Monographs & Edited Collections (4,726 posts)

Every person aspires to a good life. But what does “a good or a better life” mean? The second edition of How’s Life? paints a comprehensive picture of well-being in OECD countries and other major economies, by looking at people’s material living conditions and quality of life across the population. In addition, the report contains in-depth studies of four key cross-cutting issues in well-being that are particularly relevant: how has well-being evolved during the global economic and financial crisis?; how big are gender differences in well-being?; how can we assess well-being in the workplace?; and how to define and measure the sustainability of well-being over time?

The preparedness and resilience of communities related to children requires a systems framework for disaster preparedness across traditional and non-traditional medical and public health stakeholders – including community organizations, schools, and other partners in municipal planning.

Subjective well-being refers to how people experience and evaluate their lives and specific domains and activities in their lives. This information has already proven valuable to researchers, who have produced insights about the emotional states and experiences of people belonging to different groups, engaged in different activities, at different points in the life course, and involved in different family and community structures. Research has also revealed relationships between people’s self-reported, subjectively assessed states and their behavior and decisions.

In The Poverty of Capitalism, John Hilary reveals the true face of transnational capital in its insatiable drive for expansion and accumulation. He exposes the myth of ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR), and highlights key areas of conflict over natural resources, labour rights and food sovereignty. Hilary also describes the growing popular resistance to corporate power, as well as the new social movements seeking to develop alternatives to capitalism itself. This book will be essential reading for all those concerned with global justice, human rights and equity in the world order.

Many believe that the War on Poverty, launched by President Johnson in 1964, ended in failure. In 2010, the official poverty rate was 15 percent, almost as high as when the War on Poverty was declared. Historical and contemporary accounts often portray the War on Poverty as a costly experiment that created doubts about the ability of public policies to address complex social problems. Legacies of the War on Poverty, drawing from fifty years of empirical evidence, documents that this popular view is too negative. The volume offers a balanced assessment of the War on Poverty that highlights some remarkable policy successes and promises to shift the national conversation on poverty in America.

Jerrold R. Brandell | Wayne State University

After Queer Theory makes the provocative claim that queer theory has run its course, made obsolete by the elaboration of its own logic within capitalism. James Penney argues that far from signalling the end of anti-homophobic criticism, however, the end of queer presents the occasion to rethink the relation between sexuality and politics.

Imprisonment is a central trope of Irish nationalism, often deployed to portray the injustice of an Ireland occupied by foreign rule. Irish nationalism celebrates people jailed for resistance to British forces. While such a celebratory history resists colonialist images of Irish brutality, it also generates nationalist amnesia and nostalgia.

Concern about our food system is growing, from the costs of industrial farming to the dominant role of supermarkets and recurring scandals about the origins and content of what we eat. Food for Change documents the way alternative food movements respond to these concerns by trying to create more closed economic circuits within which people know where, how, and by whom their food is produced.

For twenty-two years politicians and businessmen pushed for the Adams Mine landfill as a solution to Ontario’s garbage disposal crisis. This plan to dump millions of tonnes of waste into the fractured pits of the Adams Mine prompted five separate civil resistance campaigns by a rural region of 35,000 in Northern Ontario.

This book asks how forces and ideas opposed to neoliberal hegemony, and to the individualist tradition in Western thought, might serve to protect some form of communality, and how far we must accept assumptions about the nature of individuality and collectivity which are the legacy of an elitist tradition. Along the way it examines different ideas and practices of collectivity, from conservative notions of hierarchical and patriarchal communities to the politics of ‘horizontality’ and ‘the commons’ which are at the heart of radical movements today.

For more than 150 years, theories of social evolution, development, and modernity have been unanimous in their assumption that kinship organizes simpler, “traditional,” pre-state societies but not complex, “modern,” state societies.

The first scholarly examination of the shift in breastfeeding recommendations occurring over the last half century. Through a close analysis of scientific and medical controversies and a critical examination of the ways in which medical beliefs are communicated to the public, Amy Koerber exposes layers of shifting arguments and meaning that inform contemporary infant-feeding advocacy and policy.

What do children understand about their worlds? Why do young people behave in certain ways? Research is the key to answering these and many other questions you may have in the course of your work or study. As an introduction to research, this book helps you understand how research is designed and carried out, as well as the particular practical and ethical issues involved in researching with children and young people.

Andrew F. Sullivan’s exceptional debut collection of short stories, finds the misused and forgotten, the places in between, the borderlands on the edge of town where dead fields alternate with empty warehouses—places where men and women clutch tightly at whatever fragments remain. Motels are packed with human cargo, while parole is just another state of being. Christmas dinners become battlegrounds; truck cabs and bathroom stalls transform into warped confessionals; and stories are told and retold, held out by people stumbling towards one another in the dark.

