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What do Americans think "race" means? What determines one’s race—appearance, ancestry, genes, or culture? How do education, government, and business influence our views on race? To unravel these complex questions, Ann Morning takes a close look at how scientists are influencing ideas about race through teaching and textbooks. Drawing from in-depth interviews with biologists, anthropologists, and undergraduates, Morning explores different conceptions of race—finding for example, that while many sociologists now assume that race is a social invention or "construct," anthropologists and biologists are far from such a consensus. She discusses powerful new genetic accounts of race, and considers how corporations and the government use scientific research—for example, in designing DNA ancestry tests or census questionnaires—in ways that often reinforce the idea that race is biologically determined. Widening the debate about race beyond the pages of scholarly journals, The Nature of Race dissects competing definitions in straightforward language to reveal the logic and assumptions underpinning today’s claims about human difference.
"Exploring what patients do want gives direction to the author's inquiry into what they should want. What patients want, he believes, is properly more complex and ambiguous than being "empowered." In this book he charts that ambiguity to take the autonomy principle past current pieties into the uncertain realities of the sick room and the hospital ward." "The Practice of Autonomy is a sympathetic but trenchant study of the animating principle of modern bioethics. It speaks with freshness, insight, and even passion to bioethicists and moral philosophers (about their theories), to lawyers (about their methods), to medical sociologists (about their subject), to policy-makers (about their ambitions), to doctors (about their work), and to patients (about their lives)."--BOOK JACKET.
In this lively and provocative book, two feminist public sociologists turn to classical social thinkers--W. E. B. Du Bois, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Émile Durkheim--to understand a series of twenty-first century social traumas, including the massacre at Columbine High School, the 9/11 attacks, the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, and Hurricane Katrina. Each event was overwhelming in its own right, while the relentless pace at which they occurred made it nearly impossible to absorb and interpret them in any but the most superficial ways. Yet, each uncovered social problems that cry out for our understanding and remediation. In When the Center Is on Fire, Becky Thompson and Diane Harriford asser...
Offering intentional parenthood as the most appropriate, flexible and just normative doctrine for resolving the various dilemmas that have surfaced in the modern era.
The essays in this volume examine democracy’s development in the United States, demonstrating how that process has shaped—and continues to shape—the American political system. Scholars of American politics commonly describe the political development of the United States as exceptional and distinct from that of other advanced industrial democracies. They point to the United States as the longest-lived and most stable liberal democracy in history. What they often fail to mention, though, is that it took considerable time to extend democracy throughout the country. The contributors to this volume suggest that it is intellectually fruitful to consider the U.S. case in comparison to other c...
"The authors have done a commendable and impressive job of addressing a topic of long-lasting and increasing significance in U.S. politics." ---F. Chris Garcia, University of New Mexico "This is a path-breaking book that will be read across disciplines beyond political science." ---James Jennings, Tufts University Over the past four decades, the United States has experienced the largest influx of immigrants in its history. Not only has the ratio of European to non-European newcomers changed, but recent arrivals are coming from the Asian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, South America, and other regions which have not previously supplied many immigrants to the United States. In this timely study,...
Exposes the contemporary reality of welfare rights politics, revealing how the language of colorblind racism undermines this multiracial movement. Ernst argues that although many activists are well-meaning and truly committed, they nonetheless find themselves reproducing many of the same racial and gender biases that they are trying to fight against. She presents an intersectional analysis of how these activists understand the complexities of race, class and gender and how such understandings have affected their approach to their grassroots work. From publisher description.
Having gained unique access to California prisoners and corrections officials and to thousands of prisoners’ written grievances and institutional responses, Kitty Calavita and Valerie Jenness take us inside one of the most significant, yet largely invisible, institutions in the United States. Drawing on sometimes startlingly candid interviews with prisoners and prison staff, as well as on official records, the authors walk us through the byzantine grievance process, which begins with prisoners filing claims and ends after four levels of review, with corrections officials usually denying requests for remedies. Appealing to Justice is both an unprecedented study of disputing in an extremely ...
Examines both the legal and illegal uses of the death penalty in American history.
"The question of economic justice for Black Americans remains unresolved and continues to be the subject of contentious political debate. In Unjust Restitution, Michael K. Brown examines the meaning of racial equality during three transformative periods in American history, when significant changes to economic status and opportunity appeared to be a real possibility in the US: Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society. Political leaders believed slavery and Jim Crow degraded Black people and enacted policies to rehabilitate formerly subjugated individuals. Black Americans challenged this conception and repudiated the idea that they were damaged people in need of repair. Repeatedly,...