Society and culture: general Books

Love, Sex and Teenage Sexual Cultures in South Africa interrupts the relative silence around teenage constructions of love in South Africa. Against the backdrop of gender inequalities, HIV and violence, the book situates teenage constructions of love and...

State-sponsored torture and peacebuilding encapsulate the essence of many of the current conflicts in Indonesia. Papua in particular provides a thought-provoking example of the intricacy and complexity of building peace amidst enduring conflict and...

Jokes have always been part of African culture, but never have they been so blended with the strains and gains of the contemporary African world as today. Joke-Performance in Africa describes and analyses the diverse aesthetics, forms, and media of jokes...

Post/Colonialism and the Pursuit of Freedom in the Black Atlantic is an interdisciplinary collection of essays of wide historical and geographic scope which engages the legacy of diaspora, colonialism and slavery. The contributors explore the...

This book examines information and public opinion control by the authoritarian state in response to popular access to information and upgraded political communication channels among the citizens in contemporary China. Empowered by mass media,...

The world continues to be threatened by non-state, religiously-rationalized violence. While some fail to the see the connections between the United States' intervention in the Middle East and this ongoing threat, the non-state perpetrators of terror...

This book examines the underexplored notion of epistemic marginalization of women in the African intellectual place. Women's issues are still very much neglected by governments, corporate bodies and academics in sub-Saharan Africa. The entrenched...

Noted for their haunting melodies and enigmatic lyrics, Bauls have been portrayed as spiritually enlightened troubadours traveling around the countryside in West Bengal in India and in Bangladesh.As emblems of Bengali culture, Bauls have long been a...

This book examines the relationship that exists between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Animation has played a key role in defining our collective expectations and experiences of fantasy cinema, just as fantasy storytelling has often served...

This book is based on anthropological fieldwork among the Bai, an ethnic minority with a population of two million in Dali, southwest China. It explores the religious and ethnic revival in the last two decades against a historical background. It explains...

The right to development (RTD) seeks to address global inequities hidden in world politics and global institutions through the game of influences played by powerful actors. The negative impacts of the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, and the...

This volume brings together influential contemporary research and discussion papers to explore the issue of women's economic empowerment in the Indian Ocean rim. Women's economic empowerment has become a central policy concern of many Indian Ocean rim...

This book makes an important return to reception studies at an exciting juncture of media distribution and modes of consumption. The editors' introduction contextualizes this new work within a long history of feminist approaches to audience research, and...

The vast circulations of mobile devices, sensors and data mean that the social world is now defined by a complex interweaving of human and machine agency. Key to this is the growing power of algorithms - the decision-making parts of code - in our...

The field of organisational communication has been rapidly transforming in the wake of the linguistic and discursive turns that have been sweeping across the social sciences since the mid-eighties. These 'turns' have prompted organisational communication...

Kenya's 2007 General Election results announcement precipitated the worst ethnic conflict in the country's history; 1,133 people were killed, while 600,000 were internally displaced. Within 2 months, the incumbent and the challenger had agreed to a...

News coverage on Africa is closely connected not only with how Western audiences see the continent, but also with how a wide Western audience builds its opinion on issues that carry consequences for the public's and governments' support and policy...

This book, appropriately titled Decolonisation, Africanisation and the Philosophy Curriculum, signposts and captures issues about philosophy, the philosophy curriculum, and its decolonisation and Africanisation. This topic is of critical...

This book addresses the involuntary and arbitrary displacement of individuals resulting from armed conflict and gross human rights violations. It shows that forcible displacement constitutes a serious violation of international law and of...

In recent years, the Zimbabwe crisis rendered the country and its citizens to be a typical case of 'failed states', the world over. Zimbabwean society was and is still confronted with different challenges which include political, economic and social...

Today's convergent media industries readily produce stories that span multiple media, telling the tales of superheroes across comics, film and television, inviting audiences to participate in the popular universes across cinema, novels, the Web, and more...

This book provides case studies, many incorporating in-depth interviews and surveys of journalists. It examines issues such as journalists' attitudes toward their contributions to society; the impact of industry and technological changes; culture...

What does it imply for Nigerian philosophers to conscientiously and engagingly reflect on Nigeria as a place of philosophy and as a dynamic plural context of socioeconomic, political, cultural and ethnic problems? Any answer to this question...

Nuaulu people on the Indonesian island of Seram have displayed remarkable linguistic and cultural resilience over a period of 50 years. In 1970 their language and traditional culture was widely considered 'endangered.' Despite this, Nuaulu have not only...

