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Sexual Minorities and Mental Health: Current Perspectives and New Directions
by Joanna Semlyen Poul RohlederThis edited book presents a comprehensive guide to the research, challenges and differing perspectives within mental health for sexual minority populations in the UK. Drawing on clinical, social, health and community psychology perspectives, it brings the urgency of this topic back to the fore, providing insight into some of ways we understand and make sense of the increased prevalence of poorer mental health in these populations. Using an intersectional approach, a broad range of experts from across academia and practice explore the specific threat and discrimination faced by sexual minorities and investigate the high prevalence of poor mental health, health risk behaviours and psychological distress in these groups. The volume also offers innovative insight as to ways in which the disparities experienced by sexual minorities may be addressed. Ideal for practitioners in mental health and sexuality, as well as psychologists, policy makers, and academics alike interested in mental health, sexuality, public health, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, or counselling, this collection features wide array of qualitative and quantitative sources to describe the current state of the art with an interdisciplinary lens.
The Legacy of Watergate and the Nixon Presidency: Nixon's Curse (The Evolving American Presidency)
by Michael A. GenoveseThis book examines the Nixon presidency, reviews the events surrounding Watergate and the President’ resignation, and unpacks the effects of Watergate on our politics and public attitudes about the political process. Genovese, a prolific scholar of the American presidency who has published three previous books on Nixon and Watergate, argues that the roots of modern political dysfunction and slash-and-burn politics can be traced to the impact of the Vietnam War, the Watergate Crisis, the policies and activities of the Nixon presidency, and the hyper-partisanship they spawned. Now, 50 years on from the scandal, it is time for a reappraisal of Nixon’s impact and a review of the impact he has had on our political system and political culture.
Writings on Subaltern Practice
by Ahmar MahboobSubaltern theory emerged as a small voice within academia decades ago. Over time, this work generated significant debate and numerous publications, talks, and conferences. However, little has changed in the experienced lives of the masses. This led people to wonder: “the subalterns seem to have a voice, but can they take action?”; or, in other words, is there subaltern practice?This collection of essays and poems, written with a broad audience in mind, hopes to demonstrate not just how the subaltern can identify and question hegemonic practices, but how they can create alternative frameworks and material that enable themselves and their communities. In doing so, this book aims to demonstrate not just how deep the colonial poisons run, but also how to detoxify ourselves and the environment around us.The writings included in this book study the inequalities that we experience in and around us and suggest actions and practices that can help us regain harmony. It is a call for action and a sharing of ideas that can enable us to regain balance and fulfil our human responsibilities.
Reassessing Russia's Security Policy (Routledge Contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe Series)
by Nurlan AliyevThis book provides a detailed analysis of the evolution of Russia’s security policy. Based on extensive original research, including an analysis of official documents, political and military elite speeches, interviews, and reports, and considering the subject from the early twentieth century onwards, the book evaluates how far Russia’s security policy is underpinned by “strategic asymmetry” – the acceptance by Russia of its inferior military position, and the pursuit of its strategic aims through the application of a variety of methods, military and non-military, including the manipulation of public opinion, the use of economic leverage and external security approaches - known as Russia’s “hybrid war operations” - to gain the advantage over a militarily and economically superior adversary. The book discusses how Russia’s security policy has been and is being applied in specific cases, including the present war in Ukraine, the Russian anti-satellite program and Russia’s contemporary Afghan policy. The aim of the book is to explain how and why Russia uses different security strategies and methods using these three cases.
