Every day for the next twenty years, more than 10,000 people in the United States will turn 65. With life expectancies increasing as well, many of these Americans will eventually require round-the-clock attention—and we have only begun to prepare for the challenge of caring for them. In Labors of Love, Jason Rodriquez examines the world of the fast-growing elder care industry, providing a nuanced and balanced portrait of the day-to-day lives of the people and organizations that devote their time to supporting America’s aging population. Through extensive ethnographic research, interviews with staff and management, and analysis of internal documents, Rodriquez explores the inner workings of two different nursing homes—one for-profit and one non-profit—to understand the connections among the administrative regulations, the professional requirements, and the type of care provided in both types of facilities. He reveals a variety of challenges that nursing home care workers face day to day: battles over the budget; the administrative hurdles of Medicaid and Medicare; the employees’ struggle to balance financial stability and compassionate care for residents. Yet, Rodriquez argues, nursing home workers give meaning and dignity to their work by building emotional attachments to residents and their care. An unprecedented study, Labors of Love brings new insight into the underlying structures of a crucial and expanding sector of the American health care system.
Is global culture merely a pale and sinister reflection of capitalist globalization? Bruce Robbins responds to this and other questions in Feeling Global , a crucial document on nationalism, culturalism, and the role of intellectuals in the age of globalization. Building on his previous work, Robbins here takes up the question of the status of international human rights. Robbins' conception of internationalism is driven not only by the imperatives of global human rights policy, but by an understanding of transnational cultures, thus linking practical policymaking to cultural politics at the expense of neither. Robbins' cultural criticism, in other words, affords us much more than an understanding of how culture «shapes our lives.» Instead, Robbins shows, particularly in his discussions of Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, Susan Sontag, Michael Walzer and others, how «culture» itself has become a term that blocks—for commentators on both the right and the left—serious engagement with the contemporary cosmopolitan ideal of a nonuniversalist discourse of human rights. Rescuing «cosmopolitanism» itself from its connotations of leisured individuals loyal to no one and willing to sample all cultures at will, Feeling Global presents a compelling way to think about the ethical obligations of intellectuals at a time when their place in the new world order is profoundly uncertain.
Click here to listen to Julia Ericksen's interview about Dance with Me on Philadelphia NPR's «Radio Times» Rumba music starts and a floor full of dancers alternate clinging to one another and turning away. Rumba is an erotic dance, and the mood is hot and heavy; the women bend and hyperextend their legs as they twist and turn around their partners. Amateur and professional ballroom dancers alike compete in a highly gendered display of intimacy, romance and sexual passion. In Dance With Me, Julia Ericksen, a competitive ballroom dancer herself, takes the reader onto the competition floor and into the lights and the glamour of a world of tanned bodies and glittering attire, exploring the allure of this hyper-competitive, difficult, and often expensive activity. In a vivid ethnography accompanied by beautiful photographs of all levels of dancers, from the world’s top competitors to social dancers, Ericksen examines the ways emotional labor is used to create intimacy between professional partners and between professionals and their students, illustrating how dancers purchase intimacy. She shows that, while at first glance, ballroom presents a highly gendered face with men leading and women following, dancing also transgresses gender.
The global financial crisis showed deep problems with mainstream economic predictions. At the same time, it showed the vulnerability of the world’s richest countries and the enormous potential of some poorer ones. China, India, Brazil and other countries are growing faster than Europe or America and they have weathered the crisis better. Will they be new world leaders? And is their growth due to following conventional economic guidelines or instead to strong state leadership and sometimes protectionism? These issues are basic not only to the question of which countries will grow in coming decades but to likely conflicts over global trade policy, currency standards, and economic cooperation. Contributors include: Immanuel Wallerstein, David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, James Kenneth Galbraith, Manuel Castells, Nancy Fraser, Rogers Brubaker, David Held, Mary Kaldor, Vadim Volkov, Giovanni Arrighi, Beverly Silver, and Fernando Coronil.The three volumes can purchased individually or as a set.
