In the sixth edition of Contested Knowledge, social theorist Steven Seidman presents the latest topics in social theory and addresses the current shift of 'universalist theorists' to networks of clustered debates. Responds to current issues, debates, and new social movements Reviews sociological theory from a contemporary perspective Reveals how the universal theorist and the era of rival schools has been replaced by networks of clustered debates that are relatively 'autonomous' and interdisciplinary Features updates and in-depth discussions of the newest clustered debates in social theory—intimacy, postcolonial nationalism, and the concept of 'the other' Challenges social scientists to renew their commitment to the important moral and political role social knowledge plays in public life

In the sixth edition of Contested Knowledge, social theorist Steven Seidman presents the latest topics in social theory and addresses the current shift of 'universalist theorists' to networks of clustered debates. Responds to current issues, debates, and new social movements Reviews sociological theory from a contemporary perspective Reveals how the universal theorist and the era of rival schools has been replaced by networks of clustered debates that are relatively 'autonomous' and interdisciplinary Features updates and in-depth discussions of the newest clustered debates in social theory—intimacy, postcolonial nationalism, and the concept of 'the other' Challenges social scientists to renew their commitment to the important moral and political role social knowledge plays in public life

Medicine has always been a significant tool of an empire. This book focuses on the issue of the contestation of knowledge, and examines the non-Western responses to Western medicine. The decolonised states wanted Western medicine to be established with Western money, which was resisted by the WHO. The attribution of an African origin to AIDS is related to how Western scientists view the disease as epidemic and sexually threatening. Veterinary science, when applied to domestic stock, opens up fresh areas of conflict which can profoundly influence human health. Pastoral herd management was the enemy of land enclosure and efficient land use in the eyes of the colonisers. While the native Indians of the United States were marginal participants in the delivery or shaping of health care, the Navajo passively resisted Western medicine by never giving up their own religion-medicine. The book discusses the involvement of the Rockefeller Foundation in eradicating the yellow fever in Brazil and hookworm in Mexico. The imposition of Western medicine in British India picked up with plague outbreaks and enforced vaccination. The plurality of Indian medicine is addressed with respect to the non-literate folk medicine of Rajasthan in north-west India. The Japanese have been resistant to the adoption of the transplant practices of modern scientific medicine. Rumours about the way the British were dealing with plague in Hong Kong and Cape Town are discussed. Thailand had accepted Western medicine but suffered the effects of severe drug resistance to the WHO treatment of choice in malaria.

This book is a wide-ranging introduction to critical theory, providing an overview of the practice, role and importance of theory across the humanities and social sciences. Concepts and terms are explained and presented with examples and references.

Medicine has always been a significant tool of an empire. This book focuses on the issue of the contestation of knowledge, and examines the non-Western responses to Western medicine. The decolonised states wanted Western medicine to be established with Western money, which was resisted by the WHO. The attribution of an African origin to AIDS is related to how Western scientists view the disease as epidemic and sexually threatening. Veterinary science, when applied to domestic stock, opens up fresh areas of conflict which can profoundly influence human health. Pastoral herd management was the enemy of land enclosure and efficient land use in the eyes of the colonisers. While the native Indians of the United States were marginal participants in the delivery or shaping of health care, the Navajo passively resisted Western medicine by never giving up their own religion-medicine. The book discusses the involvement of the Rockefeller Foundation in eradicating the yellow fever in Brazil and hookworm in Mexico. The imposition of Western medicine in British India picked up with plague outbreaks and enforced vaccination. The plurality of Indian medicine is addressed with respect to the non-literate folk medicine of Rajasthan in north-west India. The Japanese have been resistant to the adoption of the transplant practices of modern scientific medicine. Rumours about the way the British were dealing with plague in Hong Kong and Cape Town are discussed. Thailand had accepted Western medicine but suffered the effects of severe drug resistance to the WHO treatment of choice in malaria.

