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Aging Matters: An Introduction to Social Gerontology

Presents Social Gerontology from Multiple Perspectives Aging Matters illuminates cultural, biological, physiological, emotional, cognitive, economic, and social aspects of aging. A useful guide to a range of disciplines, this title helps readers of all educational backgrounds understand the dynamic interactions between older people and their environments.

Aging Nationally in Contemporary Poland: Memory, Kinship, and Personhood (Global Perspectives on Aging)

Active aging programs that encourage older adults to practice health-promoting behaviors are proliferating worldwide. In Poland, the meanings and ideals of these programs have become caught up in the sociocultural and political-economic changes that have occurred during the lifetimes of the oldest generations—most visibly, the transition from socialism to capitalism. Yet practices of active aging resonate with older forms of activity in late life in ways that exceed these narratives of progress. Moreover, some older Poles come to live valued, meaningful lives in old age despite threats to respect and dignity posed by illness and debility. Through intimate portrayals of a wide range of experiences of aging in Poland, Jessica C. Robbins shows that everyday practices of remembering and relatedness shape how older Poles come to be seen by themselves and by others as living worthy, valued lives. In Aging Nationally in Contemporary Poland, we see how memories and understandings of the Polish nation intersect with ideals and experiences of late life to produce forms of life that are not reducible to binary categories of health or illness, independence or dependence, or socialism or capitalism.

Aging Veterans with Disabilities: A Cross-National Study of Policies and Challenges

The number of older war veterans receiving disability benefits is steadily growing and is predicted to rise in the next decade. This book provides comprehensive knowledge about health and psychosocial concerns of veterans aging with disabilities and unmet needs and compares policy in three countries that have been involved in massive warfare in the 20th century––the United Kingdom (UK), the United States (US), and Israel. Using a cross-national comparative study of the policies, legislation and services provided by these three countries, which have significant numbers of aging disabled military veterans, this book provides evidence-based knowledge on the trajectories and attendant mental-health and psychosocial problems this sub-group faces when aging with a disability. It sheds light on the paradox in which most veterans with disabilities in the UK, USA and Israel are older, while the current legislation and budget target younger veterans with disabilities. The book reflects the current debate regarding the desired policy toward older veterans with disabilities in these countries and whether to provide them with proactive health services prior to retirement to prevent "accelerated aging". It also evaluates the dilemma of whether to serve aging veterans separately as a unique population or to provide them with the same services used by the general population. This book will be of interest to all academics and students working in disability studies, rehabilitation studies, gerontology, psychology, sociology, social work, social policy, and law more broadly.

Aging Workers and the Employee-Employer Relationship

This book focuses on the aging workforce from the employment relationship perspective. This innovative book specifically focuses on how organizations can ensure their aging workers remain motivated, productive and healthy. In 15 chapters, several experts on this topic describe how organizations through effective human resource management can ensure that workers are able to continue working at higher age. In addition, this book discusses the role older workers themselves play in continuing work at higher age. To do this, the authors integrate research from different areas, such as literature on leadership, psychological contracts and diversity with literature on the aging workforce. Through this integration this book provides innovative ways for organizations and workers to maintain productivity, motivation and health. Aging Workers and the Employee-Employer Relationship summarizes the latest research on how employment relationships change with age and its implications for supporting the well-being, motivation and productivity of older workers. It identifies ways to improve how both companies and workers solve the problems they face. These include better designed employment practices and more adaptive job content and developmental opportunities for aging workers along with activities aging workers can engage to enhance their own job crafting, learning and employability.

Agonies of Empire: American Power from Clinton to Biden

The defeat of Donald Trump in November 2020 followed by the attack on the US Congress on 6th January 2021 represented a tipping point moment in the history of the American republic. Divided at home and facing a world sceptical of American claims to be the ‘indispensable nation’ in world politics, it is clear that the next few years will be decisive ones for the United States. But how did the US, which was riding high only 30 years ago, arrive at this critical point? And will it lead to the fall of what many would claim has been one of the most successful empires of modern times? In this volume, Michael Cox, a leading scholar of American foreign policy, outlines the ways in which five very different American Presidents – Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and now Biden – have addressed the complex legacies left them by their predecessors while dealing with the longer-term problems of running an empire under increasing stress. In so doing, he sets out a framework for thinking critically about US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War without ever losing sight of the biggest question of all: can America continue to shape world affairs or is it now facing long-term decline?

