Download or read book Generations Lost written by Timothy W. Quinnan and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2002-02 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Generations Lost considers the unusual relationship between popular culture and American youth in a collection of essays touching on differing aspects of this current social crisis. Following a rash of school shootings culminating in the massacre at Columbine High, a heated national debate arose over the potentially toxic effects of contemporary culture and its voice--mass media-- on teens. Evidence suggests youth are in crisis. With absentee parents, failing schools and a lack of role models, adolescents have adopted the values and behaviors of those media-made heroes and myths they are bombarded by. Minus the steadying presence of adults to counteract this deception, they are especially vulnerable to this insidious universe of influences. Bizarre images and bogus representations of reality have distorted their perception. Television, films, video games and cyberspace contribute to their corruption. For youth, reality as adults knew and taught it to children no longer exists. This crucial difference in perception and subsequent behavior accounts for many of the extreme anti-social disorders youth now display.
Download or read book Culture and Crisis written by Nina Witoszek and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2002 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is often argued that Germany and Scandinavia stand at two opposite ends of a spectrum with regard to their response to social-economic disruptions and cultural challenges. Though, in many respects, they have a shared cultural inheritance, it is nevertheless the case that they mobilize different mythologies and different modes of coping when faced with breakdown and disorder. The authors argue that it is at these "critical junctures," points of crisis and innovation in the life of communities, that the tradition and identity of national and local communities are formed, polarized, and revalued; it is here that social change takes a particular direction.
Download or read book Culture in Crisis and the Renewal of Civil Life written by T. William Boxx and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1996 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important book addresses many of the most compelling social issues of our times, and delves into the causes of America's social pathologies and strained sociopolitical condition. Contributors include T. William Boxx, Linda Chavez, Midge Decter, Don E. Eberly, Heather R. Higgins, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Russell Hittinger, Glenn C. Loury, Michael Novak, Robert Royal, and James Q. Wilson.
Download or read book Hillbilly Elegy written by J. D. Vance and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER IS NOW A MAJOR-MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY RON HOWARD AND STARRING AMY ADAMS, GLENN CLOSE, AND GABRIEL BASSO "You will not read a more important book about America this year."—The Economist "A riveting book."—The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."—David Brooks, New York Times Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.
Download or read book Zombies Migrants and Queers written by Camilla Fojas and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2017-02-10 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The alarm and anxiety unleashed by the Great Recession found fascinating expression across popular culture. Harried survivors negotiated societal collapse in The Walking Dead. Middle-class whites crossed the literal and metaphorical Mexican border on Breaking Bad or coped with a lack of freedom among the marginalized on Orange Is the New Black. Camilla Fojas uses representations of people of color, the incarcerated, and trans/queers--vulnerable populations all--to work through the contradictions created by the economic crisis and its freefalling aftermath. Television, film, advertising, and media coverage of the crisis created a distinct kind of story about capitalism and the violence that supports it. Fojas shows how these pop culture moments reshaped social dynamics and people's economic sensibilities and connects the ways pop culture reflected economic devastation. She also examines how these artifacts illuminated parts of society usually kept off-screen or on the margins even as they defaulted to stories of white protagonists.
Download or read book Crisis Cultures written by Brian Whitener and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a mix of political, economic, literary, and filmic texts, Crisis Cultures challenges current cultural histories of the neoliberal period by arguing that financialization, and not just neoliberalism, has been at the center of the dramatic transformations in Latin American societies in the last thirty years. Starting from political economic figures such as crisis, hyperinflation, credit, and circulation and exemplary cultural texts, Whitener traces the interactions between culture, finance, surplus populations, and racialized state violence after 1982 in Mexico and Brazil. Crisis Cultures makes sense of the emergence of new forms of exploitation and terrifying police and militarized violence by tracking the cultural and discursive forms, including real abstraction and the favela and immaterial cadavers and voided collectivities, that have emerged in the complicated aftermath of the long downturn and global turn to finance.
