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"Social sciences (General)"
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The craft of knowledge : experiences of living with data
\"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.
Book
Landscape archaeology between art and science
This volume contains thirty-five papers from a 2010 conference on landscape archaeology focusing on the definition of landscape as used by processual archaeologists, earth scientists, and most historical geographers, in contrast to the definition favored by postprocessual archaeologists, cultural geographers, and anthropologists. This tension provides a rich foundation for discussion, and the papers in this collection cover a variety of topics including: how do landscapes change; how to improve temporal, chronological, and transformational frameworks; how to link lowlands with mountainous areas; applications of scale; new directions in digital prospection and modeling techniques; and the future of landscape archaeology.
eBook
Experience : new foundations for the human sciences
\"This book is a radical plea for the centrality of experience in the social and human sciences. Scott Lash argues that a large part of the output of the social sciences today is still shaped by assumptions stemming from positivism, in contrast to the tradition of interpretative social enquiry pioneered by Max Weber. These assumptions are particularly central to economics, with its emphasis on homo economicus, the utility-maximizing, instrumental actor, but they have infiltrated the other social sciences too. Lash argues for a social sciences based not in positivisms utilitarian a priori but instead in the a posteriori of grounded and embedded subjective experience. This features a politics of Hannah Arendts public sphere, which begins with the particular experience of Aristotles polis and moves - via Rome, Augustine and Kant - to a modernity that acknowledges the fragility of political worlds. Yet modernity is also a matter of technological experience and technological forms of life. Lash - starting from Aristotles technics and working through Turings and Shannons computer mediation develops a novel account of technological experience, of how objects themselves experience. And here he finds a surprising convergence with Chinese cosmologys ethos of dao, qi and li: the experience of the embedded multiplicity of the ten thousand things. This original book by a leading social and cultural theorist will be of interest to scholars and students across the social sciences, from sociology and cultural studies to anthropology and politics\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Moral laboratories
Moral Laboratoriesis an engaging ethnography and a groundbreaking foray into the anthropology of morality. It takes us on a journey into the lives of African American families caring for children with serious chronic medical conditions, and it foregrounds the uncertainty that affects their struggles for a good life. Challenging depictions of moral transformation as possible only in moments of breakdown or in radical breaches from the ordinary, it offers a compelling portrait of the transformative powers embedded in day-to-day existence. From soccer fields to dinner tables, the everyday emerges as a moral laboratory for reshaping moral life. Cheryl Mattingly offers vivid and heart-wrenching stories to elaborate a first-person ethical framework, forcefully showing the limits of third-person renderings of morality.
eBook
Counterfactuals and causal inference : methods and principles for social research
\"In this second edition of Counterfactuals and Causal Inference, completely revised and expanded, the essential features of the counterfactual approach to observational data analysis are presented with examples from the social, demographic, and health sciences. Alternative estimation techniques are first introduced using both the potential outcome model and causal graphs; after which, conditioning techniques, such as matching and regression, are presented from a potential outcomes perspective. For research scenarios in which important determinants of causal exposure are unobserved, alternative techniques, such as instrumental variable estimators, longitudinal methods, and estimation via causal mechanisms, are then presented. The importance of causal effect heterogeneity is stressed throughout the book, and the need for deep causal explanation via mechanisms is discussed\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism
The lethality of lone-wolf terrorism has reached an all-time high in the United States. Isolated individuals using firearms with high-capacity magazines are committing brutally efficient killings with the aim of terrorizing others, yet there is little consensus on what connects these crimes and the motivations behind them. InThe Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism, terrorism experts Mark S. Hamm and Ramón Spaaij combine criminological theory with empirical and ethnographic research to map the pathways of lone-wolf radicalization, helping with the identification of suspected behaviors and recognizing patterns of indoctrination.Reviewing comprehensive data on these actors, including more than two hundred terrorist incidents, Hamm and Spaaij find that a combination of personal and political grievances lead lone wolves to befriend online sympathizers-whether jihadists, white supremacists, or other antigovernment extremists-and then announce their intent to commit terror when triggered. Hamm and Spaaij carefully distinguish between lone wolves and individuals radicalized within a group dynamic. This important difference is what makes this book such a significant manual for professionals seeking richer insight into the transformation of alienated individuals into armed warriors. Hamm and Spaaij conclude with an analysis of recent FBI sting operations designed to prevent lone-wolf terrorism in the United States, describing who gets targeted, strategies for luring suspects, and the ethics of arresting and prosecuting citizens.
eBook
The stickup kids
Randol Contreras came of age in the South Bronx during the 1980s, a time when the community was devastated by cuts in social services, a rise in arson and abandonment, and the rise of crack-cocaine. For this riveting book, he returns to the South Bronx with a sociological eye and provides an unprecedented insider's look at the workings of a group of Dominican drug robbers. Known on the streets as \"Stickup Kids,\" these men raided and brutally tortured drug dealers storing large amounts of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and cash. As a participant observer, Randol Contreras offers both a personal and theoretical account for the rise of the Stickup Kids and their violence. He mainly focuses on the lives of neighborhood friends, who went from being crack dealers to drug robbers once their lucrative crack market opportunities disappeared. The result is a stunning, vivid, on-the-ground ethnographic description of a drug robbery's violence, the drug market high life, the criminal life course, and the eventual pain and suffering experienced by the casualties of the Crack Era. Provocative and eye-opening, The Stickup Kids urges us to explore the ravages of the drug trade through weaving history, biography, social structure, and drug market forces. It offers a revelatory explanation for drug market violence by masterfully uncovering the hidden social forces that produce violent and self-destructive individuals. Part memoir, part penetrating analysis, this book is engaging, personal, deeply informed, and entirely absorbing.
eBook
More-than-human sociology : a new sociological imagination
\"This book is a call for a bolder, more creative sociology. It argues that to make sociology responsive to life in the 21st century we need a new sociological imagination, one that addresses connectivity, understands the world in which we live as both a human and non-human world, and is sensitive to the multiple scales on which things exist. \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Living displacement
Focusing on two cases of resettlement in rural Cundinamarca, Colombia, this book examines how displaced campesinos make sense of their displacement and how displacement shapes their everyday lives. It is based on a ten-month fieldwork employing ethnographic methods working, living and sharing with the displaced and their host. The book calls for a longer time-frame analysis of the phenomenon of displacement, which considers people’s lives both pre- and post- physical relocation. It examines how violence and terror altered people’s sense of place and set off displacement process before they actually moved. It analyses the challenges the displaced are facing in their subsequent place-making endeavours, including the negotiation of social relations, consequences of categorization, engagement with the physical land, and memories of violence to challenge the notion that displacement starts with uprooting and terminates with resettlement or return.
eBook