Download or read book Inarticulate Society written by Tom Shachtman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-09-11 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Schachtman, author of Skyscraper Dreams, approaches the muddy, intolerant world of political conversation through the belief that Americans have lost the ability to respond and argue differing points of view without coming swiftly to blows. Considering the rising tide of political violence in America and the hateful and intolerant speech that appears to incite it, Thomas Schachtman argues that political debates are in danger of moving from the Senate chamber to the streets, taking the social stability needed for a working democracy with it. Blaming this decline on the jargon used by specialists in the professions and academia in order to distinguish superiority over common citizens, Schachtman proposes a concrete, multifaceted program for rehabilitating eloquence through the constructive use of media in combination with political and educational reform.
Download or read book Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking 1709 1791 written by Freya Johnston and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2005-02-17 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Johnson's centrality in the late eighteenth century makes his fretfulness about the social and aesthetic boundaries of writing especially fertile and influential. This book suggests that literary taxonomies, inventories, and canons simultaneously construct and reject a hierarchy of ethical as well as aesthetic values, and examines how figures of cultural authority conceive of their relationships to and with the margins of writing and of society.
Download or read book Novel Notions written by Katherine E. Kickel and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-06-14 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medical, popular, and literary understanding about the imagination converged when Thomas Willis asserted that he had discovered the area of the brain that facilitated imagining. Taking this 'discovery' as paradigmatic, Novel Notions examines the reverberations of the medical investigation of the imagination in early British novels by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Ann Radcliffe. It argues that one of the novel's central features was a mapping of the terrain of human cognition, imagination, and creation, as a continuation of early modern medicine's account of perceptual experience. All the novels discussed reveal a simultaneous anxiety and excitement about medicine's understanding of the relationship between the imagination and perceptual experience through narrators who reflect on the nature of authoring.
Download or read book Archons and Acolytes written by Clarence Cyril Walton and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1998 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A commentary on contemporary culture, focusing on the tension between the viewpoints of G.K. Chesterton and Jean Baudrillard. Walton (retired president, Catholic University of America) builds his arguments in the margins of Harvard Professor Richard Pipes' claim that the US has recently acquired a "vociferous intelligentsia." Walton critiques this intelligentsia in all its forms, particularly deconstructionists, postmoderns, and gender feminists. Also covers the impact of this elite on law, business, and religion. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Relevance and Irrelevance written by Jan Strassheim and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-09-24 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relevance drives our actions and channels our attention; it shapes how we make sense of the world and communicate with each other. Irrelevance spreads a twilight which blurs the line between information we do not want to access and information we cannot access. In disciplines as diverse as philosophy, sociology, the information sciences and linguistics, “relevance” has been proposed as a key concept. This book is the first to bring together the often unrelated traditions. Researchers from different fields discuss relevance and relate it to the challenges of “irrelevance”, which have so far been neglected despite their significance for our chances of making well-informed decisions and understanding others. The contributions focus on theoretical and conceptual questions, on specific factors and fields, and on practical and political implications of relevance and irrelevance as forces which are even stronger when they remain in the background.
Download or read book Building Social Capital in Thailand written by Danny Unger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-09-28 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1984 and 1994 Thailand had the most rapid economic expansion in the world. This 1998 book offers an explanation of this successful record of economic growth in Thailand, and in Southeast Asia more generally. The book explains why Thai leaders adopted a market-driven strategy from the late 1950s, and also shows how the overseas Chinese in Thailand built on their community's social capital to overcome the market failures common to all developing countries. Unger takes an interdisciplinary approach, building on the literatures of social capital and embedded autonomy. He considers the unique organization of Thai society, and the impact this has had on the country's institutions, and their political and economic outcomes. The book includes detailed analysis of the financial and textile sectors, as well as the development of heavy industries and transportation infrastructure.
Download or read book Four Contemporary Novels written by Kerry McSweeney and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1983-01-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four Contemporary Novelists offer accounts of the fiction of Angus Wilson, Brian Moore, John Fowles, and V. S. Naipaul. The author has charted the development of each writer; identified dominant themes, controlling techniques, and informing sensibility; explained what each has tried to accomplish and compare theory to practice; provided an appropriate context for appreciation and evaluation of all parts of each canon; and made qualitative discriminations.
