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 104 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 When the Rivers Run Dry written by Fred Pearce and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking book, veteran science correspondent Fred Pearce travels to more than thirty countries to examine the current state of crucial water sources. Deftly weaving together the complicated scientific, economic, and historic dimensions of the world water crisis, he provides our most complete portrait yet of this growing danger and its ramifications for us all. "A strong-and scary-case that a worldwide water shortage is the most fearful looming environmental crisis. With a drumbeat of facts both horrific (thousands of wells in India and Bangladesh are poisoned by fluoride and arsenic) and fascinating (it takes 20 tons of water to make one pound of coffee), the former New Scientist news editor documents a "kind of cataclysm" already affecting many of the world"s great rivers." -Publishers Weekly, starred review "Oil we can replace. Water we can"t-which is why this book is both so ominous and so important." -Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature
Download or read book The Crisis of the Twenty First Century written by Russell Foster and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empire is one of the oldest forms of political organisation and has dominated societies in all parts of the world. Yet, despite the emergence of nation-states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the apparent end of empire with the breakup of European colonial regimes and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century, empire remains powerful in the modern world. The EUs accession policies, the United States War on Terror, Chinas economic developments in Africa, among others, draw accusations of imperial agendas. Empire is no stranger to crisis but, in recent years, the effects of global austerity have forced states, both powerful and weak, to adapt, with varying degrees of success and failure. The confusions, contradictions, and contestations which emerge from imperial crisis point to a vital question how is Austerity changing Empire and how will this shape tomorrows world?This book was published as a special issue of Global Discourse.
Download or read book The Crisis of American Foreign Policy written by G. John Ikenberry and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Was George W. Bush the true heir of Woodrow Wilson, the architect of liberal internationalism? Was the Iraq War a result of liberal ideas about America's right to promote democracy abroad? In this timely book, four distinguished scholars of American foreign policy discuss the relationship between the ideals of Woodrow Wilson and those of George W. Bush. The Crisis of American Foreign Policy exposes the challenges resulting from Bush's foreign policy and ponders America's place in the international arena. Led by John Ikenberry, one of today's foremost foreign policy thinkers, this provocative collection examines the traditions of liberal internationalism that have dominated American foreign policy since the end of World War II. Tony Smith argues that Bush and the neoconservatives followed Wilson in their commitment to promoting democracy abroad. Thomas Knock and Anne-Marie Slaughter disagree and contend that Wilson focused on the building of a collaborative and rule-centered world order, an idea the Bush administration actively resisted. The authors ask if the United States is still capable of leading a cooperative effort to handle the pressing issues of the new century, or if the country will have to go it alone, pursuing policies without regard to the interests of other governments. Addressing current events in the context of historical policies, this book considers America's position on the global stage and what future directions might be possible for the nation in the post-Bush era.
Download or read book Composition in the Twenty first Century written by Lynn Z. Bloom and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this book, stemming from a national conference of the same name, focus on the single subject required of nearly all college students--composition. Despite its pervasiveness and its significance, composition has an unstable status within the curriculum. Writing programs and writing faculty are besieged by academic, political, and financial concerns that have not been well understood or addressed. At many institutions, composition functions paradoxically as both the gateway to academic success and as the gatekeeper, reducing access to academic work and opportunity for those with limited facility in English. Although writing programs are expected to provide services that range from instruction in correct grammar to assisting--or resisting--political correctness, expanding programs and shrinking faculty get caught in the crossfire. The bottom line becomes the firing line as forces outside the classroom determine funding and seek to define what composition should do. In search of that definition, the contributors ask and answer a series of specific and salient questions: What implications--intellectual, political, and institutional--will forces outside the classroom have on the quality and delivery of composition in the twenty-first century? How will faculty and administrators identify and address these issues? What policies and practices ought we propose for the century to come? This book features sixteen position papers by distinguished scholars and researchers in composition and rhetoric; most of the papers are followed by invited responses by other notable compositionists. In all, twenty-five contributors approach composition from a wide variety of contemporary perspectives: rhetorical, historical, social, cultural, political, intellectual, economic, structural, administrative, and developmental. They propose solutions applicable to pedagogy, research, graduate training of composition teachers, academic administration, and public and social policy. In a very real sense, then, this is the only book to offer a map to the future of composition.
Download or read book Imperialism in the Twenty First Century written by John Smith and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-01-22 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the first Paul A. Baran-Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award for an original monograph concerned with the political economy of imperialism, John Smith's Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century is a seminal examination of the relationship between the core capitalist countries and the rest of the world in the age of neoliberal globalization.Deploying a sophisticated Marxist methodology, Smith begins by tracing the production of certain iconic commodities-the T-shirt, the cup of coffee, and the iPhone-and demonstrates how these generate enormous outflows of money from the countries of the Global South to transnational corporations headquartered in the core capitalist nations of the Global North. From there, Smith draws on his empirical findings to powerfully theorize the current shape of imperialism. He argues that the core capitalist countries need no longer rely on military force and colonialism (although these still occur) but increasingly are able to extract profits from workers in the Global South through market mechanisms and, by aggressively favoring places with lower wages, the phenomenon of labor arbitrage. Meticulously researched and forcefully argued, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century is a major contribution to the theorization and critique of global capitalism.
