Browse

The United States has become the central state of a global world-system. Analogous in structure to China's historical Ming Dynasty tianxia ("all under heaven"), the American Tianxia is centered on the United States but incorporates other countries in proportion to their acceptance of individualistic world-society principles like human rights, democracy, and rule of law. Contrary to declinist narratives, the prominence of the United States in global distinction hierarchies is solidifying, because the externalities generated by membership in global networks ensure that people value access to these networks even when the interests of their countries clash with US interests. In the state-centric world-view of international relations scholars, China is a potential challenger to US unipolarity, but by 2010 the five Anglo-Saxon countries are likely to reach population parity with China, while over the same period hundreds of thousands of elite Chinese are likely to move their families to the United States, primarily through birth tourism. Continued US dominance is based on the incentive structures faced by these and other individuals, not on the vagaries of international relations. The American Tianxia is thus the Hegelian universal and homogeneous state that Francis Fukuyama was looking for but did not find at the end of history. It constitutes a new, millennial world-system that is very stable and likely to last for several centuries.

What would it take to make society better? For the majority, conditions are getting worse and this will continue unless strong action is taken. This book offers a wide range of expert opinions outlining what might help to make better societies and which mechanisms, interventions, and evidence are needed when we think about a better society. The book looks at what is needed to prevent the proliferation of harm and the gradual collapse of civil society. It argues that social scientists need to cast aside their commitment to the established order and its ideological support systems, look ahead at the likely outcomes of various interventions and move to the forefront of informed political debate. Providing practical steps and policy programmes, this book is ideal for academics and students across a wide range of social science fields and those interested in social inequality.

This book brings theoretical understandings of migration and displacement (including displacement as a result of urban redevelopment programmes) together with empirical illustrations of the varying ways in which communities respond. These responses can be negative, divisive and exclusionary. But responses to migration and displacement can also be positive and mutually supportive, building solidarities both within and between communities, whether locally or transnationally. Drawing upon original research, the book includes case studies from varying international contexts, illustrating how different communities respond to the challenges of migration and displacement. These include examples of responses through community arts – such as poetry, story-telling and photography, exploring the scope for building communities (including transnational, diaspora communities) of solidarity and social justice. The concluding chapters identify potential implications for public policy and professional practice, aiming to promote communities of solidarity, addressing the structural causes of widening inequalities, taking account of different interests, including those related to social class, gender, ethnicity, ability and age.

Attempts at educational equity amount to local activities performed within unequal and disjunctive political forces. As a politics, educational equity is redolent of the conditions that produce unequal schooling in the first place. Based on a four-year multi-modal study, this book identifies the forces that produced unequal schooling opportunities for Black families in Toronto, Canada, while simultaneously identifying the conditions that generated an Africentric Alternative School for these families and the Black community. The book identifies how the conditions that created unequal schooling were some of the very conditions that produced educational equity in the form of the school. This includes four preconditions to relay an account of the school’s origin, including biopolitics, neoliberalism, the politics of recognition, and the city and its relationships to ideologies of race and multiculturalism. Each precondition is discussed in a separate chapter and in relation to a significant policy event that precipitated the becoming of the Africentric Alternative School. The book utilises an unique feature by developing a ‘subtext’ that accompanies each chapter, whereby the authors reflect upon the theoretical and methodological choices in each corresponding chapter. The book concludes how this particular analysis of education policy can be used to map constellations of power and force that have a large degree of influence over policy subjects and policy actors, in concerted attempts to identify the important preconditions that shape recurring attempts at racial justice.

This book provides a critical discussion of extended working life theory and policy from an international perspective. It discusses policy, practice and employment and pensions patterns in seven countries, Australia, Ireland, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States from gender and life course perspectives. Raising retirement ages appear to work on the assumption that there is appropriate employment available for people who are expected to retire later. This book challenges this assumption, along with the gender-neutral way the expectation for extending working lives is presented in most policy-making circles. Part of the Ageing in a Global Context series, the international contributors apply life course approaches to understanding evolving definitions of work and retirement. They consider the range of transitions from paid work to retirement that are potentially different for women and men in different family circumstances and occupational locations, and offer policy solutions governments should consider to enable them to evaluate existing policies.

