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Affinity Online: How Connection and Shared Interest Fuel Learning (Connected Youth and Digital Futures #2)
by Katie Salen Mizuko Ito Crystle Martin Rachel Cody Pfister Matthew H. Rafalow Amanda WortmanHow online affinity networks expand learning and opportunity for young people Boyband One Direction fanfiction writers, gamers who solve math problems together, Harry Potter fans who knit for a cause. Across subcultures and geographies, young fans have found each other and formed community online, learning from one another along the way. From these and other in-depth case studies of online affinity networks, Affinity Online considers how young people have found new opportunities for expanded learning in the digital age. These cases reveal the shared characteristics and unique cultures and practices of different online affinity networks, and how they support “connected learning”—learning that brings together youth interests, social activity, and accomplishment in civic, academic, and career relevant arenas. Although involvement in online communities is an established fixture of growing up in the networked age, participation in these spaces show how young people are actively taking up new media for their own engaged learning and social development. While providing a wealth of positive examples for how the online world provides new opportunities for learning, the book also examines the ways in which these communities still reproduce inequalities based on gender, race, and socioeconomic status. The book concludes with a set of concrete suggestions for how the positive learning opportunities offered by online communities could be made available to more young people, at school and at home. Affinity Online explores how online practices and networks bridge the divide between in-school and out-of-school learning, finding that online affinity networks are creating new spaces of opportunity for realizing the ideals of connected learning.
Affinographs: A Dynamic Method for Assessment of Individuals, Couples, Families, and Households
by Davor JedlickaThe need for a new method for assessment and imaging of families, couples, and individuals has emerged in response to changes in family forms during the twentieth century. In the twentieth century divorce, remarriage, out-of wedlock child bearing, and alternate life styles have replaced monogamy as predominant form of marriage and the family. The methods of representation and assessment on the other hand remain based on the nineteenth century eugenics models embedded in the modern day genograms. This book is based on the premise that changes in family structure require changes in methods of representation, assessment, research, and teaching. This book introduces such a method in the form of a model named the affinograph. The affinograph provides a method which allows a greater respect for individuals, especially if their relationships contradict the preconceived institutional notions of marriage and the family. Improvement in visualizing families of various types and complexities can make affinographs an important new method that can bring together the theory, research, and application across varied disciplines that comprise family sciences.
Affirmation, Care Ethics, and LGBT Identity
by Tim R. JohnstonIn this book, Johnston argues that affirmation is not only encouragement or support, but also the primary mechanism we use to form our identities and create safe spaces. Using the work of feminist care ethics and the thinking of French philosopher Henri Bergson to examine responses to school bullying and abuses faced by LGBT older adults, he provides the theoretical analysis and practical tools LGBT people and their allies need to make all spaces, public and private, spaces in which we can live openly as members of the LGBT community. With its combination of philosophical theory and on-the-ground activist experience, this text will be useful to anyone interested in philosophy, women's and gender studies, psychology, aging, geriatrics, and LGBT activism.
Affirmations for Queer People: 100+ Positive Messages to Affirm, Empower, and Inspire
by Jess VosseteigCelebrate your resilience and bravery in the face of discrimination and empower yourself and your community with these 100+ affirmations for queer people that celebrate being LGBTQIA+.Queer people are essential members of society—trailblazing for positive change and building up a stronger and more vibrant community every day. It&’s time to affirm these truths and so many more with Affirmations for Queer People. In this book, discover more than 100 affirmations to empower yourself, emphasize your self-worth, care for your mental health and emotional well-being, and so much more. You can use these affirmations and the accompanying texts to reflect on your own life and your future. You&’ll find amazing, inclusive artwork throughout that speaks to the beauty, bravery, and diversity of this incredible community. With Affirmations for Queer People, celebrate being a queer person, affirm your talent and worth, and bring your dreams to fruition.
Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White
by Tim J. WiseAffirmative Action examines the larger structure of institutional white privilege in education, and compares the magnitude of white racial preference with the policies typically envisioned when the term "racial preference" is used. In doing so, the book demonstrates that the American system of education is both a reflection of and a contributor to a structure of institutionalized racism and racial preference for the dominant majority.
