Legacy cities, also commonly referred to as shrinking, or post-industrial cities, are places that have experienced sustained population loss and economic contraction. In the United States, legacy cities are those that are largely within the Rust Belt that thrived during the first half of the 20th century. In the second half of the century, these cities declined in economic power and population leaving a legacy of housing stock, warehouse districts, and infrastructure that is ripe for revitalization. This volume explores not only the commonalities across legacy cities in terms of industrial heritage and population decline, but also their differences. Legacy Cities poses the questions: What are the legacies of legacy cities? How do these legacies drive contemporary urban policy, planning and decision-making? And, what are the prospects for the future of these cities? Contributors primarily focus on Cleveland, Ohio, but all Rust Belt cities are discussed.

The Open Invitation explores the relationship between prefigurative politics and activist video. Schiwy analyzes activist videos from the 2006 uprising in Oaxaca, the Zapatista’s Other Campaign, as well as collaborative and community video from the Yucatán. Schiwy argues that transnational activist videos and community videos in indigenous languages reveal collaborations and that their political impact cannot be grasped through the concept of the public sphere. Instead, she places these videos in dialogue with recent efforts to understand the political with communality, a mode of governance articulated in indigenous struggles for autonomy, and with cinematic politics of affect.

Psychoanalysts of all schools have generally dismissed and sometimes openly disapproved feminism and its critique of male universalism. While other disciplines, like sociology and anthropology, have welcomed the contributions of feminist theory, psychoanalysis remains hindered by its own unconscious, which is patriarchal. This book wants to cast light on the unthought of Freudian and Lacanian theory by way of an analysis of the concept of femininity. The aim is to show how phallocentrism functions as a screen which obscures the real relations between the sexes, the meaning of desire and the understanding of sexual difference.

The first Manifesto of Futurism was published in Le Figaro on February 20th, 1909. It was to become the first avant-garde movement in art – it aimed to change the function of art within society, foster Italian culture beyond its provincial domains, and last but not least, to extend language as free expression of a new and forthcoming society of technology. Art in life was the ultimate aim of Marinetti’s poetry, which then expanded well beyond Italian borders and artistic expression, becoming an attitude for new society. The more that society was developing social constraints, the more that artistic expression would become free of canons to let imagination fluently overwhelm reality. The main topics proclaimed as crucial by Futurists are the contemporary most influential topics for social stability: politics, communication and technology as well as the major movers of social change. What can we still learn from the radical claims of avant-garde art?

Since the 1960's, developing countries in Latin America started a complex journey towards establishing new values, the ones of modernity. This volume considers the work of renowned Italian-Argentine sociologist Gino Germani, who more than anyone else has been able to outline the process of modernization from this particular aspect. The author highlights Germani’s idea of ‘freedom’ as a crucial and unavoidable concept at the core of the “modern” way of being persons, subjects, social actors and active participants within a social system. Germani also refers to the opposite direction, that of social marginality, and suggests that a ‘free’ human being is somebody who is responsible for his or her actions. Within this context, every human being is the bearer of rights insofar as he or she is capable of making choices, taking responsibilities and, able to identify – on equal footing with everyone else – the right and duty to be free. Bringing a new light to the great 20th century sociologist’s thought, this book aims to trace the path of modernization and the timely issues of freedom, marginality, and participation that still profoundly defines our social structure.

Our classrooms are multicultural, even where there are no learners from minority ethnic backgrounds. All of our learners have different cultures: socioeconomic status, gender, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, health and other factors contribute to these differences. We continue to find learners for whom traditional teaching approaches don’t work - so we need to provide active, creative learning environments and methods to reach all learners and give them an equal chance to thrive and learn. This book is a practical toolkit for teachers, trainee teachers, and others active in the field of education. The main focus is on the application of a range of co-operative learning approaches, and how to use them with diverse groups of learners.

How can we restore fundamental values on a political and cultural level? Taking this question as a starting point, the book identifies the notion of sociological imagination as a suitable method to address the widespread disorientation within the human and social sciences. In particular, the three essays included in this volume focus on the role of sociology as a tool to achieve a constructive representation of reality. Through a sharp analysis of the current, growing dismissal of cultural structures and the lack of an ethical view in the interpretation of social phenomena, the author offers new perspectives in order to recover authentic human commitments that are able to re-establish meaningful relationships between people.

Roots in Reverse explores how Latin music contributed to the formation of the négritude movement in the 1930s. Taking Senegal and Cuba as its primary research areas, this work uses oral histories, participant observation, and archival research to examine the ways Afro-Cuban music has influenced Senegalese debates about cultural and political citizenship and modernity. Shain argues that the trajectory of Afro-Cuban music in twentieth century Senegal illuminates many dimensions of that nation’s cultural history such as gender relations, generational competition and conflict, debates over cosmopolitanism and hybridity, the role of nostalgia in Senegalese national culture and diasporic identities. More than just a new form of musical enjoyment, Afro-Cuban music provided listeners with a tool for creating a public sphere free from European and North American cultural hegemony.