Download or read book Communication and Consequences written by Robert Norton and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The communicative process allows, sometimes forces, one to make connections about the self and simultaneously how the self relates to the other and the world. The bonus of communicating is that one makes connections with other individuals. Not only are social connections made, but political, business, spiritual, esoteric, and functional connections as well. Each connection holds the possibility of teaching the person more about the self and the world. This book helps individuals understand the dynamics of change particularly by focusing on enthymematic communication that can be used to effect change. It demonstrates the simultaneous potential of communication to both constrain and free the individual. The first part of the book establishes the theoretical ground by identifying the definitional issues, defining communication, and relating content and style to the sense-making function of interaction. The second part examines the primary consequences of interaction in both self and relational identity. Communication creates self-identification as well as relational identity, both of which provide a means of stabilizing the self and simultaneously allowing for change.
Download or read book Uncommon Thinking written by Babashola Chinsman and published by Trafford Publishing. This book was released on 2007-02-08 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When independence arrived in sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1960s, everyone was optimistic higher living standards would quickly follow. But after almost half-a-century of intensive policy and institutional reforms, and massive foreign grants and loans, the condition of the majority has hardly improved. Bad governance has been a key factor, and must be rectified before the region can attain its aspirations. But the need for reforms extends beyond African governments alone. Some of the prescriptions donors enthusiastically promoted were flawed. Others acted as disincentives to development. Market principles, backed with external aid mostly targeting humanitarian relief, did not lay a solid foundation for growth. The problem though is not with the basic principles, but with the failure to apply them contextually. The response to poverty - the major challenge in the region - is a typical case in point. Conventional programmes try to mitigate the suffering of the poor, only to keep them hovering at the edge of hardship. A pragmatic response would recognize that poverty prevents an economy from operating at its full potential, and would elicit action to bring the poor into mainstream economic activity. Reducing poverty is no longer a magnanimous gesture, because it makes good economic and business sense. This uncommon perspective, taking social realities in the region into account, is the basis of the new strategies for policy and institutional reforms, aid management and governance, that are advanced. It is not policies and strategies alone that need to be fixed. Complex delivery processes need to be simplified. Progress would not require a revolution, but a gradual accumulation of small results, interacting to produce big impact. Most importantly, development should be promoted as an activity people do for themselves. With the right incentives, people can organize themselves to beat the adversity of poverty.
Download or read book Communication Centers written by Kathleen J. Turner and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-01-12 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communication Centers: A Theory-Based Guide to Training and Management offers advice based on extant research and best practices to both faculty who are asked to develop a communication center and for directors of established centers. Broken into easily understood parts, Turner and Sheckels begin with the development of communication centers, offering guidance on the history of centers, how to start a center, and, in a contribution by Kyle Love, creative approaches to marketing. They provide a communication perspective on selecting and training tutors, and then address how to train the tutors in their tasks of helping students with invention, disposition, style, memory, and delivery as well as presentation aids, including consideration of special situations and diverse populations. The authors explore ways to broaden the vision for communication centers, and conclude with chapters on techniques for assessment by Marlene Preston and on the rich rhetorical roots of communication centers by Linda Hobgood. The volume concludes with appendixes on guidelines for directors and for certification of tutor training programs. Communication Centers is a valuable resource for scholars in any stage of developing or improving a communication center at their university.
Download or read book Shades of Loneliness written by Richard Stivers and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2004 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this incisive and controversial book, Richard Stivers rejects genetic explanations of psychological problems, arguing instead that the very organization of technological societies is behind the pervasive experience of loneliness. In its extreme form, loneliness assumes pathological dimensions in neurosis and schizophrenia, which reflect the contradiction between power and meaninglessness that characterizes modern life. Loneliness, in its many manifestations, seems to be the price we must pay for living in a technological world. Yet nurturing family, friend, and community ties can mitigate its culturally and psychologically disorganizing power. This book is a clarion call for a renewal of moral awareness and custom to combat the fragmentation and depersonalization of our technological civilization. Visit our website for sample chapters!
Download or read book Realism for Realistic People written by Hasok Chang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-13 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative book, Hasok Chang constructs a philosophy of science for 'realistic people' interested in understanding and promoting the actual practices of inquiry in science and other knowledge-focused areas of life. Inspired by pragmatist philosophy, he reconceives the very notions of reality and truth on the basis of his concept of the 'operational coherence' of epistemic activities, and offers new pragmatist conceptions of truth and reality as operational ideals achievable in actual scientific practice. Rejecting the version of scientific realism that is concerned with claiming that our theories correspond to an ultimate reality, he proposes instead an 'activist realism': a commitment to do all that we can actually do to improve our knowledge of realities. His book will appeal to scholars and students in philosophy, science and the history of science, and all who are concerned about the place of science and empirical truth in society.
