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\"The struggle to create and sustain meaning in our everyday lives is fought using cultural ingredients to spin the webs of meaning that keep us going. To help reveal the complexity and intricacy of the webs of meaning in which they are suspended, Tom Inglis interviewed one-hundred people in their native home of Ireland to discover what was most important and meaningful for them in their lives. Inglis believes language is a medium: there is never an exact correspondence between what is said and what is felt and understood. Using a variety of theoretical lenses developed within sociology and anthropology, Inglis places their lives within the context of Ireland's social and cultural transformations, and of longer-term processes of change such as increased globalisation, individualisation, and informalisation\"-- Provided by publisher.

01 02 This book explores the possibilities and limitations re-theorizing disability using historical materialism in the interdisciplinary contexts of social theory, cultural studies, social and education policy, feminist ethics, and theories of citizenship. 19 02 Proposes a relational analysis to understand disability within a global context; theorizes disability in critical relationship to race, gender, and sexuality within the context of transnational capitalism This is an interdisciplinary text that spans the humanities and the social sciences in the areas of social theory, cultural studies, social and educational policy, feminist ethics and theories of citizenship From education to sociology and even poetry theory, disability studies is a growing discipline that offers a unique critique of our standards of normalcy and acceptance in our society; interest in this topic, among all fields of research will continue to increase and it is important that we include books with this focus on our lists 08 02 'The time for Disability and Difference in Global Contexts is now. At the forefront of both the global and materialist turns in disability studies, Nirmala Erevelles provides readers with an indispensable analysis of the ways in which disability in the current world order is constructed in relation to systems of gender, race, class, caste, and sexual orientation. Erevelles calls for a transformative body politic that resists the compulsory subject positions and relations of domination generated by neoliberal, capitalist modes of production. In and through that call, she remaps, in emancipatory ways, the terrain of disability studies, feminist studies, Marxist theory, postcolonial theory, and education.' –Robert McRuer, Professor of English, George Washington University 'In this wide-ranging exploration through the often violent historical imbrications of disability and race, Erevelles brings us to questions we will never soon forget. This book demonstrates the historical production of disability and other social differences as they press upon us today making our bodies, minds, senses matter as the conflicting social scenes that they are. No one in disability studies, or any of its affiliated fields, should go without reading this book; and no one will rest easy with their current disability knowledge once having read Disability and Difference in Global Context.' - Tanya Titchkosky, Associate Professor and Associate Chair, Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto 'Disability and Difference in Global Contexts offers an important corrective to established scholarship in disability studies by demanding a focus on intersectionality. In language by turns provocative and heartbreaking, Nirmala Erevelles explains and enacts a 'carnal historical materialism': the theoretical yet everyday dance between identity, injury, privilege and hope.' - Margaret Price, Associate Professor of English, Spelman College 'At once deeply personal and sharply theoretical, personal and probing, this book gives us the big picture: 'disability' in its historical, material, and global settings. Erevelles' brilliant work of social theory marks a new and crucial advance in its rigorous explorations of confluences of disability, race, class, gender, and citizenship.' - Susan Schweik, Professor of English, University of California at Berkeley 02 02 This book explores the possibilities and limitations re-theorizing disability using historical materialism in the interdisciplinary contexts of social theory, cultural studies, social and education policy, feminist ethics, and theories of citizenship. 13 02 Nirmala Erevelles is an associate professor of Social Foundations of Education at the University of Alabama. 31 02 This book explores the possibilities and limitations re-theorizing disability using historical materialism in interdisciplinary contexts 04 02 Making Bodies that Matter: The Political Economy of 'Becoming' (Disabled) Of Ghosts and Ghetto Politics: Embodying Education Policy as if Disability Mattered 'Unspeakable' Offenses: Disability Studies at the Intersection of Multiple Differences (with Andrea Minear) Embodied Antimonies: Feminist Disability Studies Meets Third World Feminism (Im)Material Citizens: Cognitive Disability, Race, and the Politics of Citizenship The 'Other' Side of the Dialectic: Towards a Materialist Ethic of Care

\"Social and Cultural Anthropology: the Key Concepts is an easy to use A-Z guide to the central concepts that students are likely to encounter in this field.Now fully updated, this third edition includes entries on:Material CultureEnvironmentHuman RightsHybridityAlterityCosmopolitanismEthnographyApplied AnthropologyGenderCyberneticsWith full cross-referencing and revised further reading to point students towards the latest writings in Social and Cultural Anthropology, this is a superb reference resource for anyone studying or teaching in this area. \"-- Provided by publisher.

\"In The Craft of Knowledge experienced researchers come together to explore what really matters to them in the process of doing research, providing personal accounts of what can often be the trying or painful processes of creating research-based knowledge and understandings of social life. Sociologists, anthropologists and historians come together to pool insights into what it is like to be immersed in real life research and to explore how they deal with the demands and challenges it creates. This is not a book about techniques but about what matters when carrying out qualitative research projects today. Faced with increasing demands for quick answers and unambiguous findings, this book is an appeal for more nuanced processes, deeper ethical considerations and the power of imagination in carrying out social research\"-- Provided by publisher.

