Time and Social Theory

Time and Social Theory PDF Author: Barbara Adam
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745669395
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Book Description
Time is at the forefront of contemporary scholarly inquiry across the natural sciences and the humanities. Yet the social sciences have remained substantially isolated from time-related concerns. This book argues that time should be a key part of social theory and focuses concern upon issues which have emerged as central to an understanding of today's social world. Through her analysis of time Barbara Adam shows that our contemporary social theories are firmly embedded in Newtonian science and classical dualistic philosophy. She exposes these classical frameworks of thought as inadequate to the task of conceptualizing our contemporary world of standardized time, computers, nuclear power and global telecommunications.

Performing Politics: Media Interviews, Debates and Press Conferences

Performing Politics: Media Interviews, Debates and Press Conferences PDF Author: Geoffrey Craig
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745689655
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
For successful political leaders, public speaking is only half the battle. A good politician must also be a competent performer. Whether facing critical questions in an interview, posturing in a leaders’ debate, or conversing on a daytime chat show, success is reliant upon a candidate’s ability to dramatically but authentically impart a strong individual identity. In this innovative analysis, Geoffrey Craig looks at the interrogative exchanges between politicians and journalists. The power struggles and evasions in these encounters often leave the public exasperated, but it is the politicians’ negotiation of these struggles that determines success. Drawing on analyses of the language and performances of leaders such as Barack Obama and David Cameron, Craig examines the particular kinds of interactions that occur across political interviews, debates, conferences, and talk shows. The political games that take place between politicians and journalists, he argues, constitute the true theatre of politics. Engaging and insightful, Performing Politics will appeal to students and scholars of journalism, politics, linguistics, and media studies, as well as anyone concerned about the quality of contemporary political communication.

Performing Polity

Performing Polity PDF Author: Carolyn P. Collette
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
Reading a variety of texts centred in the power and agency of women during the period 1385 to 1620, this book examines changing ideals of gender within the context of changing ideologies of governance and polity. Together the essays that comprise this book lay out three lines of thinking about women and polity: that the ideology of late medieval gender roles articulated in Anglo-French texts of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries outlined important roles for women's voice and agency in supporting the larger polity as well as the smaller household; that the acceptance and the value of those roles diminished as models of polity in both Church and State in England changed in the early modern period; that to see this change merely in terms of change in expectations of gender roles is to miss the vital link between the status of women and the political construction of individual relationship to authority. Woman is the site on which society delineates the degree of freedom and independence it will tolerate in the political subject. The attention directed to women's roles in the plethora of woman-centred stories, courtesy books, prayer books, sermons and tracts in the period 1385-1620 is an index to shifting alignments of power that replaced medieval models of partnership and co-operation with models of obedience.

Dancing Modernism / Performing Politics

Dancing Modernism / Performing Politics PDF Author: Mark Franko
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253065445
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
In the much-anticipated update to a classic in dance studies, Mark Franko analyzes the political aspects of North American modern dance in the 20th century. A revisionary account of the evolution of modern dance, this revised edition of Dancing Modernism / Performing Politics features a foreword by Juan Ignacio Vallejos on Franko's career, a new preface, a new chapter on Yvonne Rainer, and an appendix of left-wing dance theory articles from the 1930s. Questioning assumptions that dancing reflects culture, Franko employs a unique interdisciplinary approach to dance analysis that draws from cultural theory, feminist studies, and sexual, class, and modernist politics. Franko also highlights the stories of such dancers as Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and even revolutionaries like Douglas Dunn in order to upend and contradict ideas on autonomy and traditionally accepted modernist dance history. Revealing the captivating development of modern dance, this revised edition of Dancing Modernism / Performing Politics will fascinate anyone interested in the intersection of performance studies, history, and politics.

State of Crisis

State of Crisis PDF Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745685293
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 151

Book Description
Today we hear much talk of crisis and comparisons are often made with the Great Depression of the 1930s, but there is a crucial difference that sets our current malaise apart from the 1930s: today we no longer trust in the capacity of the state to resolve the crisis and to chart a new way forward. In our increasingly globalized world, states have been stripped of much of their power to shape the course of events. Many of our problems are globally produced but the volume of power at the disposal of individual nation-states is simply not sufficient to cope with the problems they face. This divorce between power and politics produces a new kind of paralysis. It undermines the political agency that is needed to tackle the crisis and it saps citizens’ belief that governments can deliver on their promises. The impotence of governments goes hand in hand with the growing cynicism and distrust of citizens. Hence the current crisis is at once a crisis of agency, a crisis of representative democracy and a crisis of the sovereignty of the state. In this book the world-renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and fellow traveller Carlo Bordoni explore the social and political dimensions of the current crisis. While this crisis has been greatly exacerbated by the turmoil following the financial crisis of 2007-8, Bauman and Bordoni argue that the crisis facing Western societies is rooted in a much more profound series of transformations that stretch back further in time and are producing long-lasting effects. This highly original analysis of our current predicament by two of the world’s leading social thinkers will be of interest to a wide readership.

