarked part of life.
In Color Matters , Kimberly Jade Norwood has collected the most up-to-date research on this insidious form of discrimination, including perspectives from the disciplines of history, law, sociology, and psychology. Anchored with historical chapters that show how the influence and legacy of slavery have shaped the treatment of skin color in American society, the contributors to this volume bring to light the ways in which colorism affects us all--influencing what we wear, who we see on television, and even which child we might pick to adopt. Sure to be an eye-opening collection for anyone curious about how race and color continue to affect society, Color Matters provides students of race in America with wide-ranging overview of a crucial topic.
Coming Apart: the state of white America, 1960-2010 by
Coming Apart - an acclaimed bestseller that explains why white America has become fractured and divided in education and class.
In Coming Apart , Charles Murray explores the formation of American classes that are different in kind from anything we have ever known, focusing on whites as a way of driving home the fact that the trends he describes do not break along lines of race or ethnicity.
Drawing on five decades of statistics and research, Coming Apart demonstrates that a new upper class and a new lower class have diverged so far in core behaviors and values that they barely recognize their underlying American kinship--divergence that has nothing to do with income inequality and that has grown during good economic times and bad.
The top and bottom of white America increasingly live in different cultures, Murray argues, with the powerful upper class living in enclaves surrounded by their own kind, ignorant about life in mainstream America, and the lower class suffering from erosions of family and community life that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness. That divergence puts the success of the American project at risk.
The evidence in Coming Apart is about white America. Its message is about all of America.
A Different Mirror: a history of multicultural America by
Takaki, a Berkeley professor, has taken a controversial subject and gone behind it, fleshing out its history. America is multicultural, and every step of its development has involved incorporation of another people, either stolen from their homes, fleeing them, or looking for new opportunity. These chapters illustrate the immigrant experiences of Japanese, African, Irish, and Jewish Americans, as well as others. In his precisely written account, Takaki does not skirt controversy. He fully exposes the abuses suffered by Native Americans, African slaves, and all nationalities who have worked in the sweatshops, plantations, and construction projects that fueled the growth of the U.S. By simply showing the facts of multiculturalism, the historical coincidence of all our many minorities, the author eloquently shows the need for this viewpoint to be part of our education. Highly recommended for all history and social issues collections. ~--Angus Trimnell
Discrimination and Disparities by
In this new, revised and enlarged edition, Discrimination and Disparities goes beyond its analysis--in the first edition--of the sources of disparities and the different kinds of discrimination. It deals with undeniable fact of gross disparities in opportunity, without succumbing to the 'social justice' vision of our time--a vision with demonstrably false assumptions, and solutions that may not even be possible, in any comprehensive and sustainable sense. Instead, some more modest but feasible options are examined."--Dust jacket.
A Dreadful Deceit: the myth of race from the colonial era to Obama's America by
In 1656, a Maryland planter tortured and killed an enslaved man named Antonio, an Angolan who refused to work in the fields. Three hundred years later, Simon P. Owens battled soul-deadening technologies as well as the fiction of "race" that divided him from his co-workers in a Detroit auto-assembly plant. Separated by time and space, Antonio and Owens nevertheless shared a distinct kind of political vulnerability; they lacked rights and opportunities in societies that accordedmarked privileges to people labeled "white."An American creation myth posits that these two black men were the victims of "racial" discrimination, a primal prejudice that the United States has haltingly but gradually repudiated over the course of many generations. In A Dreadful Deceit, award-winning historian Jacqueline Jones traces the lives of Antonio, Owens, and four other African Americans to illustrate the strange history of "race" in America. In truth, Jones shows, race does not exist, and the very factors that we think of as determining it- a person's heritage or skin color-are mere pretexts for the brutalization of powerless people by the powerful. Jones shows that for decades, southern planters did not even bother to justify slavery by invoking the concept of race; only in the late eighteenth century did whites begin to rationalize the exploitation and marginalization of blacks through notions of "racial" difference. Indeed, race amounted to a political strategy calculated to defend overt forms of discrimination, as revealed in the stories of Boston King, a fugitive in Revolutionary South Carolina; Elleanor Eldridge, a savvy but ill-starred businesswoman in antebellum Providence, Rhode Island; Richard W. White, aUnion veteran and Republican politician in post-Civil War Savannah; and William Holtzclaw, founder of an industrial school for blacks in Mississippi, where many whites opposed black schooling of any kind. These stories expose the fluid, contingent, and contradictory idea of race, and the disastrous effects it has had, both in the past and in our own supposedly post-racial society.Expansive, visionary, and provocative, A Dreadful Deceit explodes the pernicious fiction that has shaped four centuries of American history.
Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America by
Harlem is one of the most famous neighborhoods in the world—a historic symbol of both black cultural achievement and of the rigid boundaries separating the rich from the poor. But as this book shows us, Harlem is far more culturally and economically diverse than its caricature suggests: through extensive fieldwork and interviews, John L. Jackson reveals a variety of social networks and class stratifications, and explores how African Americans interpret and perform different class identities in their everyday behavior.
Immigrant Experiences by
Immigrant Experiences: Why Immigrants Come to the United States and What They Find When They Get Here weaves together detailed historical and contemporary examples of immigration to the United States that move beyond hackneyed stereotypes about immigrants to give readers a fact-based understanding of why and how immigration occurs. Discussing immigration from the 1800s to today, Ewing explores the motivations, challenges, and triumphs of various immigrant groups, including the Irish, Italians, Mexicans, Chinese, and Indians. Tackling issues of discrimination and assimilation, this book looks at how immigrants have added to the American culture and way of life, and what to expect going forward.
Islam, Gender and Migrant Integration: the case of Somali immigrant families by
Al Huraibi addresses three questions: how do Somali immigrants negotiate gender notions and practices between those maintained in Somali culture and those adopted from mainstream American culture; how immigrants¿ understandings of Islamic writings on gender shape the negotiation process and how the integration process shapes their understanding of Islamic gender discourse; and to what extent resultant gender perceptions and practices reflect the transnational integration and cultural hybridism of two or more cultures. Al Huraibi concludes that respondents¿ cross-cultural selection of aspects from both cultures indicates a transnational pattern of integration in a globalized world. She argues, contrary to common perceptions, that Islam enables Muslim immigrants to distance themselves from certain aspects of the culture left behind and to embrace aspects from the host culture. All in order to be better Muslims.
Making a Way Out of No Way: African American women and the second great migration by
The Second Great Migration, the movement of African Americans between the South and the North that began in the early 1940s and tapered off in the late 1960s, transformed America. This migration of approximately five million people helped improve the financial prospects of black Americans, who, in the next generation, moved increasingly into the middle class. Over seven years, Lisa Krissoff Boehm gathered oral histories with women migrants and their children, two groups largely overlooked in the story of this event. She also utilized existing oral histories with migrants and southerners in leading archives. In extended excerpts from the oral histories, and in thoughtful scholarly analysis of the voices, this book offers a unique window into African American women?s history. These rich oral histories reveal much that is surprising. Although the Jim Crow South presented persistent dangers, the women retained warm memories of southern childhoods. Notwithstanding the burgeoning war industry, most women found themselves left out of industrial work. The North offered its own institutionalized racism; the region was not the promised land. Additionally, these African American women juggled work and family long before such battles became a staple of mainstream discussion. In the face of challenges, the women who share their tales here crafted lives of great meaning from the limited options available, making a way out of no way.
Metropolitan Migrants by
Challenging many common perceptions, this is the first book fully dedicated to understanding a major new phenomenon--the large numbers of skilled urban workers who are now coming across the border from Mexico's cities. Based on a ten-year, on-the-ground study of one working-class neighborhood in Monterrey, Mexico's industrial powerhouse and third-largest city, Metropolitan Migrants explores the ways in which Mexico's economic restructuring and the industrial modernization of the past three decades have pushed a new flow of migrants toward cities such as Houston, Texas, the global capital of the oil industry. Weaving together rich details of everyday life with a lucid analysis of Mexico's political economy, Rub#65533;n Hern#65533;ndez-Le#65533;n deftly traces the effects of restructuring on the lives of the working class, from the national level to the kitchen table.
The New Chinese America by
The 1965 Immigration Act altered the lives and outlook of Chinese Americans in fundamental ways. The New Chinese America explores the historical, economic, and social foundations of the Chinese American community, in order to reveal the emergence of a new social hierarchy after 1965. In this detailed and comprehensive study of contemporary Chinese America, Xiaojian Zhao uses class analysis to illuminate the difficulties of everyday survival for poor and undocumented immigrants and analyzes the process through which social mobility occurs. Through ethnic ties, Chinese Americans have built an economy of their own in which entrepreneurs can maintain a competitive edge given their access to low-cost labor; workers who are shut out of the mainstream job market can find work and make a living; and consumers can enjoy high quality services at a great bargain. While the growth of the ethnic economy enhances ethnic bonds by increasing mutual dependencies among different groups of Chinese Americans, it also determines the limits of possibility for various individuals depending on their socioeconomic and immigration status.
The New Mind of the South by
This ground-breaking, thought-provoking exploration upends stereotypes and fallacies to reveal the true heart of the South today--a region still misunderstood by outsiders and even by its own society.
There are those who say the South has disappeared. But in her groundbreaking, thought-provoking exploration of the region, Tracy Thompson, a Georgia native and Pulitzer Prize finalist, asserts that it has merely drawn on its oldest tradition: an ability to adapt and transform itself.
Thompson spent years traveling through the region and discovered a South both amazingly similar and radically different from the land she knew as a child. African Americans who left en masse for much of the twentieth century are returning in huge numbers, drawn back by a mix of ambition, family ties, and cultural memory. Though Southerners remain more churchgoing than other Americans, the evangelical Protestantism that defined Southern culture up through the 1960s has been torn by bitter ideological schisms. The new South is ahead of others in absorbing waves of Latino immigrants, in rediscovering its agrarian traditions, in seeking racial reconciliation, and in reinventing what it means to have roots in an increasingly rootless global culture.
Drawing on mountains of data, interviews, and a whole new set of historic archives, Thompson upends stereotypes and fallacies to reveal the true heart of the South today--a region still misunderstood by outsiders and even by its own people. In that sense, she is honoring the tradition inaugurated by Wilbur Joseph Cash in 1941 in his classic, The Mind of the South . Cash's book was considered the virtual bible on the origins of Southern identity and its transformation through time. Thompson has written its sequel for the twenty-first century.
Seeing Race in Modern America by
In this fiercely urgent book, Matthew Pratt Guterl focuses on how and why we come to see race in very particular ways. What does it mean to see someone as a color? As racially mixed or ethnically ambiguous? What history makes such things possible? Drawing creatively from advertisements, YouTube videos, and everything in between, Guterl redirects our understanding of racial sight away from the dominant categories of color--away from brown and yellow and black and white--and instead insists that we confront the visual practices that make those same categories seem so irrefutably important.
Zooming out for the bigger picture, Guterl illuminates the long history of the practice of seeing--and believing in--race, and reveals that our troublesome faith in the details discerned by the discriminating glance is widespread and very popular. In so doing, he upends the possibility of a postracial society by revealing how deeply race is embedded in our culture, with implications that are often matters of life and death.
So You Want to Talk about Race by
A current, constructive, and actionable exploration of today's racial landscape, offering straightforward clarity that readers of all races need to contribute to the dismantling of the racial divide. In So You Want to Talk About Race, Editor at Large of The Establishment, Ijeoma Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the "N" word. Perfectly positioned to bridge the gap between people of color and white Americans struggling with race complexities, Oluo answers the questions readers don't dare ask, and explains the concepts that continue to elude everyday Americans. Oluo is an exceptional writer with a rare ability to be straightforward, funny, and effective in her coverage of sensitive, hyper-charged issues in America. Her messages are passionate but finely tuned, and crystalize ideas that would otherwise be vague by empowering them with aha-moment clarity. Her writing brings to mind voices like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay, and Jessica Valenti in Full Frontal Feminism, and a young Gloria Naylor, particularly in Naylor's seminal essay "The Meaning of a Word.