Once celebrated as a model development for its progressive social indicators, the southern Indian state of Kerala has earned the new distinction as the nation's suicide capital, with suicide rates soaring to triple the national average since 1990. Rather than an aberration on the path to development and modernity, Keralites understand this crisis to be the bitter fruit borne of these historical struggles and the aspirational dilemmas they have produced in everyday life. Suicide, therefore, offers a powerful lens onto the experiential and affective dimensions of development and global change in the postcolonial world. In the long shadow of fear and uncertainty that suicide casts in Kerala, living acquires new meaning and contours. In this powerful ethnography, Jocelyn Chua draws on years of fieldwork to broaden the field of vision beyond suicide as the termination of life, considering how suicide generates new ways of living in these anxious times.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed housing discrimination by race and provided an important tool for dismantling legal segregation. But almost fifty years later, residential segregation remains virtually unchanged in many metropolitan areas, particularly where large groups of racial and ethnic minorities live. Why does segregation persist at such high rates and what makes it so difficult to combat? InCycle of Segregation, sociologists Maria Krysan and Kyle Crowder examine how everyday social processes shape residential stratification. Past neighborhood experiences, social networks, and daily activities all affect the mobility patterns of different racial groups in ways that have cemented segregation as a self-perpetuating cycle in the twenty-first century.Through original analyses of national-level surveys and in-depth interviews with residents of Chicago, Krysan and Crowder find that residential stratification is reinforced through the biases and blind spots that individuals exhibit in their searches for housing. People rely heavily on information from friends, family, and coworkers when choosing where to live. Because these social networks tend to be racially homogenous, people are likely to receive information primarily from members of their own racial group and move to neighborhoods that are also dominated by their group. Similarly, home-seekers who report wanting to stay close to family members can end up in segregated destinations because their relatives live in those neighborhoods. The authors suggest that even absent of family ties, people gravitate toward neighborhoods that are familiar to them through their past experiences, including where they have previously lived, and where they work, shop, and spend time. Because historical segregation has shaped so many of these experiences, even these seemingly race-neutral decisions help reinforce the cycle of residential stratification. As a result, segregation has declined much more slowly than many social scientists have expected.To overcome this cycle, Krysan and Crowder advocate multi-level policy solutions that pair inclusionary zoning and affordable housing with education and public relations campaigns that emphasize neighborhood diversity and high-opportunity areas. They argue that together, such programs can expand the number of destinations available to low-income residents and help offset the negative images many people hold about certain neighborhoods or help introduce them to places they had never considered.Cycle of Segregationdemonstrates why a nuanced understanding of everyday social processes is critical for interrupting entrenched patterns of residential segregation.

\"Technoscientific developments often have far-reaching consequences, both negative and positive, for the public. Yet, because science has the authority to decide which judgments about scientific issues are sound, public concerns are often dismissed because they are not part of the technoscientific paradigm they question. This book addresses the role of science popularization in that paradox; it explains how science writing works and argues that it can do better at promoting public discussions about science-related issues. To support these arguments, it situates science popularization in its historical and cultural context; provides a conceptual framework for analyzing popular science texts; and examines the rhetorical effects of common strategies used in popular science writing. Twenty-six years after Dorothy Nelkin's groundbreaking book, Selling Science: How the Press Covers Science and Technology, popular science writing is still not meeting its potential as a public interest genre; Communicating Popular Science explores how it can move closer to doing so\"-- Provided by publisher.

In the years after World War II, a new generation of scholars redefined the central concepts and practices of social science in America. Before the Second World War, social scientists struggled to define and defend their disciplines. After the war, \"high modern\" social scientists harnessed new resources in a quest to create a unified understanding of human behavior—and to remake the world in the image of their new model man. In Age of System, Hunter Heyck explains why social scientists—shaped by encounters with the ongoing \"organizational revolution\" and its revolutionary technologies of communication and control—embraced a new and extremely influential perspective on science and nature, one that conceived of all things in terms of system, structure, function, organization, and process. He also explores how this emerging unified theory of human behavior implied a troubling similarity between humans and machines, with freighted implications for individual liberty and self-direction. These social scientists trained a generation of decision-makers in schools of business and public administration, wrote the basic textbooks from which millions learned how the economy, society, polity, culture, and even the mind worked, and drafted the position papers, books, and articles that helped set the terms of public discourse in a new era of mass media, think tanks, and issue networks. Drawing on close readings of key texts and a broad survey of more than 1, 800 journal articles, Heyck follows the dollars—and the dreams—of a generation of scholars that believed in \"the system.\" He maps the broad landscape of changes in the social sciences, focusing especially intently on the ideas and practices associated with modernization theory, rational choice theory, and modeling. A highly accomplished historian, Heyck relays this complicated story with unusual clarity.