Reflections on Empire

Reflections on Empire PDF Author: Antonio Negri
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745637051
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Book Description
This new book from Antonio Negri, one of the most influential political thinkers writing today, provides a concise and accessible introduction to the key ideas of his recent work. Giving the reader a sense of the wider context in which Negri has developed the ideas that have become so central to current debates, the book is made up of five lectures which address a series of topics that are dealt with in his world-famous books empire, globalization, multitude, sovereignty, democracy. Reflections on Empire will appeal to anyone interested in current debates about the ways in which the world is changing today, to the many people who are followers of Negri's work and to students and scholars in sociology, politics and cultural studies.

The Performance of Politics

The Performance of Politics PDF Author: Jeffrey C. Alexander
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199780021
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Book Description
Contemporary observers of politics in America often reduce democracy to demography. Whatever portion of the vote not explained by the class, gender, race, and religious differences of voters is attributed to the candidates' positions on the issues of the day. But are these the only--or even the main--factors that determine the vote? The Performance of Politics develops a new way of looking at democratic struggles for power, explaining what happened, and why, during the 2008 presidential campaign in the United States. Drawing on vivid examples taken from a range of media coverage, participant observation at a Camp Obama, and interviews with leading political journalists, Jeffrey Alexander argues that images, emotion, and performance are the central features of the battle for power. While these features have been largely overlooked by pundits, they are, in fact, the primary foci of politicians and their staff. Obama and McCain painstakingly constructed heroic self-images for their campaigns and the successful projections of those images suffused not only each candidate's actual rallies, and not only their media messages, but also the ground game. Money and organization facilitate the ground game, but they do not determine it. Emotion, images, and performance do. Though an untested senator and the underdog in his own party, Obama succeeded in casting himself as the hero--and McCain the anti-hero--and the only candidate fit to lead in challenging times. Illuminating the drama of Obama's celebrity, the effect of Sarah Palin on the race, and the impact of the emerging financial crisis, Alexander's engaging narrative marries the immediacy and excitement of the final months of this historic presidential campaign with a new understanding of how politics work.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler PDF Author: Moya Lloyd
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745654800
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
With the publication of her highly acclaimed and much-cited book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler became one of the most influential feminist theorists of her generation. Her theory of gender performativity and her writings on corporeality, on the injurious capacity of language, on the vulnerability of human life to violence and on the impact of mourning on politics have, taken together, comprised a substantial and highly original body of work that has a wide and truly cross-disciplinary appeal. In this lively book, Moya Lloyd provides both a clear exposition and an original critique of Butler's work. She examines Butlers core ideas, traces the development of her thought from her first book to her most recent work, and assesses Butlers engagements with the philosophies of Hegel, Foucault, Derrida, Irigaray and de Beauvoir, as well as addressing the nature and impact of Butler's writing on feminist theory. Throughout Lloyd is particularly concerned to examine Butler's political theory, including her critical interventions in such contemporary political controversies as those surrounding gay marriage, hate-speech, human rights, and September 11 and its aftermath. Judith Butler offers an accessible and original contribution to existing debates that will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike.

Wasted Lives

Wasted Lives PDF Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745637159
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 120

Book Description
The production of ‘human waste’ – or more precisely, wasted lives, the ‘superfluous’ populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts – is an inevitable outcome of modernization. It is an unavoidable side-effect of economic progress and the quest for order which is characteristic of modernity. As long as large parts of the world remained wholly or partly unaffected by modernization, they were treated by modernizing societies as lands that were able to absorb the excess of population in the ‘developed countries’. Global solutions were sought, and temporarily found, to locally produced overpopulation problems. But as modernization has reached the furthest lands of the planet, ‘redundant population’ is produced everywhere and all localities have to bear the consequences of modernity’s global triumph. They are now confronted with the need to seek – in vain, it seems – local solutions to globally produced problems. The global spread of the modernity has given rise to growing quantities of human beings who are deprived of adequate means of survival, but the planet is fast running out of places to put them. Hence the new anxieties about ‘immigrants’ and ‘asylum seekers’ and the growing role played by diffuse ‘security fears’ on the contemporary political agenda. With characteristic brilliance, this new book by Zygmunt Bauman unravels the impact of this transformation on our contemporary culture and politics and shows that the problem of coping with ‘human waste’ provides a key for understanding some otherwise baffling features of our shared life, from the strategies of global domination to the most intimate aspects of human relationships.

The Politics of Performance

The Politics of Performance PDF Author: Baz Kershaw
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134932723
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Book Description
Addresses fundamental questions about the social and political purposes of performance through an investigation of post-war alternative and community theatre. A detailed analysis of oppositional theatre as radical cultural practice.