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In Schoolishness, Susan D. Blum continues her journey as an anthropologist and educator. The author defines "schoolishness" as educational practices that emphasize packaged "learning," unimaginative teaching, uniformity, constant evaluation by others, arbitrary forms, predetermined time, and artificial boundaries, resulting in personal and educational alienation, dependence, and dread.Drawing on critical, progressive, and feminist pedagogy in conversation with the anthropology of learning, and building on the insights of her two previous books Blum proposes less-schoolish ways of learning in ten dimensions, to lessen the mismatch between learning in school and learning in the wild. She asks, if learning is our human "superpower," why is it so difficult to accomplish in school? In every chapter Blum compares the fake learning of schoolishness with successful examples of authentic learning, including in her own courses, which she scrutinizes critically.Schoolishness is not a pedagogical how-to book, but a theory-based phenomenology of institutional education. It has moral, psychological, and educational arguments against schoolishness that, as Blum notes, "rhymes with foolishness."

In Sociology of Corruption, David Jancsics provides a fresh approach to the study of corruption in Hungary, which once seemed to be the most likely of the ex-communist bloc nations to catch up to the West and is, according to many experts and scholars, a country with a highly corrupt dynamic.Based on data from 2022, Hungary is now the most corrupt member state of the European Union. There is also a consensus among experts that a small clique of corrupt political actors has captured most Hungarian state institutions and a significant portion of the business sector. What fostered corruption in Hungary? What are the most typical forms of corruption in this country? What do Hungarians think about it? What is the role of prime minister Viktor Orbán in this? Sociology of Corruption proposes a novel sociological theory of corruption focusing on social status and relationships, network structures, and power dynamics as important explanatory factors of corrupt behavior. Although his focus is on Hungary, Jancsics's findings are applicable to other nations and cultural contexts.

The Future Is Feminist by Sara Rahnama offers a closer look at a pivotal moment in Algerian history when Algerians looked to feminism as a path out of the stifling realities of French colonial rule. Algerian people focused outward to developments in the Middle East, looking critically at their own society and with new eyes to Islamic tradition. In doing so, they reordered the world on their own terms--pushing back against French colonial claims about Islam's inherent misogyny. Rahnama describes how Algerians took inspiration from Middle Eastern developments in women's rights. Empowered by the Muslim reform movement sweeping the region, they read Islamic knowledge with new eyes, even calling Muhammad "the first Arab feminist." They compared the blossoming women's rights movements across the Middle East and this history of Islam's feminist potential to the stifled position of Algerian women, who suffered from limited access to education and respectable work. Local dynamics also shaped these discussions, including the recent entry of thousands of Algerian women into the workforce as domestic workers in European settler homes. While Algerian people disagreed about whether Algeria's future should be colonial or independent, they agreed that women's advancement would offer a path forward for Muslim society toward a more prosperous future. Through its use of Arabic-language sources alongside French ones, The Future Is Feminist moves beyond Algeria's colonial relationship to France to illuminate its relationship to the Middle East.

Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century illuminates the transnational agrarian movements that are remaking rural society and the world's food and agriculture systems. Marc Edelman explains how peasant movements are staking their claims from farmers' fields to massive protests around the world, shaping heated debates over peasants' rights and the very category of "peasant" within the agrarian organizations and in the United Nations.Edelman chronicles the rise of these movements, their objectives, and their alliances with environmental, human rights, women's, and food justice groups. The book scrutinizes high-profile activists and the forgotten genealogies and policy implications of foundational analytical frameworks like "moral economy," and concepts, such as "food sovereignty" and "civil society." Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century charts the struggle of agrarian movements in the face of land grabbing, counter agrarian reform, and a looming climate catastrophe, and celebrates engaged research from Central America to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

In Indirect Rule, David A. Lake examines how states indirectly exercise authority over others and how this mode of rule affects domestic and international politics. Indirect rule has long characterized interstate relationships and US foreign relations. A key mechanism of international hierarchy, indirect rule involves an allied group within a client state adopting policies preferred by a dominant state in exchange for the latter's support. Drawing on the history of US involvement in the Caribbean and Central America, Western Europe, and the Arab Middle East, Lake shows that indirect rule is more likely to occur when the specific assets at risk are large and governance costs are low. Lake's conceptualization of indirect rule sharpens our understanding of how the United States came to occupy the pinnacle of world power. Yet the consequences of indirect rule he documents--including anti-Americanism--reveal its shortcomings. As US efforts at democracy promotion and other forms of intervention abroad face declining support at home, Indirect Rule compels us to consider whether this method of rule ultimately advances American interests.