Download or read book Zombies in Western Culture written by John Vervaeke and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has the zombie become such a pervasive figure in twenty-first-century popular culture? John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic seek to answer this question by arguing that particular aspects of the zombie, common to a variety of media forms, reflect a crisis in modern Western culture. The authors examine the essential features of the zombie, including mindlessness, ugliness and homelessness, and argue that these reflect the outlook of the contemporary West and its attendant zeitgeists of anxiety, alienation, disconnection and disenfranchisement. They trace the relationship between zombies and the theme of secular apocalypse, demonstrating that the zombie draws its power from being a perversion of the Christian mythos of death and resurrection. Symbolic of a lost Christian worldview, the zombie represents a world that can no longer explain itself, nor provide us with instructions for how to live within it. The concept of 'domicide' or the destruction of home is developed to describe the modern crisis of meaning that the zombie both represents and reflects. This is illustrated using case studies including the relocation of the Anishinaabe of the Grassy Narrows First Nation, and the upheaval of population displacement in the Hellenistic period. Finally, the authors invoke and reformulate symbols of the four horseman of the apocalypse as rhetorical analogues to frame those aspects of contemporary collapse that elucidate the horror of the zombie. Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis is required reading for anyone interested in the phenomenon of zombies in contemporary culture. It will also be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience including students and scholars of culture studies, semiotics, philosophy, religious studies, eschatology, anthropology, Jungian studies, and sociology.
Download or read book The Crisis of Contemporary Culture written by Terry Eagleton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 21 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Eagleton ranges widely over a number of topics of relevance to contemporary culture: the loss of a sense of corporate cultural identity in the contemporary crisis of `nationhood', and the factors responsible for this erosion; the conflict between a traditionalist conception of culture and a `postmodern' one; the assumed decline in cultural standards; the teaching of English in schools, and so on. He sets something of the history and current situation of Oxford English within this wider context, and outlines a programme of desirable reforms. He concludes his lecture with some reflections on poetry and philosophy, literary theory, multinational capitalism, the historical concepts of Walter Benjamin and one or two other topics.
Download or read book Culture and Crisis Communication written by Amiso M. George and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-09-18 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of case studies from nonwestern countries that offers an analysis of the significant role culture plays in crisis communication Culture and Crisis Communication presents an examination of how politics, culture, religion, and other social issues affect crisis communication and management in nonwestern countries. From intense human tragedy to the follies of the rich, the chapters examine how companies, organizations, news outlets, health organizations, technical experts, politicians, and local communities communicate in crisis situations. Taking a wider view than a single country’s perspective, the text contains a cross-cultural and cross-country approach. In addition, the case studies offer valuable lessons that organizations that wish to operate or are operating in those cultures can adopt in preparing and managing crises. The book highlights recent crisis events such as Syria’s civil war, missing Malaysia Flight MH370, andJapan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster. Each of the case studies examines how culture impacts communication and responses to crises. Authoritative, insightful, and instructive, this important resource: Analyzes how nonwestern cultures respond to crises Covers the role of culture in crisis communication in recent news events Includes contributions from 18 international authors who provide insight on nonwestern culture and crisis communication Written for communication professionals, academics, and students, Culture and Crisis Communication presents an insightful introduction to the topic of culture and crisis communication and then delves into illustrative case studies that explore intra-cultural and trans-boundary crisis communication.
Download or read book Culture in Crisis written by James F. Downs and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cultures in Crisis written by James F. Downs and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Apocalypse and Heroism in Popular Culture written by Katherine E. Sugg and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-02-25 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories of world-ending catastrophe have featured prominently in film and television. Zombie apocalypses, climate disasters, alien invasions, global pandemics and dystopian world orders fill our screens--typically with a singular figure or tenacious group tasked with saving or salvaging the world. Why are stories of End Times crisis so popular with audiences? And why is the hero so often a white man who overcomes personal struggles and major obstacles to lead humanity toward a restored future? This book examines the familiar trope of the hero and the recasting of contemporary anxieties in films like The Walking Dead, Snowpiercer and Mad Max: Fury Road. Some have familiar roots in Western cultural traditions yet many question popular assumptions about heroes and heroism to tell new and fascinating stories about race, gender and society and the power of individuals to change the world.