Taking on Diversity: How We Can Move From Anxiety to Respect: a Diversity Doctor's Best Lessons From the Campus by
In this enlightening book, a campus “diversity doctor” relates stories that individuals have shared with him about their anxieties in situations involving people who are in some way different than themselves. Dr. Rupert W. Nacoste regularly counsels students at North Carolina State University about their problems dealing with diversity of all kinds, including of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual-orientation. Here, he shares his most effective techniques for handling the unavoidable realities of being in a neo-diverse community, whether that means in college or America as a nation. The author's proven “safe space” strategy can be applied to the campus, community groups, churches, and workplaces as a means to facilitate positive dialogue about diversity.In this time of current tensions, students, or “young travelers” as Nacoste fondly refers to them, still have much work ahead of them to achieve mutual respect and understanding. From everyday encounters, parties, and email and social media exchanges, they provide examples of ongoing bigotry: racial slurs and stereotypes are still used; young men continue to project demeaning attitudes toward women; and the heterosexual majority sometimes shows little understanding of the LBGT minority.Dr. Nacoste considers it his role to usher students off the “Wrong-Line train,” and he has noticed that as they “leave the station,” adults begin to follow their lead. The author demonstrates how we can maintain fairness and respect while still acknowledging our differences. By doing so, we can all learn to meet these challenges using sensitivity to different perspectives, open-minded attitudes, and the recognition that diversity in America is here to stay. From the Trade Paperback edition.
The Warmth of Other Suns: the epic story of America's great migration by
In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.
With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties.
Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an "unrecognized immigration" within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.
How to Be an Antiracist by
The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it -- and then dismantle it." Ibram X. Kendi's concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America -- but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it. In this book, Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science, bringing it all together with an engaging personal narrative of his own awakening to antiracism. How to Be an Antiracist is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond an awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a truly just and equitable society
The Ways of the World by
David Harvey is one of most famous Marxist intellectuals in the past half century, as well as one of the world's most cited social scientists. Beginning in the early 1970s with his trenchant and still-relevant book Social Justice and the City and through this day, Harvey has written numerous books and dozens of influential essays and articles on topics across issues in politics, culture, economics, and social justice. In The Ways of the World, Harvey has gathered his most important essays from the past four decades. They form a career-spanning collection that tracks not only the development of Harvey over time as an intellectual, but also a dialectical vision that gradually expanded its reach from the slums of Baltimore to global environmental degradation to the American imperium. While Harvey's coverage is wide-ranging, all of the pieces tackle the core concerns that have always animated his work: capitalism past and present, social change, freedom, class, imperialism, the city, nature, social justice,postmodernity, globalization, and-not least-the crises that inhere in capitalism. A career-defining volume, The Ways of the World will stand as a comprehensive work that presents the trajectory of Harvey's lifelong project in full.
Living Through the Hoop: High School Basketball, Race, and the American Dream by
Visit the author's YouTube channel! When high school basketball player LeBron James was selected as the top pick in the National Basketball Association draft of 2003, the hopes of a half-million high school basketball players soared. If LeBron could go straight from high school to the NBA, why couldn’t they? Such is the allure of basketball for so many young African American men. Unfortunately, the reality is that their chances of ever playing basketball at the professional, or even college, level are infinitesimal. In Living Through the Hoop, Reuben A. Buford May tells the absorbing story of the hopes and struggles of one high school basketball team. With a clear passion for the game, May grabs readers with both hands and pulls them onto the hardwood, going under the hoop and inside the locker room. May spent seven seasons as an assistant coach of the Northeast High School Knights in Northeast, Georgia. We meet players like Larique and Pooty Cat, hard-working and energetic young men, willing to play and practice basketball seven days a week and banking on the unlimited promise of the game. And we meet Coach Benson, their unorthodox, out-spoken, and fierce leader, who regularly coached them to winning seasons, twice going to the state tournaments Elite Eight championships. Beyond the wins and losses, May provides a portrait of the players’ hopes and aspirations, their home lives, and the difficulties they face in living in a poor and urban area — namely, the temptations of drugs and alcohol, violence in their communities, run-ins with the police, and unstable family lives. We learn what it means to become a man when you live in places that define manhood by how tough you can be, how many women you can have, and how much money you can hustle. May shows the powerful role that the basketball team can play in keeping these kids straight, away from street-life, focused on completing high school, and possibly even attending college. Their stories, and the double-edged sword of hoop dreams, is at the heart of this compelling story about young African American men’s struggle to find their way in an often grim world.
The Trouble with Brunch: work, class and the pursuit of leisure by
One of The Globe and Mail's Globe 100: Best Books of 2014
Every weekend, in cities around the world, bleary-eyed diners wait in line to be served overpriced, increasingly outr#65533; food by hungover waitstaff. For some, the ritual we call brunch is a beloved pastime; for others, a bedeviling waste of time. But what does its popularity say about shifting attitudes towards social status and leisure? In some ways, brunch andother forms of conspicuous consumption have blinded us to ever-more-precarious employment conditions. For award-winning writer and urbanist Shawn Micallef, brunch is a way to look more closely at the nature of work itself and a catalyst for solidarity among the so-called creative class.
Drawing on theories from Thorstein Veblen to Richard Florida, Micallef traces his own journey from the rust belt to a cosmopolitan city where the evolving middle class he joined was obliviousto its own instability and insularity.
The Trouble with Brunch is a provocative analysis of foodie obsession and status anxiety, but it's also a call to reset our class consciousness. The real trouble with brunch isn't so much bad service and outsized portions of bacon, it's that brunch could be so much more.
'At the crux of it, Micallef's issue with brunch is a lack of self-awareness, and his book is essentially a call to arms to consider the implications of one's actions, even for something as innocuous as meeting friends for eggs and mimosas.'
- Bookslut
Praise for Shawn Micallef:
'As Toronto grows into a more mature, more compelling city, a new group of non-academic, street-smart urbanists has emerged to appreciate it - with-it young writers, architects and men and women about town who love big cities and see things in Toronto that most of usmiss. Shawn Micallef is one of the sharpest of this sharp-eyed breed.'
- Globe and Mail
'A smart and intimate guide to the city that makes you feel like an insider from start to finish.'
- Douglas Coupland [on Stroll ]
Arrival City: how the largest migration in history is reshaping our world by
Look around: the largest migration in human history is under way. For the first time ever, more people are living in cities than in rural areas. Between 2007 and 2050, the world's cities will have absorbed 3.1 billion people. Urbanization is the mass movement that will change our world during the twenty-first century, and the "arrival city" is where it is taking place.
The arrival city exists on the outskirts of the metropolis, in the slums, or in the suburbs; the American version is New York's Lower East Side of a century ago or today's Herndon County, Virginia. These are the places where newcomers try to establish new lives and to integrate themselves socially and economically. Their goal is to build communities, to save and invest, and, hopefully, move out, making room for the next wave of migrants. For some, success is years away; for others, it will never come at all.
As vibrant places of exchange, arrival cities have long been indicators of social health. Whether it's Paris in 1789 or Tehran in 1978, whenever migrant populations are systematically ignored, we should expect violence and extremism. But, as the award-winning journalist Doug Saunders demonstrates, when we make proper investments in our arrival cities--through transportation, education, security, and citizenship--a prosperous middle class develops.
Saunders takes us on a tour of these vital centers, from Maryland to Shenzhen, from the favelas of Rio to the shantytowns of Mumbai, from Los Angeles to Nairobi. He uncovers the stories--both inspiring and heartbreaking--of the people who live there, and he shows us how the life or death of our arrival cities will determine the shape of our future.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century by
What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.
The American Way of Poverty: how the other half still lives by
Fifty years after Michael Harrington published his groundbreaking book The Other America , in which he chronicled the lives of people excluded from the Age of Affluence, poverty in America is back with a vengeance. It is made up of both the long-term chronically poor and new working poor--the tens of millions of victims of a broken economy and an ever more dysfunctional political system. In many ways, for the majority of Americans, financial insecurity has become the new norm.
The American Way of Poverty shines a light on this travesty. Sasha Abramsky brings the effects of economic inequality out of the shadows and, ultimately, suggests ways for moving toward a fairer and more equitable social contract. Exploring everything from housing policy to wage protections and affordable higher education, Abramsky lays out a panoramic blueprint for a reinvigorated political process that, in turn, will pave the way for a renewed War on Poverty.
It is, Harrington believed, a moral outrage that in a country as wealthy as America, so many people could be so poor. Written in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, in an era of grotesque economic extremes, The American Way of Poverty brings that same powerful indignation to the topic.
The Velvet Rope Economy : how inequality became big business by
"...Nelson D. Schwartz explores a new aspect of economic inequality that is profoundly reshaping public and private life. In recent years businesses and venture capitalists have stepped in to exploit the gap between the rich and everyone else, worsening services for the masses while finding new ways to serve the privileged... And with corporate leaders and other decision makers living on the friction-free side of the velvet rope, they are less inclined to lower--or to even notice--the barriers everyone else must content with. [This book] offers a riveting behind-the scenes tour that reveals how the velvet rope economy erodes American ideals of community, justice, and opportunity."
Borderline Americans: racial division and labor war in the Arizona borderlands by
Benton-Cohen examines the Arizona frontier, including the infamous Bisbee Deportation and the OK Corral gunfight to explain the complex development of racial divisions in a Southwest borderland.
The Dignity of Working Men by
"Michele Lamont takes us into the world inhabited by working-class men - the world as they understand it. Interviewing black and white working-class men who, because they are not college graduates, have limited access to high-paying jobs and other social benefits, she constructs a revealing portrait of how they see themselves and the rest of society."
Heartland by
"During Sarah Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the country's changing economic policies solidified her family's place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to examine the class divide in our country and the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less. Her personal history affirms the corrosive impact intergenerational poverty can have on individuals, families, and communities, and she explores this idea as lived experience, metaphor, and level of consciousness. Born a fifth-generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side, Smarsh grew up in a family of laborers trapped in a cycle of poverty. Whether working the wheat harvest, helping on her dad's construction sites, or visiting her grandma's courthouse job, she learned about hard work. She also absorbed painful lessons about economic inequality. Through her experience growing up as the child of a dissatisfied teenage mother--and being raised predominantly by her grandmother on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita--she gives us a unique, essential look into the lives of poor and working-class Americans living in the middle of our country. Combining memoir with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, Heartland is an uncompromising look at class, identity, and the particular perils of having less in a country known for its excess. "
Hillbilly Elegy by
Vance, a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, provides an account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.'s grandparents were "dirt poor and in love," and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance's grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America.
Men Still at Work: professionals over sixty and on the job by
Men Still at Work explores the reasons why many men are continuing to work well beyond the traditional retirement age. In today's challenging economy, they are the second-fastest growing group of workers (just behind older women). Filled with profiles of older working men, as well as dynamic interview quotes, Men Still at Work explores thorny issues such as masculinity and the "need to provide," as well as economic issues, job satisfaction, and more.
