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Women without Men illuminates Russia's "quiet revolution" in family life through the lens of single motherhood. Drawing on extensive ethnographic and interview data, Jennifer Utrata focuses on the puzzle of how single motherhood—frequently seen as a social problem in other contexts—became taken for granted in the New Russia. While most Russians, including single mothers, believe that two-parent families are preferable, many also contend that single motherhood is an inevitable by-product of two intractable problems: "weak men" (reflected, they argue, in the country's widespread, chronic male alcoholism) and a "weak state" (considered so because of Russia's unequal economy and poor social ...
Now in paperback, The Rural Face of White Supremacy presents a detailed study of the daily experiences of ordinary people in rural Hancock County, Georgia. Drawing on his own interviews with over two hundred black and white residents, Mark Schultz argues that the residents acted on the basis of personal rather than institutional relationships. As a result, Hancock County residents experienced more intimate face-to-face interactions, which made possible more black agency than their urban counterparts were allowed. While they were still firmly entrenched within an exploitive white supremacist culture, this relative freedom did create a space for a range of interracial relationships that included mixed housing, midwifery, church services, meals, and even common-law marriages.
When NAFTA went into effect in 1994, many feared it would intensify animosity among North American unions, lead to the scapegoating of Mexican workers and immigrants, and eclipse any possibility for cross-border labor cooperation. But far from polarizing workers, NAFTA unexpectedly helped stimulate labor transnationalism among key North American unions and erode union policies and discourses rooted in racism. The emergence of labor transnationalism in North America presents compelling political and sociological puzzles: how did NAFTA, the concrete manifestation of globalization processes in North America, help deepen labor solidarity on the continent? In addition to making the provocative argument that global governance institutions can play a pivotal role in the development of transnational social movements, this book suggests that globalization need not undermine labor movements: collectively, unions can help shape how the rules governing the global economy are made.
First Published in 2013. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the 1917 Revolution still looms large: not only because Russians remain divided over whether the revolution arrived forcibly or inevitably and whether it was a colossally tragic or colossally generative event, but also because its social, cultural, scientific, and even moral residues remain everywhere in Putin’s Russia. Revolutionary Aftereffects looks at the ways in which 1917 has been and continues to be commemorated in Russia. Although post-Soviet Russia has emphasized its complete break with the past, this study of the memorialization and legacy of 1917 explores a fundamental continuity underlying an apparent discourse of discontinuity in post-socialist Russia. Contributors provide insight into the continuing reverberations of the revolution from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including history and literary studies as well as heritage studies, anthropology, geography, and sociology. Collectively, these essays demonstrate the changing nature of the revolution’s memorialization in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia and the ambivalence and contradictions within those narratives.
This book examines how we navigate questions of commitment and flexibility at work and at home in a world where insecurity has become the norm. How do people today, especially parents, think and talk about what we owe each other on the job and in intimate relationships-with partners, children, and others-when so much is perpetually up in the air?
The end of socialism in the Soviet Union and its satellite states ushered in a new era of choice. Yet the idea that people are really free to live as they choose turns out to be problematic. Personal choice is limited by a range of factors such as a person’s economic situation, class, age, government policies and social expectations, especially regarding gender roles. Furthermore, the notion of free choice is a crucial feature of capitalist ideology, and can be manipulated in the interests of the market. This edited collection explores the complexity of choice in Russia and Ukraine. The contributors explore how the new choices available to people after the collapse of the Soviet Union have interacted with and influenced gender identities and gender, and how choice has become one of the driving forces of class-formation in countries which were, in the Soviet era, supposedly classless. The book will of interest to students and scholars across a range of subjects including gender and sexualities studies, history, sociology and political science.
How race and racism shape middle-class families’ decisions to homeschool their children While families of color make up 41 percent of homeschoolers in America, little is known about the racial dimensions of this alternate form of education. In The Color of Homeschooling, Mahala Dyer Stewart explores why this percentage has grown exponentially in the past twenty years, and reveals how families’ schooling decisions are heavily shaped by race, class, and gender. Drawing from almost a hundred interviews with Black and white middle-class homeschooling and nonhomeschooling families, Stewart’s findings contradict many commonly held beliefs about the rationales for homeschooling. Rather than c...
Our nation began with the simple phrase, “We the People.” But who were and are “We”? Who were we in 1776, in 1865, or 1968, and is there any continuity in character between the we of those years and the nearly 300 million people living in the radically different America of today? With Made in America, Claude S. Fischer draws on decades of historical, psychological, and social research to answer that question by tracking the evolution of American character and culture over three centuries. He explodes myths—such as that contemporary Americans are more mobile and less religious than their ancestors, or that they are more focused on money and consumption—and reveals instead how grea...
This intensively researched urban study dissects Russian Imperial and early Soviet rule in Islamic Central Asia from the diverse viewpoints of tsarist functionaries, Soviet bureaucrats, Russian workers, and lower-class women as well as Muslim notables and Central Asian traders. Jeff Sahadeo's stimulating analysis reveals how political, social, cultural, and demographic shifts altered the nature of this colonial community from the tsarist conquest of 1865 to 1923, when Bolshevik authorities subjected the region to strict Soviet rule. In addition to placing the building of empire in Tashkent within a broader European context, Sahadeo's account makes an important contribution to understanding the cultural impact of empire on Russia's periphery.