Fractures and Reconnections

Fractures and Reconnections PDF

Author: J. Abbink

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 3643902565

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This collective volume pays tribute to the work of Africanist Piet Konings and his 30-year career (1978-2008) at the African Studies Centre Leiden. It focuses on key themes addressed in Konings' work such as labour relations, African development, social and political history, ethno-regionalism, and civil society and civic movements. Contributions: Introduction: Piet Konings' contributions to African Studies (J. Abbink); The political economy of authochthony: labour migration and citizenship in Southwest Cameroon (Peter Geschiere); 'Ganyu' in Malawi: transformation of local labour relations under famine and HIV/AIDS duress (Deborah Fahy Bryceson); Labour migration from the Gold Coast to the Dutch East Indies: recruting African troops for the Dutch colonial army in the age of indentured labour (Ineke van Kessel); Economic crisis and imaginative response: the upsurge in traditional medical practices among youths in Cameroon (Robert Mbe Akoko); Taking Africaness and African law seriously in South African law schools: some conceptual challenges (Francis B. Nyamnjoh); Football in Cameroon: its origins, politics and sorcery (Paul Nchoji Nkwi); 'Sagacity spirit' and 'ghetto ethic': 'feymania' and new African entrepreneurship (Basile Ndjio); Examining the architecture of electoral authoritarianism in Cameroon (Nantang Jua); Multipartyism and 'big man' democracy in Cameroon, 1990-2011 (Ibrahim Mouiche). [ASC Leiden abstract]

Reconnection

Reconnection PDF

Author: Miles Richardson

Publisher: Pelagic Publishing Ltd

Published: 2023-04-25

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1784273511

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How did our relationship with nature become broken, why does it matter and how can we fix it? From a past in which we were embedded in the natural world, revolutions in farming, science and industry have seen the human bond with nature eroded with the promise of prosperity offering happiness and meaning in life. This mindset may have delivered comfortable living for many, but there is growing recognition that the root cause of wildlife loss and the warming climate is people’s disconnection from nature, which is also an important factor in our mental health. Yet solutions focus on technical fixes to treat the symptoms of that damaged relationship, such as reducing carbon emissions and increasing habitat. What we urgently need is a whole new way of thinking. Reconnection explores our hidden links with nature through the science of nature connectedness, setting out a way to revivify the relationship across society. Here is a route to a meaningful life that unites both human and nature’s wellbeing for a truly sustainable future. What's more, everybody has a role to play. From business leaders to conservationists, teachers to medics, from drivers to walkers, we can all reduce the damage we do and find new ways to bring nature into our lives. This timely book considers the problems scientifically, then offers simple, practical, positive steps for how we can all work towards a better world.

Toni Morrison and Motherhood

Toni Morrison and Motherhood PDF

Author: Andrea O'Reilly

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 0791485161

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Traces Morrison's theory of African American mothering as it is articulated in her novels, essays, speeches, and interviews. Mothering is a central issue for feminist theory, and motherhood is also a persistent presence in the work of Toni Morrison. Examining Morrison's novels, essays, speeches, and interviews, Andrea O'Reilly illustrates how Morrison builds upon black women's experiences of and perspectives on motherhood to develop a view of black motherhood that is, in terms of both maternal identity and role, radically different from motherhood as practiced and prescribed in the dominant culture. Motherhood, in Morrison's view, is fundamentally and profoundly an act of resistance, essential and integral to black women's fight against racism (and sexism) and their ability to achieve well-being for themselves and their culture. The power of motherhood and the empowerment of mothering are what make possible the better world we seek for ourselves and for our children. This, argues O'Reilly, is Morrison's maternal theory—a politics of the heart. "As an advocate of 'a politics of the heart,' O'Reilly has an acute insight into discerning any threat to the preservation and continuation of traditional African American womanhood and values ... Above all, Toni Morrison and Motherhood, based on Andrea O'Reilly's methodical research on Morrison's works as well as feminist critical resources, proffers a useful basis for understanding Toni Morrison's works. It certainly contributes to exploring in detail Morrison's rich and complex works notable from the perspectives of nurturing and sustaining African American maternal tradition." — African American Review "O'Reilly boldly reconfigures hegemonic western notions of motherhood while maintaining dialogues across cultural differences." — Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering "Andrea O'Reilly examines Morrison's complex presentations of, and theories about, motherhood with admirable rigor and a refusal to simplify, and the result is one of the most penetrating and insightful studies of Morrison yet to appear, a book that will prove invaluable to any scholar, teacher, or reader of Morrison." — South Atlantic Review "...it serves as a sort of annotated bibliography of nearly all the major theoretical work on motherhood and on Morrison as an author ... anyone conducting serious study of either Toni Morrison or motherhood, not to mention the combination, should read [this book] ... O'Reilly's exhaustive research, her facility with theories of Anglo-American and Black feminism, and her penetrating analyses of Morrison's works result in a highly useful scholarly read." — Literary Mama "By tracing both the metaphor and literal practice of mothering in Morrison's literary world, O'Reilly conveys Morrison's vision of motherhood as an act of resistance." — American Literature "Motherhood is critically important as a recurring theme in Toni Morrison's oeuvre and within black feminist and feminist scholarship. An in-depth analysis of this central concern is necessary in order to explore the complex disjunction between Morrison's interviews, which praise black mothering, and the fiction, which presents mothers in various destructive and self-destructive modes. Kudos to Andrea O'Reilly for illuminating Morrison's 'maternal standpoint' and helping readers and critics understand this difficult terrain. Toni Morrison and Motherhood is also valuable as a resource that addresses and synthesizes a huge body of secondary literature." — Nancy Gerber, author of Portrait of the Mother-Artist: Class and Creativity in Contemporary American Fiction "In addition to presenting a penetrating and original reading of Toni Morrison, O'Reilly integrates the evolving scholarship on motherhood in dominant and minority cultures in a review that is both a composite of commonalities and a clear representation of differences." — Elizabeth Bourque Johnson, University of Minnesota Andrea O'Reilly is Associate Professor in the School of Women's Studies at York University and President of the Association for Research on Mothering. She is the author and editor of several books on mothering, including (with Sharon Abbey) Mothers and Daughters: Connection, Empowerment, and Transformation and Mothers and Sons: Feminism, Masculinity, and the Struggle to Raise Our Sons.