Transdisciplinary Research, Sustainability, and Social Transformation: Governance and Knowledge Co-Production (Routledge Studies in Sustainability)
by Tom DedeurwaerdereThis book addresses the gap in the existing literature on the governance of transdisciplinary research partnerships in transformational sustainability research by exploring the governance of knowledge co-production in coupled socio-ecological system dynamics. Multiple social and ecological crises raise new cross-sectoral research questions that call for an evolution in contemporary science in the direction of society-wide knowledge co-production on sustainability transformations of interdependent social and ecological systems. This book proposes a new approach to this based on enabling capacities for collaboration among scientific researchers and societal actors with diverse values, perspectives, and research interests. By drawing upon the thriving literature on the conditions for community and multistakeholder-driven collective action, the analysis sheds new light on the governance arrangements for organizing so-called transdisciplinary research partnerships for sustainability. This book identifies robust conditions that lead to effective collaborative research with societal actors and digs deeper into capacity building for partnership research through fostering social learning on sustainability values among research partners and organizing training and knowledge exchange at institutions of higher education. The book proposes solutions for addressing collective action challenges in transdisciplinary partnerships in an accessible and broadly interdisciplinary manner to a large audience of sustainability scholars and practitioners. It will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of sustainable development, social ecological transitions, and science policy, while also being a useful resource for engineers, QSE managers, and policymakers.
Sustainable Futures for Climate Adaptation: Wearing Our Ecology
by Benedict AndersonConsidering sustainability as a flawed and restrictive term in practice, Sustainable Futures for Climate Adaptation argues that we must radically adapt humanity and reform society, cities, buildings, and our approach to migration in order to coexist in harmony with our natural environments. The book conceives an Earth–human coexistence where the world’s regions are shared globally between all people, in contrast to a reality where we have lost touch with the natural world. It is this decoupling of humanity and nature that has brought us to the brink of climate disaster. In response, Benedict Anderson explores the concept of ‘wearing our ecology’, where human mobility is synchronized with the environment, merging people with landscapes, topographies, and geographies. Anderson argues that we need to create new migration routes for people moving between the Global South and North and establish flexible and adaptive living environments. Only by rethinking separations between urban and rural, resource extraction and consumption, racial prejudice and accessibility are we able to forge a closer partnership with nature to adapt to climate change and mitigate the worst of its effects. Touching on themes of adaptive urban design, racial and gender segregation and inequality, and climate apocalypticism, this book will be valuable reading for researchers, scholars, and upper-level students in the fields of urban studies, migration studies, human geography, ecology, politics, and design.
The Independence of Official Statistics: Norms, Arrangements, Instruments (Society, Environment and Statistics)
by Jean-Guy PrévostThis book explores the independence of official statistics and describes the various legal and professional norms, institutional arrangements, instruments and practices that statisticians have developed over recent decades to protect their work from political interference. It argues that this ‘drive for independence’, which saw the replication of these norms, arrangements, and instruments across countries, was largely led by the international epistemic community of statisticians, and it identifies some of the paths and processes that enabled this drive.The study conducts an overall, multi-dimensional, and detailed comparative examination of the thirty-eight OECD countries’ norms, arrangements, and practices regarding the institutional and professional independence of official statistics. For that purpose, several dimensions have been surveyed and an index has been built that allows patterns and clusters to be uncovered among the OECD countries, shedding light on the variations that can be observed from one subgroup of countries to another.The issue of the independence of official statistics has been at the heart of several recent statistical controversies, including that of Greece’s debt, censuses in Canada and the United States, the Argentinian cost of living index, and some recent cases of resignation or dismissal of senior statisticians in various countries. Such independence has been a major topic of discussion in the epistemic community since the turn of the century, and concerns have also been addressed more widely, in the media. The subject of the book is particularly relevant as official statistics also play a significant role in monitoring the progress of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the topic of official statistics and to students of government in general.
Polish Immigrant Organisations in Germany: The Transnational Opportunity Structure (Studies in Migration and Diaspora)
by Michał NowosielskiPolish Immigrant Organizations in Germany examines the situation of Polish immigrant organizations in Germany. Based on in-depth, mixed-method research consisting of surveys, case studies, and interviews with immigrants, representatives of institutions involved in the implementation of integration strategy and those responsible for Polish diaspora policy, it develops the notion of the transnational opportunity structure, which analyses the major factors shaping the situation of immigrant organizations. With attention to the characteristics of the migration process and the immigrant community, the country of residence, the country of origin, and bilateral relations between the two countries—which are in turn moderated by both global factors and micro factors—this book offers a multi-faceted analysis of diverse processes of developing diaspora groups and their organizations. It will therefore appeal to scholars of sociology, political science, security studies, and public policy with interests in migration and Diaspora studies, as well as intra-European mobility.
