A case for liberating learningEnhancing students’ quality of life through education in the classroom and beyondThroughout the history of our civilisation, education has been seen by philosophers, national leaders and educators as essential for social cohesion and economic development. However, there is a tension between the (proper) interest of governments in ensuring that education prepares young people to be effective citizens, and the de...

Much has been written about the role and presence of the Arabs in the world at the beginning of this millennium, and their ability to meet the challenges overwhelming our planet, bristling as it is with science, technology and latest lethal weapons. Now this new book by Sheikh Mohamed Bin Issa Al Jaber penetrates to the heart of the Arab situation by a new route, hitherto uncharted. The author gives us a practical and precise summary of his own contemporary Arab experience from an intercon...

This volume of essays brings together critical analysis and commentary on the literary work of Michel Tournier.

In today's globalised world, it is increasingly important to understand the otherness of different societies and their beliefs, histories and practices. This book focuses on a burning cultural issue: how concepts and constructions of gender and sexuality impact upon health, medicine and healthcare. Starting from the premise that health is neither a universal nor a unitary concept, it offers a series of interdisciplinary analyses of what sickness and well-being have been, are and can be.

If you want to know what anthropology is, look at what anthropologists do. This Very Short Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology combines an accessible account of some of the disciplines guiding principles and methodology with abundant examples and illustrations of anthropologists at work. Peter Just and John Monaghan begin by discussing anthropologys most important contributions to modern thought: its investigation of culture as a distinctively human character...

Sociolinguistics deals with the social life of language, language in its sociocultural context. It is a branch of linguistics that looks less at the shape or sound of words--morphology or phonology--and more at how our words and sentences are influenced by the society around us--for instance, how the accent or the dialect we use has been shaped by where we come from or which social class we belong to. In this Very Short Introduction, John Edwards offers the most up-to-date brief overview a...

Adrienne Rich's influential and landmark investigation concerns both the experience and the institution of motherhood.The experience is her own—as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother—but it is an experience determined by the institution, imposed on all women everywhere. She draws on personal materials, history, research, and literature to create a document of universal importance.

From an award-winning anthropologist, a lively accessible, and at times irreverent introduction to the subjectWhat is anthropology? What can it tell us about the world? Why, in short, does it matter? For well over a century, cultural anthropologists have circled the globe, from Papua New Guinea to suburban England and from China to California, uncovering surprising facts and insights about how humans organize their lives and articulate their values. In the process,...

Feminism and postcolonialism are allies, and the impressive selection of writings brought together in this volume demonstrate how fruitful that alliance can be. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills have assembled a brilliant selection of thinkers, organizing them into six categories: "Gendering Colonialism and Postcolonialism/Radicalizing Feminism," "Rethink

Leading historian Lynn Hunt rethinks why history matters in today’s global world and how it should be written.Globalization is emerging as a major economic, cultural, and political force. In Writing History in the Global Era, historian Lynn Hunt examines whether globalization can reinvigorate the telling of history. She looks toward scholars from the East and West collaborating in new ways as they share their ideas. She proposes a sweeping reevaluation of ...

In this classic work, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the leading and most influential cultural theorists working today, analyzes the relationship between language, women and culture in both Western and non-Western contexts. Developing an original integration of powerful contemporary methodologies – deconstruction, Marxism and feminism – Spivak turns this new model on major debates in the study of literature and culture, thus ensuring that In Other Worlds has become a valuable ...

The language we use forms an important part of our sense of who we are - of our identity. This book outlines the relationship between our identity as members of groups - ethnic, national, religious and gender - and the language varieties important to each group. What is a language? What is a dialect? Are there such things as language 'rights'? Must every national group have its own unique language? How have languages, large and small, been used to spread religious ideas? Why have particula...