Nomadland by
From the beet fields of North Dakota to the National Forest campgrounds of California to Amazon's CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool, made up largely of transient older Americans. Finding that social security comes up short, often underwater on mortgages, these invisible casualties of the Great Recession have taken to the road by the tens of thousands in late-model RVs, travel trailers, and vans, forming a growing community of nomads: migrant laborers who call themselves "workampers."On frequently traveled routes between seasonal jobs, Jessica Bruder meets people from all walks of life: a former professor, a McDonald's vice president, a minister, a college administrator, and a motorcycle cop, among many others--including her irrepressible protagonist, a onetime cocktail waitress, Home Depot clerk, and general contractor named Linda May.In a secondhand vehicle she christens "Van Halen," Bruder hits the road to get to know her subjects more intimately. Accompanying Linda May and others from campground toilet cleaning to warehouse product scanning to desert reunions, then moving on to the dangerous work of beet harvesting, Bruder tells a compelling, eye-opening tale of the dark underbelly of the American economy--one that foreshadows the precarious future that may await many more of us. At the same time, she celebrates the exceptional resilience and creativity of these quintessential Americans who have given up ordinary rootedness to survive. Like Linda May, who dreams of finding land on which to build her own sustainable "Earthship" home, they have not given up hope.
Reshaping the Work-Family Debate by
The United States has the most family-hostile public policy in the developed world. Contesting the idea that women need to negotiate better within the family, and redefining the notion of success in the workplace, Joan C. Williams reinvigorates the work-family debate and offers the first steps to making life manageable for all American families.
Sociological Perspectives of Organic Agriculture by
"The Common Agricultural Policy and Organic Farming" covers how ideational change came about to enhance the understanding of change within the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and to plan and implement change in European agriculture policy. The contents cover institutional change within the CAP and focus on the institutional construction policy concerned with organic farming.
White Working Class by
"Around the world, populist movements are gaining traction among the white working class. Meanwhile, the professional elite--journalists, managers, and establishment politicians--is on the outside looking in, and left to argue over the reasons why. In White Working Class, Joan C. Williams, described as "something approaching rock star status" in her field by the New York Times, explains why so much of the elite's analysis of the white working class is misguided, rooted in assumptions by what she has controversially coined "class cluelessness." Williams explains how most analysts, and the corresponding media coverage, have conflated "working class" with "poor." All too often, white working class motivations have been dismissed as simply racism or xenophobia. Williams explains how the term "working class" has been misapplied--it is, in fact, the elusive, purportedly disappearing middle class. This demographic often resents both the poor and the professionals. They don't, however, tend to resent the truly rich, nor are they particularly bothered by income inequality. Their dream is not to join the upper middle class, with its different culture, but to stay true to their own values in their own communities--just with more money. White Working Class is a blunt, bracing narrative that sketches a nuanced portrait of millions of people throughout the world who have proven to be a potent political force. For anyone stunned by the rise in populist, nationalist movements, wondering why so many would seemingly vote against their own economic interests or simply feeling like a stranger in their own country, White Working Class will be a convincing primer on how to connect with a crucial set of workers--and voters"
Women Still at Work: professionals over sixty and on the job by
From Betty White to Toni Morrison, we're surrounded by examples of women working well past the traditional retirement age. In fact, the fastest growing segment of the workforce is women age sixty-five and older. Women Still at Work tells the everyday stories of hard-working women and the reasons they're still on the job, with a focus on women in the professional workforce. The book is filled with profiles of real women, working in settings from academia to drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers, from business to the arts, talking about the many reasons why they still work and the impact work has on their lives. Women Still at Work draws on national survey data and in-depth interviews, showing not only the big picture of older women advancing their careers despite tough economic conditions, but also providing the personal insights of everyday working women from all parts of the country. Their stories showcase some of the key themes women choose to stay at work--including job satisfaction, diminishing retirement savings, the need to support children or parents longer in life, exercising the hard-won right to work, and more. Women Still at Work shows employment to be a positive and rewarding part of life for many women well beyond the expected retirement age.
On the Clock by
A college-educated young professional details the grueling realities of hourly labor for the fastest-growing segment of the American workforce while outlining strategies for more humane employment practices. When Guendelsberger took a pre-Christmas job at an Amazon fulfillment center outside Louisville, Kentucky, the vending machines were stocked with painkillers, and the staff turnover was dizzying. In the new year she traveled to North Carolina to work at a call center, a place where even bathroom breaks were timed to the second. Then she was hired at a San Francisco McDonald's, narrowly escaping revenge-seeking customers who pelted her with condiments. Here she takes us behind the scenes of the fastest-growing segment of the American workforce to understand how workers went from being the most expensive element of production to the cheapest-- and how low wage jobs have been remade to serve the ideals of efficiency, at the cost of humanity.
A history of street networks : from grids to sprawl and beyond by
Roadway networks are the basic frameworks of cities. They endure for centuries, influencing the ways that cities operate and their residents' quality of life. A History of Street Networks explores the origins and institutionalization of modern roadway networks, particularly the networks of urban sprawl. The book surveys an international history of these powerful yet unheralded infrastructure systems. It is a story of far-reaching reform, as dreamers, designers, engineers, and business interests sought to remold urban environments into new and radically different patterns. Traffic separation--the separation of different types of traffic from each other--was a key motive of their city-planning and traffic-engineering efforts. The traffic-separation idea is traced from its international emergence during the Industrial Revolution, to its codification in urban sprawl, to the countermovement of neotraditionalism. More than one hundred individuals, visions, built projects, and policies are examined, representing the most important efforts to make and control roadway patterns. Comprehensive, detailed, and abundantly illustrated, A History of Street Networks is a valuable resource for anyone wanting to understand some of the major forces that have shaped, and continue to shape, urban environments.
The Bigot: why prejudice persists by
Stephen Eric Bronner is a prolific author, activist, and one of America's leading political thinkers. His new book presents bigotry as a systematic, all-encompassing mindset that has a special affinity for right-wing movements. In what will surely prove a seminal study, Bronner explores its appeal, the self-image it justifies, the interests it serves, and its complex connection with modernity. He reveals how prejudice shapes the conspiratorial and paranoid worldview of the true believer, the elitist, and the chauvinist. In the process, it becomes apparent how the bigot hides behind mainstream conservative labels in order to support policies designed to disadvantage the targets of his contempt. Examining bigotry in its various dimensions--anthropological, historical, psychological, sociological, and political--Professor Bronner illustrates how the bigot's intense hatred of "the other" is a direct reaction to social progress, liberal values, secularism, and an increasingly complex and diverse world. A sobering look at the bigot in the twenty-first century, this volume is essential for making sense of the dangers facing democracy now and in the future.
Braving the Wilderness by
Social scientist Brené Brown, PhD, LMSW, has sparked a global conversation about the experiences that bring meaning to our lives -- experiences of courage, vulnerability, love, belonging, shame, and empathy. Now Brown redefines what it means to truly belong in an age of increased polarization. Brown argues that we're experiencing a spiritual crisis of disconnection, and introduces four practices of true belonging that challenge everything we believe about ourselves and each other. She writes, "True belonging requires us to believe in and belong to ourselves so fully that we can find sacredness both in being a part of something and in standing alone when necessary. But in a culture that's rife with perfectionism and pleasing, and with the erosion of civility, it's easy to stay quiet, hide in our ideological bunkers, or fit in rather than show up as our true selves and brave the wilderness of uncertainty and criticism. But true belonging is not something we negotiate or accomplish with others; it's a daily practice that demands integrity and authenticity. It's a personal commitment that we carry in our hearts." Brown offers us the clarity and courage we need to find our way back to ourselves and to each other. And that path cuts right through the wilderness. Brown writes, "The wilderness is an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching. It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, a place as sought after as it is feared. But it turns out to be the place of true belonging, and it's the bravest and most sacred place you will ever stand.
Capital and Ideology by
Thomas Piketty's bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system. Our economy, Piketty observes, is not a natural fact. Markets, profits, and capital are all historical constructs that depend on choices. Piketty explores the material and ideological interactions of conflicting social groups that have given us slavery, serfdom, colonialism, communism, and hypercapitalism, shaping the lives of billions. He concludes that the great driver of human progress over the centuries has been the struggle for equality and education and not, as often argued, the assertion of property rights or the pursuit of stability. The new era of extreme inequality that has derailed that progress since the 1980s, he shows, is partly a reaction against communism, but it is also the fruit of ignorance, intellectual specialization, and our drift toward the dead-end politics of identity. Once we understand this, we can begin to envision a more balanced approach to economics and politics. Piketty argues for a new "participatory" socialism, a system founded on an ideology of equality, social property, education, and the sharing of knowledge and power"--
Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system. Our economy, he observes, is not a natural fact. Markets, profits, and capital are all historical constructs that depend on choices. The great driver of human progress over the centuries has been the struggle for equality and education and not, as often argued, the assertion of property rights or the pursuit of stability.
Cross-Cultural Analysis: the science and art of comparing the world's modern societies and their cultures by
Cross-Cultural Analysis is the sequel to Culture's Consequences , the classic work published by Geert Hofstede, one of the most influential management thinkers in today's times. Hofstede's original work introduced a new research paradigm in cross-cultural analysis: studying cultural differences through nation-level dimensions (complex variables defined by intercorrelated items). This paradigm has been subsequently used by hundreds of prominent scholars all over the world and has produced solid results.
This new text takes the next step: It critically examines in one comprehensive volume the current, prevalent approaches to cross-cultural analysis at the level of nations that have been developed since Hofstede's work, offering students and researchers the theoretical and practical advantages and potential pitfalls of each method.
The book is structured into four distinct parts. Parts I and II focus on the main theoretical and statistical issues in cross-cultural analysis using Hofstede's approach and the different research methods now associated with it. Part II consists of presentations of all well-known (and some lesser known) large-scale cross-cultural studies since Hofstede′s work that have explained cross-cultural variation in terms of dimensional models. Part III summarizes the main conclusions to be drawn from the presentations in Part II and l explains how the proposed models have contributed to our practical understanding of cross-cultural diversity.
Cultural Technologies: the shaping of culture in media and society by
The essays in this volume discuss both the culture of technology that we live in today, and culture as technology. Within the chapters of the book cultures of technology and cultural technologies are discussed, focussing on a variety of examples, from varied national contexts. The book brings together internationally recognised scholars from the social sciences and humanities, covering diverse themes such as intellectual property, server farms and search engines, cultural technologies and epistemology, virtual embassies, surveillance, peer-to-peer file-sharing, sound media and nostalgia and much more. It contains both historical and contemporary analyses of technological phenomena as well as epistemological discussions on the uses of technology.
Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times by
Cut Adrift makes an important and original contribution to the national conversation about inequality and risk in American society. Set against the backdrop of rising economic insecurity and rolled-up safety nets, Marianne Cooper's probing analysis explores what keeps Americans up at night. Through poignant case studies, she reveals what families are concerned about, how they manage their anxiety, whose job it is to worry, and how social class shapes all of these dynamics, including what is even worth worrying about in the first place. This powerful study is packed with intriguing discoveries ranging from the surprising anxieties of the rich to the critical role of women in keeping struggling families afloat. Through tales of stalwart stoicism, heart-wrenching worry, marital angst, and religious conviction, Cut Adrift deepens our understanding of how families are coping in a go-it-alone age--and how the different strategies on which affluent, middle-class, and poor families rely upon not only reflect inequality, but fuel it.
Enlightenment Now by
If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science.
Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing.
Far from being a naive hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation.
With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.
Identity Politics Reconsidered by
Based on the ongoing work of the agenda-setting Future of Minority Studies national research project, Identity Politics Reconsidered reconceptualizes the scholarly and political significance of social identity. It focuses on the deployment of 'identity' within ethnic, women's, disability, and gay and lesbian studies in order to stimulate discussion about issues that are simultaneously theoretical and practical, ranging from ethics and epistemology to political theory and pedagogical practice. This collection of powerful essays by both well-known and emerging scholars offers original answers to questions concerning the analytical legitimacy of 'identity' and 'experience', and the relationships among cultural autonomy, moral universalism and progressive politics.
