The Lure Of The Social

The Lure of the Social is an intimate and personal exploration into the key individuals, institutions, and gatherings that make up the field of socially engaged art. In this book of encounters, the reader follows Gretchen Coombs on her journey through what could be considered the most significant shift in art world practices in the last two decades. The book navigates a spectrum: at one end, the author works closely with socially engaged artists as part of her ethnographic research; at the other, she tries to find critical distance from which to write about their art projects and the institutional structures that support their work, such as art schools and conferences. Readers are introduced to artists, their work, and the key debates and issues facing this emergent field. In the course of her study, Coombs analyzes the contradictions and paradoxes of this field of practice and gives expression to the artists working to make art relevant in times of social and political uncertainty.

Were the Romans who watched brutal gladiatorial games all that different from us? This book argues they were not.

Explores the multiple senses of place in society through cultural studies, history, geography, photography, and contemporary public art

Cities, by their very nature, are a mass of contradictions. They can be at once visually stunning, culturally rich, exploitative, and unforgiving. In The Lure of the City, Austin Williams and Alastair Donald explore the potential of cities to meet the economic, social, and political challenges of the current age. This book seeks to examine the dynamics of urban life, showing that new opportunities can be maximized and social advances realized in existing and emerging urban centers. The book explores both the planned and organic nature of urban developments and the impacts and aspirations of the people who live and work in them. It argues convincingly that the metropolitan mindset is essential to the struggle for human liberation. The short, accessibly written essays are guaranteed to spark debate across the media and academia about the place of cities and urban life in our ever-changing world.

From literary theory to social anthropology, the influence of Freud runs through every part of the human and social sciences. In The Lure of Dreams, Harvie Ferguson shows how Freud's writings and particulary The Interpretation of Dreams contribute, both in their content and in the baroque and dream-like forms in which they are cast, to our understanding of the character of modernity. This novel and stimulating approach to Freud and to the dilemmas of modernity and postmodernity will fascinate everyone with an interest in the development of the modern consciousness.

A scholarly exploration of the "UFO movement" probes life on the fringes of modernity, tracing the fascinating links between science and religion implied by this philosophy.

A human and global take on a beloved vacation spot. The crash of surf, smell of salted air, wet whorls of sand underfoot. These are the sensations of the beach, that environment that has drawn humans to its life-sustaining shores for millennia. And while the gull's cry and the cove's splendor have remained constant throughout time, our relationship with the beach has been as fluid as the runnels left behind by the tide's turning. The Lure of the Beach is a chronicle of humanity's history with the coast, taking us from the seaside pleasure palaces of Roman elites and the aquatic rituals of medieval pilgrims, to the venues of modern resort towns and beyond. Robert C. Ritchie traces the contours of the material and social economies of the beach throughout time, covering changes in the social status of beach goers, the technology of transport, and the development of fashion (from nudity to Victorianism and back again), as well as the geographic spread of modern beach-going from England to France, across the Mediterranean, and from nineteenth-century America to the world. And as climate change and rising sea levels erode the familiar faces of our coasts, we are poised for a contemporary reckoning with our relationship--and responsibilities--to our beaches and their ecosystems. The Lure of the Beach demonstrates that whether as a commodified pastoral destination, a site of ecological resplendency, or a flashpoint between private ownership and public access, the history of the beach is a human one that deserves to be told now more than ever before.

Winner of the Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History, Organization of American Historians Co-Winner of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History Book Award Thinking Small tells the story of how the United States sought to rescue the world from poverty through small-scale, community-based approaches. And it also sounds a warning: such strategies, now again in vogue, have been tried before, with often disastrous consequences. “Unfortunately, far from eliminating deprivation and attacking the social status quo, bottom-up community development projects often reinforced them...This is a history with real stakes. If that prior campaign’s record is as checkered as Thinking Small argues, then its intellectual descendants must do some serious rethinking... How might those in twenty-first-century development and anti-poverty work forge a better path? They can start by reading Thinking Small.” —Merlin Chowkwanyun, Boston Review “As the historian Daniel Immerwahr demonstrates brilliantly in Thinking Small, the history of development has seen constant experimentation with community-based and participatory approaches to economic and social improvement...Immerwahr’s account of these failures should give pause to those who insist that going small is always better than going big.” —Jamie Martin, The Nation