Home Rule

Home Rule PDF

Author: Nandita Sharma

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2020-02-14

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 147800245X

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In Home Rule Nandita Sharma traces the historical formation and political separation of Natives and Migrants from the nineteenth century to the present to theorize the portrayal of Migrants as “colonial invaders.” The imperial-state category of Native, initially a mark of colonized status, has been revitalized in what Sharma terms the Postcolonial New World Order of nation-states. Under postcolonial rule, claims to autochthony—being the Native “people of a place”—are mobilized to define true national belonging. Consequently, Migrants—the quintessential “people out of place”—increasingly face exclusion, expulsion, or even extermination. This turn to autochthony has led to a hardening of nationalism(s). Criteria for political membership have shrunk, immigration controls have intensified, all while practices of expropriation and exploitation have expanded. Such politics exemplify the postcolonial politics of national sovereignty, a politics that Sharma sees as containing our dreams of decolonization. Home Rule rejects nationalisms and calls for the dissolution of the ruling categories of Native and Migrant so we can build a common, worldly place where our fundamental liberty to stay and move is realized.

Java Hill: An African Journey

Java Hill: An African Journey PDF

Author: T.P. Manus Ulzen

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation

Published: 2013-03

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1479791199

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"The personal is political". So went a popular saying in the heady 60s. In presenting the story of the Ulzens and Elmina as a metaphor for the African condition in history, this novel is an eloquent corroboration of this idea. I applaud the brutal honesty, not unmixed with touching empathy, with which the author narrates the details of political events and family dramas: characters, personalities, roles and relations marked by conscious and unwitting paradoxes, complicities, mixed motives behind noble stances and deeds. In a word, IRONY is the dominant prism through which the events are rendered. Ato Sekyi Otu Professor Emeritus of Social and Political Thought York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Fractured Ground

Fractured Ground PDF

Author: Kimberly R. Wagner

Publisher: Presbyterian Publishing Corp

Published: 2023-01-03

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1646982916

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Mass trauma is an unavoidable reality in the United States. Trauma from violence, natural disasters, and disease has become all too familiar in the American experience, inevitably raising questions about where God is to be found in the midst of such tragedies. In every case, the aftermath leaves communities’ sense of well-being broken and capacity to imagine a way forward thwarted. Though language often fails us in the midst of trauma, preachers and religious leaders are nevertheless called on to offer a Word. Fractured Ground helps pastors craft sermons that fully plumb the disorienting suffering created by events of mass trauma, while still offering an authentic word of hope. Kimberly Wagner provides both incisive explanations of what trauma is and especially how it affects communities of faith, along with practical guidance for crafting sermons that reflect the brokenness of the traumatic situation and the persistent love of God that binds the broken together. Drawing on the burgeoning field of trauma studies, eschatological theologies of hope, scriptural wisdom, and liturgies of lament, Wagner helps preachers imagine what it might mean to preach a narratively fractured sermon in the aftermath of a communal traumatic event, ultimately affirming that no amount of brokenness is beyond the presence and promise of God.

African Customary Justice

African Customary Justice PDF

Author: Pnina Werbner

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-29

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1000519015

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This book presents an important ethnographic and theoretical advance in legal anthropological scholarship by interrogating customary law, customary courts and legal pluralism in sub-Saharan Africa. It highlights the vitality and continued relevance of customary justice at a time when customary courts have waned or even disappeared in many postcolonial African nations. Taking Botswana as a casestudy from in-depth fieldwork over a fifty-year period, the book shows, the ‘customary’ is robustly enduring, central to settling interpersonal disputes and constitutive of the local as well as the national public ethics. Customary law continues to be constitutionally protected, authorised by the country’s past as an authentic, viable legacy, from the British colonial period of indirect rule to the postcolonial state’s present development as a highly bureaucratised democracy. Along with a theoretical overview of the underlying issues for the anthropology and sociology of law, the book documents customary law as living law in the context of legal pluralism. It takes a legal realist approach and highlights the need to pay close attention to the lived experience of justice and its role in the production of legal subjectivities. The book will be valuable to Africanists but also, more broadly, to social scientists, social historians and socio-legal scholars with interests in law and social change, public ethics and personal morality, and the intersection of politics and judicial decision making.