LikeWar by
"Social media has been weaponized, as state hackers and rogue terrorists have seized upon Twitter and Facebook to create chaos and destruction. This urgent report is required reading, from defense expert P.W. Singer and Council on Foreign Relations fellow Emerson Brooking"
Public Sociology: research, action, and change by
This timely resource, written by a team of authors who are working at the forefront of the public sociology movement, provides a contemporary analysis of public sociology. The book highlights a variety of ways in which sociology brings about social change in community settings, assists nonprofit and social service organizations in their work, and influences policy at the local, regional, and national levels. The book also spotlights sociology that informs the general public on key policy issues through media and creates research centers that develop and carry out collaborative research.
Society Explained: an introduction to sociology by
Society Explained introduces students to key concepts in sociology through engaging narrative examples. After an overview of the history of sociology, the book walks readers through subjects that include individualism; culture; socialization and imagination; values, money, and politics; marriage and family; religious diversity; and education and social change. Nathan Rousseau engages readers with personal examples and those drawn from wider society. Each chapter covers leading thinkers and critical concepts, and chapters build on each other to helps readers acquire a holistic view of society and their role in it. This concise book is an ideal introduction to the sociological imagination.
The Sociological Quest: an introduction to the study of social life by
An introductory essay on the discipline of sociology, outlining some of the important components of a sociological way of understanding the social world. Now fully revised and updated with new examples.
The Sociology Book by
The Sociology Book takes on some of humankind's biggest questions: What is society? What makes it tick? Why do we interact in the way that we do with our friends, coworkers, and rivals?
The Sociology Book profiles the world's most renowned sociologists and more than 100 of their biggest ideas, including issues of equality, diversity, identity, and human rights; the effects of globalization; the role of institutions; and the rise of urban living in modern society
Easy to navigate and chock-full of key concepts, profiles of major sociological thinkers, and conversation starters galore, this is a must-have, in-a-nutshell guide to some of the most fascinating questions on earth.
The Sociology Book is part of the award-winning Big Ideas Simply Explained series, designed to distill big ideas and elusive theories into graspable, memorable concepts, using an approachable graphic treatment and creative typography.
Tribe by
Decades before the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin lamented that English settlers were constantly fleeing over to the Indians -- but Indians almost never did the same. Tribal society has been exerting an almost gravitational pull on Westerners for hundreds of years, and the reason lies deep in our evolutionary past as a communal species. The most recent example of that attraction is combat veterans who come home to find themselves missing the incredibly intimate bonds of platoon life. The loss of closeness that comes at the end of deployment may help explain the high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by military veterans today. Combining history, psychology, and anthropology, TRIBE explores what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty, belonging, and the eternal human quest for meaning. It explains the irony that -- for many veterans as well as civilians -- war feels better than peace, adversity can turn out to be a blessing, and disasters are sometimes remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations. TRIBE explains why we are stronger when we come together, and how that can be achieved even in today's divided world.
Understanding Social Networks: theories, concepts, and findings by
Despite the swift spread of social network concepts and their applications and the rising use of network analysis in social science, there is no book that provides a thorough general introduction for the serious reader. Understanding Social Networks fills that gap by explaining the big ideasthat underlie the social network phenomenon. Written for those interested in this fast moving area but who are not mathematically inclined, it covers fundamental concepts, then discusses networks and their core themes in increasing order of complexity. Kadushin demystifies the concepts, theories,and findings developed by network experts. He selects material that serves as basic building blocks and examples of best practices that will allow the reader to understand and evaluate new developments as they emerge. Understanding Social Networks will be useful to social scientists who encountersocial network research in their reading, students new to the network field, as well as managers, marketers, and others who constantly encounter social networks in their work.
What Is a Social Movement? by
Social movements play a central role in the scope and direction of social change. They were instrumental in the creation of the modern state and, today, are major forces in politics and culture. Environmentalism, gay rights, alterglobalization, and Islamic fundamentalism are all movements with far-reaching impacts on contemporary society.
What is a Social Movement? traces how the study of movements such as these - of their structures, their ideas, and their repertoires of protest - have grown in recent years to become a major focus in the social sciences. It deftly navigates the organizational, ideational, and cultural complexity of political and social movements, and offers a succinct but comprehensive overview of the hows, whys, and wheretofores of studying them. The book analyzes how politics and culture frequently intersect as people participate in movements that call for change and pursue group interests. By focusing on movement organizations and networks, on what they do, and how they articulate their ideas of justice and collective interests, What is a Social Movement? lays the essential groundwork for understanding this significant and exciting field of research, where it came from, and where it is headed.
Considering Hate: violence, goodness, and justice in American culture and politics by
A provocative book about rethinking hatred and violence in America
Over the centuries American society has been plagued by brutality fueled by disregard for the humanity of others: systemic violence against Native peoples, black people, and immigrants. More recent examples include the Steubenville rape case and the murders of Matthew Shepard, Jennifer Daugherty, Marcelo Lucero, and Trayvon Martin. Most Americans see such acts as driven by hate. But is this right? Longtime activists and political theorists Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski boldly assert that American society's reliance on the framework of hate to explain these acts is wrongheaded, misleading, and ultimately harmful.
All too often Americans choose to believe that terrible cruelty is aberrant, caused primarily by "extremists" and misfits. The inevitable remedy of intensified government-based policing, increased surveillance, and harsher punishments has never worked and does not work now. Stand-your-ground laws; the US prison system; police harassment of people of color, women, and LGBT peop≤ and the so-called war on terror demonstrate that the remedies themselves are forms of institutionalized violence.
Considering Hate challenges easy assumptions and failed solutions, arguing that "hate violence" reflects existing cultural norms. Drawing upon social science, philosophy, theology, film, and literature, the authors examine how hate and common, even ordinary, forms of individual and group violence are excused and normalized in popular culture and political discussion. This massive denial of brutal reality profoundly warps society's ideas about goodness and justice.
Whitlock and Bronski invite readers to radically reimagine the meaning and structures of justice within a new framework of community wholeness, collective responsibility, and civic goodness.
Emerging Intersections: Race, Class, and Gender in Theory, Policy, and Practice by
The United States is known as a "melting pot" yet this mix tends to be volatile and contributes to a long history of oppression, racism, and bigotry. Emerging Intersections, an anthology of ten previously unpublished essays, looks at the problems of inequality and oppression from new angles and promotes intersectionality as an interpretive tool that can be utilized to better understand the ways in which race, class, gender, ethnicity, and other dimensions of difference shape our lives today. The book showcases innovative contributions that expand our understanding of how inequality affects people of color, demonstrates the ways public policies reinforce existing systems of inequality, and shows how research and teaching using an intersectional perspective compels scholars to become agents of change within institutions. By offering practical applications for using intersectional knowledge, Emerging Intersections will help bring us one step closer to achieving positive institutional change and social justice.
How Did We Get into This Mess? by
George Monbiot is one of the most vocal, and eloquent, critics of the current consensus. How Did We Get into this Mess?, based on his powerful journalism, assesses the state we are now in: the devastation of the natural world, the crisis of inequality, the corporate takeover of nature, our obsessions with growth and profit and the decline of the political debate over what to do. While his diagnosis of the problems in front of us is clear-sighted and reasonable, he also develops solutions to challenge the politics of fear. How do we stand up to the powerful when they seem to have all the weapons? What can we do to prepare our children for an uncertain future? Controversial, clear but always rigorously argued, How Did We Get into this Mess? makes a persuasive case for change in our everyday lives, our politics and economics, the ways we treat each other and the natural world.
Inequality in America: race, poverty, and fulfilling democracy's promise by
Why does inequality have such a hold on American society and public policy? And what can we, as citizens, do about it? Inequality in America takes an in-depth look at individual-level and systemic inequality, focusing in particular on race, poverty, and gender, across a wide range of issues from housing and education to crime, employment and health. Caliendo shows how individual-level prejudice and systemic inequality are interrelated, how individual beliefs and attitudes can affect public opinion and lawmakers' policy solutions and how systemic barriers to advancement as a result of these policies then contribute to individual perceptions, creating a cycle of disadvantage and advantage that can be difficult to break, though not impossible.
Feature boxes throughout the book offer insight into key public figures who have worked to combat inequality and suggestions for individual action. Concise and written in an accessible manner, Inequality in America paves the way for students to think critically about the effects of the attitudes, behaviors and structures of inequality.
Limbo by
This work of narrative nonfiction uncovers a cultural phenomenon, the limbo existence of people raised in blue-collar families, living white-collar lives. Its approach is threefold: first, the personal story of the author himself, a working-class kid from Brooklyn who crossed over to the middle class after attaining an Ivy League education; second, a distillation of thought about class and mobility from leading experts; and finally, and most importantly, the stories of more than 100 interviewees, all "Straddlers" struggling with the duality that exists in their workplace, their hearts, and their minds. This work is a treatise on the lasting consequences of class mobility in America. Drawing on his own story as well as on dozens more from individuals who share his experience, the author, a journalist sheds light on the predicament of some 13 million Americans: reconciling their blue-collar upbringing with the white-collar world they now inhabit. The son of a Brooklyn bricklayer, the author came of age in a neighborhood imbued with typical working-class values like the importance of hard work, loyalty to family and community, and a healthy respect for religion. Academically gifted, he attended Columbia University, and went on to achieve professional success as a reporter. But he quickly found that the lessons he had absorbed in childhood would not serve him as well as the upper-class gifts of subtlety, diplomacy, and cultural capital, leaving him strangely isolated from both his workplace peers and the world he had left behind. Unfamiliar with the rules of upper-class life, which serves as the model for corporate culture, the "Straddlers" (as he dubs them) find themselves ill-equipped for that buttoned-down world. Yet they share the author's ambiguity, and their choices frequently challenge the philosophical and moral assumptions of working-class life. Combining personal stories with the latest thinking from leading experts, this work offers a blend of first-person confessional and sociological study that is both profoundly affecting and rigorously informed. Though it wholly dismisses the widely held notion that class is a dead subject in America, it avoids cynicism and easy judgment, seeking only to provide a glimpse at what lies beneath our social and cultural fabric. The profiles here show a remarkable consistency of emotion and experience across a diverse demographic that crosses all boundaries of sex, race, and religion. Opening a long-awaited dialogue, this work reflects the reality of a unique class struggling with an all-American brand of cultural isolation. These are stories of life in our modern meritocracy.
Sociology in America: A History by
Though the word “sociology” was coined in Europe, the field of sociology grew most dramatically in America. Despite that disproportionate influence, American sociology has never been the subject of an extended historical examination. To remedy that situation—and to celebrate the centennial of the American Sociological Association—Craig Calhoun assembled a team of leading sociologists to produce Sociology in America. Rather than a story of great sociologists or departments, Sociology in America is a true history of an often disparate field—and a deeply considered look at the ways sociology developed intellectually and institutionally. It explores the growth of American sociology as it addressed changes and challenges throughout the twentieth century, covering topics ranging from the discipline’s intellectual roots to understandings (and misunderstandings) of race and gender to the impact of the Depression and the 1960s. Sociology in America will stand as the definitive treatment of the contribution of twentieth-century American sociology and will be required reading for all sociologists. Contributors: Andrew Abbott, Daniel Breslau, Craig Calhoun, Charles Camic, Miguel A. Centeno, Patricia Hill Collins, Marjorie L. DeVault, Myra Marx Ferree, Neil Gross, Lorine A. Hughes, Michael D. Kennedy, Shamus Khan, Barbara Laslett, Patricia Lengermann, Doug McAdam, Shauna A. Morimoto, Aldon Morris, Gillian Niebrugge, Alton Phillips, James F. Short Jr., Alan Sica, James T. Sparrow, George Steinmetz, Stephen Turner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, Immanuel Wallerstein, Pamela Barnhouse Walters, Howard Winant
Upheaval by
With his international bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of why civilizations rise and fall. Now, in his third book in this monumental trilogy, he reveals how some nations successfully recover from crises while adopting selective changes--a coping mechanism more commonly associated with individuals recovering from personal crises. Diamond compares how six countries have survived recent upheavals--ranging from the forced opening of Japan by U.S. Commodore Perry's fleet, to the Soviet Union's attack on Finland, to a murderous coup or countercoup in Chile and Indonesia, to the transformations of Germany and Austria after World War Two. Because Diamond has lived and spoken the language in five of these six countries, he can present gut-wrenching histories experienced firsthand. These nations coped, to varying degrees, through mechanisms such as acknowledgment of responsibility, painfully honest self-appraisal, and learning from models of other nations. Looking to the future, Diamond examines whether the United States, Japan, and the whole world are successfully coping with the grave crises they currently face. Can we learn from lessons of the past? Adding a psychological dimension to the in-depth history, geography, biology, and anthropology that mark all of Diamond's books, Upheaval reveals factors influencing how both whole nations and individual people can respond to big challenges. The result is a book epic in scope, but also his most personal book yet.
