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"Autism has become an all-too-common diagnosis here in the United States. Typically diagnosed in early childhood, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is identified based on developmental delays in three areas: language, social skills, and particular behaviors. But what Americans know and think about autism is shaped by our social relationship to health, disease, and our country's medical system. The Western Disease explores the ways that Somali recent immigrants make sense of their children's diagnosis of autism. Having never heard of the disease before migrating to North America, they often determine that since autism doesn't exist in Somalia, it must be a Western disease. Many even believe it i...
In the years since the end of apartheid, South Africans have enjoyed a progressive constitution, considerable access to social services for the poor and sick, and a booming economy that has made their nation into one of the wealthiest on the continent. At the same time, South Africa experiences extremely unequal income distribution, and its citizens suffer the highest prevalence of HIV in the world. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has noted, “AIDS is South Africa’s new apartheid.” In Ancestors and Antiretrovirals, Claire Laurier Decoteau backs up Tutu’s assertion with powerful arguments about how this came to pass. Decoteau traces the historical shifts in health policy after apartheid and...
The landscape of social theory has changed significantly over the three decades since the publication of Anthony Giddens and Jonathan Turner’s seminal Social Theory Today. Sociologists in the twenty-first century desperately need a new agenda centered around central questions of social theory. In Social Theory Now, Claudio E. Benzecry, Monika Krause, and Isaac Ariail Reed set a new course for sociologists, bringing together contributions from the most distinctive?sociological?traditions?in an ambitious survey of where social theory is today and where it might be going. The book?provides a strategic window onto social theory based on current research, examining trends in classical tradition...
For the past fifty years anxiety over naturalism has driven debates in social theory. One side sees social science as another kind of natural science, while the other rejects the possibility of objective and explanatory knowledge. Interpretation and Social Knowledge suggests a different route, offering a way forward for an antinaturalist sociology that overcomes the opposition between interpretation and explanation and uses theory to build concrete, historically specific causal explanations of social phenomena.
A comprehensive survey of how scientific disciplines have always been informed by politics and ideology on the basis of the Gramscian views in historical materialism, hegemony and civil society.
Regulation : how the politics of skill become law -- Production : how skill makes cities -- Skill : how skill is embodied and what it means for the control of bodies -- Protest : how skillful practice becomes resistance -- Body : how definitions of skill cause injury -- Earth : how the politics of skill shape responses to climate change.
Examines the conflict between modern and postmodern theories in sociology and attempts to bridge the divide between them.
Over the past four decades, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory of the postwar era. When he died in 2002, he was considered to be the most influential sociologist in the world and a thinker on a par with Foucault and Levi-Strauss - a public intellectual as important to his generation as Sartre was to his. Sketch for a Self-Analysis is the ultimate outcome of Bourdieu's lifelong preoccupation with reflexivity. Vehemently not an autobiography, this unique book is instead an application of Bourdieu's theories to his own life and intellectual trajectory; along the way it offers compelling and intimate insights into the most important French intellectuals of the time - including Foucault, Sartre, Aron, Althusser, and de Beauvoir - as well as Bourdieu's own formative experiences at boarding school and his moral outrage at the colonial war in Algeria.
"The COVID-19 pandemic inaugurated a state of emergency unprecedented for most Americans. Some could observe this emergency from the relative safety of their homes, working remotely, conducting routine medical appointments over Zoom, and mastering the art of timing our grocery shopping or ordering delivery. But we all watched in horror as those in marginalized communities got sick and died without access to the same privileges, sometimes even at the expense of others; after all, someone had to ship goods from warehouses, someone had to clean the hospital, someone had to shelve and deliver groceries. In this book, sociologist Claire Laurier Decoteau attempts to document and theorize the emerg...
“A lovely weave of memory and science, great characters and compassionate humor” from the author of Sweat: A History of Exercise (Anne Lamott). We often think of sleep as mere stasis, a pause button we press at the end of each day. Yet sleep is full of untold mysteries—eluding us when we seek it too fervently, throwing us into surreal dream worlds when we don’t, sometimes even possessing our bodies so that they walk and talk without our conscious volition. Delving into the mysteries of his own sleep patterns, Bill Hayes marvels, “I have come to see that sleep itself tells a story.” An acclaimed journalist and memoirist—and partner of the late neurologist Oliver Sacks—Hayes ha...