Download or read book Gender Class and Freedom in Modern Political Theory written by Nancy J. Hirschmann and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-11 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory, Nancy Hirschmann demonstrates not merely that modern theories of freedom are susceptible to gender and class analysis but that they must be analyzed in terms of gender and class in order to be understood at all. Through rigorous close readings of major and minor works of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Mill, Hirschmann establishes and examines the gender and class foundations of the modern understanding of freedom. Building on a social constructivist model of freedom that she developed in her award-winning book The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom, she makes in her new book another original and important contribution to political and feminist theory. Despite the prominence of "state of nature" ideas in modern political theory, Hirschmann argues, theories of freedom actually advance a social constructivist understanding of humanity. By rereading "human nature" in light of this insight, Hirschmann uncovers theories of freedom that are both more historically accurate and more relevant to contemporary politics. Pigeonholing canonical theorists as proponents of either "positive" or "negative" liberty is historically inaccurate, she demonstrates, because theorists deploy both conceptions of freedom simultaneously throughout their work.
Download or read book Freedom Beyond Sovereignty written by Sharon R. Krause and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-03-13 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to be free? We invoke the word frequently, yet the freedom of countless Americans is compromised by social inequalities that systematically undercut what they are able to do and to become. If we are to remedy these failures of freedom, we must move beyond the common assumption, prevalent in political theory and American public life, that individual agency is best conceived as a kind of personal sovereignty, or as self-determination or control over one’s actions. In Freedom Beyond Sovereignty, Sharon R. Krause shows that individual agency is best conceived as a non-sovereign experience because our ability to act and affect the world depends on how other people interpret and respond to what we do. The intersubjective character of agency makes it vulnerable to the effects of social inequality, but it is never in a strict sense socially determined. The agency of the oppressed sometimes surprises us with its vitality. Only by understanding the deep dynamics of agency as simultaneously non-sovereign and robust can we remediate the failed freedom of those on the losing end of persistent inequalities and grasp the scope of our own responsibility for social change. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty brings the experiences of the oppressed to the center of political theory and the study of freedom. It fundamentally reconstructs liberal individualism and enables us to see human action, personal responsibility, and the meaning of liberty in a totally new light.
Download or read book The Subject of Liberty written by Nancy J. Hirschmann and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reconsiders the dominant Western understandings of freedom through the lens of women's real-life experiences of domestic violence, welfare, and Islamic veiling. Nancy Hirschmann argues that the typical approach to freedom found in political philosophy severely reduces the concept's complexity, which is more fully revealed by taking such practical issues into account. Hirschmann begins by arguing that the dominant Western understanding of freedom does not provide a conceptual vocabulary for accurately characterizing women's experiences. Often, free choice is assumed when women are in fact coerced--as when a battered woman who stays with her abuser out of fear or economic necessity is said to make this choice because it must not be so bad--and coercion is assumed when free choices are made--such as when Westerners assume that all veiled women are oppressed, even though many Islamic women view veiling as an important symbol of cultural identity. Understanding the contexts in which choices arise and are made is central to understanding that freedom is socially constructed through systems of power such as patriarchy, capitalism, and race privilege. Social norms, practices, and language set the conditions within which choices are made, determine what options are available, and shape our individual subjectivity, desires, and self-understandings. Attending to the ways in which contexts construct us as "subjects" of liberty, Hirschmann argues, provides a firmer empirical and theoretical footing for understanding what freedom means and entails politically, intellectually, and socially.
Download or read book Theoretical Perspectives on Gender and Development written by Jane L. Parpart and published by IDRC. This book was released on 2000 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theoretical Perspectives on Gender and Development demytsifies the theory of gender and development and shows how it plays an important role in everyday life. It explores the evolution of gender and development theory, introduces competing theoretical frameworks, and examines new and emerging debates. The focus is on the implications of theory for policy and practice, and the need to theorize gender and development to create a more egalitarian society. This book is intended for classroom and workshop use in the fields ofdevelopment studies, development theory, gender and development, and women's studies. Its clear and straightforward prose will be appreciated by undergraduate and seasoned professional, alike. Classroom exercises, study questions, activities, and case studies are included. It is designed for use in both formal and nonformal educational settings.
Download or read book Qualitative Research from Start to Finish First Edition written by Robert K. Yin and published by Guilford Press. This book was released on 2011-09-26 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively, practical text presents a fresh and comprehensive approach to doing qualitative research. The book offers a unique balance of theory and clear-cut choices for customizing every phase of a qualitative study. A scholarly mix of classic and contemporary studies from multiple disciplines provides compelling, field-based examples of the full range of qualitative approaches. Readers learn about adaptive ways of designing studies, collecting data, analyzing data, and reporting findings. Key aspects of the researcher's craft are addressed, such as fieldwork options, the five phases of data analysis (with and without using computer-based software), and how to incorporate the researcher's “declarative” and “reflective” selves into a final report. Ideal for graduate-level courses, the text includes:* Discussions of ethnography, grounded theory, phenomenology, feminist research, and other approaches.* Instructions for creating a study bank to get a new study started.* End-of-chapter exercises and a semester-long, field-based project.* Quick study boxes, research vignettes, sample studies, and a glossary.* Previews for sections within chapters, and chapter recaps.* Discussion of the place of qualitative research among other social science methods, including mixed methods research.
Download or read book The Ethics of Care written by Virginia Held and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author assesses the ethics of care as a promising alternative to the familiar moral theories that serve so inadequately to guide our lives. Held examines what we mean by care and focuses on caring relationships. She also looks at the potential of care for dealing with social issues and global problems.