Children, Media and Culture by
"Children, Media and Culture seeks to redefine the discipline's domain by including classical art, fairy tales, and literature in the research purview along with media such as television, gaming, and social networking. Maire Messenger Davies continues to offer an original voice in the scholarship of media and children."
Professor Dafna Lemish, Editor, Journal of Children and Media
"An ambitious and quite helpful synthesis of scholarly research, policy reports, professional opinion and personal impressions on what it has meant to be represented as a child in relation to different cultural and historical contexts and media forms up to the present day... I commend the author for the lively and clear, yet scholarly and eloquent quality of her prose. Would that more academics were also trained appreciators of literature and former journalists!"
Mark Evan Nelson, Assistant Professor in English Language and Literature at the NationalInstitute of Education, Singapore
Childhood and children's culture are regularly in the forefront of debates about how society is changing - often, it is argued, for the worse. This book addresses the continuing concerns around media 'effects' and critically examines the view that technology has dramatically changed modern children's lives.This book engages with and seeks to broaden the public debate about the role of popular media in children's lives. It considers how public anxieties regarding the harmful influences of the media are heightened at times of rapid technological change. This change is most visible in the appearance of new media technology - currently including digital television; the Internet; computer games, mobile phones and i-pods, but also, in the past, print material, films, radio and broadcast television, when they were new.
Written in a lively and accessible style, the book discusses various genres, including television and the Internet, children's books, fairy tales, children in art, playground games, and film. Case studies include Disney, Harry Potter; Teletubbies, Sesame Street, Cbeebies and The Secret Garden.
Essential reading for media students, this book situates the study of childhood and the media within a framework of different disciplines, including historical, sociological, psychological and political approaches.
The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age by
Introduction : an invitation to meet the class -- Living and learning in the digital age -- A year of fieldwork -- Networks and social worlds -- Identities and relationships -- Life at school : from routines to civility -- Learning at school : measuring and levelling the self -- Life at home together and apart -- Making space for learning in the home -- Learning to play music : class, culture, and taste -- Life trajectories, social mobility, and cultural capital -- Conclusions : conservative, competitive or connected.
Cliques by
Behind each policy debate over welfare reform, AIDS funding, and hate crime laws are the people struggling with poverty, illness, and discrimination. While the experts cite statistics and employ rhetoric about drug abuse, crime, and child abuse, individuals confront the horrors of addiction and the trauma of victimization. Greenhaven Press's Social Issues Firsthand series illuminates the often-neglected human side of society's pressing problems. Each anthology presents a collection of personal narratives on a featured social issue. Contributors include those who have had personal experience with the topic under discussion-either as a participant, a witness, or an involved professional. For example, Terrorism includes the perspectives of terrorists, victims, families of victims, and emergency workers. Additional features include an introduction that provides each book with essential context, a thorough bibliography, a list of organizations to contact, an annotated table of contents, and a thorough index. Each book in the Social Issues Firsthand series will provide readers with a personal context for the most pressing topics of today's political discussions. Book jacket.
Gender Myths and Feminist Fables: The Struggle for Interpretive Power in Gender and Development by
This collection brings together leading feminist thinkers who examine the struggles for interpretive power which underlies international development. Questions why the insights from years of feminist gender and development research are so often turned into 'gender myths' and 'feminist fables': women are more likely to care for the environment; are better at working together; are less corrupt; have a seemingly infinite capacity to survive Explores how bowdlerized and impoverished representations of gender relations have simultaneously come to be embedded in development policy and practice Traces the ways in which language and images of development are related to practice and provides a nuanced account of the politics of knowledge production Argues that struggles for interpretive power are not only important for our own sake, but also for the implications they have for women's lives worldwide An informed analysis of how 'gender' has been transformed in its transfer into development policy and how many authors are now revisiting and reflecting on their earlier work
It's Complicated: the social lives of networked teens by
An essential read, written by a leading expert, for anyone who wants to understand young people's use of social media
What is new about how teenagers communicate through services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Do social media affect the quality of teens' lives? In this eye-opening book, youth culture and technology expert danah boyd uncovers some of the major myths regarding teens' use of social media. She explores tropes about identity, privacy, safety, danger, and bullying. Ultimately, boyd argues that society fails young people when paternalism and protectionism hinder teenagers' ability to become informed, thoughtful, and engaged citizens through their online interactions. Yet despite an environment of rampant fear-mongering, boyd finds that teens often find ways to engage and to develop a sense of identity.
Boyd's conclusions are essential reading not only for parents, teachers, and others who work with teens but also for anyone interested in the impact of emerging technologies on society, culture, and commerce in years to come. Offering insights gleaned from more than a decade of original fieldwork interviewing teenagers across the United States, boyd concludes reassuringly that the kids are all right. At the same time, she acknowledges that coming to terms with life in a networked era is not easy or obvious. In a technologically mediated world, life is bound to be complicated.
Overwhelmed: work, love, and play when no one has the time by
Can working parents in America--or anywhere--ever find true leisure time?
According to the Leisure Studies Department at the University of Iowa, true leisure is "that place in which we realize our humanity." If that's true, argues Brigid Schulte, then we're doing dangerously little realizing of our humanity. In Overwhelmed , Schulte, a staff writer for The Washington Post , asks: Are our brains, our partners, our culture, and our bosses making it impossible for us to experience anything but "contaminated time"?
Schulte first asked this question in a 2010 feature for The Washington Post Magazine : "How did researchers compile this statistic that said we were rolling in leisure--over four hours a day? Did any of us feel that we actually had downtime? Was there anything useful in their research--anything we could do?"
Overwhelmed is a map of the stresses that have ripped our leisure to shreds, and a look at how to put the pieces back together. Schulte speaks to neuroscientists, sociologists, and hundreds of working parents to tease out the factors contributing to our collective sense of being overwhelmed, seeking insights, answers, and inspiration. She investigates progressive offices trying to invent a new kind of workplace; she travels across Europe to get a sense of how other countries accommodate working parents; she finds younger couples who claim to have figured out an ideal division of chores, childcare, and meaningful paid work. Overwhelmed is the story of what she found out.
The Parent App: understanding families in the digital age by
Ninety-five percent of American kids have Internet access by age 11; the average number of texts a teenager sends each month is well over 3,000. More families report that technology makes life with children more challenging, not less, as parents today struggle with questions previousgenerations never faced: Is my thirteen-year-old responsible enough for a Facebook page? What will happen if I give my nine year-old a cell phone? In The Parent App, Lynn Schofield Clark provides what families have been sorely lacking: smart, sensitive, and effective strategies for coping with the dilemmas of digital and mobile media in modern life. Clark set about interviewing scores of mothers and fathers, identifying not only their variousapproaches, but how they differ according to family income. Parents in upper-income families encourage their children to use media to enhance their education and self-development and to avoid use that might distract them from goals of high achievement. Lower income families, in contrast, encouragethe use of digital and mobile media in ways that are respectful, compliant toward parents, and family-focused. Each approach has its own benefits and drawbacks, and whatever the parenting style or economic bracket, parents experience anxiety about how to manage new technology. With the understandingof a parent of teens and the rigor of a social scientist, Clark tackles a host of issues, such as family communication, online predators, cyber bullying, sexting, gamer drop-outs, helicopter parenting, technological monitoring, the effectiveness of strict controls, and much more.The Parent App is more than an advice manual. As Clark admits, technology changes too rapidly for that. Rather, she puts parenting in context, exploring the meaning of media challenges and the consequences of our responses - for our lives as family members and as members of society.
Straights: heterosexuality in post-closeted culture by
Sincethe Stonewall Riots in 1969, the politics of sexual identity in America havedrastically transformed. It's almost old news that recent generations ofAmericans have grown up in a culture more accepting of out lesbians and gaymen, seen the proliferation of LGBTQ media representation, and witnessed theattainment of a range of legal rights for same-sex couples. But the changeswrought by a so-called "post-closeted culture" have not just affected the queercommunity--heterosexuals are also in the midst of a sea change in how theirsexuality plays out in everyday life. In Straights,James Joseph Dean argues that heterosexuals can neither assume the invisibilityof gays and lesbians, nor count on the assumption that their ownheterosexuality will go unchallenged. The presumption that we are allheterosexual, or that there is such a thing as 'compulsory heterosexuality,' heclaims, has vanished.
Based on 60 in-depth interviews witha diverse group of straight men and women, Straights explores how straight Americans make sense of their sexual and genderedselves in this new landscape, particularly with an understanding of how racedoes and does not play a role in these conceptions. Dean provides a historicalunderstanding of heterosexuality and how it was first established, then moveson to examine the changing nature of masculinity and femininity and, mostimportantly, the emergence of a new kind of heterosexuality--notably, for men,the metrosexual, and for women, the emergence of a more fluid sexuality. Thebook also documents the way heterosexuals interact and form relationships withtheir LGBTQ family members, friends, acquaintances, and coworkers. Althoughhomophobia persists among straight individuals, Dean shows that beinggay-friendly or against homophobic expressions is also increasingly commonamong straight Americans. A fascinating study, Straights provides an in-depth look at the changing nature ofsexual expression in America.
Youth Programs as Builders of Social Capital by
This volume builds understanding of practices in youth and community development that create or build social capital assets at the individual, group, and community levels. The authors explore whether programs contribute to the development of social capital at the individual and community scales, thereby fostering and enhancing positive youth development as well as community development. It includes articles on defining and measuring social capital through instruments designed to document impact and also to engage program participants. The authors then discuss program practices that build social capital in a wide range of youth development settings, from community-based service-learning to 4-H community clubs. Finally, they focus on building social capital in particular contexts, including work in rural communities with the most vulnerable youth. The volume is designed to help practitioners: Refine their dual focus on youth and community development Clarify constructs that help translate the public value of positive youth development to community stakeholders Provide examples of practices that link youth and youth programs more intentionally to the social relationships that knit communities together. This is the 138th volume of New Directions for Youth Development, the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series dedicated to bringing together everyone concerned with helping young people, including scholars, practitioners, and people from different disciplines and professions.
Unretirement: how baby boomers are changing the way we think about work, community, and the good life by
The budget battles of recent years have amplified the warnings of demographic doomsayers who predicted that a wave of baby boomers would bleed America dry, bankrupting Social Security and Medicare as they faded into an impoverished old age. On the contrary, argues award-winning journalist Chris Farrell, we are instead on the verge of a broad, positive transformation of our economy and society.
The old idea of "retirement"-a word that means withdrawal, describing a time when people gave up productive employment and shrank their activities-was a short-lived historical anomaly. Humans have always found meaning and motivation in work and community, Farrell notes, and the boomer generation, poised to live longer in better health than any before, is already discovering unretirement -extending their working lives, often with new careers, entrepreneurial ventures, and volunteer service. Their experience, wisdom-and importantly, their continued earnings-will enrich the American workplace, treasury, and our whole society in the decades to come.