Affirmative Action And Equal Opportunity: Action, Inaction, Reaction
by Nijole V. BenokraitisThe affirmative action program has engendered a hostile reaction in many quarters. Originating in presidential executive orders and civil rights legislation, the program is intended to combat institutional race and sex discrimination by encouraging public and private organizations to go beyond the mere cessation of formal discriminatory practices—to enact their own programs to end unfair practices. In contrast to the passive nondiscrimination of equal opportunity, affirmative action means that employers must act positively, affirmatively, and aggressively to remove all barriers, however informal or subtle, that prevent minorities and women from having equal access to all levels of the nation's educational, industrial, and government institutions. Is affirmative action, in fact, geared to equal opportunity? Or has it resulted in greater inequality for white males? The authors of this book empirically examine employment in government, industry, and higher education and enrollment in colleges and universities to determine the current status of women and minorities as employees and students. They also describe the machinery of affirmative action, its budget and staff problems, the compliance and enforcement processes, and the results of the program. Their final chapter includes a theoretical explanation for the very apparent resistance to affirmative action and expresses their pessimism about the program's ability to accomplish its goals, especially in light of recent efforts to weaken its already limited power. They close with a discussion of the future of affirmative action and the likelihood of achieving equal opportunity in employment.
Affirmative Action and the Law: Efficacy of National and International Approaches
by Erica Howard Elvira Dominguez-Redondo Narciso Leandro Xavier BaezAffirmative Action and the Law analyses the practical application of affirmative action measures and their efficacy in achieving substantive equality through the lenses of the United Nations human rights machinery and the legal regime and policies implemented in China, India, Central and South America, South Africa and the United Kingdom. The product of a joint research project involving academics from the Brazil, Chile, Mexico, India, Spain and the United Kingdom, the findings identify and reflect on trends emerging from State practice across the world in eradicating structural inequality through special measures for certain designated groups. The book seeks to provide a coherent and systematic approach to the analysis of special measures in the targeted countries. It also comprises two case-studies with in-depth insights on gender diversity on the boards of public listed companies in the UK and the European Union and the access of persons with disabilities to higher education in Brazil. The book will be a valuable resource for students and academics in the field of human rights, law, sociology and politics. It will also provide a source of good practice for states and policy makers in the framing of responses to increased inequality at national and international level; and for civil society actors seeking to explore meaningful interaction with a highly controversial topic in society.
The Affirmative Action Debate
by Steven M. CahnThis book is an essential guide to the full range of arguments surrounding affirmative action. Following the debate, as no other collection does, from all the early foundational articles to up-to-date selections, the book presents the strongest contributions from both sides of this highly charged issue. For students and general readers seeking to understand the controversy, this book offers a unique guide to the main lines of argument in the discussion. The contributors include most of the major contributors to the debate: Anita L. Allen, Robert Amdur, Michael D;. Bayles, Tom L. Beauchamp, Barbara R. Bergmann, Derek Bok, William G. Bowen, Carl Cohen, J. L. Cowan, Ronald Dworkin, Robert K. Fullinwider, Alan H. Goldman, Sidney Hook, James W. Nickel, William A. Nunn III, George Sher, Robert Simon, Paul W. Taylor, Abigail Thernstrom, Stephen Thernstrom, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Celia Wolf-Devine, and Paul Woodruff.
Affirmative Action, Ethnicity and Conflict (Routledge Malaysian Studies Series)
by Edmund Terence Gomez Ralph PremdasIn recent years a number of countries have introduced affirmative action programmes in order to put right historical injustices and economic inequalities involving ethnic communities. This book examines affirmative action programmes in a range of countries around the world. It discusses how such programmes came about and how they have been implemented, and examines their effectiveness. Throughout it explores how far affirmative action programmes reinforce ethnic identities and thereby contribute to division and conflict. The countries covered are India, the United States, South Africa, Northern Ireland, Brazil, Malaysia and Fiji.