The Practical Accomplishment of Everyday Activities Without Sight (Directions in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis)
by Brian L. DueThis book is about the everyday life of people with visual impairment or blindness. Using video ethnographic methods and ethnomethodological conversation analysis, it unpacks the practical accomplishments of everyday activities such as navigating in public space, identifying objects and obstacles, being included in workplace activities, interacting with guide dogs, or interacting in museums or classes in school. Navigation, social inclusion, and the world of touch constitute key phenomena that are affected by visual impairment and which we study in this book. Whereas sighted people use their sight for navigating, for figuring out the location of co-participants and the embodied cues they produce, and for achieving understanding of objects in the world, visually impaired people on the contrary cannot rely on vision for navigating, for interpreting embodied cues, or for identifying or recognizing objects. Other sensory resources and other practices are employed to accomplish these basic human actions. The chapters in this book present examples and findings relevant to these issues and draw out the general theoretical implications of these findings. Whereas existing research often studies visual impairment from a medical, cognitive, and psychological perspective, this book provides insights into how visually impaired people accomplish ordinary activities in orderly, organized ways by a detailed atudy of their actions. While most books describe cognitive and biological issues, many of them using experimental methods, this book provides empirical findings about the actual daily lives as it naturally unfolds based on video recordings. The book contributes insights into the practices of living with visual impairment as well as perspectives for rethinking some of the most basic aspects of human sociality, including perception, interaction, multisensoriality and ocularcentrism (the view that the world is de facto designed by and for sighted persons). As such, the book provides novel findings in the field of ethnomethodological conversation analysis. Renewing the social model of disability, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology with interests in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, the emergence of practical skills, and understandings of disability in terms of relations between the individual and the social environment.
Three Faces of Antisemitism: Right, Left and Islamist (Studies in Contemporary Antisemitism)
by Jeffrey HerfThree Faces of Antisemitism examines the three primary forms of antisemitism as they emerged in modern and contemporary Germany, and then in other countries. The chapters draw on the author’s historical scholarship over the years on the form antisemitism assumed on the far right in Weimar and Nazi Germany, in the Communist regime in East Germany, and in the West German radical left, and in Islamist organizations during World War II and the Holocaust, and afterward in the Middle East. The resurgence of antisemitism since the attacks of September 11, 2001, has origins in the ideas, events, and circumstances in Europe and the Middle East in the half century from the 1920s to the 1970s. This book covers the period since 1945 when neo-Nazism was on the fringes of Western and world politics, and the persistence of antisemitism took place primarily when its leftist and Islamist forms combined antisemitism with anti-Zionism in attacks on the state of Israel. The collection includes recent essays of commentary that draw attention to the simultaneous presence of antisemitism’s three faces. While scholarship on the antisemitism of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust remains crucial, the scholarly, intellectual, and political effort to fight antisemitism in our times requires the examination of antisemitism’s leftist and Islamist forms as well. This book will be of interest to scholars researching antisemitism, racism, conspiracy theories, the far right, the far left, and Islamism.