Download or read book Undoing the Demos written by Wendy Brown and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-02-13 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing neoliberalism's devastating erosions of democratic principles, practices, and cultures. Neoliberal rationality—ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture—remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice bow to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either. In an original and compelling argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. Undoing the Demos makes clear that for democracy to have a future, it must become an object of struggle and rethinking.
Download or read book Caring Democracy written by Joan C. Tronto and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-04-12 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans now face a caring deficit: there are simply too many demands on people’s time for us to care adequately for our children, elderly people, and ourselves.At the same time, political involvement in the United States is at an all-time low, and although political life should help us to care better, people see caring as unsupported by public life and deem the concerns of politics as remote from their lives. Caring Democracy argues that we need to rethink American democracy, as well as our fundamental values and commitments, from a caring perspective. The idea that production and economic life are the most important political and human concerns ignores the reality that caring, for ourselves and others, should be the highest value that shapes how we view the economy, politics, and institutions such as schools and the family. Care is at the center of our human lives, but Tronto argues it is currently too far removed from the concerns of politics. Caring Democracy traces the reasons for this disconnection and argues for the need to make care, not economics, the central concern of democratic political life. Joan C. Tronto is a Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (Routledge).
Download or read book Feminist Political Theory written by and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Epistemologies of the South written by Boaventura de Sousa Santos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the concept of 'cognitive injustice': the failure to recognise the different ways of knowing by which people across the globe run their lives and provide meaning to their existence. Boaventura de Sousa Santos shows why global social justice is not possible without global cognitive justice. Santos argues that Western domination has profoundly marginalised knowledge and wisdom that had been in existence in the global South. She contends that today it is imperative to recover and valorize the epistemological diversity of the world. Epistemologies of the South outlines a new kind of bottom-up cosmopolitanism, in which conviviality, solidarity and life triumph against the logic of market-ridden greed and individualism.
Download or read book Fortunes of Feminism written by Nancy Fraser and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2013-04-09 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nancy Fraser’s major new book traces the feminist movement’s evolution since the 1970s and anticipates a new—radical and egalitarian—phase of feminist thought and action. During the ferment of the New Left, “Second Wave” feminism emerged as a struggle for women’s liberation and took its place alongside other radical movements that were questioning core features of capitalist society. But feminism’s subsequent immersion in identity politics coincided with a decline in its utopian energies and the rise of neoliberalism. Now, foreseeing a revival in the movement, Fraser argues for a reinvigorated feminist radicalism able to address the global economic crisis. Feminism can be a force working in concert with other egalitarian movements in the struggle to bring the economy under democratic control, while building on the visionary potential of the earlier waves of women’s liberation. This powerful new account is set to become a landmark of feminist thought.
Download or read book On Norms and Agency written by Ana María Muñoz Boudet and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on focus groups and interviews with nearly 4,000 women, men, girls, and boys from 20 countries, this book explores areas that are less often studied in gender and development: gender norms and agency. It reveals how little gender norms have changed, how similar they are across countries, and how they are being challenged and contested.
Download or read book Feminist Debates written by Valerie Bryson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 1999-05-21 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are women still oppressed? Is paid employment the key to liberation? Should pornography be banned? Do women have an absolute right to abortion? Can women in government really make a difference? This book draws on a wide range of theoretical, empirical and comparative material to provide a lucid account of feminist debates and the ways in which political disagreements stem from underlying theoretical assumptions. Clear and balanced in its assessment of different problems and perspectives, it offers an essential guide to contemporary feminist thinking and practice.
Download or read book Why We Lost the Sex Wars written by Lorna N. Bracewell and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Reexamining feminist sexual politics since the 1970s-the rivalries and the remarkable alliances"--
Download or read book 50 Key Concepts in Gender Studies written by Jane Pilcher and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2004-04-10 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors' introduction gives an account of gender studies - what it is and how it originated. Their selection of topics is authoritative and the 50 entries reflect the complex, multi-faceted nature of the field in an accessible dictionary format.
Download or read book The Ethics of Identity written by Kwame Anthony Appiah and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-03 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold vision of liberal humanism for navigating today’s complex world of growing identity politics and rising nationalism Collective identities such as race, nationality, religion, gender, and sexuality clamor for recognition and respect, sometimes at the expense of other things we value. To what extent do they constrain our freedom, and to what extent do they enable our individuality? Is diversity of value in itself? Has the rhetoric of human rights been overstretched? Kwame Anthony Appiah draws on thinkers through the ages and across the globe to explore such questions, developing an account of ethics that connects moral obligations with collective allegiances and that takes aim at clichés and received ideas about identity. This classic book takes seriously both the claims of individuality—the task of making a life—and the claims of identity, these large and often abstract social categories through which we define ourselves.
Download or read book The Politics of Slavery written by Laura Brace and published by EUP. This book was released on 2019-08-07 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critically interrogates of the history and politics of slavery, from classical Greek philosophy to todayWhat makes a slave a slave? What does it mean to think about slavery as a political question? This book examines slavery and freedom as founding narratives of the liberal subject and of modernity. Laura Brace asks what happens when we try to bring slaves back into history, and into the history of political thought in particular. Looking at scholarship on both 'old' and 'new' slavery, the book assesses the work of Aristotle, Locke, Hegel, Kant, Wollstonecraft and Mill, and explores the contemporary concerns of human trafficking and the prison industrial complex to consider the limitations of 'new slavery' discourse.Key Features: Analyses the dominant liberal discourse on slavery, from Aristotle to Nietzsche; Examines the connections between 'old' and 'new' slavery; Explores the role of concepts of power, violence, domination and subordination, issues of economic exploitation and the organization of labour and the influence of race and gender.
