The challenges of teaching a successful introductory sociology course today demand materials very different from the norm. It is a question of making the practice of sociological thinking meaningful, rigorous, and relevant to today’s world of undergraduates.This comparatively concise, highly visual, and engaging book offers a refreshingly new way forward to reach students, using one of the most powerful tools in a sociologist’s teaching arsenal – the familiar stuf...

North Americans love eating meat. Despite the increased awareness of the meat industry's harms–violence against animals, health problems, and associations with environmental degradation–the rate of meat eating hasn't changed significantly in recent years. Instead, what has emerged is an uncomfortable paradox: a need to square one's values with the behaviors that contradict those values.Using a large-scale, multidimensional, and original dataset, Happy Meat explores the tho...

North Americans love eating meat. Despite the increased awareness of the meat industry's harms–violence against animals, health problems, and associations with environmental degradation–the rate of meat eating hasn't changed significantly in recent years. Instead, what has emerged is an uncomfortable paradox: a need to square one's values with the behaviors that contradict those values.Using a large-scale, multidimensional, and original dataset, Happy Meat explores the tho...

This important cultural analysis tells two stories about food. The first depicts good food as democratic. Foodies frequent ‘hole in the wall’ ethnic eateries, appreciate the pie found in working-class truck stops, and reject the snobbery of fancy French restaurants with formal table service. The second story describes how food operates as a source of status and distinction for economic and cultural elites, indirectly maintaining and reproducing social inequality. While the first storyline ...

The intersections of aging, media, and culture are under-explored given trends in population aging, rapid increases in the mediation of everyday life, and the growing cultural significance of media consumption at the global level. This book brings together an international collection of critical scholars, both well-established and up-and-coming, from the various academic disciplines that share a common interest in the future study of aging and media. This anthology of original articles int...

Susanna may be mute, but not stupid. And although she is still a child she can draw wonderful pictures. But as it was in the Soviet Union behind the iron curtain in those days it was not easy to raise a deaf child that didn't fit into the communist ideal, and the state would whisk her swiftly away into a home if they found her. Her mother Antonia had a stroke of luck as she, although a lowly worker in a factory, became a room in a communal apartment that she would share with three older wo...

The teacher and gerontological social work scholar Mercedes Bern-Klug joins experts on nursing, law, medicine, sociology, and social work to provide a thorough understanding of nursing home palliative care. Their broad definition of palliative care treats comfort care as appropriate across the illness experience, not just at the end of life.Because a majority of nursing home residents are older adults facing multiple, advanced chronic conditions, this book is grounded in the provis...

Colorful and enlightening vignettes about life by everyday people in their seventies, eighties, and nineties.When social worker Wendy Lustbader was asked to take down the histories of residents in a retirement community, she discovered that "the man with Alzheimer's in room 410" was actually ninety-six-year-old Ole Harlen, a former concert pianist. "The woman who people-watches in the lobby" was really Lila Lane, who eloped to Tijuana with her sweetheart at age sixteen, and who at ...

More than ever, the aging process is recognized as carrying a special set of emotional challenges–especially when acute or chronic medical conditions are involved. In this light, Psychodynamic Perspectives on Aging and Illness presents a fresh, contemporary application of psychodynamic theory, addressing the complex issues surrounding declining health. Informed by the spectrum of psychodynamic thought from self, relational, and classical theories, this forward looking volume offer...

People are leading significantly longer lives than previous generations did, and the proportion of older people in the population is growing. Residential care for older people will become increasingly necessary as our society ages and, we will require more of it. At this moment in time, the rights of older people receive attention at international and regional levels, with the United Nations, the Organization of American States and the African Union exploring the possibility of establishin...

The Politics of Age and Disability in Contemporary Spanish Film examines the onscreen construction of adolescent, elderly, and disabled subjects in Spanish cinema from 1992 to the present. Applying a dual lens of film analysis and theory drawn from the allied fields of youth, age, and disability studies, this study is set both within and against a conversation on cultural diversity—with respect to gender, sexual, and ethnic identity—which has driven not only much of the past decad...

Evidence Based Treatment with Older Adults: Theory, Practice, and Research provides a detailed examination of five research-supported psychosocial interventions for use with older adults: cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing, life review/reminiscence, problem solving therapy, and psychoeducational/social support approaches. These interventions address the diversity of mental health conditions and late-life challenges that older adults and their family members ex...