Reconfiguring the World PDF Download

Author: Margaret J. Osler
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 080189655X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
Ultimately, she shows how a few gifted students of nature changed the way we see ourselves and the universe.

Author: Affrica Taylor
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136672176
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
In this fascinating new book, Affrica Taylor encourages an exciting paradigmatic shift in the ways in which childhood and nature are conceived and pedagogically deployed, and invites readers to critically reassess the naturalist childhood discourses that are rife within popular culture and early years education.Through adopting a common worlds fram

Author: Carl Grodach
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317912020
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Following decades of neglect and decline, many US cities have undergone a dramatic renaissance. From New York to Nashville and Pittsburgh to Portland governments have implemented innovative redevelopment strategies to adapt to a globally integrated, post-industrial economy and cope with declining industries, tax bases, and populations. However, despite the prominence of new amenities in revitalized neighborhoods, spectacular architectural icons, and pedestrian friendly entertainment districts, the urban comeback has been highly uneven. Even thriving cities are defined by a bifurcated population of creative class professionals and a low-wage, low-skilled workforce. Many are home to diverse and thriving immigrant communities, but also contain economically and socially segregated neighborhoods. They have transformed high-profile central city brownfields, but many disadvantaged neighborhoods continue to grapple with abandoned and environmentally contaminated sites. As urban cores boom, inner-ring suburban areas increasingly face mounting problems, while other shrinking cities continue to wrestle with long-term decline. The Great Recession brought additional challenges to planning and development professionals and community organizations alike as they work to maintain successes and respond to new problems. It is crucial that students of urban revitalization recognize these challenges, their impacts on different populations, and the implications for crafting effective and equitable revitalization policy. Urban Revitalization: Remaking Cities in a Changing World will be a guide in this learning process. This textbook will be the first to comprehensively and critically synthesize the successful approaches and pressing challenges involved in urban revitalization. The book is divided into five sections. In the introductory section, we set the stage by providing a conceptual framework to understand urban revitalization that links a political economy perspective with an appreciation of socio-cultural factors in explaining urban change. Stemming from this, we will explain the significance of revitalization and present a summary of the key debates, issues and conflicts surrounding revitalization efforts. Section II will examine the historical causes for decline in central city and inner-ring suburban areas and shrinking cities and, building from the conceptual framework, discuss theory useful to explain the factors that shape contemporary revitalization initiatives and outcomes. Section III will introduce students to the analytical techniques and key data sources for urban revitalization planning. Section IV will provide an in-depth, criticaldiscussion of contemporary urban revitalization policies, strategies, and projects. This section will offer a rich set of case studies that contextualize key themes and strategic areas across a range of contexts including the urban core, central city neighborhoods, suburban areas, and shrinking cities. Lastly, Section V concludes by reflecting on the current state of urban revitalization planning and the emerging challenges the field must face in the future. Urban Revitalization will integrate academic and policy research with professional knowledge and techniques. Its key strength will be the combination of a critical examination of best practices and innovative approaches with an overview of the methods used to understand local situations and urban revitalization processes. A unique feature will be chapter-specific case studies of contemporary urban revitalization projects and questions geared toward generatingclassroom discussion around key issues. The book will be written in an accessible style and thoughtfully organized to provide graduate and upper-level undergraduate students with a comprehensive resource that will also serve as a reference guide for professionals

Author: Julia Adeney Thomas
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520926846
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Julia Adeney Thomas turns the concept of nature into a powerful analytical lens through which to view Japanese modernity, bringing the study of both Japanese history and political modernity to a new level of clarity. She shows that nature necessarily functions as a political concept and that changing ideas of nature's political authority were central during Japan's transformation from a semifeudal world to an industrializing colonial empire. In political documents from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, nature was redefined, moving from the universal, spatial concept of the Tokugawa period, through temporal, social Darwinian ideas of inevitable progress and competitive struggle, to a celebration of Japan as a nation uniquely in harmony with nature. The so-called traditional "Japanese love of nature" masks modern state power. Thomas's theoretically sophisticated study rejects the supposition that modernity is the ideological antithesis of nature, overcoming the determinism of the physical environment through technology and liberating denatured subjects from the chains of biology and tradition. In making "nature" available as a critical term for political analysis, this book yields new insights into prewar Japan's failure to achieve liberal democracy, as well as an alternative means of understanding modernity and the position of non-Western nations within it.

