Deepening Crisis

Response to financial meltdown is entangled with basic challenges to global governance. Environment, global security and ethnicity and nationalism are all global issues today. Focusing on the political and social dimensions of the crisis, contributors examine changes in relationships between the world’s richer and poorer countries, efforts to strengthen global institutions, and difficulties facing states trying to create stability for their citizens. Contributors include: Immanuel Wallerstein, David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, James Kenneth Galbraith, Manuel Castells, Nancy Fraser, Rogers Brubaker, David Held, Mary Kaldor, Vadim Volkov, Giovanni Arrighi, Beverly Silver, and Fernando Coronil. The three volumes can purchased individually or as a set.

Response to financial meltdown is entangled with basic challenges to global governance. Environment, global security and ethnicity and nationalism are all global issues today. Focusing on the political and social dimensions of the crisis, contributors examine changes in relationships between the world’s richer and poorer countries, efforts to strengthen global institutions, and difficulties facing states trying to create stability for their citizens.

Herbert Schiller, long one of America's leading critics of the communications industry, here offers a salvo in the battle over information. In Information Inequality he explains how privatization and the corporate economy directly affect our most highly prized democratic institutions: schools and libraries, media, and political culture. A master media-watcher, Schiller presents a crisp and far-reaching indictment of the "data deprivation" corporate interests are inflicting on the social fabric.

From bank bailouts to austerity, Europe's and Ireland's response to the economic crisis has been engineered specifically to shift the burden of paying for the crisis onto ordinary citizens while investors, financiers, bankers and the privileged are protected. The authors expose the class-based nature of Ireland's crisis resolution.

Richard Florida, one of the world's leading urbanists and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, confronts the dark side of the back-to-the-city movement In recent years, the young, educated, and affluent have surged back into cities, reversing decades of suburban flight and urban decline. and yet all is not well. In The New Urban Crisis, Richard Florida, one of the first scholars to anticipate this back-to-the-city movement, demonstrates how the forces that drive urban growth also generate cities' vexing challenges, such as gentrification, segregation, and inequality. Meanwhile, many more cities still stagnate, and middle-class neighborhoods everywhere are disappearing. We must rebuild cities and suburbs by empowering them to address their challenges. The New Urban Crisis is a bracingly original work of research and analysis that offers a compelling diagnosis of our economic ills and a bold prescription for more inclusive cities capable of ensuring prosperity for all.

Through a comparative analysis of the political Left and social movements in Chile and Peru, this book explores the structural and institutional forces which have limited the scope and quality of democracy in contemporary Latin America.

Articles and graphics describe economic conditions since the 1980s and their effect on the nation.

The greatest social change in Europe during the last twenty years is that almost half of Europe's young people now attend college. Yet despite these unprecedented levels of university attendance, the lived experiences of students remain largely undocumented. Focusing on the effects of the financial crisis and austerity, this empirically grounded analysis compares the lives of university students from three very different European welfare systems: Italy, England, and Sweden. By contrasting access to welfare support--in connection with the role of families, the state, and the labor market postgraduation--Student Lives in Crisis exposes the students' often overlooked social realities, as well as the impact of their shared experience of financial uncertainty. Drawing on questionnaires and first person interviews, Lorenza Antonucci reveals the misconceptions behind many higher education policies in Europe, demonstrating that university participation exacerbates rather than ameliorates inequalities among young people from different social backgrounds.