View the Table of Contents .Read the Introduction . "Beautifully written and rigorously argued, After Whiteness is the most important theoretical statement on white racial formation since ‘whiteness studies' began its current academic sojourn. By reading debates about multiculturalism, ethnicity, and the desire for difference as part of the material practices of the U.S. university system, it engages questions of race, humanistic inquiry, intellectual labor, and the democratic function of critical thought. The result is a critically nuanced analysis that promises to solidify Mike Hill's reputation as one of the finest thinkers of his generation."—Robyn Wiegman, Duke University "Mike Hill's After Whiteness is an important, provocative and timely book."— Against the Current "A lucid, fiercely argued, brilliantly conceived, richly provocative work in an emergent and growing area of cultural studies. After Whiteness sets new directions in American literary and cultural studies, and will become a landmark in the field."—Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University"Americanists across the disciplines will find Hill's analysis insightful and brilliant. A must for any scholar who wishes to, in Ralph Ellison's words, ‘go to the territory.'"—Sharon Holland, University of Illinois at ChicagoAs each new census bears out, the rise of multiracialism in the United States will inevitably result in a white minority. In spite of the recent proliferation of academic studies and popular discourse on whiteness, however, there has been little discussion of the future: what comes after whiteness? On the brink of what many are now imagining as a post-white American future, it remains a matter of both popular and academic uncertainty as to what will emerge in its place. After Whiteness aims to address just that, exploring the remnants of white identity to ask how an emergent post-white national imaginary figure into public policy issues, into the habits of sexual intimacy, and into changes within public higher education. Through discussions of the 2000 census and debates over multiracial identity, the volatile psychic investments that white heterosexual men have in men of color—as illustrated by the Christian men's group the Promise Keepers and the neo-fascist organization the National Alliance—and the rise of identity studies and diversity within the contemporary public research university, Mike Hill surveys race among the ruins of white America. At this crucial moment, when white racial change has made its ambivalent cultural debut, Hill demonstrates that the prospect of an end to whiteness haunts progressive scholarship on race as much as it haunts the paranoid visions of racists.
Offering a perceptive study of the urgent human rights issue of trafficking in persons, this important book analyses the development and effectiveness of public policies across Eurasia. Drawing on multi-method research in the region, Laura A. Dean explores the factors behind anti-trafficking strategies and the role of governments and activists in combating labour and sexual exploitation. She examines the intersection of global strategies and state-by-state approaches, and uses diffusion of innovation framework to cast new light on the impetus and implementation of different policy approaches. Identifying the strengths, weaknesses, and best practices in trafficking policies around Eurasia, Dean’s book will appeal to a wide range of students, scholars, practitioners, and policy makers.
This critical interdisciplinary study charts the modern history of mental health services, reflects upon the evolution of care in communities and considers the most effective policies and practices for the future. Starting with the development of community care in the 1960s, Cummins explores the political, economic and bureaucratic factors behind the changes and crises in mental health social care since, returning to those roots to identify progressive principles that can pave a sustainable pathway forward. This is a ground-breaking contribution to debates about the role, values and future of community care and is vital reading for students, teachers and researchers in the field of social work and mental health.
Revised, restructured and updated to reflect the latest data and debates, this new edition of the widely-used, classic textbook offers students an accessible account of the major social divisions that structure social life. Written by internationally known sociologists and experts, the book: • addresses a wide range of social divisions and inequalities in novel ways, with added chapters on education and age; • provides a framework for understanding contemporary social inequalities and diversities, and how they inter-relate; • lends itself to teaching in a range of contexts with the potential to dip into particular chapters for different modules, or to use the book in a more extensive way for one particular module; • features signposting through the material, as well as key points, discussion questions and selected further readings for each chapter. This clearly-written volume presents a structured and critical guide to a core field that cuts across disciplines. It is an invaluable introduction and source book for students taking social inequalities and diversity modules in Sociology, Social Policy, Social Work, Education and Health Studies. The previous editions of this work was published by Palgrave Macmillan.
9.5 Theses on Art and Class seeks to show how a clear understanding of class makes sense of what is at stake in a broad number of contemporary art's most persistent debates, from definitions of political art to the troubled status of «outsider» and street art to the question of how we maintain faith in art itself. Ben Davis currently lives and works in New York City where he is Executive Editor at Artinfo.
Offering a unique perspective that views human rights as the foundation of social justice, Joseph Wronka’s groundbreaking <strong>Human Rights and Social Justice</strong> outlines human rights and social justice concerns as a powerful conceptual framework for policy and practice interventions for the helping and health professions. This highly accessible, interdisciplinary text urges the creation of a human rights culture as a “lived awareness” of human rights principles, including human dignity, nondiscrimination, civil and political rights, economic, social, and cultural rights, and solidarity rights. The <strong>Second Edition</strong> includes numerous social action activities and questions for discussion to help scholars, activists, and practitioners promote a human rights culture and the overall well-being of populations across the globe.