Download or read book High Theory Low Culture written by M. Brottman and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-03-01 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In High Theory/Low Culture , Brottman uses the tools of 'high' cultural theory to examine many areas of today's popular culture, including style magazines, sport, shopping, tabloid newspapers, horror movies and pornography. In doing so, she not only demonstrates the practical use of 'high' theory as it relates to our everyday world, but she also investigates the kinds of 'low' culture that are regularly dismissed by academic scholars. Through a close examination of these cultural forms, Brottman reveals how the kinds of popular culture that we usually take for granted are, in fact, far more complex and sophisticated than is normally assumed.
Download or read book Liberal Learning and the Art of Self Governance written by Emily Chamlee-Wright and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concerns over affordability and accountability have tended to direct focus away from the central aims of liberal learning, such as preparing minds for free inquiry and inculcating the habits of mind, practical skills, and values necessary for effective participation in civil society. The contributors to this volume seek to understand better what it is that can be done on a day-to-day basis within institutions of liberal learning that shape the habits and practices of civil society. The central argument of this volume is that institutions of liberal learning are critical to a developing and flourishing civil society. It is within these "civil society incubators" that the habits of open discourse are practiced and honed; that a collaborative (often contentious) commitment to truth seeking serves as the rules that govern our work together; that the rules of personal and widespread social cooperation are established, practiced, and refined. Many have made this argument as it relates to community based learning, and we explore that theme here as well. But acquiring and practicing the habits of civil society recur within and throughout the college context—in the classrooms, in college governance structures, in professional associations, in collaborative research, in the residence halls, and on the playing field. To put it another way, when they are at their best, institutions of liberal learning are contexts in which students learn how to live in a free society and learn the art of self-governance.
Download or read book Gifted Tongues written by Gary Alan Fine and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learning to argue and persuade in a highly competitive environment is only one aspect of life on a high-school debate team. Teenage debaters also participate in a distinct cultural world--complete with its own jargon and status system--in which they must negotiate complicated relationships with teammates, competitors, coaches, and parents as well as classmates outside the debating circuit. In Gifted Tongues, Gary Alan Fine offers a rich description of this world as a testing ground for both intellectual and emotional development, while seeking to understand adolescents as social actors. Considering the benefits and drawbacks of the debating experience, he also recommends ways of reshaping programs so that more high schools can use them to boost academic performance and foster specific skills in citizenship. Fine analyzes the training of debaters in rapid-fire speech, rules of logical argumentation, and the strategic use of evidence, and how this training instills the core values of such American institutions as law and politics. Debates, however, sometimes veer quickly from fine displays of logic to acts of immaturity--a reflection of the tensions experienced by young people learning to think as adults. Fine contributes to our understanding of teenage years by encouraging us not to view them as a distinct stage of development but rather a time in which young people draw from a toolkit of both childlike and adult behaviors. A well-designed debate program, he concludes, nurtures the intellect while providing a setting in which teens learn to make better behavioral choices, ones that will shape relationships in their personal, professional, and civic lives.
Download or read book SAGE Qualitative Research Methods written by Paul Atkinson and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2010-11-17 with total page 1617 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SAGE has been a major force shaping the field of qualitative methods, not just in its specialist methods journals like Qualitative Inquiry but in the ′empirical′ journals such as Social Studies of Science. Delving into SAGE′s deep backlist of qualitative research methods journals, Paul Atkinson and Sara Delmont, editors of Qualitative Research, have selected over 70 articles to represent SAGE′s distinctive contribution to methods publishing in general and qualitative research in particular. This collection includes research from the past four decades and addresses key issues or controversies, such as: explanations and defences of qualitative methods; ethics; research questions and foreshadowed problems; access; first days in the field; field roles and rapport; practicalities of data collection and recording; data analysis; writing and (re) presentation; the rise of auto-ethnography; life history, narrative and autobiography; CA and DA; and alternatives to the logocentric (such as visual methods).
Download or read book The Inarticulate Society written by Tom Shachtman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1995 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Inarticulate Society, Thomas Shachtman persuasively argues that Americans have lost the ability to respond to other points of view - to argue - without coming swiftly to blows. His case is forcefully punctuated by the rising tide of political violence in America and the hateful and intolerant speech that appears to incite it. We are in danger of moving our political debates from the Senate chamber to the streets, in the process of losing the social stability needed for a working democracy. Shachtman pins the blame for this decline on the jargon-spouting "specialists" in the professions and academia, who use parochial vocabulary to erect linguistic barriers between themselves and "ordinary" citizens; on teachers who are barely articulate themselves; on the pervasiveness of popular entertainment geared to the lowest common denominator; on insipid advertising and marketing campaigns that deliberately bypass reason to appeal to emotions; and especially on our political leaders who find it easier to play the demagogue than to give substantive explanations of policy choices. Shachtman proposes a concrete, multifaceted program for rehabilitating eloquence through the constructive use of media together with political and educational reform.