Download or read book A Kingdom in Crisis written by Andrew MacGregor Marshall and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Perhaps the best introduction yet to the roots of Thailand's present political impasse. A brilliant book.' Simon Long, The Economist Struggling to emerge from a despotic past, and convulsed by an intractable conflict that will determine its future, Thailand stands at a defining moment in its history. Scores have been killed on the streets of Bangkok. Freedom of speech is routinely denied. Democracy appears increasingly distant. And many Thais fear that the death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej is expected to unleash even greater instability. Yet in spite of the impact of the crisis, and the extraordinary importance of the royal succession, they have never been comprehensively analysed – until now. Breaking Thailand's draconian lèse majesté law, Andrew MacGregor Marshall is one of the only journalists covering contemporary Thailand to tell the whole story. Marshall provides a comprehensive explanation that for the first time makes sense of the crisis, revealing the unacknowledged succession conflict that has become entangled with the struggle for democracy in Thailand.
Download or read book Capital in the Twenty First Century written by Thomas Piketty and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-14 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.
Download or read book The Social Question in the Twenty First Century written by Jan Breman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness: first recognized together in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, these are the focus of the Social Question. In 1942 William Beveridge called them the “giant evils” while diagnosing the crises produced by the emergence of industrial society. More recently, during the final quarter of the twentieth century, the global spread of neoliberal policies enlarged these crises so much that the Social Question has made a comeback. The Social Question in the Twenty-First Century maps out the linked crises across regions and countries and identifies the renewed and intensified Social Question as a labor issue above all. The volume includes discussions from every corner of the globe, focusing on American exceptionalism, Chinese repression, Indian exclusion, South African colonialism, democratic transitions in Eastern Europe, and other phenomena. The effects of capitalism dominating the world, the impact of the scarcity of waged work, and the degree to which the dispossessed poor bear the brunt of the crisis are all evaluated in this carefully curated volume. Both thorough and thoughtful, the book serves as collective effort to revive and reposition the Social Question, reconstructing its meaning and its politics in the world today.
Download or read book The New Odyssey written by Patrick Kingsley and published by Guardian Faber Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Europe is facing a wave of migration unmatched since the end of World War II - and no one has reported on this crisis in more depth or breadth than the Guardian's migration correspondent, Patrick Kingsley. Throughout 2015, Kingsley travelled to 17 countries along the migrant trail, meeting hundreds of refugees making epic odysseys across deserts, seas and mountains to reach the holy grail of Europe. This is Kingsley's unparalleled account of who these voyagers are. It's about why they keep coming, and how they do it. It's about the smugglers who help them on their way, and the coastguards who rescue them at the other end. The volunteers that feed them, the hoteliers that house them, and the border guards trying to keep them out. And the politicians looking the other way. The New Odyssey is a work of original, bold reporting written with a perfect mix of compassion and authority by the journalist who knows the subject better than any other.
Download or read book Global Crises and the Challenges of the 21st Century written by Thomas Reifer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-23 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite prognostications of the "end of history," the 21st century has posed new challenges and a host of global crises. This book takes up the current global economic crisis in relation to new and changing dynamics of territory, authority, and rights in today's global system. The authors explore long simmering conflicts in comparative perspective, including settler colonialism in South Africa, Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine. They discuss indigenous struggles against environmental land grabs and related destruction of indigenous lands by the US nuclear weapons complex. The book uniquely considers the sacred in the context of the global system, including struggles of Latina/o farm workers in the U.S. for social justice and for change in the Catholic Church. Other chapters examine questions of civilizations and identity in the contemporary global system, as well as the role of world-regions.
Download or read book Corona Climate Chronic Emergency written by Andreas Malm and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does the COVID 19 tell us about the climate breakdown, and what should we do about it? The economic and social impact of the coronavirus pandemic has been unprecedented. Governments have spoken of being at war and find themselves forced to seek new powers in order to maintain social order and prevent the spread of the virus. This is often exercised with the notion that we will return to normal as soon as we can. What if that is not possible? Secondly, if the state can mobilize itself in the face of an invisible foe like this pandemic, it should also be able to confront visible dangers such as climate destruction with equal force. In Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, leading environmental thinker, Andreas Malm demands that this war-footing state should be applied on a permanent basis to the ongoing climate front line. He offers proposals on how the climate movement should use this present emergency to make that case. There can be no excuse for inaction any longer.
