Life At Home In The Twenty First Century

Winner of the 2014 John Collier Jr. Award Winner of the Jo Anne Stolaroff Cotsen Prize Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century cross-cuts the ranks of important books on social history, consumerism, contemporary culture, the meaning of material culture, domestic architecture, and household ethnoarchaeology. It is a distant cousin of Material World and Hungry Planet in content and style, but represents a blend of rigorous science and photography that these books can claim. Using archaeological approaches to human material culture, this volume offers unprecedented access to the middle-class American home through the kaleidoscopic lens of no-limits photography and many kinds of never-before acquired data about how people actually live their lives at home. Based on a rigorous, nine-year project at UCLA, this book has appeal not only to scientists but also to all people who share intense curiosity about what goes on at home in their neighborhoods. Many who read the book will see their own lives mirrored in these pages and can reflect on how other people cope with their mountains of possessions and other daily challenges. Readers abroad will be equally fascinated by the contrasts between their own kinds of materialism and the typical American experience. The book will interest a range of designers, builders, and architects as well as scholars and students who research various facets of U.S. and global consumerism, cultural history, and economic history.

A close-up examination and exploration, How We Live Now challenges our old concepts of what it means to be a family and have a home, opening the door to the many diverse and thriving experiments of living in twenty-first century America. Across America and around the world, in cities and suburbs and small towns, people from all walks of life are redefining our “lifespaces”—the way we live and who we live with. The traditional nuclear family in their single-family home on a suburban lot has lost its place of prominence in contemporary life. Today, Americans have more choices than ever before in creating new ways to live and meet their personal needs and desires. Social scientist, researcher, and writer Bella DePaulo has traveled across America to interview people experimenting with the paradigm of how we live. In How We Live Now, she explores everything from multi-generational homes to cohousing communities where one’s “family” is made up of friends and neighbors to couples “living apart together” to single-living, and ultimately uncovers a pioneering landscape for living that throws the old blueprint out the window. Through personal interviews and stories, media accounts, and in-depth research, How We Live Now explores thriving lifespaces, and offers the reader choices that are freer, more diverse, and more attuned to our modern needs for the twenty-first century and beyond.

A theorization of how the bioeconomy and biotechnology remake 'life itself,' creating crises in ethics and governance.

This book explores contemporary families as sites of consumption, examining the changing contexts of family life, where new forms of family are altering how family life is practised and produced, and addressing key social issues – childhood obesity, alchohol and drug addiction, social networking, viral marketing – that put pressure on families as the social, economic and regulatory environments of consumption change.

What, in these times, in is anthropology for? How do anthropologists want to be understood? For whom do they write, and in what language? And can we use anthropology's past as a resource for thinking about challenges past and future? In his new book, Ulf Hannerz cements his reputation as one of anthropology's finest writers, showing how anthropology came to be a central intellectual discipline and why it is vital that it remains so in an increasingly globalized world. "Anthropology's world" refers, on the one hand, to the discipline as a social world in itself, as a community stretching across national boundaries. It also refers to the wider outside world to which it must relate in various ways. This book deals with the world of anthropology through a broad and revealing historical analysis, questioning the way anthropologists approach their work now, and speculating how they will do so in the future. Turning the toolkit of the anthropologist upon the discipline itself and asking searching questions of the purpose, ethics and future of the subject, Anthropology's World will be required reading for all students and practitioners of anthropology.

The Value of Resilience represents one of the first systematic studies of resilience in the field of security studies. At the turn of the twenty-first century, resilience has become a ‘buzz-word’ within fields as diverse as network engineering, ecosystems management, child psychology and military training programmes. Resilience has emerged as a solution to the common problematic of radical contingency experienced across these fields. At its most general level resilience is understood as the capacity to absorb, withstand and ‘bounce-back’ quickly and efficiently from a perturbation. It is considered to be both a natural property and a quality which can be improved within a broad array of complex systems. Rather than treating resilience as either a unified concept or technique of governance, this book analyses resilience as an emergent security value. Utilizing a biopolitical analytic, it demonstrates that the value of resilience has appreciated alongside transformations in the order of power/knowledge enacted by political economies of security. Zebrowski argues that resilience was not lying in wait for the march of science to provide the conditions for its recognition. Nor was it concealed by the distortions of ideology which lifted with the culmination of the Cold War. There is nothing natural about resilience. By drawing attention to the complex historical processes and significant governmental efforts required to make resilience possible, this book aims to open up a space through which the value of resilience may be more critically interrogated. It will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, security studies and conflict resolution.

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

In the tradition of Quantum Healing and Guns, Germs and Steel, Philip Shepherd's New Self, New World makes an intellectual inquiry into how we might restore freedom, creativity, and a sense of presence in the moment by rejecting several fundamental myths about being human New Self, New World challenges the primary story of what it means to be human, the random and materialistic lifestyle that author Philip Shepherd calls our “shattered reality.” This reality encourages us to live in our heads, self-absorbed in our own anxieties. Drawing on diverse sources and inspiration, New Self, New World reveals that our state of head-consciousness falsely teaches us to see the body as something we possess and to try to take care of it without ever really learning how to inhabit it. Shepherd articulates his vision of a world in which each of us enjoys a direct, unmediated experience of being alive. He petitions against the futile pursuit of the “known self” and instead reveals the simple grace of just being present. In compelling prose, Shepherd asks us to surrender to the reality of “what is” that enables us to reunite with our own being. Each chapter is accompanied by exercises meant to bring Shepherd’s vision into daily life, what the author calls a practice that “facilitates the voluntary sabotage of long-standing patterns.” New Self, New World is at once a philosophical primer, a spiritual handbook, and a roaming inquiry into human history.