Drawing on empirical research with the UK’s two largest charitable food organisations, this book explores the prolific rise of food charity over the last 15 years and its implications for overcoming food insecurity. As the welfare state withdraws, leaving food banks to protect the most vulnerable, the author questions the sustainability of this system and asks where responsibility lies – in practice and in theory – for ensuring everyone can realise their human right to food. The book argues that effective, policy-driven solutions require a clear rights-based framework, which enables a range of actors including the state, charities and the food industry to work together towards, and be held accountable for, the progressive realisation of the right to food for all in the UK.

Indigeneity is a politics of potential. It allows indigenous peoples to think and pursue political aspirations beyond colonial victimhood. The politics of indigeneity is a theory of human agency. It is closely intertwined with discourses of reconciliation, self-determination and sovereignty. This book explores these discourses’ significance for contemporary indigenous politics. It uses them to examine just terms of indigenous citizenship in three contemporary post-settler states. The book argues for differentiated liberal citizenship as a way of allowing indigenous peoples to share in the public sovereignty of the nation-state while, at the same time, sharing a meaningful political authority vested in indigenous institutions. It tests neo-colonial understandings of power, politics and justice. The book’s comparative focus is unique. It compares the Australasian states with Fiji to show that historical constraints on political authority are not diminished with the withdrawal of the colonial power alone. Nor does the restoration of collective indigenous majority status, on its own, serve meaningful self-determination. Conversely, negative power relationships in Australia and New Zealand are not simply a function of minority status in majoritarian democracies. The comparison shows that the claims of indigeneity must hold equally well whatever the post-colonial indigenous population status.

This book explores the aims and priorities of trends to internationalize social work education, in the context of wider processes of economic and cultural globalization. Its analysis draws on interviews with leading social work educators who have been recipients of the Katherine Kendall Award of the International Association of Schools of Social Work, for their contribution to international social work education. Three phases of internationalization are identified: a foundation phase before World War II, an establishment phase until the millennium and a subsequent shift towards international advocacy on issues of concern to the social work profession. Interviews and in three cases biographies illustrate the concerns and internationalizing activities of leading educators during these last two phases. A focus in the 20th century on achieving the adoption of social work education and practice throughout the world led to a concern for practice education and community and social development. An important project in the 1970s involved family planning as a focus of social development. Social justice, political and social conflict and more recently green issues have engaged educators' commitments. Even though women are in a majority in social work, women leaders and leaders from the Global South often faced considerable struggle to assert their research and development priorities. The analysis shows that most Kendall awardees came from Europe and the US, where finance and linguistic and cultural hegemony facilitated educators in playing international roles.

To repartner in later life is increasingly common in large parts of the Western world. This book addresses the gap in knowledge about late life repartnering and provides a comprehensive map of the changing landscape of late life intimacy. The book examines the changing structural conditions of intimacy and ageing in late modernity. How do longer lives, changing norms and new technologies affect older people’s relationship careers, their attitudes to repartnering and the formation of new relationships? Which forms do these new unions take? What does a new intimate relationship offer older men and women and what are the consequences for social integration? What is the role and meaning of sex? By introducing a gains-perspective the book challenges stereotypes of old age as a period of loss and decline. It also challenges the image of older people as conservative, and instead present them as an avant-garde that often experiment with new ways of being together.

This book examines minority women’s experiences of and activism within the austerity regimes of France and Britain. Through in depth case studies of the particular dynamics of austerity and activism in Scotland, England and France, we explore how activists operate in this moment of political and economic uncertainty and practice a ‘politics of survival’ (Hill Collins 2000). It explores how race, class, gender and legal status interact and shape both minority women’s grassroots anti-austerity activism in each country and what kinds of claims and political actors are recognised and legitimated by both policymakers and civil society allies. It is interested in who is audible and legitimate and how these hierarchies of knowledge and political credibility are reproduced or overthrown. Centering minority women’s articulations of both crisis and resistance is a way to subvert the dominant narrative of both ‘crisis’ and ‘activism’.