Tracing and theorizing the concept of the boundaries through literary works, visual objects and cultural phenomena, this book argues against the reification of boundaries as fixed and empty non-spaces that simply divide the world. Expanding on her previous work on gender and Orientalism, Inge Boer takes us into uncertain territories of fashion and art, tourism and travel, skilfully engaging the ambivalence of boundaries, as both protecting and confining, as bringing distinction while existing by virtue of their ability to be transgressed. In her close readings of that boundaries as desert, as frame, as home (or lack of it), Boer shows that boundaries are spaces within, through, and in the name of which negotiations take place. They are not lines but spaces ; neither fixed nor empty but flexible and inhabited.

The concept of a social contract has been central to political thought since the seventeenth century. Contract theory has been used to justify political authority, to account for the origins of the state, and to provide foundations for moral values and the creation of a just society.In The Social Contract from Hobbes to Rawls, leading scholars from Britain and America survey the history of contractarian thought and the major debates in political theory which surround the notion of social contract. The book examines the critical reception to the ideas of thinkers including Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, and includes the more contemporary ideas of John Rawls and David Gauthier. It also incorporates discussions of international relations theory and feminist responses to contractarianism. Together, the essays provide a comprehensive introduction to theories and critiques of social contract, within a broad political theoretical framework.

A fascination with 1988, the most liberal moment in China since 1949, inspired this study, as did a frustration with breathless accounts of present day social change in China. As an historian, I wanted to trace the roots of contemporary developments, building on an almost fortyyear acquaintance with life in China. Many people and institutions have kindly enabled me to do this. A major grant from the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand provided much appreciated support for several visits to China. The Lee Hysan Foundation generously supported a two-month period working in the Universities Service Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The PekingUniversity Library was a productive home base for much of this research. Other institutions that helped include the Shanghai Library, the Library of the China Youth University for Political Sciences in Beijing, the National Library in Beijing, and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. Research support also came from the University of Auckland, including its Faculty of Arts. Many colleagues and friends have helped along the way, including Philip Abela, Chris Berry, Tony and Susan Browne, Chen Xin, BrianDonovan, Hong-yu Gong,AndersHansson, Wayne Lawrence, HaiqingLin, Bonnie McDougall, Rumi Sakamoto, RobertSanders, Rebecca Wu Xiaojing, and Zhou Xuelin. Bonnie McDougall and Stanley Rosen offered valuable advice at crucial points in the project. Linda Lew made good use of a University of Auckland Summer Scholarship to trawl the Internet on my behalf. Jeff Lau has helped keep me grounded. At Cambridge in New York, Eric Crahan and Abigail Zorbaugh provided vital encouragement and support. These people and institutions, along with numerous friends and colleagues in China whom I have not named, have made the research a pleasure and this book possible. I warmly thank them all, including those whom I have not identified. The book’s shortcomings are mine alone.

The Encyclopedia of Domestic Violence is a modern reference from the leading international scholars in domestic violence research. This ground-breaking project has created the first ever publication of an encyclopedia of domestic violence. The primary goal of the Encyclopedia is to provide information on a variety of traditional, as well as breakthrough, issues in this complex phenomenon. The coverage of the Encyclopedia is broad and diverse, encompassing the entire life span from infancy to old age. The entries include the traditional research areas, such as battered women, child abuse and dating violence. However, this Encyclopedia is unique in that it includes many under-studied areas of domestic violence, such as ritual abuse-torture within families, domestic violence against women with disabilities, pseudo-family violence and domestic violence within military families. It is also unique in that it examines cross-cultural perspectives of domestic violence. One of the key special features in this Encyclopedia is the cross-reference section at the end of each entry. This allows the reader the ability to continue their research of a particular topic. This book will be an easy-to-read reference guide on a host of topics, which are alphabetically arranged. Precautions have been taken to ensure that the Encyclopedia is not politically slanted; rather, it is hoped that it will serve as a basic guide to better understanding the myriad issues surrounding this labyrinthine topic. Topics covered include: Victims of Domestic Violence; Theoretical Perspectives and Correlates to Domestic Violence; Cross-Cultural Perspectives and Religious Perspectives; Understudied Areas within Domestic Violence Research; Domestic Violence and the Law; and Child Abuse and Elder Abuse.