Policing Welfare Fraud: The Government of Welfare Fraud and Non-Compliance (Routledge Studies in Crime and Justice in Asia and the Global South)
by Scarlet WilcockPolicing Welfare Fraud charts and interrogates the suite of measures ostensibly designed to combat welfare fraud and non-compliance. In Australia, which serves as the empirical focus of this book, these strategies include stringent ID checks, pre-emptive data surveillance technologies including the infamous and illegal ‘robodebt’ programme, a dedicated fraud hotline and an ‘intelligence-led’ fraud investigation framework. Drawing on original documentary and interview data, including interviews with fraud investigators, this book unpacks the logics that underpin these anti-fraud initiatives with a focus on how these initiatives are imbued with logics and practices more readily associated with the criminal justice system. The central argument of the book is that the emergence of contemporary welfare compliance regimes represents a form of ‘governing through fraud’ in which the threat of welfare fraud has effectively necessitated a regime of criminalisation within the welfare state. This has been enabled by a broader process of neoliberal welfare reform, which has cast suspicion over all welfare use. The overall effect of this regime is to restrict access to social security, punish welfare recipients and stigmatise welfare use. Policing Welfare Fraud also highlights points of contradiction and multiplicity in the enactment of specific welfare compliance initiatives, including attempts by welfare officials to moderate or reformulate these strategies ‘on the ground’. These findings demonstrate that the criminalisation of welfare is neither uniform nor inexorable, and that more progressive welfare reform is possible. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, politics and those interested in the policing of welfare recipients.
Sociology in Action
by Kathleen Odell Korgen Maxine P. AtkinsonSociology in Action, Third Edition is an introductory text that encourages doing sociology through real-world activities that emphasize hands-on work, application, and learning by example. Each chapter is written by a specialist in that subject who also shares a passion for active learning. Edited by Kathleen Odell Korgen and Maxine P. Atkinson, this text explains sociology′s key concepts and theories, and pairs that foundational coverage with a series of carefully developed, assignable learning activities that prompt students to think and reflect, observe, analyze, investigate, and apply what they are learning. This title is accompanied by a complete teaching and learning package. Contact your SAGE representative to request a demo. Learning Platform / Courseware SAGE Vantage is an intuitive learning platform that integrates quality SAGE textbook content with assignable multimedia activities and auto-graded assessments to drive student engagement and ensure accountability. Unparalleled in its ease of use and built for dynamic teaching and learning, Vantage offers customizable LMS integration and best-in-class support. It’s a learning platform you, and your students, will actually love. Learn more. Assignable Video with Assessment Assignable video (available in SAGE Vantage) is tied to learning objectives and curated exclusively for this text to bring concepts to life. Watch a sample video now. LMS Cartridge: Import this title’s instructor resources into your school’s learning management system (LMS) and save time. Don’t use an LMS? You can still access all of the same online resources for this title via the password-protected Instructor Resource Site. Learn more.
Sociology in Action
by Kathleen Odell Korgen Maxine P. AtkinsonSociology in Action, Third Edition is an introductory text that encourages doing sociology through real-world activities that emphasize hands-on work, application, and learning by example. Each chapter is written by a specialist in that subject who also shares a passion for active learning. Edited by Kathleen Odell Korgen and Maxine P. Atkinson, this text explains sociology′s key concepts and theories, and pairs that foundational coverage with a series of carefully developed, assignable learning activities that prompt students to think and reflect, observe, analyze, investigate, and apply what they are learning. This title is accompanied by a complete teaching and learning package. Contact your SAGE representative to request a demo. Learning Platform / Courseware SAGE Vantage is an intuitive learning platform that integrates quality SAGE textbook content with assignable multimedia activities and auto-graded assessments to drive student engagement and ensure accountability. Unparalleled in its ease of use and built for dynamic teaching and learning, Vantage offers customizable LMS integration and best-in-class support. It’s a learning platform you, and your students, will actually love. Learn more. Assignable Video with Assessment Assignable video (available in SAGE Vantage) is tied to learning objectives and curated exclusively for this text to bring concepts to life. Watch a sample video now. LMS Cartridge: Import this title’s instructor resources into your school’s learning management system (LMS) and save time. Don’t use an LMS? You can still access all of the same online resources for this title via the password-protected Instructor Resource Site. Learn more.
The Scarlet Letter: A Romance
by Nathaniel. HawthorneNathaniel Hawthorne’s masterpiece, an iconic fable of guilt and redemption set in Puritan Massachusetts, has long been considered one of the greatest American novels. The story of Hester Prynne—found out in adultery, pilloried by her Puritan community, and abandoned, in different ways, by both her partner in sin and her vengeance-seeking husband—possesses a reality heightened by Hawthorne’s sympathy and his unmixed devotion to his supposedly fallen but fundamentally innocent heroine. The Scarlet Letter rightly deserves its stature as the first great novel written by an American, a work of moral force and narrative power that announced a literature equal to any in the world.