Affirmative Action for Economically Weaker Sections and Upper-Castes in Indian Constitutional Law: Context, Judicial Discourse, and Critique
by Asang WankhedeThis book examines the controversial 103rd Constitutional Amendment to the Indian Constitution that introduced an income and asset ownership-based new constitutional standard for determining backwardness marking a significant shift in the government’s social and public policy. It also analyses state level policies towards backwardness recognition of upper-caste dominant groups through case studies of Maharashtra, Haryana, and Gujarat. It provides an analytical and descriptive account of the proliferation of reservation policy in India and critiques these interventions to assess their implication on constitutional jurisprudence. Further, it assesses the theoretical and empirical challenges such developments pose to the principle of substantive equality and scope of affirmative action policies in Indian constitutional law and general discrimination law theory. The monograph shows how opening up of reservations for dominant upper-caste groups and general category will have implications for the constitutional commitment to addressing deeply entrenched marginalisation emanating from the traditional social hierarchy and the understanding of substantive equality in Indian Constitutional law. Further, it highlights key contradictions, incoherence, and internal tension in the design of the reservations for Economically Weaker Sections Critical, comprehensive, and cogently argued, this book will contribute and shape ongoing constitutional policy and judicial debates. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of law, Indian politics, affirmative action, social policy, and public policy.
Affirmative Action in Medicine: Improving Health Care for Everyone
by James L. CurtisAffirmative action programs have significantly changed American medicine for the better, not only in medical school admissions and access to postgraduate training but also in bringing a higher quality of health care to all people. James L. Curtis approaches this important transition from historical, statistical, and personal perspectives. He tells how over the course of his medical education and career as a psychiatrist and professor--often as the first or only African American in his cohort--the status of minorities in the medical professions grew from a tiny percentage to a far more equitable representation of the American population. Advancing arguments from his earlier book, Blacks, Medical Schools, and Society, Curtis evaluates the outcomes of affirmative action efforts over the past thirty years. He describes formidable barriers to minority access to medical-education opportunities and the resulting problems faced by minority patients in receiving medical treatment. His progress report includes a review of two thousand minority students admitted to U. S. medical schools in 1969, following them through graduation and their careers, comparing them with the careers of two thousand of their nonminority peers. These samples provide an important look at medical schools that, while heralding dramatic progress in physician education and training opportunity, indicates much room for further improvement. A basic hurdle continues to face African Americans and other minorities who are still confined to segregated neighborhoods and inferior school systems that stifle full scholastic development. Curtis urges us as a nation to develop all our human resources through an expansion of affirmative action programs, thus improving health care for everyone. James L. Curtis is Clinical Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Affirmative Acts: Political Essays
by June JordanAffirmative Acts: Political Essays marks the twenty-fifth book in the celebrated career of poet, essayist, activist, and professor June Jordan. The recipient of the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest and the PEN West Freedom to Write Awards, Jordan has created a widely influential and groundbreaking body of work over several decades. With the same clear-sighted passion found in her classic essay collections Civil Wars and Living Room, in Affirmative Acts Jordan writes brilliantly about controversial, critical, and timely issues that are currently at the center of American debate. Whether discussing the tragic dismantling of affirmative action; ruminating on the combustible intersections of race, class, gender, and injustice; reflecting on the palpable hatred that infuses American society; or speaking out against worldwide suffering, June Jordan paints, as in her previous works, what she calls "an intimate face of universal struggle."
Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics
by Dara Z. StrolovitchThe United States boasts scores of organizations that offer crucial representation for groups that are marginalized in national politics, from women to racial minorities to the poor. Here, in the first systematic study of these organizations, Dara Z. Strolovitch explores the challenges and opportunities they face in the new millennium, as waning legal discrimination coincides with increasing political and economic inequalities within the populations they represent. Drawing on rich new data from a survey of 286 organizations and interviews with forty officials, Strolovitch finds that groups too often prioritize the interests of their most advantaged members: male rather than female racial minorities, for example, or affluent rather than poor women. But Strolovitch also finds that many organizations try to remedy this inequity, and she concludes by distilling their best practices into a set of principles that she calls affirmative advocacy—a form of representation that aims to overcome the entrenched but often subtle biases against people at the intersection of more than one marginalized group. Intelligently combining political theory with sophisticated empirical methods, Affirmative Advocacy will be required reading for students and scholars of American politics.
