Changing Societies offers a fresh, timely approach to sociology. Based upon nested theory, the book explains sociology through processes of global and local change--showing how social change occurs in larger global or national structures and influences events that happen in students' immediate personal and social environments. At the same time, Changing Societies emphasizes that social change is a two-way street--that we can influence the world in addition to being affected by it. Racial, ethnic, and gender differences are themes that are woven into every chapter of the book, showing how they affect stratification and inequality, and the workings of particular social institutions and processes. A concluding chapter not only explains agency and social movements, but involves students in activities that help them to think about and plan social action.
This unique hybrid of text and readings combines the major writings of sociology’s core classical and contemporary theorists with an historical as well as theoretical framework for understanding them. This novel approach provides students the analytical guidance necessary to interpret the readings. No other theory text combines such "student-friendly" explanation and analysis with original theoretical works.
This path-breaking Handbook of Disability Studies signals the emergence of a vital new area of scholarship, social policy and activism. Drawing on the insights of disability scholars around the world and the creative advice of an international editorial board, the book engages the reader in the critical issues and debates framing disability studies and places them in an historical and cultural context. Five years in the making, this one volume summarizes the ongoing discourse ranging across continents and traditional academic disciplines.
The Handbook answers the need expressed by the disability community for a thought provoking, interdisciplinary, international examination of the vibrant field of disability
The Canadian census lists more than one hundred ethnicities in the Canadian population, making it rather unique even among modern, multi-ethnic nations. Understanding Diversity is a core text for use at universities and colleges across Canada. Its aim is to stimulate students to think about ethnicity and race in a more systematic, analytical manner -- one that will lead to a better understanding of the important place of ethnicity in Canada and in the global society. Over the past 30 years or so, an entire body of theoretical and empirical knowledge has developed about ethnicity and ethnic and race relations in Canada. While researchers may disagree on specific issues, they have much in common and they share a basic agreement on the importance of quantitative and qualitative methods in resolving their outstanding differences. This book describes the essential features of the “sub-discipline” that has emerged in this area and it details what we know, don’t know, and still need to know about ethnicity and ethnic and race relations in Canada.
Celebrants of an ever-emerging 'globalization' fly the banner of free trade, the mass marketization of once faltering economies, and rising economic and social standards for all. Many opponents to globalization rightfully point out that borders still exist largely for the purposes of keeping one 'commodity' in its place: the labor commodity or, the more familiar, immigrant. Arguments of this type are often steeped in economic and social discourse. Race and ethnicity are seen as either being subsumed by this discourse or are entirely ignored as incidental to this type of political thought. In Ethnicity, Class and Nationalism: Caribbean and Extra-Caribbean Dimensions specialists writing on the Caribbean form of the nation-state place race and ethnicity--along with class--in its proper context: at the very foundations of the modern nation. Editor Anton L. Allahar has handpicked scholarship that is both contemporary and expert in its consideration of Caribbean geo-politics. Furthermore, essays in this volume include comparative cases from around the globe. In the interest of locating race and ethnicity as sociological and political categories that are inimical to contemporary conceptions of the nation state, Allahar explores spaces other than the Caribbean. The result is a comparative study that is unique in scope and also in its level of scholarly reflection. This book is the first of its kind. It is essential reading for anyone interested in advancing their analysis of political, economic, social, and cultural thought in the Caribbean.