Distributive Politics in Malaysia: Maintaining Authoritarian Party Dominance (Politics in Asia)
by Hidekuni WashidaThe election on 9 May 2018 ended six decades of rule by the ruling coalition in Malaysia (Barisan Nasional or BN, formerly the Alliance). Despite this result, the BN’s longevity and resilience to competition is remarkable. This book explores the mechanisms behind the emergence, endurance, fight for survival and decline of the party’s dominance. Using a systematic analysis of key resources (budgets, posts, and seats), Washida challenges the conventional argument that a punitive threat to exclude opposition supporters from distributive benefits sustained the loyalty of the masses as well as the elites. He also calls into question whether the mere existence of party organization in and of itself enables leaders to credibly commit to power-sharing. Instead he posits a theory of mobilization agency, in which a party leader needs to design an effective incentive mechanism. In addition, he explains how the BN had manufactured legislative dominance by tactical gerrymandering and malapportionment. The insights drawn from the Malaysian case can help deepen our understanding of the rise and fall of authoritarian parties and distributive politics in general.
Gender, Sexuality and Islam in Contemporary Indonesia: Queer Muslims and their Allies (Routledge Contemporary Southeast Asia Series)
by Diego Garcia RodriguezGender, Sexuality and Islam in Contemporary Indonesia explores gender, sexuality and religion in contemporary Indonesia. It is the first book-length analysis of the experiences of queer Muslims in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country and the world’s fourth most populous nation, as well as the first monograph exploring the voices of their allies vis-à-vis the role of Indonesian progressive Islam and Islam Nusantara. An ethnographic study based on semi-structured in-depth interviews, participant observation and media analysis, the book analyses how queer Indonesian Muslims come to, and navigate, their gender, sexual and religious subjectivities and subject positions, beliefs and practices. This is done by paying attention to their interactions with family, education, media, and peers. It also investigates the emergence of queer religious geographies through the case of an annual camp leading to alternative discussions on gender, sexuality, and religion impacting processes of subjectivity formation among participants. The author draws on recent scholarship that attends to ‘agency’ not merely as a synonym for resistance but also as a modality of action to examine the rise of queer religious agentic systems through the everyday practices of queer Muslims. Finally, the book explores the background of the allies of queer Muslims who have come to develop queer-inclusive strategies from within Islam by considering the processes that shaped their advocacy and the role of Islam Nusantara. The book reflects on the critical role of Islam for gender and sexual minorities in Indonesia. Presenting the voices, practices and activism of present-day Indonesians to explore the position of Islam as a source of emotional strength, guidance, and social support, this book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Religious Studies, Asian Studies and Southeast Asian Studies, Islamic Studies and Queer Anthropology.
Activism and the Detention of Migrants: The Law and Politics of Immigration Detention (Social Justice)
by Tom KempThis book is an empirically grounded, critical engagement with the politics of immigration detention and deportation. Focusing on the constitutive tensions and political generativity within the activist practices of the anti-detention movement, this book examines the distinction between representational and post-representational political sensibilities. Representational politics centres on representing the interests of disenfranchised people to the state and public and operates primarily within the regime of immigration law. Post-representational politics focuses on working collaboratively with those in detention, to resist and challenge the deportation system. Since representational politics is the predominant political imaginary of migrant rights campaigning, the book focuses on illustrating and evaluating the role of post-representational politics. The book argues that the concept of post-representational politics is important for understanding and participating in radical opposition to state racism. This argument rests on the expanded possibilities it motivates of engaging with and resisting institutions that are poised to co-opt resistance; the attention it fosters to the situated power dynamics of political activities that collaborate with imprisoned people; and its sensitivity to the politically and conceptually generative capacities of everyday, embodied practices of resistance. To make this argument, this book employs innovative methodology to illuminate and engage with the practice-based thinking of activist movements about the concepts of solidarity, hospitality, witnessing and accountability. This book will be of interest to scholars and activists with interests in socio-legal studies of immigration and refugee law, as well as others in social movement studies, critical legal studies, border criminology and critical theory.