Download or read book Culture in Crisis written by Daniel Serwer and published by . This book was released on 2017-04-23 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iraq and Syria are now suffering unprecedented plunder and outright destruction of their heritage from armed conflict. Facing the largest cultural emergency since World War II, the global community stands at a crossroads. Violent extremist organizations like Daesh (also known as ISIL or ISIS) are arming their cause through antiquities looting and trafficking, while also deliberately and systematically destroying heritage as a weapon of war. The cultural crisis has become inseparable from the humanitarian crisis.
Download or read book An Introduction to Popular Culture in the US written by Jenn Brandt and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first introductory textbook to situate popular culture studies in the United States as an academic discipline with its own history and approach to examining American culture, its rituals, beliefs, and the objects that shape its existence.
Download or read book The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England written by Dr Abigail Shinn and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2014-08-28 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of current research on popular culture in the early modern era. For the first time a detailed yet wide-ranging consideration of the breadth and scope of early modern popular culture in England is collected in one volume, highlighting the interplay of 'low' and 'high' modes of cultural production (while also questioning the validity of such terminology). The authors examine how popular culture impacted upon people's everyday lives during the period, helping to define how individuals and groups experienced the world. Issues as disparate as popular reading cultures, games, food and drink, time, textiles, religious belief and superstition, and the function of festivals and rituals are discussed. This research companion will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early modern history and culture.
Download or read book Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination written by Henry Jenkins and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How popular culture is engaged by activists to effect emancipatory political change One cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Civic imagination is the capacity to conceptualize alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; it also requires the ability to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change, as a participant in a larger democratic culture. Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination represents a call for greater clarity about what we’re fighting for—not just what we’re fighting against. Across more than thirty examples from social movements around the world, this casebook proposes “civic imagination” as a framework that can help us identify, support, and practice new kinds of communal participation. As the contributors demonstrate, young people, in particular, are turning to popular culture—from Beyoncé to Bollywood, from Smokey Bear to Hamilton, from comic books to VR—for the vernacular through which they can express their discontent with current conditions. A young activist uses YouTube to speak back against J. K. Rowling in the voice of Cho Chang in order to challenge the superficial representation of Asian Americans in children’s literature. Murals in Los Angeles are employed to construct a mythic imagination of Chicano identity. Twitter users have turned to #BlackGirlMagic to highlight the black radical imagination and construct new visions of female empowerment. In each instance, activists demonstrate what happens when the creative energies of fans are infused with deep political commitment, mobilizing new visions of what a better democracy might look like.
Download or read book Born in Crisis and Shaped by Controversy written by John R. Tyson and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-07-29 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Methodism was Born in Crisis. It was a religious response to political polarization, ecclesiastical lethargy, classism and privilege, wage slavery and economic disparity, as well as to prejudice, inequality, and exclusion based on gender and race. Among the crises that convulsed Georgian England were: 1) the debilitating effects of the political use of religious authority; 2) the challenges of keeping faith in an age of science and reason; 3) the decline of “main line” religion; 4) the painful and oppressive impact of class privilege; 5) the inequities caused by dramatic economic disparity; 6) the hopelessness of wage slavery; 7) the devaluing and structural exclusion of women; 8) racial prejudice, and the systematic oppression non-white people; 9) the social crisis caused by religious prejudice; and 10) the debilitating effects of popular culture and its pastimes. The current volume traces how each of these historic crises drew from the early Methodists theological, spiritual, moral, and organizational impulses that became part of their spiritual DNA and left them with family traits that have come down to us in this very day. In a subsequent volume, Shaped by Controversy, eight of the main internal struggles that caused familial strife within the Methodist tradition will be examined and assessed. Taken together, these volumes are like a “distant mirror” with which Methodists and other modern Christians might take a good look at themselves. As such this is an invitation to hope anew and for Methodists as well as Christians of all backgrounds to consider who they are and what they intend be for Jesus Christ in the world.
