On March 26th, 1923, in a formal ceremony, construction of the Milan–Alpine Lakes autostrada officially began, the preliminary step toward what would become the first European motorway. That Benito Mussolini himself participated in the festivities indicates just how important the project was to Italian Fascism. Driving Modernity recounts the twisting fortunes of the autostrada, which—alongside railways, aviation, and other forms of mobility—Italian authorities hoped would spread an ideology of technological nationalism. It explains how Italy ultimately failed to realize its mammoth infrastructural vision, addressing the political and social conditions that made a coherent plan of development impossible.

In Driving toward Modernity, Jun Zhang ethnographically explores the entanglement between the rise of the automotive regime and emergence of the middle class in South China. Focusing on the Pearl River Delta, one of the nation's wealthiest regions, Zhang shows how private cars have shaped everyday middle-class sociality, solidarity, and subjectivity, and how the automotive regime has helped make the new middle classes of the PRC. By carefully analyzing how physical and social mobility intertwines, Driving toward Modernity paints a nuanced picture of modern Chinese life, comprising the continuity and rupture as well as the structure and agency of China's great transformation.

Mao Zedong had developed the Three Worlds Theory; however, after the dissolution of Soviet Union, Third World has been used interchangeably with least developed countries and somehow conveys poverty. Nevertheless, the term Third World has also been used to describe some rich countries with very high Gross Domestic Product or even high Human Development Index; therefore, poverty is not always economical, and roots within society. The nature of society is rooted in culture, which is set of ideas, norms, and values; and structure, which is the fundamental organization of society into its institutions, groups, statuses, and roles. While evaluating the difference between “real culture” and “ideal culture”, lead us to understand that cultural values are not always consistent, even within the same society. Global poverty dates back to centuries of plunder and confiscation of land and riches from the indigenous people under the flag of colonialism and exploitation. Over years, exploitation has led the current economic system being funded by the poor through theft of land and natural resources, unfair debt settlement, and unjust taxes on labor and consumption. Social inequality – in sense of distribution of material possessions, money, power, prestige, relationship – whether within societies or among them is a topic at the heart of sociology. The theory of a “Culture of Poverty” describes the combination of factors that perpetuate patterns of inequality and poverty in society. This theory states that living in conditions of prevalent poverty leads to the development of a culture or subculture adapted to those conditions, and characterized by prevalent feelings of vulnerability, dependency, marginality, and feebleness. The myth of the Culture of Poverty, intensifying Cultural Poverty, Cycle of poverty or development trap, insufficiency of materialist information society, necessity of knowledge society, and other key factors in crafting the third world are discussed in this book. “The Third World; Country or People” takes a systematic approach to the analysis of human lives and interactions and evaluates various fields including anthropology, economics, political science, ethnic studies, area studies, gender studies, cultural studies.

The experience of suburban modernity looks at the history of the London suburbs in the interwar years. It shows that, contrary to those accounts that portray suburbia as static and boring, these suburbs were in fact at the heart of the adoption of private transport and new mobilities. Wealthier middle-class suburbanites enjoyed driving at speed on new arterial roads, visiting roadhouses for a transgressive night out, taking five-shilling flights from the local airport, and joining cycling and motorcycle clubs. All this fun came at a price for some in the form of thousands of deaths in road accidents, plane crashes on suburban housing and in the despoiling of the countryside through road development. This book will be welcomed by academics and students working in suburban studies, historical geography and interwar British history and can also be enjoyed by anyone interested in the history of London.

Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust is a decisive text of intellectual reflection after Auschwitz, in which Bauman rejected the idea that the Holocaust represented the polar opposite of modernity and saw it instead as its dark potentiality. Bringing together leading scholars from across disciplines, this volume offers the first set of focused and critical commentaries on this classic work of social theory, evaluating its ongoing contribution to scholarship in the social sciences and humanities. Addressing the core messages of Modernity and the Holocaust that continue to sound amidst the convulsions of the present, the chapters situate Bauman’s volume in the social, cultural and academic context of its genesis, and considers its role in the complex processes of Holocaust memorialisation. Offering extensions of Bauman’s thesis to lesser-known and undertheorised events of mass violence, and also considering the significance of Janina Bauman’s writings in their own right, this volume will appeal to scholars of sociology, intellectual history, Holocaust and genocide studies, moral philosophy, memory studies and cultural theory.

The 2012 Wheaton Theology Conference was convened around the formidable legacy of Lutheran pastor, theologian and anti-Nazi resistant Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This collection, focusing on the man's views of Christ, the church and culture, contributes to a recent awakening of interest in Bonhoeffer among evangelicals.

This work offers a fresh perspective to the study of 'Europe' by placing the discussion of 'What is Europe?' and 'What is it to be European?', in a wider context of the study of modernity through a collection of nine case studies.

Using Europe as an example, this book readdresses and updates the concept of 'society', exploring society in the context of both globalization and conflict theory to develop a new theory of society for our times.

The awareness that the churches shaped out of the European Reformations are in an advanced process of unraveling is becoming increasingly sensed by many. This book proposes a way of addressing this unraveling based on the experiences and knowledge of people who have always had to struggle with the unraveling of their own communities and worlds. It takes us outside the circular conversations of the Euro-tribal churches into dialogue with people who have been marginalized to see how they have learned to reenter their formative stories to discover ways of remaking themselves in the unraveling. The book then turns these discoveries into ways the churches can engage their own massive unraveling.

Through the lens of the everyday, this book explores ’the countryside’ as an inhabited and practised realm with lived rhythms and routines. It relocates the topography of everyday life from its habitually urban focus, out into the English countryside. The rural is often portrayed as existing outside of modernity, or as its passive victim. Here, the rural is recast as an active and complex site of modernity, a shift which contributes alternative ways of thinking the rural and a new perspective on the everyday. In each chapter, pieces of visual culture - including scrapbooks, art works, adverts, photographs and films - are presented as tools of analysis which articulate how aspects of the everyday might operate differently in non-metropolitan places. The book features new readings of the work of significant artists and photographers, such as Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane, Stephen Willats, Anna Fox, Andrew Cross, Tony Ray Jones and Homer Sykes, seen through this rural lens, together with analysis of visually fascinating archival materials including early Shell Guides and rarely seen scrapbooks made by the Women’s Institute. Combining everyday life, rural modernity and visual cultures, this book is able to uncover new and different stories about the English countryside and contribute significantly to current thinking on everyday life, rural geographies and visual cultures.