Tropical Africa was one of the last regions of the world to experience formal European colonialism, a process that coincided with the advent of a range of new scientific specialties and research ...methods. Africa as a Living Laboratory is a far-reaching study of the thorny relationship between imperialism and the role of scientific expertise—environmental, medical, racial, and anthropological—in the colonization of British Africa.A key source for Helen Tilley's analysis is the African Research Survey, a project undertaken in the 1930s to explore how modern science was being applied to African problems. This project both embraced and recommended an interdisciplinary approach to research on Africa that, Tilley argues, underscored the heterogeneity of African environments and the interrelations among the problems being studied. While the aim of British colonialists was unquestionably to transform and modernize Africa, their efforts, Tilley contends, were often unexpectedly subverted by scientific concerns with the local and vernacular. Meticulously researched and gracefully argued, Africa as a Living Laboratory transforms our understanding of imperial history, colonial development, and the role science played in both.
Systems of social protection can provide crucial assistance to the poorest and most vulnerable groups in society, but not all systems are created equally. In Latin America, social policies have ...historically exhibited large gaps in coverage and high levels of inequality in benefit size. Since the late 1990s, countries in this region have begun to grapple with these challenges, enacting a series of reforms to healthcare, social assistance and education policy. While some of these initiatives have moved in a universal direction, others have maintained existing segmentation or moved in a regressive direction. Welfare and Party Politics in Latin America explores this variation in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Venezuela, finding that the design of previous policies, the intensity of electoral competition, and the character of political parties all influence the nature of contemporary social policy reform in Latin America.
As cash-strapped metropolitan newspapers struggle to maintain their
traditional influence and quality reporting, large national and
international outlets have pivoted to serving readers who can and
...will choose to pay for news, skewing coverage toward a wealthy,
white, and liberal audience. Amid rampant inequality and distrust,
media outlets have become more out of touch with the democracy they
purport to serve. How did journalism end up in such a predicament,
and what are the prospects for achieving a more equitable future?
In News for the Rich, White, and Blue , Nikki Usher recasts
the challenges facing journalism in terms of place, power, and
inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of field research, she
illuminates how journalists decide what becomes news and how news
organizations strategize about the future. Usher shows how
newsrooms remain places of power, largely white institutions
growing more elite as journalists confront a shrinking job market.
She details how Google, Facebook, and the digital-advertising
ecosystem have wreaked havoc on the economic model for quality
journalism, leaving local news to suffer. Usher also highlights how
the handful of likely survivors-well-funded media outlets such as
the New York Times -increasingly appeal to a global,
"placeless" reader. News for the Rich, White, and Blue
concludes with a series of provocative recommendations to reimagine
journalism to ensure its resiliency and its ability to speak to a
diverse set of issues and readers.
What are the determinants of democratization? Do the factors that move countries toward democracy also help them refrain from backsliding toward autocracy? This book attempts to answer these ...questions through a combination of a statistical analysis of social, economic, and international determinants of regime change in 165 countries around the world in 1972–2006, and case study work on nine episodes of democratization occurring in Argentina, Bolivia, Hungary, Nepal, Peru, the Philippines, South Africa, Turkey, and Uruguay. The findings suggest that democracy is promoted by long-term structural forces such as economic prosperity, but also by peaceful popular uprisings and the institutional setup of authoritarian regimes. In the short-run, however, elite actors may play a key role, particularly through the importance of intra-regime splits. Jan Teorell argues that these results have important repercussions both for current theories of democratization and for the international community's effort in developing policies for democracy promotion.
Radio Fields Bessire, Lucas; Fisher, Daniel; Ginsburg, Faye
11/2012
eBook
Radio is the most widespread electronic medium in the world today. As a form of technology that is both durable and relatively cheap, radio remains central to the everyday lives of billions of people ...around the globe. It is used as a call for prayer in Argentina and Appalachia, to organize political protest in Mexico and Libya, and for wartime communication in Iraq and Afghanistan. In urban centers it is played constantly in shopping malls, waiting rooms, and classrooms. Yet despite its omnipresence, it remains the media form least studied by anthropologists.Radio Fields employs ethnographic methods to reveal the diverse domains in which radio is imagined, deployed, and understood. Drawing on research from six continents, the volume demonstrates how the particular capacities and practices of radio provide singular insight into diverse social worlds, ranging from aboriginal Australia to urban Zambia. Together, the contributors address how radio creates distinct possibilities for rethinking such fundamental concepts as culture, communication, community, and collective agency.
As unprecedented waves of young, rural women journey to cities in China, not only to work, but also to see the worldand gain some autonomy, they regularly face significant institutional obstacles as ...well as deep-seated anti-rural prejudices. Based on immersive fieldwork, Cara Wallis provides an intimate portrait of the social, cultural, and economic implications of mobile communication for a group of young women engaged in unskilled service work in Beijing, where they live and work for indefinite periods of time.While simultaneously situating her work within the fields of feminist studies, technology studies, and communication theory, Wallis explores the way in which the cell phone has been integrated into the transforming social structures and practices of contemporary China, and the ways in which mobile technology enables rural young women - a population that has been traditionally marginalized and deemed as backward and other - to participate in and create culture, allowing them to perform a modern, rural-urban identity. In this theoretically rich and empirically grounded analysis,Wallis provides original insight into the co-construction of technology and subjectivity as well as the multiple forces that shape contemporary China.
