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In today’s globalized world, where the foundations of home and social security are destabilized due to wars and neoliberal transformations, the villagers of Kosovo are linked with a common locality despite living across borders. By tracing long-distant family relations with a special focus on cross-border marriages, this study looks at the reconfiguration of care relations, gender and generational roles among kin-members of Kosovo, who now live in different European states.
Those Who Countÿscrutinizes the scientific and expert practices of Roma classification and counting, and the politics of Roma-related knowledge production. The book takes a historical perspective on Roma group construction, both as an epistemic object and a policy target, with a focus on the expert discourse of the last two decades. The book argues that knowledge production on Roma is neither objective nor disinterested but rather is co-produced by political and academic actors driven by organizational interests with rather narrow disciplinary research traditions, as well as by political manifestos. The result of such co-production is a negative Roma public image circulating well beyond the...
Since the second half of the 1980s social movements, which questioned the legitimacy of the hitherto seemingly stable systems of Kemalist Turkey and socialist Balkans, won ground. Political Islam struck Turkey; in the Balkan socialist countries the dams broke, and parliamentary democracies replaced monolithic socialist regimes. These processes have not been gender neutral. Therefore the central question is: after the abolition of patriarchy and the official installation of gender equality, are patriarchy and female discrimination returning in the region through the backdoor, although in a modernized version?
In Late Antiquity the emergence of Christian asceticism challenged the traditional Greco-Roman views and practices of family life. The resulting discussions on the right way to live a good Christian life provide us with a variety of information on both ideological statements and living experiences of late Roman childhood. This is the first book to scrutinise the interplay between family, children and asceticism in the rise of Christianity. Drawing on texts of Christian authors of the late fourth and early fifth centuries the volume approaches the study of family dynamics and childhood from both ideological and social historical perspectives. It examines the place of children in the family in...
"Reckoning with Matter" tells the story of early modern European calculating machines, from the early attempts of Blaise Pascal in the 1640s through Charles Babbage s efforts of the 1820s to 40s. All failed spectacularly. By exploring these failed technologies, Matthew L. Jones tracks diverse forms of technical life different social arrangements of practitioners, different legal conceptions of the ownership of work and ideas, and different philosophical conceptions of knowledge and skill. Philosophers, engineers, and craftspeople wrote about their distinctive competencies, about technical novelty, and about the best way to coordinate their efforts, and drawing on these remarkably well-preser...
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, people across the former socialist world saw their lives transformed. In just a few years, labor markets were completely disrupted, and the meanings attached to work were drastically altered. How did people who found themselves living under state socialism one day and capitalist democracy the next adjust to the changing social order and its new system of values? Till Hilmar examines memories of the postsocialist transition in East Germany and the Czech Republic to offer new insights into the power of narratives about economic change. Despite the structural nature of economic shifts, people often interpret life outcomes in individual terms. Many are deeply ...
Through his research on the status of women in Florence and other Italian cities, Julius Kirshner helped to establish the socio-legal history of women in late medieval and Renaissance Italy and challenge the idea that Florentine women had an inferior legal position and civic status. In Marriage, Dowry, and Citizenship in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy, Kirshner collects nine important essays which address these issues in Florence and the cities of northern and central Italy. Using a cross-disciplinary approach that draws on the methodologies of both social and legal history, the essays in this collection present a wealth of examples of daughters, wives, and widows acting as full-fledged social and legal actors. Revised and updated to reflect current scholarship, the essays in Marriage, Dowry, and Citizenship in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy appear alongside an extended introduction which situates them within the broader field of Renaissance legal history.
Although Argentina's use of genetically modified (GM) soybean seeds has spurred a major agricultural boom, it has also had a negative impact on many communities. In Soybeans and Power, Pablo Lapegna explores the ways in which these communities have coped with GM soybean expansion. Peasants initially resisted, yet ultimately adapted to the new agricultural technologies, playing an active role in their own demobilization in order to maneuver the situation to their advantage. A rare glimpse into the life cycle of a social movement, Soybeans and Power gives voice to the communities most adversely affected by GM technology and the strategies that they have enacted in order to survive.
The new immigrants coming to the United States and establishing ethnic congregations do not abandon religious ties in their home countries. Rather, as they communicate with family and friends left behind in their homelands, they influence religious structures and practices there. Religion Across Borders examines both personal and organizational networks that exist between members in U.S. immigrant religious communities and individuals and religious institutions left behind. Building upon Religion and the New Immigrants (2000)_their previous study of immigrant religious communities in Houston_sociologists Ebaugh and Chafetz ask how religious remittances flow between home and host communities,...