Unretirement not only explains this seismic change, now in its early stages, it provides key insights and practical advice for boomers about to navigate this exciting, but unsettled, new frontier. Drawing on Chris Farrell's decades of covering personal finance and economics for Bloomberg Businessweek and Marketplace Money , this will be an indispensable guide to the landscape of unretirement from one of America's most trusted experts.
Dream Hoarders by
It is conventional wisdom to focus on the wealth of the top 1 percent -- especially the top 0.01 percent -- and how the ultra-rich are concentrating income and prosperity while incomes for most other Americans are stagnant. But the most important, widening gap in American society is between the upper middle class and everyone else. Richard Reeves defines the upper middle class as those whose incomes are in the top 20 percent of American society. Income is not the only way to measure a society, but in a market economy it is crucial because access to money generally determines who gets the best quality education, housing, health care, and other necessary goods and services. As Reeves shows, the growing separation between the upper middle class and everyone else can be seen in family structure, neighborhoods, attitudes, and lifestyle. Those at the top of the income ladder are becoming more effective at passing on their status to their children, reducing overall social mobility. The result is not just an economic divide but a fracturing of American society along class lines. Various forms of "opportunity hoarding" among the upper middle class make it harder for others to rise up to the top rung. Examples include zoning laws and schooling, occupational licensing, college application procedures, and the allocation of internships. Upper middle class opportunity hoarding, Reeves argues, results in a less competitive economy as well as a less open society. Inequality is inevitable and can even be good, within limits. But Reeves argues that society should take effective action to reduce opportunity hoarding and thus promote broader opportunity.
Encountering Urban Places: Visual and Material Performances in the City by
The aesthetics of urban life offer a curious quality, one that is both highly visible and hidden, both openly influencing and subtly imprinting. These aesthetics participate in the production of places; to the way they are built, to their resisting materiality, to their image in people's minds, to advertising and to the way people respond to the place. Exploring the encounter with the aesthetics, images and material design of urban life, this book offers analytic insights into contemporary cities. It shows how photography, maps and videos play a crucial role in bringing aesthetic dimensions into urban studies. This transdisciplinary approach draws on the full spectrum of the visual representation to tie the encounter with the realm of the visual directly and explicitly into the exploration of urban space.
From Community to Consumption: New and Classical Themes in Rural Sociological Research by
This edited book contains salient papers presented at the XII World Congress of Rural Sociology held in South Korea in 2008. These papers have been selected for their quality and have undergone a peer review process. The rationale behind this book rests on the desire to share the wealth of research presented at the World Congress with interested individuals who could not attend the event and it reflects the empirical work and thinking characterizing contemporary rural sociology. As this sociological sub-discipline evolves along with society and the rural world, it appears of paramount importance to make available ground-breaking research to the international scientific community. Rural sociology is changing and this volume testifies of this change by documenting the introduction of new themes of research as well as the evolution of established ones. In this regard, it provides a unique and uniquely international view of the most recent advanced production in rural sociology. The volume consists of eighteen chapters representing original pieces of research and an introduction that frames them in the context of the evolution of the discipline.
Urban People and Places: the sociology of cities, suburbs, and towns by
An undergraduate exploration of urban sociology, giving balanced treatment to both the process by which cities are built (i.e., urbanization) and the ways of life practiced by people that live and work in more urban places (i.e., urbanism).
White Fragility by
In this groundbreaking and timely book, antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility. Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo explores how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.
At Home on the Street: people, poverty, and a hidden culture of homelessness by
"What they told us just did not fit with what we had heard from the experts," write authors Wasserman (sociology, Texas Tech Univ.) and Clair (sociology, Univ. of Alabama, Birmingham) in their preface, and this candor and determination to understand the underpinnings of homelessness in this country inform this splendid book. "As a society, how we deal with those who are homeless typically wavers between subtle paternalism and heavy-handed authoritarianism," they report after experiencing the "complexities and apparent contradictions" of street life for themselves and closely observing what began as a distrusting population and ended with real friendships. The authors' near-disarming sincerity is offset by the reliability of their reports and familiarity with the existing literature, as well as the useful index and list of references. Candid throughout, they conclude "by offering, not solutions on how to end homelessness, but rather insights about how to begin to think about it in new ways." VERDICT This meditation on friendship as much as a cutting-edge report on homelessness is recommended for public policy players, psychologists, social workers, urban planners, sociologists, and anyone interested in the vicissitudes-and pleasures-of the research process.-Ellen D. Gilbert, Princeton, NJ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Civil Disabilities: citizenship, membership, and belonging by
An estimated one billion people around the globe live with a disability; this number grows exponentially when family members, friends, and care providers are included. Various countries and international organizations have attempted to guard against discrimination and secure basic human rights for those whose lives are affected by disability. Yet despite such attempts many disabled persons in the United States and throughout the world still face exclusion from full citizenship and membership in their respective societies. They are regularly denied employment, housing, health care, access to buildings, and the right to move freely in public spaces. At base, such discrimination reflects a tacit yet pervasive assumption that disabled persons do not belong in society.
Civil Disabilities challenges such norms and practices, urging a reconceptualization of disability and citizenship to secure a rightful place for disabled persons in society. Essays from leading scholars in a diversity of fields offer critical perspectives on current citizenship studies, which still largely assume an ableist world. Placing historians in conversation with anthropologists, sociologists with literary critics, and musicologists with political scientists, this interdisciplinary volume presents a compelling case for reimagining citizenship that is more consistent, inclusive, and just, in both theory and practice. By placing disability front and center in academic and civic discourse, Civil Disabilities tests the very notion of citizenship and transforms our understanding of disability and belonging.
A Disability History of the United States by
The first book to cover the entirety of disability history, from pre-1492 to the present
Disability is not just the story of someone we love or the story of whom we may become; rather it is undoubtedly the story of our nation. Covering the entirety of US history from pre-1492 to the present, A Disability History of the United States is the first book to place the experiences of people with disabilities at the center of the American narrative. In many ways, it's a familiar telling. In other ways, however, it is a radical repositioning of US history. By doing so, the book casts new light on familiar stories, such as slavery and immigration, while breaking ground about the ties between nativism and oralism in the late nineteenth century and the role of ableism in the development of democracy.
A Disability History of the United States pulls from primary-source documents and social histories to retell American history through the eyes, words, and impressions of the people who lived it. As historian and disability scholar Nielsen argues, to understand disability history isn't to narrowly focus on a series of individual triumphs but rather to examine mass movements and pivotal daily events through the lens of varied experiences. Throughout the book, Nielsen deftly illustrates how concepts of disability have deeply shaped the American experience--from deciding who was allowed to immigrate to establishing labor laws and justifying slavery and gender discrimination. Included are absorbing--at times horrific--narratives of blinded slaves being thrown overboard and women being involuntarily sterilized, as well as triumphant accounts of disabled miners organizing strikes and disability rights activists picketing Washington.
Engrossing and profound, A Disability History of the United States fundamentally reinterprets how we view our nation's past: from a stifling master narrative to a shared history that encompasses us all.
Drug Mules by
Contents: Introduction: cartels and cocaine queens -- Imagining drug trafficking: mafias, markets, mules -- What do women talk about when they talk about trafficking? -- Who are the 'traffickers'? -- For money and love: women's narratives about becoming mules -- Beginning mule-work -- Mule-work and gender -- Backing out -- Conclusion: women's offending in global context.
Drugs Clubs and Young People by
In this volume, contributors employ sociological and public health perspectives to offer insights into behaviours common at raves and nightclubs. The volume provides theoretical observations on illicit club drug use and supply, helping to challenge current orthodoxies on the role of drug use within young peoples' lives. Drawing material from the USA, UK and Hong Kong, the volume allows the demystification of stereotypical presentations surrounding young people who attend clubs and/or use club drugs. This work provides a badly needed and objective analysis of youthful drug use, and a foundation from which future sociological and public studies on young people, clubs and drugs - as well as young people themselves - will benefit.
Farewell to the World by
In this comparative study, sociologist Marzio Barbagli examines suicide as a socio-cultural, religious, and political phenomenon, exploring the reasons that underlie it and the meanings it has acquired in different cultures throughout the world. Drawing on a body of research carried out by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and psychologists, Barbagli argues that a satisfactory theory of suicide cannot limit itself to the two causes highlighted by French sociologist Émile Durkheim--namely, social integration and regulation--but must rather provide a new account that links the motives for and significance attributed to individual actions with the people for and against whom individuals take their lives.--From publisher description.
Feeding the Other by
How food pantries stigmatize their clients through a discourse that emphasizes hard work, self help, and economic productivity rather than food justice and equity.
The United States has one of the highest rates of hunger and food insecurity in the industrialized world, with poor households, single parents, and communities of color disproportionately affected. Food pantries--run by charitable and faith-based organizations--rather than legal entitlements have become a cornerstone of the government's efforts to end hunger. In Feeding the Other, Rebecca de Souza argues that food pantries stigmatize their clients through a discourse that emphasizes hard work, self help, and economic productivity rather than food justice and equity. De Souza describes this "framing, blaming, and shaming" as "neoliberal stigma" that recasts the structural issue of hunger as a problem for the individual hungry person.
De Souza shows how neoliberal stigma plays out in practice through a comparative case analysis of two food pantries in Duluth, Minnesota. Doing so, she documents the seldom-acknowledged voices, experiences, and realities of people living with hunger. She describes the failure of public institutions to protect citizens from poverty and hunger; the white privilege of pantry volunteers caught between neoliberal narratives and social justice concerns; the evangelical conviction that food assistance should be "a hand up, not a handout"; the culture of suspicion in food pantry spaces; and the constraints on food choice. It is only by rejecting the neoliberal narrative and giving voice to the hungry rather than the privileged, de Souza argues, that food pantries can become agents of food justice.
Food and Poverty by
Food insecurity rates, which skyrocketed with the Great Recession, have yet to fall to pre-recession levels. Food pantries are stretched thin, and states are imposing new restrictions on programs like SNAP that are preventing people from getting crucial government assistance. At the same time, we see an increase in obesity that results from lack of access to healthy foods. The poor face a daily choice between paying bills and paying for food.
Human Behavior in the Social Environment: theories for social work practice by
Human Behavior in the Social Environment (HBSE) is a critical course for social work students because it introduces them to the very specific person-in-environment, biopsychosocial perspective that sets social work apart from other helping professions. Authored by the foremost scholars in the field, this book takes a theoretical approach to human behavior in the social environment and covers all the major theories'from cognitive behavioral to family systems to psychosocial. Aligned with social work accreditation standards (EPAS), this book provides social work students with thorough coverage of human behavior at every level of interaction.
Mercy For Animals by
A compelling look at animal welfare and factory farming in the United States from Mercy For Animals, the leading international force in preventing cruelty to farmed animals and promoting compassionate food choices and policies.
Nathan Runkle would have been a fifth-generation farmer in his small midwestern town. Instead, he founded our nation's leading nonprofit organization for protecting factory farmed animals. In Mercy For Animals , Nathan brings us into the trenches of his organization's work; from MFA's early days in grassroots activism, to dangerous and dramatic experiences doing undercover investigations, to the organization's current large-scale efforts at making sweeping legislative change to protect factory farmed animals and encourage compassionate food choices.
But this isn't just Nathan's story. Mercy For Animals examines how our country moved from a network of small, local farms with more than 50 percent of Americans involved in agriculture to a massive coast-to-coast industrial complex controlled by a mere 1 percent of our population--and the consequences of this drastic change on animals as well as our global and local environments. We also learn how MFA strives to protect farmed animals in behind-the-scenes negotiations with companies like Nestl#65533; and other brand names--conglomerates whose policy changes can save countless lives and strengthen our planet. Alongside this unflinching snapshot of our current food system, readers are also offered hope and solutions--big and small--for ending mistreatment of factory farmed animals. From simple diet modifications to a clear explanation of how to contact corporations and legislators efficiently, Mercy For Animals proves that you don't have to be a hardcore vegan or an animal-rights activist to make a powerful difference in the lives of animals.
