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Late Iron Age and Early Roman Britain has often been homogenised by models that focus on the resistance/assimilation dichotomy during the period of transition. Complex Assemblages examines the rural settlements of this period through the lens of Cultural Theory in order to tease out the more nuanced and diverse human landscape that the material suggests. This approach develops new ways of thinking about the variability observed in rural settlements from the end of the Middle Iron Age (MIA) to the early 2nd century AD; the selected study area is the Upper and Middle Thames Valley. This book uses the grid/group designations of Mary Douglas’ Cultural Theory as a tool to produce a more multifaceted picture of the period, exploring the assemblages of these rural settlements to understand the nature of the socio-political structures of the region, beyond the anonymity of tribal affiliation and the faceless economic dichotomy of high and low status.
This book explores the shortcomings of the criminal justice system’s response to sexual violence. Despite a plethora of legal and policy reforms, concerns remain regarding the conviction rates for rape and the extent to which cases fall out of the system. Ample research has highlighted the ongoing impact of ‘rape myths’ and the presence of an ‘implementation gap’ whereby policies, provisions and measures — proposed in order to improve the system’s response — are frequently not brought into practice, nor utilised as expected. Rape and the Criminal Trial proposes a move beyond representational theory and towards New Materialism and affects, a school of thought which emphasises the importance of embodiment and the ontological intensive regime as necessary in order to generate radical new approaches for understanding this problematic status quo, and in order to move forward to the production of more effective solutions.
In Understanding Religion through Artificial Intelligence, Justin E. Lane looks at the reasons why humans feel they are part of a religious group, despite often being removed from other group members by vast distances or multiple generations. To achieve this, Lane offers a new perspective that integrates religious studies with psychology, anthropology, and data science, as well as with research at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence (AI). After providing a critical analysis of approaches to religion and social cohesion, Lane proposes a new model for religious studies, which he calls the “Information Identity System.” This model focuses on the idea of conceptual ties: links between an individual's self-concept and the ancient beliefs of their religious group. Lane explores this idea through real-world examples, ranging from the rise in global Pentecostalism, to religious extremism and self-radicalization, to the effect of 9/11 on sermons. Lane uses this lens to show how we can understand religion and culture today, and how we can better contextualize the changes we see in the social world around us.
In this collection of essays, the authors don’t argue with those attributes deemed to be the essence of professionalism in medicine. Instead, they ask questions of the discourse from which they arise, how the specialized language of academic medicine disciplines has defined, organized, contained, and made seemingly immutable a group of attitudes, values, and behaviors subsumed under the label "professional" or "professionalism." This collection aims to be a critical text, one that questions the profession’s beliefs about the nature of its work and how such beliefs are enacted (or not) in medical education, particularly as they fuel the professionalism discourse.
In the past two decades, feminist politics on prostitution has become more polarised and ideological. On the one hand, those on the radical spectrum of feminist politics have fought long and hard to criminalise sex purchase with the intention of ultimately abolishing prostitution. Other feminists have lobbied the state to recognise and institutionalise sex workers’ human rights. The collection is both a critical intervention in and a re-orientation of the schism in contemporary feminist prostitution politics. Contributors will use this schism as a platform from which to challenge current debates, and ‘think’ an alternative sex worker-centred politics for social justice. By placing sex workers’ lived experiences of prostitution at the centre of the conversation, the book rejects the hegemony of neo-abolitionism as the solution to the ‘problem’ of sex work. The book brings international, trans-disciplinary scholars together to address a rights-based agenda for sex work law and policy and consequently for sex workers’ lives. This collection offers an invaluable resource on the subject of how sex workers experience injustices and how we can mitigate this globally through a transformative vision of social justice.
For the past two decades, ‘complexity’ has informed a range of work across the social sciences. There are diverse schools of complexity thinking, and authors have used these ideas in a multiplicity of ways, from health inequalities to the organization of large scale firms. Some understand complexity as emergence from the rule-based interactions of simple agents and explore it through agent-based modelling. Others argue against such ‘restricted complexity’ and for the development of case-based narratives deploying a much wider set of approaches and techniques. Major social theorists have been reinterpreted through a complexity lens and the whole methodological programme of the social sciences has been recast in complexity terms. In four parts, this book seeks to establish ‘the state of the art’ of complexity-informed social science as it stands now, examining: the key issues in complexity theory the implications of complexity theory for social theory the methodology and methods of complexity theory complexity within disciplines and fields. It also points ways forward towards a complexity-informed social science for the twenty-first century, investigating the argument for a post-disciplinary, ‘open’ social science. Byrne and Callaghan consider how this might be developed as a programme of teaching and research within social science. This book will be particularly relevant for, and interesting to, students and scholars of social research methods, social theory, business and organization studies, health, education, urban studies and development studies.
Examining how changing conditions in the Mediterranean Region have affected the decisions of those considering migrating from Sub-Saharan Africa to or through the Region, this book represents an important and overdue contribution to international policy-making and academic discourse. In current discussions relating to this migration phenomenon, the complexity of individual decision-making is often left unacknowledged, so that subsequent policy responses draw upon simplified models. In this volume, individual decision-making takes central stage by bringing together chapters that demonstrate very different types of decision-making frameworks. In this project, it is highlighted that people move for a variety of reasons such as being affected by conflict and insecurity, by economic pressures, and by desire for other forms of enrichment. Throughout, the book’s contributors find that events in the Mediterranean cannot be considered alone in understanding migration decision-making from Sub-Saharan Africa, but as part of an increasingly complicated global system not encompassed by one simplified theory or by looking at one regional context in isolation. Knowing why individual people are moving and how they decide upon which routes to take can help to ensure policy that promotes safer travel options, or makes genuine alternatives to migration available.
The philosophy of the social sciences considers the underlying explanatory powers of the social (or human) sciences, such as history, economics, anthropology, politics, and sociology. The type of questions covered includes the methodological (the nature of observations, laws, theories, and explanations) to the ontological -- whether or not these sciences can explain human nature in a way consistent with common-sense beliefs. This Handbook is a major, comprehensive look at the key ideas in the field, is guided by several principles. The first is that the philosophy of social science should be closely connected to, and informed by, developments in the sciences themselves. The second is that the volume should appeal to practicing social scientists as well as philosophers, with the contributors being both drawn from both ranks, and speaking to ongoing controversial issues in the field. Finally, the volume promotes connections across the social sciences, with greater internal discussion and interaction across disciplinary boundaries.
This study investigates the development of urbanism in the north-western provinces of the Roman empire. Key themes include continuity and discontinuity between pre-Roman and Roman ‘urban’ systems, relationships between juridical statuses and levels of monumentality, levels of connectivity and economic integration, and regional urban hierarchies.