American crucible Gerstle, Gary
2017., 20170228, 2017, 2017-06-26
eBook
This sweeping history of twentieth-century America follows the changing and often conflicting ideas about the fundamental nature of American society: Is the United States a social melting pot, as our ...civic creed warrants, or is full citizenship somehow reserved for those who are white and of the "right" ancestry? Gary Gerstle traces the forces of civic and racial nationalism, arguing that both profoundly shaped our society. After Theodore Roosevelt led his Rough Riders to victory during the Spanish American War, he boasted of the diversity of his men's origins- from the Kentucky backwoods to the Irish, Italian, and Jewish neighborhoods of northeastern cities. Roosevelt's vision of a hybrid and superior "American race," strengthened by war, would inspire the social, diplomatic, and economic policies of American liberals for decades. And yet, for all of its appeal to the civic principles of inclusion, this liberal legacy was grounded in "Anglo-Saxon" culture, making it difficult in particular for Jews and Italians and especially for Asians and African Americans to gain acceptance. Gerstle weaves a compelling story of events, institutions, and ideas that played on perceptions of ethnic/racial difference, from the world wars and the labor movement to the New Deal and Hollywood to the Cold War and the civil rights movement. We witness the remnants of racial thinking among such liberals as FDR and LBJ; we see how Italians and Jews from Frank Capra to the creators of Superman perpetuated the New Deal philosophy while suppressing their own ethnicity; we feel the frustrations of African-American servicemen denied the opportunity to fight for their country and the moral outrage of more recent black activists, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and Malcolm X. Gerstle argues that the civil rights movement and Vietnam broke the liberal nation apart, and his analysis of this upheaval leads him to assess Reagan's and Clinton's attempts to resurrect nationalism. Can the United States ever live up to its civic creed? For anyone who views racism as an aberration from the liberal premises of the republic, this book is must reading. Containing a new chapter that reconstructs and dissects the major struggles over race and nation in an era defined by the War on Terror and by the presidency of Barack Obama, American Crucible is a must-read for anyone who views racism as an aberration from the liberal premises of the republic. -- Provided by publisher
This book examines the concept of new public diplomacy against empirical data derived from three country case studies, in order to offer a systematic assessment of policy and practice in the early ...21st century.
The new public diplomacy (PD) is a major paradigm shift in international political communication. Globalisation and a new media landscape challenge traditional foreign ministry 'gatekeeper' structures, and foreign ministries can no longer lay claim to being sole or dominant actors in communicating foreign policy. This demands new ways of elucidating foreign policy to a range of nongovernmental international actors, and new ways of evaluating the influence of these communicative efforts.
The author investigates the methods and strategies used by five foreign ministries and cultural institutes in three countries as they attempt to adapt their PD practices to the demands of the new public diplomacy environment. Drawing upon case studies of US, British, and Swedish efforts, each chapter covers national policy, current activities, evaluation methods, and examples of individual campaigns.
This book will be of much interest to students of public diplomacy, foreign policy, political communication, media studies and international relations in general.
From award-winning economic historian Sanford M. Jacoby, a fascinating and important study of the labor movement and shareholder capitalism
Since the 1970s, American unions have shrunk dramatically, ...as has their economic clout. Labor in the Age of Finance traces the search for new sources of power, showing how unions turned financialization to their advantage.
Sanford Jacoby catalogs the array of allies and finance-based tactics labor deployed to stanch membership losses in the private sector. By leveraging pension capital, unions restructured corporate governance around issues like executive pay and accountability. In Congress, they drew on their political influence to press for corporate reforms in the wake of business scandals and the financial crisis. The effort restrained imperial CEOs but could not bridge the divide between workers and owners. Wages lagged behind investor returns, feeding the inequality identified by Occupy Wall Street. And labor’s slide continued.
A compelling blend of history, economics, and politics, Labor in the Age of Finance explores the paradox of capital bestowing power to labor in the tumultuous era of Enron, Lehman Brothers, and Dodd-Frank.
In 1959 C. P. Snow delivered his now-famous Rede Lecture, 'The Two Cultures,' a reflection on the academy based on the premise that intellectual life was divided into two cultures: the arts and ...humanities on one side and science on the other. Since then, a third culture, generally termed 'social science' and comprised of fields such as sociology, political science, economics, and psychology, has emerged. Jerome Kagan's book describes the assumptions, vocabulary, and contributions of each of these cultures and argues that the meanings of many of the concepts used by each culture are unique to it and do not apply to the others because the source of evidence for the term is special. The text summarizes the contributions of the social sciences and humanities to our understanding of human nature and questions the popular belief that biological processes are the main determinant of variation in human behavior.
