Theorizing Culture

Theorizing Culture PDF

Author: Barbara Adam

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2006-04-07

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1135366810

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This highly original and timely volume engages scholars from the breadth of social science and the humanities to provide a critical perspective on cultural forms, practices and identities. It looks beyond the postmodern debate to reinstate the critical dimension in cultural analysis, providing a "student-friendly" introduction to key contemporary issues such as the body, AIDS, race, the environment and virtual reality. Theorizing Culture is essential reading for undergraduate courses in cultural and media studies and sociology, and will have considerable appeal for students and scholars of critical theory, gender studies and the history of ideas.

Theorising Culture

Theorising Culture PDF

Author: Jinghe Han

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-08-31

Total Pages: 104

ISBN-13: 3030238806

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This book seeks for an alternative perspective in analysing cultural phenomena to supplement the norm of Western dominant theorising and conceptualisation. It engages notions and concepts of culture developed by Chinese cultural theorists when addressing Chinese teachers’ cross-cultural experiences in Australian school settings. This alternative approach acknowledges the fact that the generation and development of cultural theories is contextually based. Through the reciprocated theory-data examination, it enables the arguments: Chinese culture is rooted in its written language (hanzi) which makes culture inseparable from language teaching; the core of the culture is linked back to, streamlined with and continues from China’s elongated history; this core has been consistently influential on these teachers’ practices and the observable cultural shift in them could be non-genuine mimicry for survival. Document analysis witnesses the current political push for the culture’s stability and continuity through the national education system across sectors. This book provides background information for teachers with cultural backgrounds different from their students’, and draws on a bank of practice-based evidence to suggest ways to enhance teacher-student relationships in cross-cultural settings.

Theorizing Digital Cultures

Theorizing Digital Cultures PDF

Author: Grant D. Bollmer

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2018-09-03

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1526453096

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The rapid development of digital technologies continues to have far reaching effects on our daily lives. This book explains how digital media—in providing the material and infrastructure for a host of practices and interactions—affect identities, bodies, social relations, artistic practices, and the environment. Theorizing Digital Cultures: Shows students the importance of theory for understanding digital cultures and presents key theories in an easy-to-understand way Considers the key topics of cybernetics, online identities, aesthetics and ecologies Explores the power relations between individuals and groups that are produced by digital technologies Enhances understanding through applied examples, including YouTube personalities, Facebook’s ‘like’ button and holographic performers Clearly structured and written in an accessible style, this is the book students need to get to grips with the key theoretical approaches in the field. It is essential reading for students and researchers of digital culture and digital society throughout the social sciences.

History and Cultural Theory

History and Cultural Theory PDF

Author: Simon Gunn

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-05-22

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1317868161

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In recent times there has been recognition of the growing influence of cultural theory on historical writing. Foucault, Bourdieu, Butler and Spivak are just some of the thinkers whose ideas have been taken up and deployed by historians. What are these ideas and where do they come from? How have cultural theorists thought about 'history'? And how have historians applied theoretical insights to enhance their own understanding of events in the past? This book provides a wide-ranging and authoritative guide to the often vexed and controversial relationship between history and contemporary theory. It analyses the concepts that concern both theorists and historians, such as power, identity, modernity and postcolonialism, and offers a critical evaluation of them from an historical standpoint. Written in an accessible manner, History and Cultural Theory gives historians and students an invaluable summary of the impact of cultural theory on historiography over the last twenty years, and indicates the likely directions of the subject in the future.

Theorizing Cultural Work

Theorizing Cultural Work PDF

Author: Mark Banks

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-04-11

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1134083513

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In recent years, cultural work has engaged the interest of scholars from a broad range of social science and humanities disciplines. The debate in this ‘turn to cultural work’ has largely been based around evaluating its advantages and disadvantages: its freedoms and its constraints, its informal but precarious nature, the inequalities within its global workforce, and the blurring of work–life boundaries leading to ‘self-exploitation’. While academic critics have persuasively challenged more optimistic accounts of ‘converged’ worlds of creative production, the critical debate on cultural work has itself leant heavily towards suggesting a profoundly new confluence of forces and effects. Theorizing Cultural Work instead views cultural work through a specifically historicized and temporal lens, to ask: what novelty can we actually attach to current conditions, and precisely what relation does cultural work have to social precedent? The contributors to this volume also explore current transformations and future(s) of work within the cultural and creative industries as they move into an uncertain future. This book challenges more affirmative and proselytising industry and academic perspectives, and the pervasive cult of novelty that surrounds them, to locate cultural work as an historically and geographically situated process. It will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, cultural studies, human geography, urban studies and industrial relations, as well as management and business studies, cultural and economic policy and development, government and planning.