Agonistic Democracy: Rethinking Political Institutions in Pluralist Times (Routledge Advances in Democratic Theory)

Agonistic Democracy explores how theoretical concepts from agonistic democracy can inform institutional design in order to mediate conflict in multicultural, pluralist societies. Drawing on the work of Foucault, Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Arendt, Marie Paxton outlines the importance of their themes of public contestation, contingency and necessary interdependency for contemporary agonistic thinkers. Paxton delineates three distinct approaches to agonistic democracy: David Owen’s perfectionist agonism, Mouffe’s adversarial agonism, and William Connolly and James Tully’s inclusive agonism. Paxton demonstrates how each is fundamental to enabling citizens to cultivate better virtues for themselves and society (Owen), motivating democratic engagement (Mouffe) and enhancing relations of respect and understanding between conflicting citizens (Connolly and Tully). Situated within the context of a deeply polarised post-Trump America and post-Brexit Britain, this book reveals the need to rethink our approach to conflict mediation through democratic institutions. Pulling together insights from experimental research with deliberative democratic innovations, Paxton explores how agonistic theory might be institutionalised further. Through discussing ways in which agonistic institutions might be developed to render democracy more virtuous, more engaging, and more inclusive, Agonistic Democracy provides a unique resource for students of contemporary political theory.

Agonistic Democracy

This pioneering book delivers a systematic account of agonistic democracy, and a much-needed analysis of the core components of agonism: pluralism, tragedy, and the value of conflict. It also traces the history of these ideas, identifying the connections with republicanism and with Greek antiquity. Mark Wenman presents a critical appraisal of the leading contemporary proponents of agonism and, in a series of well-crafted and comprehensive discussions, brings these thinkers into debate with one another, as well as with the post-structuralist and continental theorists who influence them. Wenman draws extensively on Hannah Arendt, and stresses the creative power of human action as augmentation and revolution. He also reworks Arendt's discussion of reflective judgement to present an alternative style of agonism, one where the democratic contest is linked to the emergence of a militant form of cosmopolitanism, and to prospects for historical change in the context of neoliberal globalisation.

Agonistic Democracy and Political Practice: Ways of Being Adversarial

This book explores the implications of agonistic democratic theory for political practice. Fuat Gürsözlü argues that at a time when political parties exacerbate political division, political protesters are characterized as looters and terrorists, and extreme partisanship and authoritarian tendencies are on the rise, the agonistic approach offers a much-needed rethinking of political practice to critically understand challenges to democracy and envision more democratic, inclusive, and peaceful alternatives. Inspired by Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic theory and drawing on insights of other prominent agonistic scholars, Gürsözlü offers a distinctive approach that develops the connections between the agonistic approach and political practice. His main claim is that approaching democratic politics from an agonistic perspective changes the way we understand the nature of democratic society, the place of political protest in democracy, the nature of adversarial engagement, and the democratic function of political parties. The book also advances an account of agonistic peace that is best fitted to the pluralistic and inherently conflictual nature of democratic societies. This book should be of interest to anyone working in the field of contemporary political theory, political philosophy, peace studies, and philosophy of peace.

Agonistics

Political conflict in our society is inevitable, and its results are often far from negative. How then should we deal with the intractable differences arising from complex modern culture? Developing her groundbreaking political philosophy of agonistics - the search for a radical and plural democracy - Chantal Mouffe examines international relations, strategies for radical politics, the future of Europe and the politics of artistic practices. She shows that in many circumstances where no alternatives seem possible, agonistics offers a new road map for change. Engaging with cosmopolitanism, post-operaism, and theories of multiple modernities she argues in favour of a multipolar world with real cultural and political pluralism.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Agony and Eloquence: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and a World of Revolution