Affirmative Aesthetics and Wilful Women: Gender, Space and Mobility in Contemporary Cinema
by Maud CeuterickFifty years of feminist thought have made the idea that women stay at home while men dominate the streets seem outdated; nevertheless, Ceuterick argues that theoretical considerations of gender, space, and power in film theory remain limited by binary models. Looking instead to more fluid models of spatial relations inspired by Sara Ahmed, Rosi Braidotti, and Doreen Massey, this book discovers wilful, affirmative, and imaginative activations of gender on screen. Through close, micro-analysis of historic European Messidor (Alain Tanner, 1979) and contemporary world cinema: Vendredi Soir (Claire Denis, 2002), Wadjda (Haifaa Al-Mansour, 2012), and Head-On (Fatih Akin, 2004), this book identifies affirmative aesthetics: light, texture, rhythm, movement and sound, all of which that participate in a rewriting of bodies and spaces. Ultimately, Ceuterick argues, affirmative aesthetics can challenge the gender categories and power structures that have been thought to determine our habitation of cars, homes, and city streets. Wilful women drive this book forward, through their movement and stillness, imagination and desire, performance and abjection.
Affirmative Psychotherapy with Bisexual Women and Bisexual Men
by Ronald C. FoxLearn the latest practical-and bisexually affirmative-approaches to helping bisexual clientsClinical work with bisexual clients has conceptually shifted beyond the exclusive emphasis on either straight or lesbian and gay issues. There are still, however, too few psychotherapists who provide affirmative psychotherapy specific to bisexual concerns. Affirmative Psychotherapy with Bisexual Women and Bisexual Men addresses the issues of bisexuals with an accepting and affirmative perspective, providing therapists with the latest viewpoints, strategies, and research to effectively treat bisexual clients. Leading authorities with affirmative-to-bisexuals perspectives discuss problems specific to bisexuals and their lifestyles, with an eye toward providing practical, effective therapy. Unique bisexual lifestyle concerns are examined, such as transgender issues, polyamory, older bisexual women and men, and cultural differences, while providing an emphasis on cultivating well-being and a sense of community in bisexual clients.Affirmative Psychotherapy with Bisexual Women and Bisexual Men sensitively avoids the double standard long held by therapists clinically treating heterosexual or lesbian and gay individuals, showing that an affirmative viewpoint is valid and crucial for the effective treatment of bisexuals. This source clearly explains practical strategies and discusses the latest research on bisexual issues such as age, culture, heterosexual and bisexual mixed couples, and the polyamorous lifestyle with appropriate acceptance and understanding. The book also explores useful ways to develop successful health and support services specific to bisexual needs.Topics in Affirmative Psychotherapy with Bisexual Women and Bisexual Men include: affirmative psychotherapy techniques specific to bisexual women and bisexual men need for validation of bisexuality ways for clients to come to terms with their bisexuality practical value-and shortcomings-of the main therapeutic schools in providing effective psychotherapy transgender bisexuality, with illustrative case studies needs and issues of African-American bisexual clients bisexual aging issues counseling heterosexual spouses of bisexual women and men therapy approaches for clients who are bisexual and polyamorous recognizing and addressing the specific needs of different sub-groups of bisexual people and more! Affirmative Psychotherapy with Bisexual Women and Bisexual Men is a crucial addition to the literature of bisexual psychotherapy and is invaluable to counselors, psychotherapists, marriage and family therapists, social workers, psychiatrists, sex therapists, researchers, and educators in the fields of psychology, sociology, anthropology, sexuality, sex education, adolescent and adult development, and community mental health.
Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity
by Hamilton CarrollAffirmative Reaction explores the cultural politics of heteronormative white masculine privilege in the United States. Through close readings of texts ranging from the popular television drama 24 to the Marvel Comics miniseries The Call of Duty, and from the reality show American Chopper to the movie Million Dollar Baby, Hamilton Carroll argues that the true privilege of white masculinity--and its defining strategy--is not to be unmarked, universal, or invisible, but to be mobile and mutable. He describes how, in response to the perceived erosions of privilege produced by post-civil rights era identity politics, white masculinity has come to rely on the very discourses of difference that unsettled its claims on the universal; it has redefined itself as a marginalized identity. Throughout Affirmative Reaction, Carroll examines the kinds of difference white masculinity claims for itself as it attempts to hold onto or maintain majority privilege. Whether these are traditional sites of minority difference--such as Irishness, white trash, or domestic melodrama--or reworked sites of masculinist investment--including laboring bodies, public-sphere politics, and vigilantism--the outcome is the same: the foregrounding of white masculinity over and against women, people of color, and the non-heteronormative. By revealing the strategies through which white masculinity is produced as a formal difference, Carroll sheds new light on the ways that privilege is accrued and maintained.
Affirming: Letters 1975-1997
by Isaiah Berlin‘IB was one of the great affirmers of our time.’ John Banville, New York Review of BooksThe title of this final volume of Isaiah Berlin’s letters is echoed by John Banville’s verdict in his review of its predecessor, Building: Letters 1960–75, which saw Berlin publish some of his most important work, and create, in Oxford’s Wolfson College, an institutional and architectural legacy. In the period covered by this new volume (1975–97) he consolidates his intellectual legacy with a series of essay collections. These generate many requests for clarification from his readers, and stimulate him to reaffirm and sometimes refine his ideas, throwing substantive new light on his thought as he grapples with human issues of enduring importance.Berlin’s comments on world affairs, especially the continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and the collapse of Communism, are characteristically acute. This is also the era of the Northern Ireland Troubles, the Iranian revolution, the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, and wars in the Falkland Islands, the Persian Gulf and the Balkans. Berlin scrutinises the leading politicians of the day, including Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachev, and draws illuminating sketches of public figures, notably contrasting the personas of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrey Sakharov. He declines a peerage, is awarded the Agnelli Prize for ethics, campaigns against philistine architecture in London and Jerusalem, helps run the National Gallery and Covent Garden, and talks at length to his biographer. He reflects on the ideas for which he is famous – especially liberty and pluralism – and there is a generous leavening of the conversational brilliance for which he is also renowned, as he corresponds with friends about politics, the academic world, music and musicians, art and artists, and writers and their work, always displaying a Shakespearean fascination with the variety of humankind.Affirming is the crowning achievement both of Berlin’s epistolary life and of the widely acclaimed edition of his letters whose first volume appeared in 2004.
Affirming: A Memoir of Faith, Sexuality, and Staying in the Church
by Sally GaryWhat is it like to discover that something you&’ve believed all your life might be wrong? Sally Gary knew since her early adulthood that she was attracted to women. But as a devoted Christian, she felt there was no way to fully embrace this aspect of her identity while remaining faithful. Now, as she prepares to marry the love of her life, she&’s ready to speak out about why—and how—her perspective changed. In this deeply personal memoir, Sally traces the experiences, conversations, and scriptural reading that culminated in her seeing her sexuality as something that made sense within the context of her faith—not outside of it or in opposition to it. Along the way, she addresses specific aspects of her journey that will resonate with many other gay Christians: the loneliness and isolation of her previously celibate life, the futile attempts she made to resist or even &“change&” her sexual orientation, and the fear of intimacy that followed a lifetime of believing same-sex relationships were sinful. Sally&’s story—one of heritage, learning, courage, and love—is written especially for the generations of LGBTQ Christians after her who are questioning whether they can stay part of the church they call home. It&’s a resounding reminder that, just like Sally&’s own heart, things can change, and sometimes, when we earnestly search for the truth, we find it in the most unexpected places.
