The Precariat Standing, Guy
2011, 2014, 2011-02-28, 20110101
eBook, Book
Open access
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. This book presents the Precariat – an emerging class, comprising ...the rapidly growing number of people facing lives of insecurity, moving in and out of jobs that give little meaning to their lives. Guy Standing argues that this class is producing instabilities in society. Although it would be wrong to characterise members of the Precariat as victims, many are frustrated and angry. The Precariat is dangerous because it is internally divided, leading to the villainisation of migrants and other vulnerable groups. Lacking agency, its members may be susceptible to the siren calls of political extremism. To prevent a ‘politics of inferno’, Guy Standing argues for a ‘politics of paradise’, in which redistribution and income security are reconfi gured in a new kind of Good Society, and in which the fears and aspirations of the Precariat are made central to a progressive strategy.
Digital Methods Rogers, Richard
2013, 20130510, 2019-06-20
eBook
In Digital Methods , Richard Rogers proposes a methodological outlook for social and cultural scholarly research on the Web that seeks to move Internet research beyond the study of online culture. It ...is not a toolkit for Internet research, or operating instructions for a software package; it deals with broader questions. How can we study social media to learn something about society rather than about social media use? How can hyperlinks reveal not just the value of a Web site but the politics of association? Rogers proposes repurposing Web-native techniques for research into cultural change and societal conditions. We can learn to reapply such "methods of the medium" as crawling and crowd sourcing, PageRank and similar algorithms, tag clouds and other visualizations; we can learn how they handle hits, likes, tags, date stamps, and other Web-native objects. By "thinking along" with devices and the objects they handle, digital research methods can follow the evolving methods of the medium. Rogers uses this new methodological outlook to examine the findings of inquiries into 9/11 search results, the recognition of climate change skeptics by climate-change-related Web sites, the events surrounding the Srebrenica massacre according to Dutch, Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian Wikipedias, presidential candidates' social media "friends," and the censorship of the Iranian Web. With Digital Methods , Rogers introduces a new vision and method for Internet research and at the same time applies them to the Web's objects of study, from tiny particles (hyperlinks) to large masses (social media).
This handbooks series aims to integrate knowledge of communication structures and processes. It is global in orientation, dedicated to cultural and epistemological diversity as well as different ...scholarly approaches. The series features volumes on 'messages, codes and channels', 'mode of address: communication situations and context', 'methodology in communication science' and 'application areas'. The latter features volumes devoted to a large range of specialist areas of communication science. The series as a whole aims at meeting the needs of undergraduates, postgraduates, academics and researchers across the area of communication studies.
Between Sex and Power Therborn, Göran
2004, 20040731, 2004-02-20, 2004-07-31, 20030101
eBook, Book
The institution of the family changed hugely during the course of the twentieth century. In this major new work, Göran Therborn provides a global history and sociology of the family as an institution ...and of politics within the family, focusing on three dimensions of family relations: on the rights and powers of fathers and husbands; on marriage, cohabitation and extra-marital sexuality; and on population policy. Therborn's empirical analysis uses a multi-disciplinary approach to show how the major family systems of the world have been formed and developed. Therborn concludes by assessing what changes the family might see during the next century. This book will be essential reading for anybody with an interest in either the sociology or the history of the family.
Preface Introduction: Sex, Power, and Families of the World Part 1: Patriarchy and Its Exits - and Closures 1. Modernities and Family Systems: Patriarchy around l900 2. A Long Night´s Journey into Dawn 3. The Patriarchal Burden of the 21st Century Part 2: Marriage and Mutations of the Socio-Sexual Order 4. Sex and Marriage in l900 5. Marital Curvatures of the 20th Century 6. The Return of Cohabitation and the Sexual Revolution Part 3: Couples, Babies, and States 7. Fertility Decline and Political Natalism 8. The Politics and the Sociology of Birth Control List of Tables A Note on Primary Sources References
"...a great work of historical intellect and imagination. It is the fruit of a rare combination of gifts. Trained as a sociologist, Therborn is a highly conceptual thinker, allying the formal rigor of his discipline at its best with a command of a vast range of empirical data. The result is a powerful theoretical structure, supported by a fascinating body of evidence. In it, you can find the largest changes in human relations of modern times." - The Nation
'The richness of the data and the text provide a fascinating account of how much, and in some cases how little, family systems have changed over the century, and the pace of the book certainly underlines the pace of these changes. It deserves to become a classic text for students and researchers of families past, present and future.' - Social Policy, Volume 36/2 - 2007
Göran Therborn is Director of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences and University Professor of Sociology at Uppsala University.
Weighing In takes on the "obesity epidemic," challenging many widely held assumptions about its causes and consequences. Julie Guthman examines fatness and its relationship to health outcomes to ask ...if our efforts to prevent "obesity" are sensible, efficacious, or ethical. She also focuses the lens of obesity on the broader food system to understand why we produce cheap, over-processed food, as well as why we eat it. Guthman takes issue with the currently touted remedy to obesity—promoting food that is local, organic, and farm fresh. While such fare may be tastier and grown in more ecologically sustainable ways, this approach can also reinforce class and race inequalities and neglect other possible explanations for the rise in obesity, including environmental toxins. Arguing that ours is a political economy of bulimia—one that promotes consumption while also insisting upon thinness—Guthman offers a complex analysis of our entire economic system.