Migrations in the Mediterranean: IMISCOE Regional Reader (IMISCOE Research Series)
by Ricard Zapata-Barrero Ibrahim AwadThis open access Regional Reader describes population movement circulating within the Mediterranean area, for any reason or from any region, be them European, African, Asian or originating from any of the Mediterranean shores. It showcases a plurality of approaches to and applications of Mediterranean migration, contributing to a regional approach to migration studies, thereby defending this regional approach by scaling Mediterranean migration issues. This book covers a large set of questions related Mediterranean migrations to the migration research agenda, such as: market and economy, politics and policies, super-diversity and intersectionality, media, society, welfare and the environment through five main parts: Geo-political Mediterranean Relations, Governance, Policies and Politics, Mobility drivers and Agency, Cities, History and Social Transformations, and Economy and Labour Markets. This Regional Reader provides an interesting read to scholars, researchers, but also policy makers and civil society organizations’ high representatives, international foundations and institutions interested in linking the Mediterranean and migration.
The Politics of Porn for Young People in New Zealand (Studies in Childhood and Youth)
by Claire MeehanThis book sheds light on young New Zealander’s social realities and lived experiences of their digital and sexual lives through an understanding of how they think about and engage with porn. Drawing on qualitative empirical data from interviews with 106 young New Zealanders, each chapter examines young people’s creation of informal norms through an investigation of the broader issues associated with their engagement with porn, namely consent, gender, pleasure and ‘empowerment.’ Following this, the book gives voice to young New Zealander’s perceptions of the value of the sexuality education they receive. Finally, this text argues toward a co-constructed intersectional sexuality education.
Incels and Ideologies: Exploring How Incels Use Language to Construct Gender and Race (Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality)
by Frazer HeritageThis book explores how incels use language and other semiotic resources to construct ideologies of gender and race/ethnicity. The author theorises and positions incels' performances of masculinity against a backdrop of broader social sciences and linguistic literature, and discusses some of the limitations of different lenses through which incels have previously been understood, as well some of the ethical issues involved with researching a hostile community. Corpus linguistic methods and netnographic reflections are used to explore how incels construct ideologies about gender, gendered social actors, and race/ethnicity, as well as where these concepts intersect. Taking a post-structuralist critical analysis to this community reveals a number of way ideologies towards different groups based on social identities are linguistically constructed. This book will be relevant to those researching or studying language, gender, and sexuality, sociology, and criminology. Outside of academic applications, it is also written in a way that is accessible to external organisations interested in equality and the prevention of incel-ideology-motivated offline attacks.
On Shifting Ground: Constructing Manhood on the Margins (Gender and Justice #11)
by Jamie FaderOn Shifting Ground examines how it is to become a man in a place and time defined by economic contraction and carceral expansion. Jamie J. Fader draws on in-depth interviews with a racially diverse sample of Philadelphia's millennial men to analyze the key tensions that organize their lives: isolation versus connectedness, stability versus "drama," hope versus fear, and stigma and shame versus positive, masculine affirmation. In the unfamiliar cultural landscape of contemporary adult masculinity, these men strive to define themselves in terms of what they can accomplish despite negative labels, as well as seeking to avoid "becoming a statistic" in the face of endemic risk.
Depth Effects: Dimensionality from Camera to Computation
by Brooke BelisleIn this bold rewriting of visual culture, Brooke Belisle uses dimensionality to rethink the history and theory of media aesthetics. With Depth Effects, she traces A.I.-enabled techniques of computational imaging back to spatial strategies of early photography, analyzing everyday smartphone apps by way of almost-forgotten media forms. Drawing on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Belisle explores depth both as a problem of visual representation (how can flat images depict a voluminous world?) and as a philosophical paradox (how do things cohere beyond the limits of our view?). She explains how today's depth effects continue colonialist ambitions toward totalizing ways of seeing. But she also shows how artists stage dimensionality to articulate what remains invisible and irreducible.