In this book, Oluwatoyin Oduntan offers a critical intervention in the scholarly fields of Nigerian, and West African history, as well as towards understanding the intellectual ideas by which modern African society was formed, and how it functions. The...

This book explores the prosecution of wartime sexual violence in international criminal law and asks what the juridicalisation of gender-based violence signifies for women. The book explores the portrayal of the various gendered identities that surface...

In comparison to other social groups, India's rural poor - and particularly Adivasis and Dalits - have seen little benefit from the country's economic growth over the last three decades. Though economists and statisticians are able to model the form and...

The 1990s heralded waves of spectacular forms of local resistance and globalized protest against oil exploitation and environmental pollution in oil-producing regions of the developing world. One of the most spectacular local uprisings against global oil...

Since 2001 The Democratic Republic of Congo has been engaged in a three-fold transition process towards liberalisation, democratisation, and peace. Throughout this process, external actors (donors, international financial institutions, the UN system, aid...

This book provides an historical overview of the Japanese Communist Party from its foundation to the present. It outlines the development of the party, explores its stance on key issues and discusses how the party has set a high moral tone, avoiding...

The ambition of the book is to investigate a possible transition in the markets for food in the Nordic countries. Six chapters from various disciplinary traditions study change and innovation within the food sectors in Denmark, Sweden and Norway; while...

The issue of divinizing in South Asian traditions has not been examined before as a process involving various methods to affect the socio-cultural cognition of the community. It is therefore essential to consider the context of "divinizing" and to...

Producing Queer Youth challenges popular ideas about online media culture as a platform for empowerment, cultural transformation, and social progress. Based on over three years of participant action research with queer teen media-makers and textual...

The large-scale movements of refugees and economic migrants from conflict zones to more stable societies have resulted in challenges, both for new entrants and their hosts. This fascinating volume brings together a collection of media analyses focused on...

This volume explores the panic that is a central affective register of our current international order. Fears of Somali pirates, "Gypsy" kidnappers, African warlords, Ebola, "Mexican meth," pimps, coyotes, gangs, climate refugees and more, structure the...

Online Activism in Latin America examines the innovative ways in which Latin American citizens, and Latin@s in the U.S., use the Internet to advocate for causes that they consider just. The contributions to the volume analyze citizen-launched websites,...

The contributions to this collection focus on the intersecting dynamics of gender, generation and class in Southeast Asian rural communities engaging with expanding capitalist relations, whether in the form of large-scale corporate land acquisition or...

Rwanda and Burundi are strikingly similar countries that underwent democratization in the early 1990s. In both, resistance to democratic reforms led to coups d'état and presidential assassinations. A conundrum arises in terms of what transpires next. In...

The community of waste pickers in Calcutta stands on its own against the hostile outside which comprises the state, elites and mainstream society. The residents of this unique world continuously try to escape the 'ideal' world of uniform homogeneity of...

Emerging from a transnational framework, this book offers a global perspective on gender, sex and race research in education across global north and south. Drawing upon pedagogical, programmatic, and activist work with respect to challenging inequalities...

The twentieth century generated tens of thousands of hours of American newsfilm but not the scholarly apparatus necessary to analyze and contextualize them. Assembling new approaches to the study of U.S. newsfilm in cinema and television, this book makes...

The first book to present the history, ideas, life and works of Chinese midwives and birth attendants, this volume seeks to encapsulate and explain the changing ideas about the practice of midwifery in China. Using participant observations and...

In 1945 Japan had to adjust very rapidly to sudden defeat, to the arrival of the American Occupation and to the encounter with the English language, together with a different outlook on many aspects of society and government. This scholarly book is based...

The movement of people from small towns and villages of India to places outside the country raises a number of questions- about the networks that enable their mobility, the aspirations that motivate them, what they give back to their home regions, and...

This book traces the development of China's banking system through the first 25 years of China's socialist market economy up to the present. It examines how China's leaders have chosen their own path for reforming and regulating the banking sector and...

This book investigates the portrayal of nationalities and sexualities in British post-Second World War crime film and melodrama. By focussing on these genres, and looking at the concept of melodrama as an analytical tool apt for the analysis of both...

This volume explores how television has been a significant conduit for the changing ideas about children and childhood in the United States. Each chapter connects relevant events, attitudes, or anxieties in American culture to an analysis of children or...

The effects of the partition of India in 1947 have been more far-reaching and complex than the existing partition narratives of violence and separation reveal. The immediacy of the movement of refugees between India and the newly-formed state of Pakistan...