Demonstrating that all notions of nature are inextricably entangled in different forms of social life, the text elaborates the many ways in which the apparently natural world has been produced from within particular social practices. These are analyzed in terms of different senses, different times and the production of distinct spaces, including the local, the national and the global. The authors emphasize the importance of cultural understandings of the physical world, highlighting the ways in which these have been routinely misunderstood by academic and policy discourses. They show that popular conceptions of, and attitudes to, nature are often contradictory and that there are no simple ways of prevailing upon people to `

Water acquisition, storage, allocation and distribution are intensely contested in our society, whether, for instance, such issues pertain to a conflict between upstream and downstream farmers located on a small stream or to a large dam located on the border of two nations. Water conflicts are mostly studied as disputes around access to water resources or the formulation of water laws and governance rules. However, explicitly or not, water conflicts nearly always also involve disputes among different philosophical views. The contributions to this edited volume have looked at the politics of contested knowledge as manifested in the conceptualisation, design, development, implementation and governance of large dams and mega-hydraulic infrastructure projects in various parts of the world. The special issue has explored the following core questions: Which philosophies and claims on mega-hydraulic projects are encountered, and how are they shaped, validated, negotiated and contested in concrete contexts? Whose knowledge counts and whose knowledge is downplayed in water development conflict situations, and how have different epistemic communities and cultural-political identities shaped practices of design, planning and construction of dams and mega-hydraulic projects? The contributions have also scrutinised how these epistemic communities interactively shape norms, rules, beliefs and values about water problems and solutions, including notions of justice, citizenship and progress that are subsequently to become embedded in material artefacts.

Bessarabia?mostly occupied by modern-day republic of Moldova?was the only territory representing an object of rivalry and symbolic competition between the Russian Empire and a fully crystallized nation-state: the Kingdom of Romania. This book is an intellectual prehistory of the Bessarabian problem, focusing on the antagonism of the national and imperial visions of this contested periphery. Through a critical reassessment and revision of the traditional historical narratives, the study argues that Bessarabia was claimed not just by two opposing projects of ?symbolic inclusion,? but also by two alternative and theoretically antagonistic models of political legitimacy. By transcending the national lens of Bessarabian / Moldovan history and viewing it in the broader Eurasian comparative context, the book responds to the growing tendency in recent historiography to focus on the peripheries in order to better understand the functioning of national and imperial states in the modern era. ÿ

Contests over knowledge are central to contests over environments. Many of those contests are not just about Ægood scienceÆ or æbad scienceÆ, but over the idea of nature itself: the idea that the nature that science makes known to the world is set apart from æcultureÆ or æsocietyÆ, or that nature is comprised of objects û rivers, fish, soil û the knowledge of which lies outside of social life and democratic politics. Contested Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge focuses on moments in which contests over ecology become moments for rethinking this ecology of knowledge. The chapters cover a wide variety of settings-from urban Cape Town to indigenous activism in Peru; from MugabeÆs Zimbabwe to the Beguela ecosystem fisheries, and include protected areas in the Aboriginal territories of northern Australia. Contested Ecologies could be read as an enlightened report on the status of knowledge worldwide. Not only does it demonstrate, with a powerful collective voice from the Global South that will be difficult to ignore, that differences between knowledges ineluctably imply differences among forms of making the world, it actually succeeds in exemplifying paths for genuine and constructive conversations across seemingly intractable divides. The volume offers the first concrete demonstration that it is indeed possible to go beyond the alleged rift between nature and culture, moving us closer towards the elusive goal of healing our planet through new knowledge formations. At a time when the academy seems mired in training students to perform well in so-called 'globalization' (understood as market success), this courageous volume represents a breath of fresh air in the debates over how to re-imagine the university as a central player in the construction of a new ethics of life. Arturo Escobar, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Extraordinarily interesting ... A new anthropology is afoot. Contested Ecologies sets out a new approach beyond the boundaries of modernity as we know it. Here different versions of nature are at play, and a 'political ontology' has emerged to grasp this problem. Cosmopolitics comes into its own in this collection. Anna Tsing, author of Friction: An ethnography of global connection Book jacket.

Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro explains when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote his plays.