When Death Falls Apart: Making and Unmaking the Necromaterial Traditions of Contemporary Japan
by Hannah GouldThrough an ethnographic study inside Japan’s Buddhist goods industry, this book establishes a method for understanding change in death ritual through attention to the dynamic lifecourse of necromaterials. Deep in the Fukuyama mountainside, “the grave of the graves” (o-haka no haka) houses acres of unwanted headstones—the material remains of Japan’s discarded death rites. In the past, the Japanese dead became venerated ancestors through sustained ritual offerings at graves and at butsudan, Buddhist altars installed inside the home. But in twenty-first-century Japan, this intergenerational system of care is rapidly collapsing. In noisy carpentry studios, flashy funeral-goods showrooms, neglected cemeteries, and cramped kitchens where women prepare memorial feasts, Hannah Gould analyzes the lifecycle of butsudan, illuminating how they are made, circulate through religious and funerary economies, mediate intimate exchanges between the living and the dead, and—as the population ages, families disperse, and fewer homes have space for large lacquer cabinets—eventually fall into disuse. What happens, she asks, when a funerary technology becomes obsolete? And what will take its place? Gould examines new products better suited to urban apartments: miniature urns and sleek altars inspired by Scandinavian design, even reliquary jewelry. She visits an automated columbarium and considers new ritual practices that embrace impermanence. At an industry expo, she takes on the role of “demonstration corpse.” Throughout, Gould invites us to rethink memorialization and describes a distinct form of Japanese necrosociality, one based on material exchanges that seek to both nurture the dead and disentangle them from the world of the living.
Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine (Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures)
by Lisa BhungaliaThe United States integrated counterterrorism mandates into its aid flows in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the early years of the global war on terror. Some two decades later, this securitized model of aid has become normalized across donor intervention in Palestine. Elastic Empire traces how foreign aid, on which much of the Palestinian population is dependent, has multiplied the sites and means through which Palestinian life is regulated, surveilled, and policed—this book tells the story of how aid has also become war. Drawing on extensive research conducted in Palestine, Elastic Empire offers a novel accounting of the US security state. The US war chronicled here is not one of tanks, grenades, and guns, but a quieter one waged through the interlacing of aid and law. It emerges in the infrastructures of daily life—in a greenhouse and library, in the collection of personal information and mapping of land plots, in the halls of municipal councils and in local elections—and indelibly transfigures lives. Situated in a landscape where the lines between humanitarianism and the global war on terror are increasingly blurred, Elastic Empire reveals the shape-shifting nature of contemporary imperial formations, their realignments and reformulations, their haunted sites, and their obscured but intimate forms.
Qaum, Mulk, Sultanat: Citizenship and National Belonging in Pakistan (South Asia in Motion)
by Ali Usman QasmiAfter the trauma of mass violence and massive population movements around the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, both new nation states faced the enormous challenge of creating new national narratives, symbols, and histories, as well as a new framework for their political life. While leadership in India claimed the anti-colonial movement, Gandhi, and a civilizational legacy in the subcontinent, the new political elite in Pakistan were faced with a more complex task: to carve out a separate and distinct Muslim history and political tradition from a millennium long history of cultural and religious interaction, mixing, and coexistence. Drawing on a rich archive of diverse sources, Ali Qasmi traces the complex development of ideas of citizenship and national belonging in the postcolonial Muslim state, offering a nuanced and sweeping history of the country's formative period. Qasmi paints a rich picture of the long, arduous, and often conflict-ridden process of writing a democratic constitution of Pakistan, while simultaneously narrating the invention of a range of new rituals of state—such as the exact color of the flag, the precise date of birth of the national poet of Pakistan, and the observation of Eid as a "national festival"—providing an illuminating analysis of the practices of being Pakistani, and a new portrait of Muslim history in the subcontinent.