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These papers, from the annual Summer/Spring School of the IRTG, revolve around the theme of “troubling the social”, exploring the complex relationships between religion, social worlds and transformation from the vantage point of the postcolony—not so much as a geographical location, but rather as a way to understand the world. The contributions examine the coloniality inherent within the academic enterprises related to religion, but also what, how, and why religious experiences, worldviews and engagements count as knowledge and the implications this has for understanding, examining, and activating social transformation processes. Processes of transformation have been prominent within the continent in the last decade and still animate crucial debates and knowledge production. In these, religion has figured paradoxically as the “blind spot” or occupied a default and marginal position. However, religion participates, through a complex assemblage of practices, subjectivities and meaning-making processes, in the creation of social worlds, social imagination and social transformations. They also explore how the decolonial renaissance is troubling the social and epistemic origins of religion and the social sciences, as well as its imagined relation to social transformation. Contributors are from Southern Africa and Germany, societies with histories of colonialism and segregation, both of which have experienced postcolonial transformations to the social fabric of their societies, and both have increasingly seen calls also for critical research on coloniality, religion and social transformation.
The Lure of the Social is an intimate and personal exploration into the key individuals, institutions, and gatherings that make up the field of socially engaged art. In this book of encounters, the reader follows Gretchen Coombs on her journey through what could be considered the most significant shift in art world practices in the last two decades. The book navigates a spectrum: at one end, the author works closely with socially engaged artists as part of her ethnographic research; at the other, she tries to find critical distance from which to write about their art projects and the institutional structures that support their work, such as art schools and conferences. Readers are introduced to artists, their work, and the key debates and issues facing this emergent field. In the course of her study, Coombs analyzes the contradictions and paradoxes of this field of practice and gives expression to the artists working to make art relevant in times of social and political uncertainty.
More than two million students are enrolled in for-profit colleges, from the small family-run operations to the behemoths brandished on billboards, subway ads, and late-night commercials. These schools have been around just as long as their bucolic not-for-profit counterparts, yet shockingly little is known about why they have expanded so rapidly in recent years—during the so-called Wall Street era of for-profit colleges. In Lower Ed Tressie McMillan Cottom—a bold and rising public scholar, herself once a recruiter at two for-profit colleges—expertly parses the fraught dynamics of this big-money industry to show precisely how it is part and parcel of the growing inequality plaguing the country today. McMillan Cottom discloses the shrewd recruitment and marketing strategies that these schools deploy and explains how, despite the well-documented predatory practices of some and the campus closings of others, ending for-profit colleges won't end the vulnerabilities that made them the fastest growing sector of higher education at the turn of the twenty-first century. And she doesn't stop there. With sharp insight and deliberate acumen, McMillan Cottom delivers a comprehensive view of postsecondary for-profit education by illuminating the experiences of the everyday people behind the shareholder earnings, congressional battles, and student debt disasters. The relatable human stories in Lower Ed—from mothers struggling to pay for beauty school to working class guys seeking "good jobs" to accomplished professionals pursuing doctoral degrees—illustrate that the growth of for-profit colleges is inextricably linked to larger questions of race, gender, work, and the promise of opportunity in America. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews with students, employees, executives, and activists, Lower Ed tells the story of the benefits, pitfalls, and real costs of a for-profit education. It is a story about broken social contracts; about education transforming from a public interest to a private gain; and about all Americans and the challenges we face in our divided, unequal society.
"Text first published in 1990 by Children's Press, Inc."
Today, transparency is a widely heralded value, and the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is often held up as one of the transparency movement’s canonical achievements. Yet while many view the law as a powerful tool for journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens to pursue the public good, FOIA is beset by massive backlogs, and corporations and the powerful have become adept at using it for their own interests. Close observers of laws like FOIA have begun to question whether these laws interfere with good governance, display a deleterious anti-public-sector bias, or are otherwise inadequate for the twenty-first century’s challenges. Troubling Transparency brings together leading scholars from different disciplines to analyze freedom of information policies in the United States and abroad—how they are working, how they are failing, and how they might be improved. Contributors investigate the creation of FOIA; its day-to-day uses and limitations for the news media and for corporate and citizen requesters; its impact on government agencies; its global influence; recent alternatives to the FOIA model raised by the emergence of “open data” and other approaches to transparency; and the theoretical underpinnings of FOIA and the right to know. In addition to examining the mixed legacy and effectiveness of FOIA, contributors debate how best to move forward to improve access to information and government functioning. Neither romanticizing FOIA nor downplaying its real and symbolic achievements, Troubling Transparency is a timely and comprehensive consideration of laws such as FOIA and the larger project of open government, with wide-ranging lessons for journalism, law, government, and civil society.
How the NSF became an important yet controversial patron for the social sciences, influencing debates over their scientific status and social relevance. In the early Cold War years, the U.S. government established the National Science Foundation (NSF), a civilian agency that soon became widely known for its dedication to supporting first-rate science. The agency's 1950 enabling legislation made no mention of the social sciences, although it included a vague reference to "other sciences." Nevertheless, as Mark Solovey shows in this book, the NSF also soon became a major--albeit controversial--source of public funding for them.
In 1834 Antigua became the only British colony in the Caribbean to move directly from slavery to full emancipation. Immediate freedom, however, did not live up to its promise, as it did not guarantee any level of stability or autonomy, and the implementation of new forms of coercion and control made it, in many ways, indistinguishable from slavery. In Troubling Freedom Natasha Lightfoot tells the story of how Antigua's newly freed black working people struggled to realize freedom in their everyday lives, prior to and in the decades following emancipation. She presents freedpeople's efforts to form an efficient workforce, acquire property, secure housing, worship, and build independent communities in response to elite prescriptions for acceptable behavior and oppression. Despite its continued efforts, Antigua's black population failed to convince whites that its members were worthy of full economic and political inclusion. By highlighting the diverse ways freedpeople defined and created freedom through quotidian acts of survival and occasional uprisings, Lightfoot complicates conceptions of freedom and the general narrative that landlessness was the primary constraint for newly emancipated slaves in the Caribbean.
Written by a highly respected team of authors brought together by the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), this book provides accessible insights into pressing social problems in the United States in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and proposes public policy responses for victims and justice, precarious populations, employment dilemmas and health and well-being.
Many social policies of the 1960s and 1970s, designed to overcome poverty and provide a decent standard of living for all Americans, ran into trouble in the 1980s with politicians, with social scientists, and with the American people. Here Nathan Glazer looks back at what went wrong, arguing that our social policies, although targeted effectively on some problems, ignored others that are equally important. Glazer's knowledge and judgment, distilled in this book, will be a source of advice and wisdom for citizens and policymakers alike.