The New Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness by
In a bold and innovative argument, a rising legal star shows readers how the mass incarceration of a disproportionate number of black men amounts to a devastating system of racial control. This is a terrifying reality that exists in the UK as much as in the US. Despite the triumphant dismantling of the Jim Crow laws, the system that once forced African-Americans into a segregated second-class citizenship still haunts and the criminal justice system still unfairly targets black men and deprives an entire segment of the population of their basic rights.
No Longer Homeless: how the ex-homeless get and stay off the streets by
Research suggests that between 6 and 14 percent of the US population has been homeless at some point in their lives--a huge number of people. No Longer Homeless shares the stories of people who have formerly been homeless to examine how they transition off the streets, find housing, and stay housed. No Longer Homeless offers a unique perspective of people who have managed to change their lives, the resources they needed, and the factors that contributed to lasting change. The book profiles men and women of different races and ages across the country, and it shares stories of people who have been off the streets from two months to twenty years. It addresses topics such as addiction, mental health, income--from formal employment and off-the-books work, and community resources. No Longer Homeless is a powerful look at a group of people we rarely hear about--those who have formerly been on the streets--sharing the details of their lives to help individuals, organizations, and communities learn to better support the ongoing challenges of homelessness. (less)
No Visible Bruises by
An award-winning journalist's intimate investigation of the true scope of domestic violence, revealing how the roots of America's most pressing social crises are buried in abuse that happens behind closed doors. We call it domestic violence. We call it private violence. Sometimes we call it intimate terrorism. But whatever we call it, we generally do not believe it has anything at all to do with us, despite the World Health Organization deeming it a 'global epidemic.' In America, domestic violence accounts for 15 percent of all violent crime, and yet it remains locked in silence, even as its tendrils reach unseen into so many of our most pressing national issues, from our economy to our education system, from mass shootings to mass incarceration to #MeToo. We still have not taken the true measure of this problem. In [this book], journalist Rachel Louise Snyder gives context for what we don't know we're seeing. She frames this urgent and immersive account of the scale of domestic violence in our country around key stories that explode the common myths--that if things were bad enough, victims would just leave; that a violent person cannot become nonviolent; that shelter is an adequate response; and, most insidiously, that violence inside the home is a private matter, sealed from the public sphere and disconnected from other forms of violence. Through the stories of victims, perpetrators, law enforcement, and reform movements from across the country, Snyder explores the real roots of private violence, its far-reaching consequences for society, and what it will take to truly address it.
Troubled: the failed promise of America's behavioral treatment programs by
"Each year thousands of young adults deemed out of control--suffering from depression, addiction, anxiety, and rage--are carted off against their will to remote wilderness programs and treatment facilities across the country. Desperate parents of these "troubled teens" fear it's their only option. The private, largely unregulated behavioral boot camps break their children down, a damnation the children suffer forever. Acclaimed journalist Kenneth R. Rosen knows firsthand the brutal emotional, physical, and sexual abuse carried out at these programs. Rosen unspools the stories of four graduates on their own scarred journeys through the programs into adulthood. Based on three years of reporting and more than one hundred interviews with other clients, their parents, psychologists, and health-care professionals, Troubled combines harrowing storytelling with investigative journalism to expose the disturbing truth about the massively profitable, sometimes fatal, grossly unchecked redirection industry. Not without hope, Troubled ultimately delivers an emotional, crucial tapestry of coming of age, neglect, exploitation, trauma, and fraught redemption.
What's Wrong with the Poor?: psychiatry, race, and the war on poverty by
In the 1960s, policymakers and mental health experts joined forces to participate in President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. In her insightful interdisciplinary history, physician and historian Mical Raz examines the interplay between psychiatric theory and social policy throughout that decade, ending with President Richard Nixon's 1971 veto of a bill that would have provided universal day care. She shows that this cooperation between mental health professionals and policymakers was based on an understanding of what poor men, women, and children lacked. This perception was rooted in psychiatric theories of deprivation focused on two overlapping sections of American society: the poor had less, and African Americans, disproportionately represented among America's poor, were seen as having practically nothing.
Raz analyzes the political and cultural context that led child mental health experts, educators, and policymakers to embrace this deprivation-based theory and its translation into liberal social policy. Deprivation theory, she shows, continues to haunt social policy today, profoundly shaping how both health professionals and educators view children from low-income and culturally and linguistically diverse homes.
Assimilation by
Does one have to speak English to be an American? Or follow a particular religion? Many students learn in school that America is the world's melting pot, yet this belies long-established attempts by many communities to retain aspects of life from original countries. Racial and ethnic identity sometimes conflict with established national narratives, leading some students to wonder how the most diverse country in history can also define itself so narrowly? This volume analyzes assimilation in the United States from contrasting viewpoints. Readers will learn the relevant questions and key ideas driving perceptions of assimilation, such as the role of immigration policies in creating assimilation, the implications of adopting dual-language and dual-citizenship programs, and the importance of pushing businesses to market to a diverse society.
The Criminalization of Immigration: the post 9/11 moral panic by
After the September 11th attacks the United States government sought a response to terrorism. The ensuing "war on terror" brought sweeping new federal regulations and changes in immigration policy. Consequent changes in society's reaction to immigration and the degree to which immigrants have become criminalized are apparent. Hauptman reveals the effects of a moral panic toward immigration after 9/11, explaining social control initiatives like the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, as a direct result of the concern over immigrants in the United States. Hauptman concludes that the response to the attacks resulted in the criminalization of immigrants in post-September 11th society.
Culling the Masses: the democratic origins of racist immigration policy in the Americas by
Culling the Masses questions the widely held view that in the long run democracy and racism cannot coexist. David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Mart#65533;n show that democracies were the first countries in the Americas to select immigrants by race, and undemocratic states the first to outlaw discrimination. Through analysis of legal records from twenty-two countries between 1790 and 2010, the authors present a history of the rise and fall of racial selection in the Western Hemisphere.
The United States led the way in using legal means to exclude "inferior" ethnic groups. Starting in 1790, Congress began passing nationality and immigration laws that prevented Africans and Asians from becoming citizens, on the grounds that they were inherently incapable of self-government. Similar policies were soon adopted by the self-governing colonies and dominions of the British Empire, eventually spreading across Latin America as well.
Undemocratic regimes in Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Cuba reversed their discriminatory laws in the 1930s and 1940s, decades ahead of the United States and Canada. The conventional claim that racism and democracy are antithetical-because democracy depends on ideals of equality and fairness, which are incompatible with the notion of racial inferiority-cannot explain why liberal democracies were leaders in promoting racist policies and laggards in eliminating them. Ultimately, the authors argue, the changed racial geopolitics of World War II and the Cold War was necessary to convince North American countries to reform their immigration and citizenship laws.
From Immigrants to Americans: the rise and fall of fitting in by
Immigration has always caused immense public concern, especially when the perception is that immigrants are not assimilating into society they way they should, or perhaps the way they once did. Americans are frustrated as they try to order food, hire laborers, or simply talk to someone they see on the street and cannot communicate with them because the person is an immigrant who has not fully adopted American culture or language. But is this truly a modern phenomenon? In From Immigrants to Americans, Jacob Vigdor offers a direct comparison of the experiences of immigrants in the United States from the mid-19th century to the present day. His conclusions are both unexpected and fascinating. Vigdor shows how the varying economic situations immigrants come from has always played an important role in their assimilation. The English language skills of contemporary immigrants are actually quite good compared to the historical average, but those who arrive without knowing English are learning at slower rates. He continues to argue that today's immigrants face far fewer "incentives" to assimilate and offers a set of assimilation friendly policies. From Immigrants to Americans is an important book for anyone interested in immigration, either the history or the modern implications, or who want to understand why today's immigrants seem so different from previous generations of immigrants and how much they are the same. Co-published with the Manhattan Institute
Key Concepts in Migration by
"Demonstrates that the study of international migration has really come of age. From acculturation to undocumented immigration, the authors consider more than three dozen concepts at the heart of migration studies. Clearly written in a highly readable style, the book is a valuable resource for students and scholars alike."- Nancy Foner, City University of New York "This very useful and authoritative compendium explicates thirty-eight concepts central to analysis of international migration. It is accessible to undergraduate students and even can enrich graduate courses. It nicely complements books like The Age of Migration or Exceptional People. Concision is a virtue!"- Mark J. Miller, University of Delaware This book provides lucid and intuitive explanations of the most important migration concepts as used in classrooms, among policymakers, and in popular and academic discourse. Arguing that there is a clear need for a better public understanding of migration, it sets out to clarify the field by exploring relevant concepts in a direct and engaging way. Each concept: Includes an easy to understand definition Provides real-world examples Gives suggestions for further reading Is carefully cross-referenced to other related concepts It is an ideal resource for undergraduate and post-graduate students studying migration in sociology, politics, development and throughout the social sciences, as well as scholars in the field and practitioners in governmental and non-governmental organizations.
The Next Great Migration : the beauty and terror of life on the move by
"A prize-winning journalist upends our centuries-long assumptions about migration through science, history, and reporting--predicting its lifesaving power in the face of climate change. The news today is full of stories of dislocated people on the move. Wild species, too, are escaping warming seas and desiccated lands, creeping, swimming, and flying in a mass exodus from their past habitats. News media presents this scrambling of the planet's migration patterns as unprecedented, provoking fears of the spread of disease and conflict and waves of anxiety across the Western world. On both sides of the Atlantic, experts issue alarmed predictions of millions of invading aliens, unstoppable as an advancing tsunami, and countries respond by electing anti-immigration leaders who slam closed borders that were historically porous. But the science and history of migration in animals, plants, and humans tell a different story. Far from being a disruptive behavior to be quelled at any cost, migration is an ancient and lifesaving response to environmental change, a biological imperative as necessary as breathing. Climate changes triggered the first human migrations out of Africa. Falling sea levels allowed our passage across the Bering Sea. Unhampered by barbed wire, migration allowed our ancestors to people the planet, catapulting us into the highest reaches of the Himalayan mountains and the most remote islands of the Pacific, creating and disseminating the biological, cultural, and social diversity that ecosystems and societies depend upon. In other words, migration is not the crisis--it is the solution. Conclusively tracking the history of misinformation from the 18th century through today's anti-immigration policies, The Next Great Migration makes the case for a future in which migration is not a source of fear, but of hope"
The Slums of Aspen: immigrants vs. the environment in America's Eden by
Winner, Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award, presented by the Environment & Technology section of the American Sociological Association Environmentalism usually calls to mind images of peace and serenity, a oneness with nature, and a shared sense of responsibility. But one town in Colorado, under the guise of environmental protection, passed a resolution limiting immigration, bolstering the privilege of the wealthy and scapegoating Latin American newcomers for the area's current and future ecological problems. This might have escaped attention save for the fact that this wasn't some rinky-dink backwater. It was Aspen, Colorado, playground of the rich and famous and the West's most elite ski town. Tracking the lives of immigrant laborers through several years of exhaustive fieldwork and archival digging, The Slums of Aspen tells a story that brings together some of the most pressing social problems of the day: environmental crises, immigration, and social inequality. Park and Pellow demonstrate how these issues are intertwined in the everyday experiences of people who work and live in this wealthy tourist community. Offering a new understanding of a little known class of the super-elite, of low-wage immigrants (mostly from Latin America) who have become the foundation for service and leisure in this famous resort, and of the recent history of the ski industry, Park and Pellow expose the ways in which Colorado boosters have reshaped the landscape and altered ecosystems in pursuit of profit and pleasure. Of even greater urgency, they frame how environmental degradation and immigration reform have become inextricably linked in many regions of the American West, a dynamic that interferes with the efforts of valorous environmental causes, often turning away from conservation and toward insidious racial privilege.
