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If one culprit is suspected above all others for encouraging society to become more violent and unfeeling, it is television. This medium, which has become so pervasive in the last 50 years, seems to play an enormous role in the lives of the vast majority of people. But who controls the content which exerts such an enormous influence and to an extent controls the people? What are they doing now and what will they be doing tomorrow? Is violence essential to sell toothpaste and hamburgers? What are our children becoming and what will their children be like? Will every child carry a gun or other weapon just waiting for someone to trigger their violent nature and ignite their preprogrammed anger?
This title looks at the contemporary need to study life narratives, considers the emergence and salience of life narratives in contemporary culture, and discusses different forms of narrativity.
This book is the third publication from the Eurogang Network, a cross-national collaboration of researchers (from both North America and Europe) devoted to comparative and multi-national research on youth gangs. It provides a unique insight into the influence of migration on local gang formation and development, paying particular attention to the importance of ethnicity. The book also explores the challenges that migration and ethnicity pose for responding effectively to the growth of such gangs, particularly in areas where public discourse on such issues is restricted. Chapters in the book are concerned to address both situations where there have been longstanding problems with street gangs as well as areas where such issues have just started to emerge. A variety of different research traditions and approaches are represented, including ethnographic methods, self-report surveys and interviews, official records data and victim interviews. It will be essential reading for anybody interested in the phenomenon of street and youth gangs.
Hope: What is it? How do we get it? Is it part of being human? Is it something that carries us through hard times? Is it something illusory? This book, which stems from the 4th Inter-Disciplinary.net conference on Hope: Probing the Boundaries held in September 2008 at Mansfield College in Oxford, England, explores all of these questions and many more. As a truly inter-disciplinary venture, this book approaches the theme of hope from the point of view of the philosophical, theological, political, literary, psychological, and sociological and presents hope not just as an abstract theme to be pondered but as an aspect of human living and thinking that has a profound impact on our lives. The conclusions reached in each chapter demonstrate the variety of ways in which hope is conceived as well as the tensions inherent in any discussion of the benefits of hope and the intricacies in dealing with hope on a theoretical and a practical level. This book is perfect for anyone wondering where hope fits into our lives during these troubling times.
This book on life politics comprises a collection of interviews and commentaries. The notion of life politics covers a number of different meanings within the book. Most importantly is the way that the genre of interviews helps cover a range of cultural contexts and intellectual milieu. Part of the life politics represented in this book is built around the belief that if we are to act as public intellectuals in the field of education and culture in the current globalised setting we need to travel. This book shows how public intellectual work gets interrogated and implemented in different social and cultural settings.
As reality television extends into the experiences of the everyday, it makes dramatic and often shocking the mundane aspects of our intimate relations. This book addresses the impact of this endless opening out of intimacy as an entertainment trend that erodes the traditional boundaries between spectator and performer.
The unremitting explosion of reality television across the schedules has become a sustainable global phenomenon generating considerable popular and political fervour. The zeal with which television executives seize on the easily replicated formats is matched equally by the eagerness of audiences to offer themselves up as television participants for others to watch and criticise. But how do we react to so many people breaking down, fronting up, tearing apart, dominating, empathising, humiliating, and seemingly laying bare their raw emotion for our entertainment? Do we feel sad when others are sad? Or are we relieved by the knowledge that our circumstances might be better? As reality televisio...