Must freedom be sacrificed to achieve ecological sustainability - or vice versa? Can we be genuinely free and live in sustainable societies? This book argues that we can, if we recognise and celebrate our ecological embeddedness, rather than seeking to transcend it.But this does not mean freedom can simply be redefined to fit within ecological limits. Addressing current unsustainability will involve significant restrictions, and hence will require political justification, ...

When Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center was first published in 1984, it was welcomed and praised by feminist thinkers who wanted a new vision. Even so, individual readers frequently found the theory "unsettling" or "provocative." Today, the blueprint for feminist movement presented in the book remains as provocative and relevant as ever. Written in hooks's characteristic direct style, Feminist Theory embodies the hope that feminists can find a common language to sprea...

What does diversity do? What are we doing when we use the language of diversity? Sara Ahmed offers an account of the diversity world based on interviews with diversity practitioners in higher education, as well as her own experience of doing diversity work. Diversity is an ordinary, even unremarkable, feature of institutional life. Yet diversity practitioners often experience institutions as resistant to their work, as captured through their use of the metaphor of the "brick wall." On ...

In Community Development in an Uncertain World, Jim Ife draws on the principles of social justice, ecological responsibility and post-Enlightenment and Indigenous perspectives to advance new holistic approaches to community development. The book explores the concept of community development on a local and international scale in the context of globalisation and postcolonial theory. Students will gain the essential skills and practical understanding required to navigate the existing manageri...

In Human Rights from Below, Jim Ife shows how human rights and community development are problematic terms but powerful ideals, and that each is essential for understanding and practising the other. Ife contests that practitioners - advocates, activists, workers and volunteers - can better empower and protect communities when human rights are treated as more than just a specialist branch of law or international relations, and that human rights can be better realised when community developm...

Is Habermas’s concept of the public sphere still relevant in an age of globalization, when the transnational flows of people and information have become increasingly intensive and when the nation-state can no longer be taken granted as the natural frame for social and political debate? This is the question posed with characteristic acuity by Nancy Fraser in her influential article ‘Transnationalizing the Public Sphere?’ Challenging careless uses of the term ‘global public sphere’, Fraser r...

This is a book with a difference: it produces a completely new perspective on lifelong learning and the learning society and locates them within humanity itself. Five themes run through this book:Humankind has always been aware of the imperfections of human society: as a consequence, it has looked back to a mythological past and forward to a utopian future that might be religious, political, economic or even educational to find something better.L...

An analytically precise and theoretically probing exploration of the challenge to our values and virtues posed by climate change.Predictions about global climate change have produced both stark scenarios of environmental catastrophe and purportedly pragmatic ideas about adaptation. This book takes a different perspective, exploring the idea that the challenge of adapting to global climate change is fundamentally an ethical one, that it is not simply a matter of ada...

A fascinating guide to thinking theoretically about the social worldOrganized around the discourses of modernity, democracy, and citizenship, A Primer in Social and Sociological Theory: Toward a Sociology of Citizenship helps readers to develop skills in critical thinking and theory analysis as they explore nine central ideas of thought: modernity, society, self, religion, capitalism, power, gender, race, and globalization...

We live in a time when those who wield unrestrained power believe they have the inalienable right to determine the destiny, nature and shape of social institutions like schools. Critical Pedagogy for Social Justice challenges this arrogance by showing how teachers, students, parents, communities, and researchers can develop narratives that amount to working with and for those who are increasingly being silenced, marginalized and excluded.John Smyth sets out to revisit crit...

Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia is one of the works which dominates contemporary debate in political philosophy. Drawing on traditional assumptions associated with individualism and libertarianism, Nozick mounts a powerful argument for a minimal `nightwatchman' state and challenges the views of many contemporary philosophers, most notably John Rawls.Jonathan Wolff's new book is the first full-length study of Nozick's work and of the debates to which it has given ...

In this clear, concise, comprehensively revised and up-to-date introduction to environmental ethics, Robin Attfield guides the student through the key issues and debates in this field in ways that will also be of interest to a wide range of scholars and researchers.The book introduces environmental problems and environmental ethics and surveys theories of the sources of the problems. Attfield also puts forward his own original contribution to the debates, advocating biocentric cons...