<P>The drama of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson is the foundational story of America--courage, loyalty, hope, fanaticism, greatness, failure, forgiveness, love. <P> Agony and Eloquence is the story of the greatest friendship in American history and the revolutionary times in which it was made, ruined, and finally renewed. <P> In the wake of Washington’s retirement, longtime friends Thomas Jefferson and John Adams came to represent the opposing political forces struggling to shape America’s future. Adams’s victory in the presidential election of 1796 brought Jefferson into his administration--but as an unlikely and deeply conflicted vice president. <P>The bloody Republican revolution in France finally brought their political differences to a bitter pitch. In Mallock’s take on this fascinating period, French foreign policy and revolutionary developments--from the fall of the Bastille to the fall of the Jacobins and the rise of Napoleon--form a disturbing and illuminating counterpoint to events, controversies, individuals, and relationships in Philadelphia and Washington. <P>Many important and fascinating people appear in the book, including Thomas Paine, Camille Desmoulins, Dr. Benjamin Rush, Tobias Lear, Talleyrand, Robespierre, Danton, Saint-Just, Abigail Adams, Lafayette, James Madison, John Quincy Adams, Dr. Joseph Priestley, Samuel Adams, Philip Mazzei, John Marshall, Alexander Hamilton, and Edward Coles. They are brought to life by Mallock’s insightful analysis and clear and lively writing. <P>Agony and Eloquence is a thoroughly researched and tautly written modern history. When the most important thing is at stake, almost anything can be justified. <P><b>A New York Times Bestseller</b>

The Agony of the American Left

Five long essays by an American historian, the author of The New Radicalism in America (1965). Under the rubric of "the collapse of mass-based radical movements," Lasch examines the decline of populism, the disintegration of the American socialist party, and the weaknesses of black nationalism. Also included is a history of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and a discussion of the '60's revival of ideological controversy.

Agrarian Capitalism, War and Peace in Colombia: Beyond Dispossession (Routledge Studies in Global Land and Resource Grabbing)

Based on extensive research conducted in Colombia since 2009, this book addresses the connection between land grabbing and agrarian capitalism, as well as the unfulfilled promises of peace and justice. While land remains a key resource at the core of many contemporary civil wars, the impact of high-intensity armed violence on the formation of agrarian capitalism is seldom discussed. Drawing on nearly 200 interviews, archival research, and geographical data, this book examines land grabbing and the role of violence in capital with a particular focus on one key actor in the Colombian civil war: paramilitary militias. This book demonstrates how the intricate ties between armed conflict and economy formation are obscured by the widespread belief that violence is a radical form of action, breaking with the normal course of society and disconnected from the legal economy. Under this view, dispossession is perceived as diametrically opposed to capitalist accumulation. This belief is enormously influential in precisely those bureaucratic agencies that are in charge of peacebuilding, both domestically and internationally. However, this narrow view of the relationship between armed violence and capitalism belies the close ties between plunder and lawful profit, and obscures the continuity between violent dispossession and the free market. By the same token, it legitimizes post-war inequality in the name of capitalist development. The book concludes by arguing that the promotion of radical democracy in the government of land and rural development emerges as the only reasonable path for pacifying a violent polity. The book is essential reading for students, scholars, and development aid practitioners interested in land and resource grabbing, agrarian capitalism, civil wars, and conflict resolution.

Agrarian Change and Urbanization in Southern India: City and the Peasant (India Studies in Business and Economics)

This book takes readers on a journey through the evolution of agricultural communities in southern India, from their historical roots to the recent global neo-liberal era. It offers insights into a unique combination of themes, with a particular focus on agrarian change and urbanisation, specifically in the state of Karnataka where both aspects are significant and co-exist. Based on case studies from Karnataka in South India, the book presents a regional yet integrated multi-disciplinary framework for analysing the persistence, resilience and future of small farmer units. In doing so, it charts possible futures for small farm holdings and identifies means of integrating their progress and sustainability alongside that of the rest of the economy. Further, it provides arguments for the relevance of small holdings in connection with sustainable livelihoods and welfare at the grass roots, while also catering to the welfare needs of society at the macro level. The book makes a valuable contribution to the scholarship of agrarian as well as peri-urban transdisciplinary literature. For agrarian academics, students and the teaching community, the book’s broad and topical coverage make it a valuable resource. For development practitioners and for those working on issues related to urbanisation, urban peripheries and the rural–urban interface, this book offers a new perspective that considers the primary sector on par with the secondary and tertiary. It also offers an insightful guide for policymakers and non-government organisations working in this area.

