WTF! A Celebration of the Popular Arts in Sociology by Robert Khoury (6 Reviews)    Price verified 5 hours ago

Sociology celebrates the popular arts! TV, Sunday comics, monster movies, professional wrestling, dumpstering, college football, bathroom graffiti, strippers, telephone pranksters, Peeping Toms, class clowns, the college sorority, the streetcorner preacher, the drive-in movie, good and evil, and more -- see familiar, everyday people and things in an offbeat, surprising way, and blow your mind to what sociologists have discovered about how you shape the world, and how the world shapes you.

Genre: Politics & Social Sciences

Lunatics! by Jeff Zimmerman (2 Reviews)    Price verified 5 hours ago

Insanity. What does that word truly mean? After the mentally mangled mind of Sienna Caiman intertwines with the twisted urges and outlooks of Jeff Zimmerman, the two figure out they can cause more carnage upon civilized society when they're together instead of apart. Devolving into demented demons of wicked madness, the two wage a dogmatic war with the powers that be and decide to display psychological and physical damage that'll, in their heads, heal their wounds that the New World Order has inflicted upon them and their fellow countrymen's souls!

Genre: Politics & Social Sciences

The Discourse of Conflict: Nonverbal semiotics and discursive practice in Northern Ireland's Troubles 1977-82 by Warren Hately (1 Review)    Price verified 5 hours ago

The Discourse of Conflict focuses on the "prison war" between Republican inmates and their British captors, and the subsequent "dirty" protest and hunger strikes, to deal with two problems central to contemporary philosophy: the unacknowledged bias of structuralist theory towards linguistic signs and the lack of a coherent theorisation of social conflict. To address these conundrums, Hately reconciles Saussurean and Peircean semiotics and then uses Ruthrof's corporeal pragmatics to break from the verbocentric idea of language as a closed system, showing instead that verbal meanings originate from the body, its senses and its imagination, as informed by the deixis of individual communities. With the transformation of linguistic semiotics into corporeality, Foucault's notion of discourse and the neglected category of discursive practice are then reworked to show how statements based on nonverbal signs might function discursively. The culmination of the 1970s Northern Irish prison war in the events of the 1981 hunger strikes offers a study that unites the focus upon nonverbal discourses with the examination of conflict. In exploring the ways in which Republican hunger strikers struggled for legitimacy with the prison authorities, Hately shows how previous notions of conflict, especially Lyotard's différend, are thrown into disrepute by a corporeal perspective recognising the intersemiotic and heterosemiotic character of communication. The availability of diverse semiotic media such as the visual, the haptic, the proximic, etc., offers positions in which conflicts may be regulated without ending in the stalemate Lyotard describes. The division of semio-discursive phenomena into verbal and nonverbal elements, and the tracing of the effects these elements have upon ideational and pragmatic planes of action, also reveal a variety of strategies related to conflict that are superposable upon other instances. As a result, The Discourse of Conflict suggests that the ...

Genre: Politics & Social Sciences

Theorising Justice: A Primer for Social Scientists by Johanna Ohlsson (Bristol University Press) (1 Review)    Price verified 5 hours ago

Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Bringing together divergent approaches to justice theorising, this volume connects normative and philosophical theories with the more empirically focused approaches emerging today in the social and political sciences and policy scholarship. The chapters overview a variety of mainstream approaches and radical critiques of justice to illustrate their value in addressing the pressing problems of climate change and economic development. Stressing the value of assessing justice theories in light of the material conditions of our changing world, the book concludes with an in-depth synthesis of how these wide ranging approaches to justice will be useful for students, scholars and practitioners concerned with realising justice.

Genre: Politics & Social Sciences

Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature (Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment) by Matthias Klestil (Palgrave Macmillan) (1 Review)    Price verified one hour ago

This open access book suggests new ways of reading nineteenth-century African American literature environmentally. Combining insights from ecocriticism, African American studies, and Foucauldian theory, Matthias Klestil examines forms of environmental knowledge in African American writing ranging from antebellum slave narratives and pamphlets to Charlotte Forten's journals, Booker T. Washington's autobiographies, and Charles W. Chesnutt's short fiction. The volume highlights how literary forms of environmental knowledge in the African American tradition were shaped by the histories of slavery and race, mainstream environmental writing traditions, and African American forms of expression and intertextuality. Turning to the Underground Railroad, debates over education and home-building, and the aesthetics of the pastoral and the georgic, Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature provides an original perspective on the African American ecoliterary traditionthat uncovers new facets of canonical and understudied texts and offers new directions for ecocriticism and African American studies.

Genre: Politics & Social Sciences

West African Agriculture and Climate Change by Abdulai Jalloh (International Food Policy Research Institute) (4 Reviews)    Price verified 7 hours ago

The first of three books in IFPRI's climate change in Africa series, West African Agriculture and Climate Change: A Comprehensive Analysis examines the food security threats facing 11 of the countries that make up West Africa -- Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo -- and explores how climate change will increase the efforts needed to achieve sustainable food security throughout the region. West Africa's population is expected to grow at least through mid-century. The region will also see income growth. Both will put increased pressure on the natural resources needed to produce food, and climate change makes the challenges greater. West Africa is already experiencing rising temperatures, shifting precipitation patterns, and increasing extreme events. Without attention to adaptation, the poor will suffer. Through the use of hundreds of scenario maps, models, figures, and detailed analysis, the editors and contributors of West African Agriculture and Climate Change present plausible future scenarios that combine economic and biophysical characteristics to explore the possible consequences for agriculture, food security, and resources management to 2050. They also offer recommendations to national governments and regional economic agencies already dealing with the vulnerabilities of climate change and deviations in environment. Decisionmakers and researchers will find West African Agriculture and Climate Change a vital tool for shaping policy and studying the various and likely consequences of climate change.

Genre: Politics & Social Sciences

Macroeconomics, Agriculture, and Food Security: A Guide to Policy Analysis in Developing Countries by Eugenio Díaz-Bonilla (International Food Policy Research Institute) (3 Reviews)    Price verified 9 hours ago

Why write a book on macroeconomic policies and their links to agriculture and food security in developing countries? The food price spikes of the years just prior to 2010 and the economic, political, and social dislocations they generated refocused the attention of policymakers and development practitioners on the agricultural sector and food security concerns. But even without those traumatic events, the importance of agriculture for developing countries -- and for an adequate functioning of the world economy -- cannot be denied. First, although declining over time, primary agriculture still represents important percentages of developing countries' overall domestic production, exports, and employment. If agroindustrial, transportation, commercial, and other related activities are also counted, then the economic and social importance of agriculture-based sectors increases significantly. Furthermore, large numbers of the world's poor still live in rural areas and work in agriculture. Through the links via production, trade, employment, and prices, agricultural production is also crucial for national food security. Second, it has been shown that agriculture in developing countries has important growth and employment multipliers for the rest of the economy, and agriculture seems to have larger positive effects in reducing poverty than growth in other sectors. Third, agriculture is not only important for individual developing countries, but it has global significance, considering the large presence of developing countries in world agricultural production and the increasing participation in international trade of those products (these three points will be covered in greater detail in Chapter 1).

Genre: Politics & Social Sciences