Author: David McKie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134161115
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
This book reconfigures the field of public relations so that it can better engage with the changing world of the 21st century. It identifies the virtual absence of contemporary theories that are core in other disciplines and fills the gap by integrating critical, postmodern, poststructural, postcolonial and other relevant theories into public relations. Reconfiguring Public Relations reenergises thinking about diversity through equity and in terms of business enterprise and environmental sustainability. It makes the case for more equitable diversity strategies in an era of increasing globalisation and establishes their relevance to organisational identity and core values. The book clarifies the present by taking a look back at the past and projecting forward to possible futures, including scenarios.

Author: Donald R. Kelley
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538127954
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
The world is becoming more complex, fraught with increasing possibilities for conflict over national rivalries, economic competition, and cultural and ideological fault lines. This clear-eyed text offers a structured and theoretically grounded way to think about the forces that animate change and the alternative futures they may create. Donald Kelley views both contemporary reality and the future we face through the perspective of four different paradigms that shape our way of thinking about the world: The nation-state paradigm, built on the assumption that the traditional Westphalian nation-state remains the key building block of the present and the future, which leads us to predict the future in terms of the nature and alignment of nation-states The economic paradigm, built on the assumption that economic factors are increasingly important, which leads us to see the future in terms of factors such as interdependence, globalization, and trade as well as the growing opposition to these developments and the prioritization of national economic needs The identity and culture paradigm, built on the distinct identities and cultures of nations and regions, which leads us to view the future in terms of conflicting culture-based communities transcending formal national or economic interests The ideology paradigm, based on a post-cold war reemergence of ideological conflict within and among nations, which leads us to view a world based on ideology-based conflict From these paradigms and their interactions, Kelley builds a series of possible alternative futures of the international system. His framework provides a unique way of looking at how and why the world is changing and the many different “futures”—some peaceful and productive, some warlike and destructive, and others simply dysfunctional—in which we might live.

Author: Jessica L. Adler
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421422875
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
In the World War I era, veterans fought for a unique right: access to government-sponsored health care. In the process, they built a pillar of American social policy. Burdens of War explores how the establishment of the veterans’ health system marked a reimagining of modern veterans’ benefits and signaled a pathbreaking validation of the power of professionalized institutional medical care. Adler reveals that a veterans’ health system came about incrementally, amid skepticism from legislators, doctors, and army officials concerned about the burden of long-term obligations, monetary or otherwise, to ex-service members. She shows how veterans’ welfare shifted from centering on pension and domicile care programs rooted in the nineteenth century to direct access to health services. She also traces the way that fluctuating ideals about hospitals and medical care influenced policy at the dusk of the Progressive Era; how race, class, and gender affected the health-related experiences of soldiers, veterans, and caregivers; and how interest groups capitalized on a tense political and social climate to bring about change. The book moves from the 1910s—when service members requested better treatment, Congress approved new facilities and increased funding, and elected officials expressed misgivings about who should have access to care—to the 1930s, when the economic crash prompted veterans to increasingly turn to hospitals for support while bureaucrats, politicians, and doctors attempted to rein in the system. By the eve of World War II, the roots of what would become the country’s largest integrated health care system were firmly planted and primed for growth. Drawing readers into a critical debate about the level of responsibility America bears for wounded service members, Burdens of War is a unique and moving case study. -- Jennifer D. Keene, Chapman University, author of Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America

Author: Karen Barad
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822339175
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
A theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, Karen Barad elaborates her theory of agential realism, a schema that is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics.

Author: Sheila Croucher
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538101661
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
In the decades since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States forces of cultural, economic, and political integration appear locked in battle with equally powerful forces of fragmentation. Globalization is facilitating unprecedented movement of goods, services, people, and ideas, while calls for building walls, erecting fences, and strengthening borders intensify. Tensions flare around claims of deeply rooted ethnic and civilizational identities—identities that are shaped and mobilized via sophisticated advances in technology. Women worldwide are achieving remarkable economic and political gains while sexual violence and gender inequalities persist and are fueled by rapid global change. This book explores the complex inter-relationship between globalization and belonging. In a hyper-modern, 21st-century world, questions and conflicts surrounding who ‘we’ are and who ‘we’ want to be predominate. This book links the politics of different forms of identification and attachment to the dynamics of an increasingly interconnected world.

Author: Yayoi Uno Everett
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253018056
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Yayoi Uno Everett focuses on four operas that helped shape the careers of the composers Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, and Tan Dun, which represent a unique encounter of music and production through what Everett calls "multimodal narrative." Aspects of production design, the mechanics of stagecraft, and their interaction with music and sung texts contribute significantly to the semiotics of operatic storytelling. Everett's study draws on Northrop Frye's theories of myth, Lacanian psychoanalysis via Slavoj Žižek, Linda and Michael Hutcheon's notion of production, and musical semiotics found in Robert Hatten's concept of troping in order to provide original interpretive models for conceptualizing new operatic narratives.