Agrarian Crisis in the United States: Pathways for Reform

From fragile, corporate-controlled supply chains breaking down, to millions of already hyper-exploited farmworkers risking their lives in the fields without basic personal protective equipment, the COVID-19 pandemic made it painfully obvious that US agriculture does not work. Agrarian Crisis in the United States: Pathways for Reform situates the many food system problems that the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare in historical context across four key policy areas, namely, in land, labor, markets, and the environment. In applying and building from the work of Jürgen Habermas, Agrarian Crisis in the United States highlights how deep-seated problems concerning systemic racism, economic inequality, and political legitimacy endanger the US food and farm system’s future. Besides analyzing crises, it presents solutions that would make agriculture in the United States more just and resilient through the implementation of certain communication and policy strategies. Its original argument, as well as a novel set of remedies, will appeal to scholars and activists with interests in agrarian studies, environmental policy, and social movements.

Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside

In the 1930s and 1940s, rural reformers in the United States and Mexico waged unprecedented campaigns to remake their countrysides in the name of agrarian justice and agricultural productivity. Agrarian Crossings tells the story of how these campaigns were conducted in dialogue with one another as reformers in each nation came to exchange models, plans, and strategies with their equivalents across the border.Dismantling the artificial boundaries that can divide American and Latin American history, Tore Olsson shows how the agrarian histories of both regions share far more than we realize. He traces the connections between the US South and the plantation zones of Mexico, places that suffered parallel problems of environmental decline, rural poverty, and gross inequities in land tenure. Bringing this tumultuous era vividly to life, he describes how Roosevelt’s New Deal drew on Mexican revolutionary agrarianism to shape its program for the rural South. Olsson also looks at how the US South served as the domestic laboratory for the Rockefeller Foundation’s “green revolution” in Mexico—which would become the most important Third World development campaign of the twentieth century—and how the Mexican government attempted to replicate the hydraulic development of the Tennessee Valley Authority after World War II.Rather than a comparative history, Agrarian Crossings is an innovative history of comparisons and the ways they affected policy, moved people, and reshaped the landscape.

The Agrarian Crusade

Agrarian Extractivism in Latin America (Routledge Critical Development Studies)

Amid the growing calls for a turn towards sustainable agriculture, this book puts forth and discusses the concept of agrarian extractivism to help us identify and expose the predatory extractivist features of dominant agricultural development models. The concept goes beyond the more apparent features of monocultures and raw material exports to examine the inherent logic and underlying workings of a model based on the appropriation of an ever-growing range of commodified and non-commodified human and non-human nature in an extractivist fashion. Such a process erodes the autonomy of resourcedependent working people, dispossesses the rural poor, exhausts and expropriates nature, and concentrates value in a few hands as a result of the unquenchable drive for profit by big business. In many instances, such extractivist dynamics are subsidized and/or directly supported by the state, while also dependent on the unpaid, productive, and reproductive labour of women, children, and elders, exacerbating unequal class, gender, and generational relations. Rather than a one-size-fits-all definition of agrarian extractivism, this collection points to the diversity of extractivist features of corporate-led, external-input-dependent plantation agriculture across distinct socio-ecological formations in Latin America. This timely challenge to the destructive dominant models of agricultural development will interest scholars, activists, researchers, and students from across the fields of critical development studies, rural studies, environmental and sustainability studies, and Latin American studies, among others.

Agrarian Policies And Agricultural Systems

This book is a comparative analysis of the agrarian policies and the agricultural systems of the European Community (EC) and the United States (US). It provides an overview of the agricultural policies of the EC and US, their stated objectives, and their impact on both agricultural sectors.

Agrarian Reform and Farmer Resistance in Punjab: Mobilization and Resilience

This book examines the different dimensions of farmer agitations in Punjab, India. It situates the 2020–2021 farmer resistance movement within the wider context of India’s post-independent development trajectory and provides a thorough analysis of various aspects of the farmers' movement in India. The volume contextualizes Punjab’s history of farmer resistance, organization and mobilization strategies, the globalization of the movement, ways of both sustaining the movement and building resilience. While providing a critical understanding of the three farm laws introduced in India in 2020, the book looks at how they may impact farm operations and livelihoods in the post-Green Revolution period and evaluates strategies of inclusive mobilization for gathering support and sustaining the movement both within India and abroad, with special focus on the role of the Sikh diaspora. Essays in this volume also discuss the participation of women in the struggle and how their experience has the potential to transform gender relations both at home and in the public sphere. Integrated, comprehensive, and concisely written by well-known experts, this book will be of interest to those involved with Punjab’s social, political, and economic history, and students and researchers of food and agriculture in developing countries, peasant and social movements, Indian federalism and role of diasporas as non-state actors.

