Provides a geographic window onto the pressing social issues of our time. This title covers topics such as: cultural diversity and immigration; income, poverty and unemployment; lifestyle risks including drug abuse, smoking and auto fatalities; access to medical care; medical costs; and status of women, children, and senior citizens.
The contributors to this innovative and wide-ranging volume reflect on the philosophical issues surrounding health and ecology. They examine the policy issues involved in health and health ecology, and explore the paths that may eventually lead to a new ecology of health.
This text explores the questions which lie at the heart of current debates in cultural studies and social theory. The contributors consider such issues as: whether the distinctive identities of gender, sexuality, race, class and nationality, which have long defined the social and cultural world of modern societies, are in decline; whether new forms of identification are rising up and fragmenting the modern individual as a unified subject; and how this "crisis of identity" relates to the wider process of changes which are generating problems for modern societies and undermining the frameworks through which people relate to institutions, each other and themselves. Individual contributors interrogate different dimensions of the crisis of identity and provide both theoretical and substantive insights into different approaches to understanding identity - illuminating and advancing debates about identity and its futures. This book should be useful reading for students and researchers in cultural studies and sociology and across a wide range of the humanities and the social sciences.
While earlier studies often portrayed African Americans as passive or powerless, as victims of white racism or slum pathologies, this book emphasizes new scholarship which conveys a sense of active involvement, of people empowered, engaged in struggle, living their lives in dignity and shaping their own futures. These ten essays written by ......
From the academy to pop culture, our society is in the throes of change rivaling the birth of modernity out of the decay of the Middle Ages. We are now moving from the modern to the postmodern era. But what is postmodernism? How did it arise? What characterizes the postmodern ethos? What is the postmodern mind and how does it differ from the ......
This text offers an overview of contemporary cultural theory. Drawing together different approaches and traditions, the author demonstrates the breadth of the field of cultural theory and proposes a multidimensional model for understanding culture in late modernity. The four main issues of contemporary thought that the author discusses are: the analysis of modernity and modernization, including the concepts of late moderntiy and postmodernity; the critique of contemporary societies including the public and private spheres, power and resistance, institutions and social movements, taste hierarchies and subcultures; the interpretation of cultural symbols such as how texts, styles, genres and media work to produce meaning; and the formation of sleves and subjects including socialization, identity, authenticity and reflexivity. The author also discusses the work of among others, Jurgen Habermas, THomas Ziehe, Paul Ricoeur, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Laplanche and Julia Kristeva.
Bridging the gap between scholarship and journalism, Sport in Society takes on major contemporary topics - race, gender and violence - as they play out in the world of sports. The editors bring together well known writers to examine many of the more pressing issues that sports are confronting. The role of the media, the international scene and some real life heroes are also discussed.
Bridging the gap between scholarship and jou rnalism, this book takes on major contemporary topics, such as race, gender and violence, as they play out in the world of sports. The role of the media and some real life heroes a re also examined. '
Who are we to suppose we are capable of comprehending the world of which we are a part, and what is the world to suppose it can be understood by us, miniscule and insignificant spatiotemporal warps contained within it?" This provocative question opens Floyd Merrell's study of post modernism and the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce, part of the ......
