The Politics Of Recognizing Difference

Despite the fact that this book was written before the 2001 Italian general elections, the basic issues regarding multiculturalism and immigration policy undoubtedly remain of how Italians and immigrants view each other, and how the Italian form of pluralism differs, for example, from Scandinavia's. Convinced that social scientists can contribute to the sociopolitical agenda regarding difference, Grillo and Pratt (anthropology, U. of Sussex, UK) introduce 14 papers by European scholars offering case studies of topics including: racism under Italian fascism; immigrant participation in leftist politics; official, alternative, and media presentations of immigrants; local policies regarding female domestics; and Italian and Senegalese-Muslim perceptions of each other. Includes a politico-institutional map of Bologna. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Contemporary societies are marked by deep inequalities grounded in collective failures to recognize the histories, needs, and experiences of marginalized social groups. What are the strategies that can help individuals become more responsive to social realities and perspectives that differ significantly from their own? In Reimagining Sympathy,Recognizing Difference: Insights from Adam Smith, Millicent Churcherattends to recent debates over the imagination as a resource for social and political reform, and highlights the central relevance of Adam Smith’s voice to these debates. Smith, best known for his work on economics, may seem an unlikely figure to draw upon in this context. However, his nuanced account of ‘sympathy’—conceived as an imaginative and reflective capacity that develops within and through social experience—greatly enriches the role of imagination in fostering mutual understanding and solidarity among a diverse citizenry. Churcher critically explores and extends Smith’s view that if sympathy is to bind people together across their differences rather than divide them, it requires work at the level of individual practice, as well as the support of wider social structures. By drawing Smith into conversation with contemporary debates in social and political theory, this monograph addresses the pressing question of what is required from individuals and institutionsto remedy abject failures to recognize and respond ethically to difference.

"This title was first published in 2002: This volume seeks to extend and deepen an understanding of the Italian experience of immigration, going on to place it in a wider, international and comparative perspective. The text is concerned in particular to articulate the workings of the politics of difference that underpin the issue. Apart from its specific concerns with immigration and racism in Italy, this volume addresses wider field of migration and ethnicity in three ways: it explores experience in a society already post-industrial, undergoing demographic decline, and considers whether processes of integration, the formation of ethnicity and policies of multiculturalism will replicate North European examples; the studies engage with comparative questions concerning how responses are shaped, for example, by the Catholic church, or the colonial legacy; and finally, work on the politics of difference, sensitive to local variations, may provide a model and agenda for research elsewhere."--Provided by publisher.

The Handbook of Sex Differences is a four-volume reference work written to assess sex differences, with a primary focus on the human species. Based on the authors’ highly influential 2008 book Sex Differences, these volumes highlight important new research findings from the last decade and a half alongside earlier findings. In this, the work’s fourth and last volume, two related questions are addressed: Are there universal sex differences (i.e., sex differences found in all societies)? And if the answer is yes, what are they and how can each one be theoretically explained? To answer the first of these two questions, this volume condenses much of the research findings amassed in the book’s first three volumes into summary tables. Then, to help identify likely universal sex differences, three versions of social role theory and two versions of evolutionary theory are examined relative to each possible universal sex difference. Consideration is even given to religious scriptures as a sixth type of explanation. In the concluding analyses, 308 likely universal sex differences are identified. No single theory was able to explain all these differences. Nevertheless, the two evolutionary theories were better in this regard than any of the three social role theories, including the recently proposed biosocial version of social role theory. The Handbook of Sex Differences is of importance for any researcher, student, or professional who requires a comprehensive resource on sex differences.

Education policymaking is traditionally seen as a domestic political process. The job of deciding where students will be educated, what they will be taught, who will teach them, and how it will be paid for clearly rests with some mix of district, state, and national policymakers. This book seeks to show how global trends have produced similar changes to very different educational systems in the United States and Japan. Despite different historical development, social norms, and institutional structures, the U.S. and Japanese education systems have been restructured over the past dozen years, not just incrementally but in ways that have transformed traditional power arrangements. Based on 124 interviews, this book examines two restructuring episodes in U.S. education and two restructuring episodes in Japanese education. The four episodes reveal a similar politics of structural education reform that is driven by symbolic action and bureaucratic turf wars, which has ultimately hindered educational improvement in both countries.

In pre-publication, book had the subtitle Diversity and its discontents.

This book explores the journey of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) as it is interpreted and translated from International Human Rights Law into domestic law and policy in different cultural contexts. Beginning with reflections on ‘culture’, ‘disability’ and ‘human rights’ from different disciplinary perspectives, the work is then organised as ‘snapshots’ of the journey of the CRPD from the international level to the domestic; the process of ratification, the process of implementation, and then the process of monitoring the CRPD’s implementation in States Parties cultural contexts. Leading global contributors provide cutting-edge accounts of the interactions between the CRPD and diverse cultures, revealing variations in the way that the concept of ‘culture’ is defined. This collection will appeal to academics and students in Law and Socio-Legal Studies, Disability Studies, Policy Studies and Social Work, Sociology, Anthropology; and those training to be service providers with persons with disabilities.

Migrant experiences accentuate general aspects of the human condition. Therefore, this volume explores migrant's movements not only as geographical movements from here to there but also as movements that constitute an embodied, cognitive, and existential experience of living "in between" or on the "borderlands" between differently figured life-worlds. Focusing on memories, nostalgia, the here-and-now social experiences of daily living, and the hopes and dreams for the future, the volume demonstrates how all interact in migrants' and refugees' experience of identity and quest for well-being.