An Affirming Flame: Meditations on Life and Politics
by Roger Cohen&“For more than forty years Roger Cohen has ventured to every corner of the earth to chronicle the great upheavals of our age, but he&’s never lost sight of what really matters: love, hope, and all the mysteries of the human heart. Here, in this collection of columns that will take you from the streets of Kyiv to an execution chamber in Alabama, you can read him at his best.&”—Dexter Filkins, best-selling author of The Forever WarA collection of the finest New York Times columns written by Roger Cohen over more than a decade, accompanied by an original, twenty-thousand-word essay on the state of the worldThe countless readers who followed Roger Cohen&’s column and mourned its end responded above all to what they saw as the marriage in his writing of head and heart. That tenor permeates An Affirming Flame.During his twelve years as a columnist, Cohen aimed to hold power to account at home and abroad, in the name of freedom, decency, pluralism, and the importance of truth and dissent in open societies. He watched with alarm as the outside threat of 9/11 morphed into the internal threat of January 6. This time, the assailants were not jihadi terrorists; they were American white supremacists and seditionists convinced of American decadence but unable to see that they personified it. The threat to American democracy is clear.Cohen dissects this ominous American fracture. He explores themes of displacement, belonging, and his own imperiled craft of journalism. His examination of the rising tide of authoritarian rule takes him to China, and in Kyiv he sees the devastating impact of Vladimir Putin's Russian nationalism. With its trenchant consideration of the plight of refugees, COVID-19, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the war in Afghanistan, Cohen's writing reflects his belief in the unquenchable human quest for dignity.He captures the fight to defend America&’s openness, democratic institutions, and ideals against the rising tide of retrogression, division, and assault on truth. This struggle, as Cohen writes, is also the world&’s. It is inseparable from the battle to save humanity from the creeping autocracy of the twenty-first century. As he writes, &“On lies is tyranny built.&”
Affirming Methodologies: Research and Education in the Caribbean
by Camille NakhidAffirming Methodologies: Research and Education in the Caribbean centres local and indigenous ways of knowing in research and education praxis in the Caribbean. The research methodologies and pedagogies are presented in this book within an Affirming Methodologies framework. They bring forward localized epistemologies whereby Caribbean ways of being and knowing are affirmed, and the expected western hierarchies between researcher and researched are removed. The chapters present approaches to knowledge construction and knowledge sharing based on practices, lived experiences, traditions, language patterns, and rituals of Caribbean communities. The importance of an Affirming Methodologies approach is demonstrated, and the characteristics of culturally affirming research methodologies and pedagogies in diverse environments including Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and the Caribbean diaspora in Aotearoa New Zealand and Canada are explored and presented. Grounded on an understanding of the authors’ Caribbean positionality, ontological distinctions within the Caribbean research context are considered. This book moves forward from a decolonizing methodology approach, and, as such, the chapters are written, not in opposition to, or tested against Eurocentric approaches to research, but deeply rooted in a Caribbean ethos. This book will engage researchers (both qualitative and quantitative), postgraduate students, academics, practitioners, policymakers, community workers, and lay persons who seek to employ culturally relevant local and indigenous research approaches in their work. Each chapter offers practical suggestions on the 'how' of research practice, making them accessible, relevant, and flexible for novice and seasoned researchers alike.
Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty
by Veena DasAffliction inaugurates a novel way of understanding the trajectories of health and disease in the context of poverty. Focusing on low-income neighborhoods in Delhi, it stitches together three different sets of issues. First, it examines the different trajectories of illness: What are the circumstances under which illness is absorbed within the normal and when does it exceed the normal—putting resources, relationships, and even one’s world into jeopardy? A second set of issues involves how different healers understand their own practices. The astonishing range of practitioners found in the local markets in the poor neighborhoods of Delhi shows how the magical and the technical are knotted together in the therapeutic experience of healers and patients. The book asks: What is expert knowledge? What is it that the practitioner knows and what does the patient know? How are these different forms of knowledge brought together in the clinical encounter, broadly defined? How does this event of everyday life bear the traces of larger policies at the national and global levels? Finally, the book interrogates the models of disease prevalence and global programming that emphasize surveillance over care and deflect attention away from the specificities of local worlds. Yet the analysis offered retains an openness to different ways of conceptualizing “what is happening” and stimulates a conversation between different disciplinary orientations to health, disease, and poverty. Most studies of health and disease focus on the encounter between patient and practitioner within the space of the clinic. This book instead privileges the networks of relations, institutions, and knowledge over which the experience of illness is dispersed. Instead of thinking of illness as an event set apart from everyday life, it shows the texture of everyday life, the political economy of neighborhoods, as well as the dark side of care. It helps us see how illness is bound by the contexts in which it occurs, while also showing how illness transcends these contexts to say something about the nature of everyday life and the making of subjects.