On Friday nights many parents want to have a little fun together—without the kids. But “getting a sitter”—especially a dependable one—rarely seems trouble-free. Will the kids be safe with “that girl”? It’s a question that discomfited parents have been asking ever since the emergence of the modern American teenage girl nearly a century ago. In Babysitter, Miriam Forman-Brunell brings critical attention to the ubiquitous, yet long-overlooked babysitter in the popular imagination and American history. Informed by her research on the history of teenage girls’ culture, Forman-Brunell analyzes the babysitter, who has embodied adults’ fundamental apprehensions about girls’ pursuit of autonomy and empowerment. In fact, the grievances go both ways, as girls have been distressed by unsatisfactory working conditions. In her quest to gain a fuller picture of this largely unexamined cultural phenomenon, Forman-Brunell analyzes a wealth of diverse sources, such as The Baby-sitter’s Club book series, horror movies like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, urban legends, magazines, newspapers, television shows, pornography, and more. Forman-Brunell shows that beyond the mundane, understandable apprehensions stirred by hiring a caretaker to “mind the children” in one’s own home, babysitters became lightning rods for society’s larger fears about gender and generational change. In the end, experts’ efforts to tame teenage girls with training courses, handbooks, and other texts failed to prevent generations from turning their backs on babysitting.

. . . the book can be recommended to all with an interest in the issue of older workers in a globalised world. Ageing and Society Early retirement has been a policy to cope with the problems of massive unemployment in many Western welfare states. However, it has become apparent that this strategy is costly and destroys human capital urgently needed in ageing societies. This book offers a comprehensive and up-to-date study of late-career patterns and processes of early retirement in fourteen OECD countries, using both cross-sectional and longitudinal data. It is an important contribution to life-course research and will provide the foundation for any serious discussion on pension reforms and increasing the employability of older workers. Hans-Jürgen Andreß, University of Cologne, Germany This timely book investigates the growth of the early retirement trend and its varying spread among different groups of older workers in fourteen modern societies. It argues for a differentiated political approach to reverse early retirement, which relies on both pension and employability policies for older workers. Examining the early retirement trend virtually all modern societies have been faced with since the onset of the globalization process in the 1970s and 1980s, this book provides a thorough analysis of older workers late careers and their retirement transitions, as well as explaining why this trend has developed differently between nations. To promote an effective reversal of the early retirement trend, national policymakers are advised not to concentrate their efforts exclusively on reducing the financial incentives for an early exit still present in most national pension systems. In addition, it is also recommended that they invest in the employability of older workers, implying a thorough reconsideration of the design of education and labor market policies. Dirk Hofäcker presents a unique and comprehensive synthesis of theories describing and explaining the trend towards early retirement, and critically discusses their comparative advantages and shortcomings. Researchers and students of sociology, economics, gerontology, demography and comparative welfare states should not be without this book and policymakers and practitioners dealing with labor market policies will find it invaluable.

Goth culture is extremely diverse, touching on visual art, fashion, film, music, and body aesthetics. Goths: A Guide to an American Subculture offers a concise, easy-to-follow history of the subculture that explores its emergence and its impact on popular culture in the United States. The book covers films, bands, and artists central to Goth culture, with emphasis on the Goth approach to fashion and body adornment. In addition, it discusses how America's Goth culture has influenced Goth populations elsewhere and how international developments have changed the U.S. Goth community. The volume is enriched with biographies of prominent Goth celebrities, such as Marilyn Manson and Robert Smith, as well as with interviews that offer readers a firsthand view of the culture. It concludes with an evaluation of Goth culture today, a look at what the future might hold, and a discussion of the significance of Goth culture to American society as a whole.

Review: "Written against the academically dominant but simplistic romanticization of popular music as a positive force, this book focuses on the 'dark side' of the subject. It is an examination of the ways in which popular music has been deployed in association with violence, ranging from what appears to be an incidental relationship, to one in which music is explicitly applied as an instrument of violence." "A preliminary overview of the physiological and cognitive foundations of sounding/hearing which are distinctive within the sensorium, discloses in particular their potential for organic and psychic violence. The study then elaborates working definitions of key terms (including the vexed idea of the 'popular') for the purposes of this investigation, and provides a historical survey of examples of the nexus between music and violence, from (pre)Biblical times to the late nineteenth century." "The second half of the book concentrates on the modern era, marked in this case by the emergence of technologies by which music can be electronically augmented, generated, and disseminated, beginning with the advent of sound recording from the 1870s, and proceeding to audio-internet and other contemporary audio-technologies. Johnson and Cloonan argue that these technologies have transformed the potential of music to mediate cultural confrontations from the local to the global, particularly through violence. The authors present a taxonomy of case histories in the connection between popular music and violence, through increasingly intense forms of that relationship, culminating in the topical examples of music and torture, including those in Bosnia, Darfur, and by US forces in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay."--BOOK JACKET.