C est l homme qui fait l homme

C est l homme qui fait l homme PDF

Author: B. Nyamnjoh

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2015-08-12

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9956762296

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The idea that human beings are inextricably bound to one another is at the heart of this book about African agency, especially drawing on the African philosophy Ubuntu, with its roots in human sociality and inclusivity. Ubuntus precepts and workings are severely tested in these times of rapid change and multiple responsibilities. Africans negotiate their social existence between urban and rural life, their continental and transcontinental distances, and all the market forces that now impinge, with relationships and loyalties placed in question. Between ideal and reality, dreams and schemes, how is Ubuntu actualized, misappropriated and endangered? The book unearths the intrigues and contradictions that go with inclusivity in Africa. Basing his argument on the ideals of trust, conviviality and support embodied in the concept of Ubuntu, Francis Nyamnjoh demonstrates how the pursuit of personal success and even self-aggrandizement challenges these ideals, thus leading to discord in social relationships. Nyamnjoh uses a popular Ivorian drama with the same title to substantiate life-world realities and more importantly to demonstrate that new forms of expression, from popular drama to fiction, thicken and enrich the ethnographic component in current anthropology.

Breakout Strategies for Emerging Markets

Breakout Strategies for Emerging Markets PDF

Author: Jagdish N. Sheth

Publisher: FT Press

Published: 2016-06-27

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0134292847

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Real strategies, tactics & solutions for succeeding in emerging markets now Attract non-consumers and upscale current customers Reflect local culture, tradition, and preferences across your business Make your products easier to find, buy, and use Strengthen your brand and deliver on your brand promises Engage and serve all your stakeholders Build a sustainable, profitable business How big is your emerging market opportunity? Potential annual consumption will hit $30 trillion by 2025, with $10 trillion in India and China alone. Emerging economies are transforming markets worldwide–attracting multinationals, strengthening domestic firms, and launching local brands onto the global stage. Best of all, there are now proven best practices for succeeding in these markets. They’ve been developed the hard way: through the experiences of pioneers who’ve learned from mistakes and listened to their customers. This book’s brand stories reflects these winning strategies. You’ll learn from high-profile leaders like Gillette, Levi’s, Starbucks, Alibaba, GlaxoSmith-Kline, and WeChat–and from great companies you’ll discover for the first time. Linking theory to practice, the authors offer expert guidance on attracting non-users, adapting products, aligning with local culture, optimizing channels, building brands, upscaling, strengthening relationships, and much more. You’ve never had an opportunity this enormous. Nobody has. Get it right–with the right advice, right from the trenches. Emerging markets offer the biggest growth opportunity in the history of capitalism. This practical guide offers a comprehensive, strategic marketing perspective tailored to these new markets. Leading experts demonstrate how companies can succeed both today and tomorrow, no matter what happens in the global economy. Breakout Strategies for Emerging Markets integrates insights drawn from the authors’ extensive primary research worldwide, their pioneering academic research and case development, practical consulting and management experience, and their conversations with industry leaders on several continents. You will learn about the experiences and actions of both local and global enterprises in industries ranging from consumer goods to entertainment, apparel to finance. The authors share new insights for attracting non-users by developing products, aligning with local traditions, upscaling, selecting channels, financing, brand messaging, using e-commerce, building relationships, and more. Discover how to... Convert non-users: Optimize acceptability, affordability, accessibility, and awareness Create “functional Fusion”: Adapt products to blend western and local elements Design “cultural fusion”: Embed local tradition, history, language, and taste Democratize the offer: Make products more affordable, financially and psychologically Upscale the offer: Upgrade choices and experiences across the income spectrum Manage reach: Get your channels and supply chains right Reinvent reach: Leverage revolutionary channels and payment methods Build brand identity: Align your brand essence with your customer’s experience Engage stakeholders: Serve the needs of every entity you touch

Reconnection

Reconnection PDF

Author: Karen Evans

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2006-03-30

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1402025211

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This book is based on the work of a European partnership, whose members came together from Belgium England Finland Germany Portugal and Greece with the support of funding from the EU Socrates Programme. Our goal was to work collaboratively to generate new ways of thinking about the situation of people aged between 14 and 25 who are at risk of (or experiencing) social exclusion, set in the context of a unique international analysis of policies, contexts and perspectives on the problems of social exclusion in Europe and the challenges of promoting lifelong learning among those who have rejected it early in life. We set out to examine programmes which help people to RE-ENTER pathways of education and training, but ended with approaches which are better characterised by their ability to RECONNECT people, not only to opportunities in the social structures but also to each other and to their communities We have developed new models and guidelines based on analysis of the best of European practice using the distinctive approaches of 'situated learning'. By an iterative and collaborative method of working, we have arrived at the concept and approaches of Learning Communities Centred on Practice (LCPs), which lie at the heart of this volume.