Languages show variations according to the social class of speakers and Latin was no exception, as readers of Petronius are aware. The Romance languages have traditionally been regarded as developing ...out of a 'language of the common people' (Vulgar Latin), but studies of modern languages demonstrate that linguistic change does not merely come, in the social sense, 'from below'. There is change from above, as prestige usages work their way down the social scale, and change may also occur across the social classes. This book is a history of many of the developments undergone by the Latin language as it changed into Romance, demonstrating the varying social levels at which change was initiated. About thirty topics are dealt with, many of them more systematically than ever before. Discussions often start in the early Republic with Plautus, and the book is as much about the literary language as about informal varieties.
Encountering affect Anderson, Ben
2014., 2014, 20170302, 2016-05-06, 2014-07-28
eBook
Since the mid-1990s, affect has become central to the social sciences and humanities. Debates abound over how to conceptualise affect, and how to understand the interrelationships between affective ...life and a range of contemporary political transformations. In Encountering Affect, Ben Anderson explores why understanding affect matters and offers one account of affective life that hones in on the different ways in which affects are ordered. Intervening in debates around non-representational theories, he argues that affective life is always-already 'mediated' - the never finished product of apparatuses, encounters and conditions. Through a wide range of examples including dread-debility-dependency in torture, ordinary hopes, and precariousness, Anderson shows the significance of affect for understanding life today.
Climate change is profoundly altering our world in ways that pose major risks to human societies and natural systems. We have entered the Climate Casino and are rolling the global-warming dice, warns ...economist William Nordhaus. But there is still time to turn around and walk back out of the casino, and in this essential book the author explains how.
Bringing together all the important issues surrounding the climate debate, Nordhaus describes the science, economics, and politics involved-and the steps necessary to reduce the perils of global warming. Using language accessible to any concerned citizen and taking care to present different points of view fairly, he discusses the problem from start to finish: from the beginning, where warming originates in our personal energy use, to the end, where societies employ regulations or taxes or subsidies to slow the emissions of gases responsible for climate change.
Nordhaus offers a new analysis of why earlier policies, such as the Kyoto Protocol, failed to slow carbon dioxide emissions, how new approaches can succeed, and which policy tools will most effectively reduce emissions. In short, he clarifies a defining problem of our times and lays out the next critical steps for slowing the trajectory of global warming.
Queer Attachments Munt, Sally R.
2007, 20170929, 2008-07-01, 2017-09-29
eBook
Why is shame so central to our identity and to our culture? What is its role in stigmatizing subcultures such as the Irish, the queer or the underclass? Can shame be understood as a productive force? ...In this lucid and passionately argued book, Sally R. Munt explores the vicissitudes of shame across a range of texts, cultural milieux, historical locations and geographical spaces - from eighteenth-century Irish politics to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, from contemporary US academia to the aesthetics of Tracey Emin. She finds that the dynamics of shame are consistent across cultures and historical periods, and that patterns of shame are disturbingly long-lived. But she also reveals shame as an affective emotion, engendering attachments between bodies and between subjects - queer attachments. Above all, she celebrates the extraordinary human ability to turn shame into joy: the party after the fall. Queer Attachments is an interdisciplinary synthesis of cultural politics, emotions theory and narrative that challenges us to think about the queerly creative proclivities of shame.
Contents: Series editors' preface: After shame; Foreword, Donald L. Nathanson; The cultural politics of shame: an introduction; Queer Irish sodomites: the shameful histories of Edmund Burke, William Smith, Theodosius Reed, the Earl of Castlehaven and diverse servants - among others; Shove the queer: Irish/American shame in New York's annual St Patrick's Day parades; Expulsion: the queer turn of shame; Queering the pitch: contagious acts of shame in organisations; Shameless in Queer Street; A queer undertaking: uncanny attachments in the HBO television drama series Six Feet Under; After the fall: queer heterotopias in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy; A queer feeling when I look at you: Tracey Emin's aesthetics of the self; Bibliography; Index.
Sally R. Munt is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex , UK. She has published extensively in cultural studies and is the author or editor of seven previous books including Heroic Desire: Lesbian Identity and Cultural Space (1998) and (as editor) Cultural Studies and the Working Class: Subject to Change (2000). She has given numerous keynote speeches and invited lectures in Europe and the US.
This is an account of industrialized killing from a participant's point of view. The author, political scientist Timothy Pachirat, was employed undercover for five months in a Great Plains ...slaughterhouse where 2,500 cattle were killed per day-one every twelve seconds. Working in the cooler as a liver hanger, in the chutes as a cattle driver, and on the kill floor as a food-safety quality-control worker, Pachirat experienced firsthand the realities of the work of killing in modern society. He uses those experiences to explore not only the slaughter industry but also how, as a society, we facilitate violent labor and hide away that which is too repugnant to contemplate.
Through his vivid narrative and ethnographic approach, Pachirat brings to life massive, routine killing from the perspective of those who take part in it. He shows how surveillance and sequestration operate within the slaughterhouse and in its interactions with the community at large. He also considers how society is organized to distance and hide uncomfortable realities from view. With much to say about issues ranging from the sociology of violence and modern food production to animal rights and welfare,Every Twelve Secondsis an important and disturbing work.
