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How can governments persuade their citizens to act in socially beneficial ways? This ground-breaking book builds on the idea of 'light touch interventions' or 'nudges' proposed in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's highly influential Nudge (2008). While recognising the power of this approach, it argues that an alternative also needs to be considered: a 'think' strategy that calls on citizens to decide their own priorities as part of a process of civic and democratic renewal. As well as setting out these divergent approaches in theory, the book provides evidence from a number of experiments to show how using 'nudge' or 'think' techniques works in practice. Updated and rewritten, this second edition features a new epilogue that reflects on recent developments in nudge theory and practice, introducing a radical version of nudge, ‘nudge plus’. There is also a substantial prologue by Cass Sunstein.
At a time in which race lies at the heart of so much public debate, Talking Race in Young Adulthood comes at an important moment. Drawing on ethnographic research with young adults in Manchester, Harries engages with ideas of the post-racial to explore how young adults make sense of their identities, relationships and new forms of racism, consequently revealing how and in what ways race remains a salient dimension of social experience. Indeed, this book presents news ways of thinking about how we live with difference, as Harries analyses the relationship between racism, generational identities and the spatial configurations of a city. Offering a distinct contribution to the sociology of race, this book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as Race and Ethnicity, Urban Sociology, Human Geography, Youth Studies, Cultural Studies and Social Anthropology.
Using rare field research, this book investigates whether and how talking may transform terrorist violence. Given the failings of today’s dominant counterterrorism strategy, is talking a viable policy option to transform conflicts marked by terrorist violence? This book examines the reasons why "negotiating with terrorists" is so often shunned by decision-makers and scholars as a policy response, concluding that such objections are primarily based on a realist and statist understanding of terrorism that has dominated the field so far. Based on interviews with top rebel and military commanders in the southern Philippine region of Mindanao and interviewing key actors in Northern Ireland, Ter...
As the issues of inequality and ethnic identity become ever more prominent in politics and media, this book is well timed to play a useful role: offering in-depth analysis of the intersection of the two issues by experts in the field. Drawn from the last three UK population censuses, it not only offers a comprehensive overview of the topic, but also clarifies key concepts. Contributors highlight persistent inequalities in access to housing, employment, education, and good health faced by some ethnic groups, and the resulting book will be a crucial resource for policy makers and researchers alike.
The Brexit debate has been accompanied by a rise in hostile attitudes to multilingualism. However, cities can provide an important counter-weight to political polarisation by forging civic identities that embrace diversity. In this timely book, Yaron Matras describes the emergence of a city language narrative that embraces and celebrates multilingualism and helps forge a civic identity. He critiques linguaphobic discourses at a national level that regard multilingualism as deficient citizenship. Drawing on his research in Manchester, he examines the 'multilingual utopia', looking at multilingual spaces across sectors in the city that support access, heritage, skills and celebration. The book explores the tensions between decolonial approaches that inspire activism for social justice and equality, and the neoliberal enterprise that appropriates diversity for reputational and profitability purposes, prompting critical reflection on calls for civic university engagement. It is essential reading for anyone concerned about ways to protect cultural pluralism in our society.
Departing from a concern with certain ’hard’ problems in social theory and focusing instead on the theoretical strategies employed in their solution, especially on how these strategies depend on what the author calls the theoretical attitude towards language, this book considers whether these strategies, far from being indispensable guides to thinking, might in fact lead social theorists to misunderstand the concepts constitutive of social life. Making use of the insights and practice of Ordinary Language Philosophy, understood as encompassing the work of Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin and their followers, Clarity and Confusion in Social Theory reveals the profound logical flaws in some of t...
Mixing policy discussion and empirical work by leading researchers in the field, Changing local governance, changing citizens aims to explain what debates about local governance mean for local people.
This book explores how theatre and performance can change the way we think about dementia and some of the environments in which dementia care takes place. Drawing on the author’s creative practice and other performance projects in the UK, it explores some of the challenges and opportunities of making performance in care homes. Rather than focusing on the transformative potential of the arts, it asks how artists can engage with the different types of relationships that exist in a care community. These include the relationships that residents and staff have with each other as well as relationships with care spaces. Exploring the intersection between participatory performance and the everyday creativity of a care home, it argues that the arts have a cultural role to play in supporting dementia care as a relational practice. Moreover, it celebrates the intrinsic creativity of caregiving and how principles and practices of care work can inform theatre and performance in diverse ways.
The war on terror and the Islamophobia it has unleashed have affected the lives of Muslims throughout the United Kingdom--but that affect is felt differently by men and women. This book looks specifically at the role of gender in the debate over terrorism and security, showing how the concept of the "Muslim woman" has been deployed as part of government and media discussions of terrorism and revealing how such stereotyping and mischaracterization affects the varied, distinct lives of countless Muslim women.
This Book develops a novel and innovative methodological framework for operationalising Henri Lefebvre’s work for empirical research on the U.S. city. Building on ethnographic research on Chicago’s South Side, Tilman Schwarze explores the current situation of urbanisation and urban life in the U.S. city through a critical reading and application of Lefebvre’s writings on space, everyday life, the urban, the state, and difference. Focusing on territorial stigmatisation, public housing transformation, and urban redevelopment, this book makes an important contribution to critical urban scholarship, foregrounding the relevance and applicability of Henri Lefebvre’s work for geographical and sociological research on urban politics and everyday life.