Funk the Clock is about those said to be emblematic of the future yet denied a place in time. Hence, this book is both an invitation and provocation for Black youth to give the finger to the hands of time, while inviting readers to follow their lead.In revealing how time is racialized, how race is temporalized, and how racism takes time, Rahsaan Mahadeo makes clear why conventional sociological theories of time are both empirically and theoretically unsustainable and more importantly, why they need to be funked up/with. Through his study of a youth center in Minneapolis, Mahadeo provides examples of Black youth constructing alternative temporalities that center their lived experiences and ensure their worldviews, tastes, and culture are most relevant and up to date. In their stories exists the potential to stretch the sociological imagination to make the familiar (i.e. time) strange. Funk the Clock forges new directions in the study of race and time by upending what we think we know about time, while centering Black youth as key collaborators in rewriting knowledge as we know it.

The Natural Border tells the recent history of Mediterranean rural capitalism from the perspective of marginalized Black African farm workers. Timothy Raeymaekers shows how in the context of global supply chains and repressive border regimes, agrarian production and reproduction are based on fundamental racial hierarchies.Taking the example of the tomato--a typical 'Made in Italy' commodity--Raeymaekers asks how political boundaries are drawn around the land and the labor needed for its production, what technologies of exclusion and inclusion enable capitalist operations to take place in the Mediterranean agrarian frontier, and which practices structure the allocation, use and commodification of land and labor across the tomato chain. While the mobile infrastructures that mobilize, channel, commodify and segregate labor play a central role in the 'naturalization' of racial segregation, they are also terrains of contestation and power--and thus, as The Natural Border demonstrates, reflect the tense socio-ecological transformation the Mediterranean border space is going through today.

Jewish Entanglements in the Atlantic World represents the first collective attempt to reframe the study of colonial and early American Jewry within the context of Atlantic History. From roughly 1500 to 1830, the Atlantic World was a tightly intertwined swathe of global powers that included Europe, Africa, North and South America, and the Caribbean. How, when, and where do Jews figure in this important chapter of history? This book explores these questions and many others. The essays of this volume foreground the connectivity between Jews and other population groups in the realms of empire, trade, and slavery, taking readers from the shores of Caribbean islands to various outposts of the Dutch, English, Spanish, and Portuguese empires.Jewish Entanglements in the Atlantic World revolutionizes the study of Jews in early American history, forging connections and breaking down artificial academic divisions so as to start writing the history of an Atlantic world influenced strongly by the culture, economy, politics, religion, society, and sexual relations of Jewish people.

This book argues that history and sociology share the same vital preoccupation: the desire to unravel the puzzle of human agency. How do large-scale social transformations occur, and what is the role of the individual in them? Phil Abrams devotes three chapters to the development of industrialism and scrutinizes, in that connection, the theories of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. Subsequent chapters consider Talcott Parsons and the debate on "convergence"; the formation of "states"; the idea of the "event" as a legitimate concern of history and sociology; individuals and sociological generations; deviancy and revolution; and a final chapter on the limits of historical sociology.

Paul Lerner traces the intertwined histories of trauma and male hysteria in German society and psychiatry and shows how these concepts were swept up into debates about Germany's national health, economic productivity, and military strength in the years surrounding World War I. From a growing concern with industrial accidents in the 1880s through the shell shock "epidemic" of the war, male hysteria seemed to bespeak the failings of German masculinity. In response, psychiatrists struggled to turn male-hysterical bodies into fit workers and loyal political subjects.Medical approaches to trauma valorized work and productivity as standards of male health, and psychiatric treatment--whether through hypnosis, electric current, or suggestion--concentrated on turning debilitated soldiers into symptom-free workers. These concerns endured through the Weimar period, as "nervous veterans" competed for disability compensation amid the republic's political crises and economic upheavals.Hysterical Men shows how wartime psychiatry furthered the process of medical rationalization. Lerner views this not as a precursor to the brutalities of Nazi-era psychiatry, but rather as characteristic of a more general medicalized modernity. The author asserts, however, that psychiatry's continual skepticism toward trauma resonated powerfully with the radical right's celebration of war and violence and its supposedly salutary effects on men and nations.

"The book shows how German-language modernist writers Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, Siegfried Kracauer, and Robert Musil reimagined history and the end of time using the spatial forms of non-Euclidean geometry and modernist mathematics, offering alternatives to the historicist paradigm of linear time guided by teleology"--

"These volumes outline critical elements learned from Scandinavian philology, folkloristics, archaeology, memory studies, and ethnography that provide not only an overview of the medieval Scandinavian world but also original arguments and interpretations that advance scholarly discussion in these areas"--

"The book presents the story of the Armenians of the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, California. Though the population stems from around the globe, is internally fragmented, and had limited previous experience with the American political system, they have rapidly remade this American suburban space in their own likeness"--