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"POLITICAL FACTORS"
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Food politics
We all witness, in advertising and on supermarket shelves, the fierce competition for our food dollars. In this engrossing exposé, Marion Nestle goes behind the scenes to reveal how the competition really works and how it affects our health. The abundance of food in the United States--enough calories to meet the needs of every man, woman, and child twice over--has a downside. Our over-efficient food industry must do everything possible to persuade people to eat more--more food, more often, and in larger portions--no matter what it does to waistlines or well-being. Like manufacturing cigarettes or building weapons, making food is big business. Food companies in 2000 generated nearly
eBook
The sociology of caregiving
This volume conceptualizes caregiving as an emerging sociological issue involving complex and fluctuating roles. The authors contend that caregiving must be considered in the context of the life span with needs that vary according to age, developmental levels, mental health needs, and physical health demands of both caregivers and care recipients. As the nature and functions of caregiving evolve it has become a critical and salient issue in the lives of individuals in all demographic, socioeconomic, and ethnic categories. This volume frames caregiving as a sociological issue and addresses a number of central concerns, such as: - Caregiving is a life span experience associated with aging and the roles of spouses and adult children. - Caregiving involves a complex of social system variables that influence the social support and services to caregivers and care recipients. - The nature of the relationship among family caregivers, professional caregivers, and the care recipient are embedded in their interaction and dynamics influenced by the internal and external variables that inhibit or facilitate the care situation. - How can caregiving be integrated with a public health agenda? - What disparities or inequalities exist in caregiving and what are the barriers that sustain them? - What community-based interventions need to be developed to improve caregiving?
Book
Lead wars
In this incisive examination of lead poisoning during the past half century, Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner focus on one of the most contentious and bitter battles in the history of public health. Lead Wars details how the nature of the epidemic has changed and highlights the dilemmas public health agencies face today in terms of prevention strategies and chronic illness linked to low levels of toxic exposure. The authors use the opinion by Maryland's Court of Appeals—which considered whether researchers at Johns Hopkins University's prestigious Kennedy Krieger Institute (KKI) engaged in unethical research on 108 African-American children—as a springboard to ask fundamental questions about the practice and future of public health. Lead Wars chronicles the obstacles faced by public health workers in the conservative, pro-business, anti-regulatory climate that took off in the Reagan years and that stymied efforts to eliminate lead from the environments and the bodies of American children.
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Social and psychological bases of ideology and system justification
This volume both reflects and exemplifies the recent resurgence of interest in the social and psychological characteristics and processes that give rise to ideological forms. Ideology is an elusive, multifaceted construct that can usefully be analyzed in terms of “top-down” processes related to the social construction and dissemination of ideology, as well as to “bottom-up” processes, including dispositional and situational factors, that make certain ideological outcomes more likely than others. The twenty chapters of this volume focus on the cognitive and motivational antecedents and consequences of adopting specific ideologies, the functions served by those ideologies, and the myriad ways in which people accept and justify (versus reject) aspects of the social and political worlds they inhabit. Current challenges and future directions for the study of ideology and system justification are also discussed in several chapters. The volume represents a wide variety of research traditions bearing on the social and psychological bases of ideology and system justification. These traditions include (a) the study of attitudes, social cognition, and information processing at both conscious and nonconscious levels of awareness, (b) theories of motivated reasoning and goal-directed cognition, (c) research on personality and dispositional correlates of political orientation, (d) work on social justice and the origins of moral values, (e) the myriad ways in which social and political opinions are shaped by local situations and environments, and (f) studies of stereotyping, prejudice, and the ideological correlates of intergroup attitudes.
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Architecture, politics, & identity in divided Berlin
\"Emily Pugh provides an original comparative analysis of selected works of architecture and urban planning in East and West Berlin during the 'Wall era,' to reveal the importance of these structures to the formation of political, cultural, and social identities\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Life as Surplus
Focusing on the period between the 1970s and the present, Life as Surplus is a pointed and important study of the relationship between politics, economics, science, and cultural values in the United States today. Melinda Cooper demonstrates that the history of biotechnology cannot be understood without taking into account the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism as a political force and an economic policy. From the development of recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s to the second Bush administration's policies on stem cell research, Cooper connects the utopian polemic of free-market capitalism with growing internal contradictions of the commercialized life sciences.
The biotech revolution relocated economic production at the genetic, microbial, and cellular level. Taking as her point of departure the assumption that life has been drawn into the circuits of value creation, Cooper underscores the relations between scientific, economic, political, and social practices. In penetrating analyses of Reagan-era science policy, the militarization of the life sciences, HIV politics, pharmaceutical imperialism, tissue engineering, stem cell science, and the pro-life movement, the author examines the speculative impulses that have animated the growth of the bioeconomy.
At the very core of the new post-industrial economy is the transformation of biological life into surplus value. Life as Surplus offers a clear assessment of both the transformative, therapeutic dimensions of the contemporary life sciences and the violence, obligation, and debt servitude crystallizing around the emerging bioeconomy.
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Beyond dollars and cents: why socio-political factors matter in energy system modeling
Traditional energy system modeling (ESM) has predominantly focused on techno-economic factors such as costs and efficiency. However, this narrow perspective fails to capture the intricate interplay between energy systems and socio-political dynamics that significantly influence their real-world impact. This piece underlines the importance of incorporating socio-political factors into ESM and highlights the need for a more comprehensive approach. We identify several reasons why socio-political factors are often overlooked in ESM, including technical bias, complexity, data standardization challenges, time and resource constraints, and societal biases. These factors must be addressed to improve the relevancy of ESM, reduce social injustice, and promote innovation in the design of future energy systems. Incorporating socio-political factors into ESM offers several benefits. To achieve these benefits, the paper suggests a shift towards a more comprehensive and value-driven approach and offers several options for improving ESM including: (I) recognizing that socio-political factors are just as important as techno-economic factors (II) improving the structure of the modeling process (III) developing new and innovative metrics for socio-political factors (IV) linking different types of models (V) emphasizing the need for interdisciplinarity in ESM. By prioritizing the aspects of the energy system that concern people to the same degree we prioritize cost, we can derive value-driven insights to assist in creating a more sustainable future for all.
Journal Article
Private Practices
Private Practices examines the relationship between science, sexuality, gender, race, and culture in the making of modern America between 1920 and 1950, when contradictions among liberal intellectuals affected the rise of U.S. conservatism. Naoko Wake focuses on neo-Freudian, gay psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, founder of the interpersonal theory of mental illness. She explores medical and social scientists' conflicted approach to homosexuality, particularly the views of scientists who themselves lived closeted lives.
Wake discovers that there was a gap--often dramatic, frequently subtle--between these scientists' \"public\" understanding of homosexuality (as a \"disease\") and their personal, private perception (which questioned such a stigmatizing view). This breach revealed a modern culture in which self-awareness and open-mindedness became traits of \"mature\" gender and sexual identities. Scientists considered individuals of society lacking these traits to be \"immature,\" creating an unequal relationship between practitioners and their subjects. In assessing how these dynamics--the disparity between public and private views of homosexuality and the uneven relationship between scientists and their subjects--worked to shape each other, Private Practices highlights the limits of the scientific approach to subjectivity and illuminates its strange career--sexual subjectivity in particular--in modern U.S. culture.
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