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Built on up-to-date field material, this edited volume suggests an anthropological approach to the palimpsest-like milieus of Wrocław, Lviv, Chernivtsi, and Chişinău. In these East-Central European borderline cities, the legacies of Nazism, Marxism-Leninism, and violent ethno-nationalism have been revisited in recent decades in search of profound moral reckoning and in response to the challenges posed by the (post-)transitional period. Present shapes and contents of these urban settings derive from combinations of fragmented material environments, cultural continuities and political ruptures, present-day heritage industries and collective memories about the contentious past, expressive ar...
This book explores democratic possibilities for education after the critique of the impact of neo-liberalism on educational policy and practice. Together, the authors investigate the contours of a ‘new publicness’ of education. This edited volume refers to well-established critiques that expose how neoliberal governance has normalised the privatisation of public life and undermined the public nature of education. Through historical reconstruction, theoretical exploration, and analyses of educational policies and practices, chapters take a novel approach by investigating democratic possibilities within and beyond the current neoliberal hegemony in education. Covering a range of educational settings – from early childhood education through to higher and professional education – chapters spotlight the Irish educational and political context, as well as exploring international implications. Ultimately, this book opens up new avenues for discussion around public education and its future, and will therefore be of great interest to researchers and students in the fields of educational theory, education politics, educational policy and democratic education.
In this book, an international team of urban anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnographers argue that politics, intergroup relations, and development in cities cannot be understood without reference to the local contexts that endow each city with specific characteristics. They also show how local urban economic, social, and cultural lives are influenced by powerful external forces. In these 'glocal' regards, the authors demonstrate how city images, borders, and social processes such as migration, tourism, and local development must be seen in broader contexts. The contributors examine them through the lenses of foreign investment, migration, and history. The volume takes an interdisciplinary approach and employs a range of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. Contributors’ multidisciplinary expertise and insights about spaces and places are applied to nine unique cities across three continents.
Now that nearly twenty years have passed since the collapse of the Soviet bloc there is a need to understand what has taken place since that historic date and where we are at the moment. Bringing together authors with different historical, cultural, regional and theoretical backgrounds, this volume engages in debates that address new questions arising from recent developments, such as whether there is a need to reject or uphold the notion of post-socialism as both a necessary and valid concept ignoring changes and differences across both time and space. The authors' firsthand ethnographies from their own countries belie such a simplistic notion, revealing, as they do, the cultural, social, and historical diversity of countries of Central and Southeastern Europe.
Changing circumstances in Western and global societies have introduced new constraints and opportunities for men and the formation of male identities. Meanwhile, the emerging diversity of 'atypical' identities ('atypical' when compared with traditional conceptions of middle-class, white, heterosexual men) poses new challenges for the production and use of spaces. Spaces of Masculinities provides a comprehensive introduction to the innovative and diverse research on spaces of masculinity. Drawing on a variety of geographical research projects, the central concern of the book is to highlight the significance of research on masculinity in sociological and geographical work dealing with constructions of gender.
To niezwykle koherentny zbiór tekstów przygotowanych przez kompetentnych autorów wyraźnie reprezentujących ten sam ”styl i kolektyw myślowy„, używając określenia Ludwika Flecka, czy inaczej ten sam paradygmat, według Thomasa Kuhna. Jest to jednoznacznie antypozytywistyczny paradygmat transformacyjno-emancypacyjny współczesnych nauk społecznych, w tym przede wszystkim pedagogiki współczesnej. Książka posiada istotną wartość poznawczą, metodyczną i dydaktyczną nie tylko w odniesieniu do rozwiniętej wykładni metodologii badań w działaniu, lecz także w kontekście aktualnej debaty nad istotą naukowości nauk humanistyczno-społecznych i uprawiania zaangażowanych...
In the last twenty-five years, the explosive rise of car mobility has transformed street life in postsocialist cities. Whereas previously the social fabric of these cities ran on socialist modes of mobility, they are now overtaken by a culture of privately owned cars. If Cars Could Walk uses ethnographic cases studies documenting these changes in terms of street interaction, vehicles used, and the parameters of speed, maneuverability, and cultural and symbolic values. The altered reality of people’s movements, replacing public transport, bicycles and other former ‘socialist’ modes of mobility with privatized mobility reflect an evolving political and cultural imagination, which in turn shapes their current political reality.
In contemporary armies, violence among soldiers seems to be a universal phenomenon found in both professional and drafted armies. However, the comparison of violent practices in various armies around the world allows us to identify specific features linked to those countries' sociological, political or anthropological contexts. Hazing, for example, seems to be more violent in the armies of transitional societies (Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America), where social tensions encountered by citizens in their daily lives are carried over to, and sometimes intensified in, the military. The comparison of Russian dedovshchina with the situation in other countries makes it possible to identify univ...
A quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and from the vantage point of a post-Cold War, globalised, world, there is a need to address the relative neglect of postcommunism in analysis of postcolonial and neo-colonial configurations of power and influence. This book proposes new critical perspectives on several themes and concepts that have emerged within, or been propagated by, postcolonial studies. These themes include structures of exclusion/ inclusion; formations of nationalism, structures of othering, and representations of difference; forms and historical realisations of anti-colonial/anti-imperial struggle; the experience of trauma (involving issues of collective memor...
Czech playwright and dissident Vaclav Havel first encountered Polish historian and dissident Adam Michnik in 1978 at a clandestine meeting on a mountaintop along the Polish-Czechoslovak border. This initial meeting of two extraordinary thinkers who “plotted” democracy, and designed an effective peaceful strategy for dismantling authoritarian regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, resulted in a lifelong friendship and an extraordinary set of bold conversations conducted over the next two postrevolutionary decades. Havel, president of Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic, and Michnik, editor-in-chief of the largest daily newspaper in the region, provide rare insights into the post-1989 challenges to building new democratic institutions and new habits in the context of an increasingly unsettling political culture. With both dismay and humor, their fascinating exchanges wrestle with the essential question of postrevolutionary life: How does one preserve the revolution’s ideals in the real world? At once historically immediate and politically universal, the Havel-Michnik conversations have never before been collected in a single volume in any language.