Atmospheres are omnipresent and they are frequently used in everyday language. Yet, when do we perceive atmospheres and how can we explore them? The concept of atmosphere extends aesthetics to aisthesis and comprehends perception as a relation bound to the present and with regard to others. In this context, the astonishing atmosphere is identified as a watershed moment when the object of perception becomes the object of discourse. Surveying Benjamin’s definitions of aura, one becomes aware of two modes of perception, which are crucial for the understanding of atmospheres. The “atmospheric portfolio”, therefore, provides for the possibility to explore the particular features of the phenomenon. It is a collection of studies and research methods, which, on the one hand, reflects on the terms and concepts, and, which, on the other, allows for exemplary experiments of the empirical approaches to the phenomenon.

The Odyssey is rightly celebrated as a story that goes far beyond the scope of epic poetry. It is an open window to an entire era and its social systems as well as its theological, cultural, economic and political structures, while running simultaneously in the register of the earthly and of the divine. Within The Odyssey, the episode of the Sirens stands out as an exceptionally evocative example of this kind of achievement. This volume is dedicated to exploring the myriad levels of analysis that are allowed by this famous episode, following in the footsteps of celebrated readers of The Odyssey such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Lukàcs, Auerbach, Kerény, Bloch, Auden, Pound, Tolstoj, Elster and Steiner. By looking at the brief encounter between Ulysses and the Sirens, the reader of this volume will discover the roots of our modern concept of middle class rationality and its profound ramifications stretching between economy, politics, and the divine.

Surprisingly, jihadi groups like ISIS do not only attract female supporters coming from Muslim communities, but also Western women who grew up in non-Muslim environments. Trauma, depression and the need for a more exciting life outside the constraints of Western society brought some women to embrace the political cause of waging jihad and supporting terrorism. This book discovers the hidden psychological and sociological drivers that can lead young Western women to support jihadi ideology, violence and sometimes suicide. Through real and uncanny stories, supported by reliable official data, the book provides a scientific analysis of the mechanisms that can lead any “girl next door” to approve and passionately fall for a destructive movement, which she perceives as a heroic, romantic and empowering act.

A&P is a multidiscilinary journal which gathers international scholars and thinkers to analyse the latest debates in the field of philosophy and anthropology.

White southerners recognized that the perpetuation of segregation required whites of all ages to uphold a strict social order -- especially the young members of the next generation. White children rested at the core of the system of segregation between 1890 and 1939 because their participation was crucial to ensuring the future of white supremacy. Their socialization in the segregated South offers an examination of white supremacy from the inside, showcasing the culture's efforts to preserve itself by teaching its beliefs to the next generation. In Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South, author Kristina DuRocher reveals how white adults in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continually reinforced race and gender roles to maintain white supremacy. DuRocher examines the practices, mores, and traditions that trained white children to fear, dehumanize, and disdain their black neighbors. Raising Racists combines an analysis of the remembered experiences of a racist society, how that society influenced children, and, most important, how racial violence and brutality shaped growing up in the early-twentieth-century South.

In the sixties and seventies, the public sphere in Western countries was a place of critique. Through their activism in the public sphere, various kinds of social movements democratised institutions and political culture. Today, neoliberal politics and populist movements have transformed this place into a perilous arena, hosting many serious threats to democracy. The outcome of this challenge and confrontation will depend on how democratic political actors will make their presence felt in the public sphere.

Exploring human nature takes the reader deep into the human experience of being in nature. Our current ecological predicament highlights the need to change people’s nature awareness and behaviour. This pioneering mixed methods study investigates a method to do this through facilitated Solo time in the wilderness. Solo time is an ancient, ritualised and pan-cultural practice of spending time alone in nature, that has been reintroduced into our current time and culture. The study focuses on the phenomenology of young adults’ immersive experiences in nature and the evaluation of long term impact on their personal development, their relationship with nature, community participation and ecological behaviour. However, this work is not only about the content of research, it is also about how research is done. On a methodological level the study takes a systemic approach: it explores and integrates an expanded, interconnected worldview and methodology. In practice, this encompasses working with participants’ dreams as data and including different ways of knowing in an expanded view on validity. It also includes collecting data on the researcher’s own experience and integrating it as a parallel narrative in the thesis. In this manner the book not only tackles the pressing issue of an increasing psychological and physical separation between humans and nature. It also calls into question how conventional research and its prevailing tendency to investigate the world in isolated pieces may contribute to the problem. Overall, this book provides a practical example of how a systemic approach may be integrated in the research process and in academic writing. It also serves as a valuable reference point for future work on promising triggers for change and highlights powerful elements for prospective programmes focussing on individual empowerment, sustainability and nature awareness. It addresses all researchers interested in ecopsychology and experiential education but also those who are curious to explore subjectivity as part of an expanded worldview and methodology in research.

The book is focused on parenthood and generativity, considered by the authors not only as biological functions, but above all as human and socio-cultural capabilities able to overcome gender differences.Therefore, the authors reconsider motherhood, emphasizing the historical and social function of women; the accent on socio-cultural gender role of women as mothers and wives also inspires an undeniable reflection on male identities and fatherhood. The book insists that parenthood and care are human characteristics, and not only a specific female frame, and suggests to the reader a new focus on gender relationships, by adopting a gylanic perspective.