Economics, Culture and Social Theory

Economics, Culture and Social Theory PDF

Author: William A. Jackson

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1849802114

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. . . the book is excellent in setting out and explaining a fundamental critique of economics one moreover that has been missed by most other current critics of the field. Making this case is an achievement. Hopefully, it will have a greater impact than its author probably expects. Journal of Cultural Economics Economics evolved by perfecting the taking of culture out of its reductionist and virtual world. But culture has recently been reintroduced, both as a sphere of application for an otherwise unchanging methodology and as a weak form of acknowledging that the economic alone is inadequate as the basis even for explaining the economy. This volume is an essential critical starting point for understanding the changing relationship between economics and culture and in offering a more satisfactory and stable union between the two. Ben Fine, University of London, UK Economics, Culture and Social Theory examines how culture has been neglected in economic theorising and considers how economics could benefit by incorporating ideas from social and cultural theory. Orthodox economics has prompted a long line of cultural criticism that goes back to the origins of economic theory and extends to recent debates surrounding postmodernism. William A. Jackson discusses the cultural critique of economics, identifies the main arguments, and assesses their implications. Among the topics covered are relativism and realism, idealism and materialism, agency and structure, hermeneutics, semiotics, and cultural evolution. Drawing from varied literatures, notably social and cultural theory, the book stresses the importance of culture for economic behaviour and looks at the prospects for a renewed and culturally informed economics. The book will be invaluable to heterodox economists and to anyone interested in the links between culture and the economy. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, arguing against the isolation of economics, and will therefore hold wide appeal for social scientists working in related fields, as well as for economists specialising in cultural economics and economic methodology.

Everyday Nationhood

Everyday Nationhood PDF

Author: Michael Skey

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-11-15

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1137570989

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This edited collection explores the continuing appeal of nationalism around the world. The authors’ ground-breaking research demonstrates the ways in which national priorities and sensibilities frame an extraordinary array of activities, from classroom discussions and social media posts to global policy-making, as well as identifying the value that can come from feeling part of a national community, especially during times of economic uncertainty and social change. They also note how attachments to nation can often generate powerful emotions, happiness and pride as well as anger and frustration, which can be used to mobilize substantial numbers of people into action. Featuring contributions from leading social scientists across a range of disciplines, including sociology, geography, political science, social psychology, media and cultural studies, the book presents a number of case studies covering a range of countries including Russia, Germany, New Zealand, Serbia, Japan, Azerbaijan, Greece and the USA. Everyday Nationhood will appeal to students and scholars of nationalism, globalization and identity across the social sciences as well as those with an interest in understanding the role of nationalism in shaping some of the most pressing political crises- migration, economic protectionism, populism - of the contemporary era.

Cultural Theory as Political Science

Cultural Theory as Political Science PDF

Author: Gunnar Grendstad

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-09-02

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1134652658

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This is the first major European political science book to discuss the growing interdisciplinary field of 'cultural theory', proposing a coherent and viable alternative to mainstream political science. The authors argue that three elements - social relations, cultural bias and behavioural strategy - illuminate political questions at a level of analysis on any scale: from the household to the state; the international regime to the political party.

Theorising Welfare

Theorising Welfare PDF

Author: Martin O′Brien

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 1998-03-30

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1849208263

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′ Theorising Welfare is very well written and painstakingly clear. It is an accessible and original textbook on the welfare state and the idea of welfare. There is nothing available like it in terms of its scope and intellectual sweep′ - Scott Lash, University of Lancaster There are many interpretations of welfare and welfare states, each providing insights into different aspects of welfare and pointing to different possibilities for its future. Theorising Welfare provides a guide to these debates through an examination of seven theoretical perspectives - liberalism, Marxism, neo-liberalism, post-structuralism, political economy, political ecology and postmodernism - situating them within their historical and political contexts.

The Media and Social Theory

The Media and Social Theory PDF

Author: David Hesmondhalgh

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2008-05-21

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 1134061439

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This collection brings together major and emerging media analysts to consider key processes of media change, using a number of critical perspectives. The editors present a formidable range of theoretical viewpoints and approaches, applied to a broad and fascinating variety of case studies, from reality television to the BBC World Service, from blogging to control of copyright.