Agrarian Reform And Rural Poverty: A Case Study Of Peru

Based on extensive data for land ownership, income distribution, and agricultural production, this book assesses Peru's experience with development planning since 1950 and discusses efforts to improve the standard of living of its rural population through changes in agrarian structure. .

Agrarian Reform in Russia

This book examines the history of reforms and major state interventions affecting Russian agriculture: the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the Stolypin reforms, the NEP, the Collectivization, Khrushchev reforms, and finally farm enterprise privatization in the early 1990s. It shows a pattern emerging from a political imperative in imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet regimes, and it describes how these reforms were justified in the name of the national interest during severe crises – rapid inflation, military defeat, mass strikes, rural unrest, and/or political turmoil. It looks at the consequences of adversity in the economic environment for rural behavior after reform and at long-run trends. It has chapters on property rights, rural organization, and technological change. It provides a new database for measuring agricultural productivity from 1861 to 1913 and updates these estimates to the present. This book is a study of the policies aimed at reorganizing rural production and their effectiveness in transforming institutions.

Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village

Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village deals with a Taráscan Indian village in southwestern Mexico which, between 1920 and 1926, played a precedent-setting role in agrarian reform. As he describes forty years in the history of this small pueblo, Paul Friedrich raises general questions about local politics and agrarian reform that are basic to our understanding of radical change in peasant societies around the world. Of particular interest is his detailed study of the colorful, violent, and psychologically complex leader, Primo Tapia, whose biography bears on the theoretical issues of the "political middleman" and the relation between individual motivation and socioeconomic change. Friedrich's evidence includes massive interviewing, personal letters, observations as an anthropological participant (e. g. , in fiesta ritual), analysis of the politics and other village culture during 1955-56, comparison with other Taráscan villages, historical and prehistoric background materials, and research in legal and government agrarian archives.

The Agrarian Structure Of Bangladesh: An Impediment To Development

The relationship between the agrarian structure of Bangladesh and its problems of rural development is established in this study based on four years (1975-79) of field research. The authors suggest that the concentration of land in the hands of a rural elite is the principal impediment to the participation of weaker sections of the peasantry in economic progress. Tracing the failure of local attempts to change Bangladesh's agrarian structure by legislative means, they outline a modified program for rural development that is linked to agrarian reform. Agrarian reform, Drs. Jannuzi and Peach argue, is the prerequisite for a rural development strategy that provides for both economic growth and improved income distribution; thus, approaches to rural development in Bangladesh that place reliance on new agricultural technology without first changing the institutions that determine peoples' relationships to the land are not viable. The authors' policy recommendations, grounded in new data on the relative proportions of owners of land, sharecroppers, and the landless, are supplemented by a theoretical analysis of the institution of sharecropping and detailed field work methodology.

Agrarian Transformation In Egypt

This book reflects the argument on agrarian transformation in Egypt. It focuses on the role of agricultural mechanization in the labor process in rural Egypt. The book emphasizes the changing role of the household and the relations between households, particularly the role of women and children. .

Agrarian Transformation in Western India: Economic Gains and Social Costs

This book examines the economic gains and social costs of agrarian transformation in India. The author looks at three phases of agrarian transformation: colonial, post- colonial, and neoliberal. This work combines macro and micro economic data, economic and noneconomic phenomena, and quantitative and qualitative aspects while exploring the context of historical and contemporary changes with special reference to Maharashtra in western India. It discusses regional disparities in agricultural development, issues of modernisation and social inequality, land owning among scheduled castes and tribes, women in agriculture, pattern of labour migration and farmer’s suicides, and documents the experiences and conditions of the rural poor and socially weaker sections to provide a comprehensive understanding of the significant changes in agrarian rural economy of western India. It also discusses contemporary development policy and practices and their consequences. Lucid and topical, this volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of agrarian studies, rural sociology, social history, agricultural economics, development studies, political economy, political studies, and public policy, as well as planning and policy experts.