Download or read book Between Two Ages written by William Van Dusen Wishard and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2001-06-29 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Between Two Ages, Van Wishard has provided us with a masterful synthesis of the main currents of history, ranging over the centuries with an experts eye to identify the key trends in economics, technology and culture that have led us to this place in time. By itself, this would be an important contribution to our understanding. But the true significance of Between Two Ages lies in his placing this analysis within a profoundly moral and ethical framework. Van Wishard has not simply diagnosed the reasons for our spiritual malaise. He has also suggested how each of us can overcome this malaise and find a larger purpose or meaning to our lives. From the foreword by Dr. Mitchell B. Reiss Dean of International Affairs College of William & Mary Introduction Despite the stratospheric heights of the Dow in recent years, the allure of prosperity and the astounding possibilities opening up for human fulfillment, the next three decades could be the most decisive 30-year period in the history of mankind. Thus you and I are living in the midst of perhaps the most uncertain period America has ever known -- more difficult than World War II, the Depression or even the Civil War. With these earlier crises, an immediately identifiable, focused emergency existed, an emergency people could see and mobilize to combat. But the crisis today is of a different character and order. For America is at the vortex of a global cyclone of change so vast and deep that it is uprooting established institutions, altering centuries-old relationships, changing underlying mores and attitudes, and now, so the experts tell us, even threatening the continued existence of the human species. It is not simply change at the margins; it is change at the very core of life. Culture-smashing change. Identity-shattering change. Soul-crushing change. Prior generations faced change within a context of stable institutions that functioned more or less effectively. Earlier generations had a more stableif less comfortableframework, as well as more clearly defined reference points. Our era doesnt have such guides, for all of Americas institutions, from government to family, from business to religion, are in upheaval. The past century has seen civilized life increasingly ripped from its moorings. The immutable certainties that anchored our ancestors no longer seem to hold in a world where the tectonic plates of life are clashing, where human antagonisms obliterate tens of thousands of people in Africa, Bosnia or Chechnya in a matter of a few days or weeks, where a stray bullet ends the life of an elderly lady quietly walking home from church in Washington, D.C. In so many ways, a life that has lost its essential meaning has cut giant swaths across humanity. Clearly, we have been standing at a unique historical dividing line -- the end of the modern era, as well as the Industrial Age, the end of the colonial period, the end of the Atlantic-based economic, political and military global hegemony, the end of Americas culture being drawn primarily from European sources, the end of the masculine patriarchal/hierarchical epoch, and as Joseph Campbell suggests, the end of the Christian eon. Obviously, one era doesnt stop and a new one start in a week. Yearseven decades or generationsof overlap take place. The sense of an age ending and something new emerging was evident during the earliest years of the 20th century. In 1913, Harvard philosopher George Santayana noted: "The civilization characteristic of Christendom has not yet disappeared, yet another civilization has begun to take its place." In 1928, at the height of the "Roaring Twenties," historian Will Durant wrote, "Human conduct and belief are now undergoing transformations profounder and more disturbing than any since the appearance of wealth and philosophy put an end to the tradition
Download or read book Christianity and the Social Crisis written by Walter Rauschenbusch and published by . This book was released on 1913 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Crisis of Globalization written by Patrick Diamond and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-29 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, the effects of economic openness and technological change have fuelled dissatisfaction with established political systems and led to new forms of political populism that exploit the economic and political resentment created by globalization. This shift in politics was evident in the decision by UK voters to leave the European Union in June 2016, the November 2016 election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, as well as the rise of populist movements on left and right throughout much of Europe. To many voters, the economy appears to be broken. Conventional politics is failing. Parties of the left and centre-left have struggled to forge a convincing response to this new phase of globalization in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. This book examines the challenges that the new era of globalization poses for progressive parties and movements across the world. It brings together leading thinkers and experts including Andrew Gamble, Jeffry Frieden and Vivien Schmidt to debate the structural causes and political consequences of this new wave of globalization.
Download or read book The University in the Twenty first Century written by Yehuda Elkana and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-30 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses the broad spectrum of challenges confronting today?s universities. Elkana and Kl”pper question the very idea and purposes of universities, especially as viewed through curriculum?what is taught, and pedagogy?how it is taught. The reforms recommended in the book focus on undergraduate or bachelor degree programs in all areas of study, from the humanities and social sciences to the natural sciences, technical fields, as well as law, medicine, and other professions. The core thesis of this book rests on the emergence of a ?New Enlightenment. This will require a revolution in curriculum and teaching methods in order to translate the academic philosophy of global contextualism into universal practice or application. Are universities willing to revamp teaching in order to foster critical thinking that would serve students their entire lives? This book calls for universities to restructure administratively to become truly integrated, rather than remaining collections of autonomous agencies more committed to competition among themselves than cooperation in the larger interest of learning. ÿ
Download or read book Food and Sustainability in the Twenty First Century written by Paul Collinson and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-06-06 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sustainability is one of the great problems facing food production today. Using cross-disciplinary perspectives from international scholars working in social, cultural and biological anthropology, ecology and environmental biology, this volume brings many new perspectives to the problems we face. Its cross-disciplinary framework of chapters with local, regional and continental perspectives provides a global outlook on sustainability issues. These case studies will appeal to those working in public sector agencies, NGOs, consultancies and other bodies focused on food security, human nutrition and environmental sustainability.