In a work of defiant ambition culled from over 5,000 photographs, Fred W. McDarrah’s Sixties presents America’s most tumultuous decade through the eyes of one man. As staff photographer for the leading counterculture weekly the Village Voice, McDarrah was everywhere—and he photographed everything and everybody. From the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago to the Newark riots; from the Beatles’ first American press conference to Andy Warhol’s Factory; from Woodstock to the closing of the Fillmore East; from Broadway to Stonewall to Harlem to City Hall, Fred’s award-winning pictures capture the struggle and the promise of the sixties and define a generation. Many of these photographs have never been published, or were seen only once in the Village Voice, where for forty years McDarrah ran the photo desk. A number of his portraits, like those of Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and Abbie Hoffman, have become some of the most celebrated icons of their subjects. These pictures represent a depth and breadth of public and private events and emotions, a view both political and startlingly intimate that is rarely found in the work of one man—a powerful synthesis of American photojournalism, cultural and political documentary and, despite McDarrah’s modest protestations, art.

Why and how do social movements emerge? In which ways are social movements analyzed? Can our understanding be enhanced by new perspectives? Making Sense of Social Movements offers a clear and comprehensive overview of the key sociological approaches to the study of social movements. The author argues that each of these approaches makes an important contribution to our understanding of social movements but that none is adequate on its own. In response he argues for a new approach which draws together key insights within the solid foundations of Pierre Bourdieu's social theory of practice. This new approach transcends the barriers that still often divide European and North American perspectives of social movements, and also those which divide recent approaches from the older 'collective behavior' approach. The result is a theoretical framework that is uniquely equipped for the demands of modern social movement analysis. The clear and concise style of the text, as well as its neat summaries of key concepts and approaches, will make this book invaluable for undergraduate courses. It will also be an essential reference for researchers.

Although the end of the Cold War was greeted with great enthusiasm by people in the East and the West, the ensuing social and especially economic changes did not always result in the hoped-for improvements in people s lives. This led to widespread disillusionment that can be observed today all across Eastern Europe. Not simply a longing for security, stability, and prosperity, this nostalgia is also a sense of loss regarding a specific form of sociability. Even some of those who opposed communism express a desire to invest their new lives with renewed meaning and dignity. Among the younger generation, it surfaces as a tentative yet growing curiosity about the recent past. In this volume scholars from multiple disciplines explore the various fascinating aspects of this nostalgic turn by analyzing the impact of generational clusters, the rural-urban divide, gender differences, and political orientation. They argue persuasively that this nostalgia should not be seen as a wish to restore the past, as it has otherwise been understood, but instead it should be recognized as part of a more complex healing process and an attempt to come to terms both with the communist era as well as the new inequalities of the post-communist era.

This book investigates intractable conflicts and their main verbal manifestation - radical disagreement – and explores what can be done when conflict resolution fails. The book identifies agonistic dialogue - dialogue between enemies - as the key to linguistic intractability. It suggests how agonistic dialogue can best be studied, explored, understood and managed even in the most severe political conflicts when negotiation, mediation, problem solving, dialogue for mutual understanding, and discourse ethics are unsuccessful. This approach of viewing radical disagreement as the central topic of analysis and conflict management is a new innovation in this field, and also supplements and enhances existing communicative transformational techniques. It also has wider implications for cognate fields, such as applied ethics, democratic theory, cultural studies and the philosophy of difference. This book will be of great interest to students of conflict resolution, peace and conflict studies, ethnic conflict and International Relations in general.

Westerners invented social movements during the 18th century, but after that social movements became vehicles of popular politics across the world. By locating social movements in history, prize-winning social scientist Charles Tilly provides rich and often surprising insights into the origins of contemporary social movement practices, relations of social movements to democratization, and likely futures for social movements. Shows how social movements are changing, including the impact of new technologies and globalization. Traces the invention and evolution of social movements with lessons for how social movements could lose their vigor. Explores fundamental questions such as 'How does democratization really occur?' Considers the relation of movements to identity, citizenship, and capital and questions whether social movements are viable in authoritarian states. Students will appreciate Tilly's vivid examples from around the world (including a fantasy of 17th century figures John Wilkes and Samuel Adams trying to discern the effectiveness of 2003 Iraq War demonstrators).