We Wanted Workers by
From America's leading immigration economist, a refreshingly level-headed exploration of the effects of immigration on migrant and non-migrant workers.
Women and Migration in the U. S. -Mexico Borderlands by
Women's migration within Mexico and from Mexico to the United States is increasing; nearly as many women as men are migrating. This development gives rise to new social negotiations, which have not been well examined in migration studies until now. This pathbreaking reader analyzes how economically and politically displaced migrant women assert agency in everyday life. Scholars across diverse disciplines interrogate the socioeconomic forces that propel Mexican women into the migrant stream and shape their employment options; the changes that these women are making in homes, families, and communities; and the "structural violence" that they confront in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands broadly conceived--all within the economic, social, cultural, and political interstices of the two countries.
This reader includes twenty-three essays--two of which are translated from the Spanish--that illuminate women's engagement with diverse social and cultural challenges. One contributor critiques the statistical fallacy of nativist discourses within the United States that portray Chicana and Mexican women's fertility rates as "out of control." Other contributors explore the relation between sexual violence and women's migration from rural areas to urban centers within Mexico, the ways that undocumented migrant communities challenge conventional notions of citizenship, and young Latinas' commemorations of the late, internationally renowned singer Selena. Several essays address workplace intimidation and violence, harassment and rape by U.S. border patrol agents and maquiladora managers, sexual violence, and the brutal murders of nearly two hundred young women near Ciudad Ju#65533;rez. This rich collection highlights both the structural inequities faced by Mexican women in the borderlands and the creative ways they have responded to them.
Which "Global Village"? by
The word village has the evocative power of ancient shared social values based on solidarity, equality, and common expectations for the betterment of life. The book's title is borrowed from McLuhan's apt metaphor, but questions its underlying assumptions. The contributors recast some of the basic elements of the complex phenomenon of the so-called globalization. Trade laws, industrial relations, economic and political systems are analyzed in a critical perspective. Moreover, environment and sustainable development, languages' rights, education, mobility and migrations are discussed in view of contemporary changes that societies are undergoing throughout the world. The vulnerability of societies caught up in new networks of interdependence due to reduced distances also are put to the fore, in the context of the new accelerated circulation of information, ideas, goods, and human beings. Provacative reading for scholars interested in a multinational, Euro-Atlanticist perspective on globalization.
The international discourse is most recently focused on some negative outgrowths of world economy, especially after the Seattle Round (December 1999) and its unexpected uprising of protests. The researches of the Center for Euro-Atlantic Studies (University of Genoa), in cooperation with scholars from Europe, Canada and the United States, offer in this collection of essays a multinational contribution which is part of their work in progress on the multifaceted issue of the contemporary global village. The book features some optimistic outcomes, and some worries about what the new millennium will not achieve, despite the common and transnational efforts, that is to say a fair re-distribution of resources to reach what R. W. Fogel defines a post-modern equality, based on values as well as on material wealth. In sum, the essayists wonder if some of the hidden promises of globalization will develop in a better new century.
Conformity by
"Conformity" explores the phenomena of social influences and their consequences from a legal perspective.
Returned: Going and Coming in an Age of Deportation by
This book follows transnational Mexicans as they experience the alienation and unpredictability of deportation, tracing the particular ways that U.S. immigration policies and state removals affect families. Deportation--an emergent global order of social injustice--reaches far beyond the individual deportee, as family members with diverse U.S. immigration statuses, including U.S. citizens, also return after deportation or migrate for the first time. RETURNED tells the story of the chaos, and design, of deportation and its aftermath.
Contesting stereotypes and creating identities : social categories, social identities, and educational participation by
Since the end of legal segregation in schools, most research on educational inequality has focused on economic and other structural obstacles to the academic achievement of disadvantaged groups. But in Contesting Stereotypes and Creating Identities , a distinguished group of psychologists and social scientists argue that stereotypes about the academic potential of some minority groups remain a significant barrier to their achievement. This groundbreaking volume examines how low institutional and cultural expectations of minorities hinder their academic success, how these stereotypes are perpetuated, and the ways that minority students attempt to empower themselves by redefining their identities.
The contributors to Contesting Stereotypes and Creating Identities explore issues of ethnic identity and educational inequality from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives, drawing on historical analyses, social-psychological experiments, interviews, and observation. Meagan Patterson and Rebecca Bigler show that when teachers label or segregate students according to social categories (even in subtle ways), students are more likely to rank and stereotype one another, so educators must pay attention to the implicit or unintentional ways that they emphasize group differences. Many of the contributors contest John Ogbu's theory that African Americans have developed an "oppositional culture" that devalues academic effort as a form of "acting white." Daphna Oyserman and Daniel Brickman, in their study of black and Latino youth, find evidence that strong identification with their ethnic group is actually associated with higher academic motivation among minority youth. Yet, as Julie Garcia and Jennifer Crocker find in a study of African-American female college students, the desire to disprove negative stereotypes about race and gender can lead to anxiety, low self-esteem, and excessive, self-defeating levels of effort, which impede learning and academic success. The authors call for educational institutions to diffuse these threats to minority students' identities by emphasizing that intelligence is a malleable rather than a fixed trait.
Contesting Stereotypes and Creating Identities reveals the many hidden ways that educational opportunities are denied to some social groups. At the same time, this probing and wide-ranging anthology provides a fresh perspective on the creative ways that these groups challenge stereotypes and attempt to participate fully in the educational system.
Defying the Odds: Class and the Pursuit of Higher Literacy by
Examines why some working-class students pursue higher literacy while others don't.
Dialogue Across Difference: practice, theory and research on intergroup dialogue by
Due to continuing immigration and increasing racial and ethnic inclusiveness, higher education institutions in the United States are likely to grow ever more diverse in the 21st century. This shift holds both promise and peril: Increased inter-ethnic contact could lead to a more fruitful learning environment that encourages collaboration. On the other hand, social identity and on-campus diversity remain hotly contested issues that often raise intergroup tensions and inhibit discussion. How can we help diverse students learn from each other and gain the competencies they will need in an increasingly multicultural America? Dialogue Across Difference synthesizes three years' worth of research from an innovative field experiment focused on improving intergroup understanding, relationships and collaboration. The result is a fascinating study of the potential of intergroup dialogue to improve relations across race and gender.
First developed in the late 1980s, intergroup dialogues bring together an equal number of students from two different groups - such as people of color and white people, or women and men - to share their perspectives and learn from each other. To test the possible impact of such courses and to develop a standard of best practice, the authors of Dialogue Across Difference incorporated various theories of social psychology, higher education, communication studies and social work to design and implement a uniform curriculum in nine universities across the country. Unlike most studies on intergroup dialogue, this project employed random assignment to enroll more than 1,450 students in experimental and control groups, including in 26 dialogue courses and control groups on race and gender each. Students admitted to the dialogue courses learned about racial and gender inequalities through readings, role-play activities and personal reflections. The authors tracked students' progress using a mixed-method approach, including longitudinal surveys, content analyses of student papers, interviews of students, and videotapes of sessions. The results are heartening: Over the course of a term, students who participated in intergroup dialogues developed more insight into how members of other groups perceive the world. They also became more thoughtful about the structural underpinnings of inequality, increased their motivation to bridge differences and intergroup empathy, and placed a greater value on diversity and collaborative action. The authors also note that the effects of such courses were evident on nearly all measures. While students did report an initial increase in negative emotions - a possible indication of the difficulty of openly addressing race and gender - that effect was no longer present a year after the course. Overall, the results are remarkably consistent and point to an optimistic conclusion: intergroup dialogue is more than mere talk. It fosters productive communication about and across differences in the service of greater collaboration for equity and justice.
Ambitious and timely, Dialogue Across Difference presents a persuasive practical, theoretical and empirical account of the benefits of intergroup dialogue. The data and research presented in this volume offer a useful model for improving relations among different groups not just in the college setting but in the United States as well.
Managing Diversity Flashpoints in Higher Education by
Covering a timely topic, which is more and more frequently in the news, this book offers vignettes that will sharpen the reader's ability to recognize and respond to difficult situations sparked by identity differences among faculty, staff, and students in college and university settings. The authors provide a systematic guide to addressing interpersonal conflicts that arise out of issues of identity difference, both for individuals and for campus work teams who provide direct service to students. Managing Diversity Flashpoints in Higher Education empowers readers to diagnose diversity flashpoint situations and positively address them without creating defensiveness and barriers to dialogue. The authors include an overview of the changing ethnic, racial, and gender composition of students in higher education in the United States and the major trends in campus responses to the changing student population. They offer an approach to creating higher education environments that welcome people of all cultural characteristics and promote civility on campus. The book is founded on the authors' research on diversity flashpoints in higher education for which they interviewed a national sample of student affairs professionals. The authors identified uncomfortable interpersonal situations with faculty members in which the discomfort arose from student identity difference. This process led to the formulation of strategies for using vignettes (resulting from interviews) in professional development sessions.
Understanding Education: a sociological perspective by
What purposes should education serve? Why does education matter? What should be done about education?
These fundamental questions of value are not always seen as central to the sociology of education. However, this book argues that they are pivotal and provides a sophisticated and engaging invitation to the field that is designed to open up these important issues. It draws attention to the many points of disagreement that exist between major thinkers in the sociology of education, and the values on which their ideas are based. By involving readers in crucial questions about the potential contribution of sociology to education policies and practices, it aims to bridge the divide between education as it is talked about by academics, and the concerns of policymakers and educators who have to make practical decisions about what is to be done.
The book reviews competing approaches in the sociology of education - structural functionalism, symbolic interactionism, Marxism, feminism, critical race theory and poststructuralism - and shows how these can be applied to major themes such as social reproduction, the politics of knowledge, multicultural education, identity and teachers' work. Throughout, the authors emphasise the importance of understanding social and educational values and the ways in which these underpin and impact upon the work of both academics and educators.
Undocumented and Unwanted: attending college against the odds by
Undocumented immigrant postsecondary students face myriad challenges while pursuing a college education. Garcia focuses on the experiences of nine students attending a public comprehensive postsecondary institution in California to assess how different types of social capital help students pursue a college education. She demonstrates how students were wholly or partly reliant on various types of social capital accessed before and during matriculation. Three of the major findings are: institutional agents were instrumental in developing students' social capital, family- and peer-based social capital was important to students' matriculation, and perceptions about immigration status affected students' matriculation and social capital development.
The American Dream and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema by 
Ethnic-Racial Stigma and Physical Health Disparities in the United States of America by
Articles on interpersonal, intergroup and structural factors as a source of physical health disparities.
Pandemics and Emerging Infectious Diseases: The Sociological Agenda by
Infectious disease pandemics are a rising threat in our globalizing world. This agenda-setting collection provides international analysis of the pressing sociological concerns they confront us with, from cross-border coordination of public health governance to geopolitical issues of development and social equity. Focuses on vital sociological issues raised by resurgent disease pandemics Detailed analysis of case studies as well as broader, systemic factors Contributions from North America, Europe and Asia provide international perspective Bold, agenda-setting treatment of a high-profile topic
The Stigma of Disease and Disability: understanding causes and overcoming injustices by
The lives of people with disease and disability are harmed not only by their conditions but by public response to these conditions in the form of stigma and discrimination. Making sense of this injustice is the focus of this book.
The two main sections of the book comprise chapters on 10 specific illnesses and conditions (mental illness, substance abuse, intellectual disability, physical and sensory disabilities, HIV-AIDS, infectious disease, cancer, obesity, childhood disorders, and Alzheimer's disease) and chapters relating to broader issues (stigma and family, overcoming stigma, stigma across cultures, and future directions).
The book concludes with observations on what has not worked in overcoming stigma as well as possible future directions.