Afflictions: Steps Toward a Visual Psychological Anthropology (Culture, Mind, and Society)
by Annie Tucker Robert LemelsonThis book is one of the first to integrate psychological and medical anthropology with the methodologies of visual anthropology, specifically ethnographic film. It discusses and complements the work presented in Afflictions: Culture and Mental Illness in Indonesia, the first film series on psychiatric disorders in the developing world, in order to explore pertinent issues in the cross-cultural study of mental illness and advocate for the unique role film can play both in the discipline and in participants' lives. Through ethnographically rich and self-reflexive discussions of the films, their production, and their impact, the book at once provides theoretical and practical guidance, encouragement, and caveats for students and others who may want to make such films.
Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America
by Martin GilensWhy policymaking in the United States privileges the rich over the poorCan a country be a democracy if its government only responds to the preferences of the rich? In an ideal democracy, all citizens should have equal influence on government policy—but as this book demonstrates, America's policymakers respond almost exclusively to the preferences of the economically advantaged. Affluence and Influence definitively explores how political inequality in the United States has evolved over the last several decades and how this growing disparity has been shaped by interest groups, parties, and elections.With sharp analysis and an impressive range of data, Martin Gilens looks at thousands of proposed policy changes, and the degree of support for each among poor, middle-class, and affluent Americans. His findings are staggering: when preferences of low- or middle-income Americans diverge from those of the affluent, there is virtually no relationship between policy outcomes and the desires of less advantaged groups. In contrast, affluent Americans' preferences exhibit a substantial relationship with policy outcomes whether their preferences are shared by lower-income groups or not. Gilens shows that representational inequality is spread widely across different policy domains and time periods. Yet Gilens also shows that under specific circumstances the preferences of the middle class and, to a lesser extent, the poor, do seem to matter. In particular, impending elections—especially presidential elections—and an even partisan division in Congress mitigate representational inequality and boost responsiveness to the preferences of the broader public.At a time when economic and political inequality in the United States only continues to rise, Affluence and Influence raises important questions about whether American democracy is truly responding to the needs of all its citizens.
Affluence and Poverty in the Middle East
by M. Riad El-GhonemyAffluence and Poverty in the Middle East is an introduction to the political economy of the Middle East, focusing on its most salient features - persistent poverty and extreme inequality. El-Ghonemy analyses the factors influencing the region, including its unique historical, religious and cultural mix, as well as its economic foundations and forms of corruption. For each factor he employs case-studies drawn from throughout the region, from Turkey to Sudan and Morocco to Iran. In the final section El-Ghomeny discusses possible solutions to the challenges facing the region, including possible uses of a peace dividend, and the role of democracy.
Affluence, Mobility and Second Home Ownership (Housing and Society Series)
by Chris ParisDespite the current recession, the frequency of second home ownership is still surprisingly high throughout the western world. While the UK and Ireland previously had lower occurrences of multiple dwellings compared to the rest of Europe, they are quickly catching up with a current surge in the ownership of second homes. The recent MP expenses scandal in the UK has also drawn attention to the prevalence of second homes (or more) within the middle classes, and the fact that the concept is becoming increasingly popular. Chris Paris uses this text to address the reasons behind why second homes are becoming more popular, both within the usual domicile of the individuals, and in international locations. The socioeconomic factors and historical contexts of homes in cultures across the world are fundamental to explaining the choices in transnational home ownership, and Paris’ case studies and comparisons between additional homes in Europe, Australia, America and Asia expand upon the motivation for people to own a second home. Affluence, Mobility and Second Home Ownership draws together debates on gentrification, globalisation, consumerism, environmental factors and investment to provide a balanced look at the pros, and cons, of second home ownership, and what implications it has for the future. An ideal text for students studying geography, urbanism and planning, this book is also of interest to individuals interested in the changing ways in which we make choices on our places of residence.