Long a hub for literary bohemians, countercultural musicians, and readers interested in a good browse, Kepler’s Books and Magazines is one of the most influential independent bookstores in American history. When owner Roy Kepler opened the San Francisco Bay Area store in 1955, he led the way as a pioneer in the “paperback revolution.” He popularized the once radical idea of selling affordable books in an intellectually bracing coffeehouse atmosphere.

In this groundbreaking text, the author examines the synthesis of two antithetical ideas—needs assessment and asset/capacity building. At the heart of this approach is a focus on assessing the strengths and assets that communities have and demonstrating how to make those assets stronger.

Until recently, many progressive groups, including progressive political parties, have shied away from advocating for tax fairness and tax reform, fearing that the issue is political dynamite. Right wingers have encountered little opposition to their calls for deep tax cuts, especially for the rich and for corporations. But the tide is turning.

Since 1948, the Fountain House “working community” has worked to address the isolation and social stigmatization faced by people with mental illness. This volume describes in detail its evidence-based, cost-effective, and replicable model, which produces substantive outcomes in employment, schooling, housing, and general wellness. Through an emphasis on personal choice, professional and patient collaboration, and, most important, “the need to be needed,” Fountain House demonstrates that people with serious mental illness can not only live but also contribute and thrive in society.

In the 1960s, for at least a brief moment, Montreal became what seemed an unlikely centre of Black Power and the Caribbean left.

The committee reviewed all relevant literature published between October 2010 and September 2011 and integrated the new findings with the previously assembled epidemiological data on each health outcome assessed with respect to exposure to the chemicals constituting the herbicides used in Vietnam, including the dioxin contaminant 2,3,7,8-TCDD. The single new conclusion was that there is limited or suggestive evidence of a scientifically meaningful association of stroke with exposure to the chemicals in question.

Controversy and Hope commemorates the civil rights legacy of James Karales (1930–2002), a professional photojournalist who documented the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March for Voting Rights with a dedication and vision that led the New York Times to deem his work “a pictorial anthem of the civil rights movement.”

The rapid rise in the proportion of foreign-born residents in the U.S. since the mid-1960s is one of the most important demographic events of the past fifty years. The increase in immigration, especially among the less-skilled and less-educated, has prompted fears that the newcomers may have depressed the wages and employment of the native-born, burdened state and local budgets, and slowed the U.S. economy as a whole.

Aboriginal rights do not belong to the broader category of universal human rights because they are grounded in the particular practices of aboriginal people. So argues Peter Kulchyski in this provocative book from the front lines of indigenous people’s struggles to defend their culture from the ongoing conquest of their traditional lands. Kulchyski shows that some differences are more different than others, and he draws a border between bush culture and mall culture, between indigenous people’s mode of production and the totalizing push of state-led capitalism.

From Tahrir Square to Occupy, from the Red Shirts in Thailand to the Teachers in Oaxaca, protest camps are a highly visible feature of social movements’ activism across the world. They are spaces where people come together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state. Drawing on over fifty different protest camps from around the world over the past fifty years, this book offers a ground-breaking and detailed investigation into protest camps from a global perspective – a story that, until now, has remained untold.

It has become increasingly accepted that important digital data must be retained and shared in order to preserve and promote knowledge, advance research in and across all disciplines of scholarly endeavor, and maximize the return on investment of public funds.

In November 1999 the first protests associated with the ‘anti-globalisation movement’ took place in Seattle, and came to be seen as the starting point for globalised resistance to neoliberal capitalism. Despite initial optimism, the following years have seen little progress in formulating a coherent alternative to neoliberalism, a failure that has become particularly poignant in the aftermath of the recent credit crisis. Now, the neoliberal mandate that appeared to be in ‘crisis’ in just 2008 has reinvented itself through the guise of a new ‘era of austerity’.

When thousands marched through ice and snow against a copyright treaty, their cries for free speech on the Internet shot to the heart of the European Union and forced a political U-turn. The mighty entertainment industries could only stare in dismay, their back-room plans in tatters. This highly original analysis of three attempts to bring in new laws to defend copyright on the Internet – ACTA, Ley Sinde and the Digital Economy Act – investigates the dance of influence between lobbyists and their political proxies and unmasks the sophistry of their arguments. Copyright expert Monica Horten outlines the myriad ways that lobbyists contrived to bypass democratic process and persuade politicians to take up their cause in imposing an American corporate agenda. In doing so, she argues the case for stronger transparency in copyright policy-making.

This study presents a first comprehensive summary of the current knowledge on the scale of health inequalities in Poland, the measurement methods used to assess them, and the risk of health inequalities in different age groups, populations and regions. The numerical data are supplemented by numerous accounts of preventive initiatives aimed at tackling health inequalities.

The study covers the determinants of inequalities at both macro and individual levels, and looks at two specific populations, children and adults. It ends with a set of recommendations on strategy and policy formulation, monitoring and coordination, on actions to improve the socioeconomic status of the population, and on public health interventions. This study is an important step in realizing the health potential of the Polish population and in contributing to a more fair and sustainable society, thereby reflecting the key values and goals of the new European policy for health, Health 2020.