The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory provides a rich overview of the analytical frameworks and theoretical concepts that feminist theorists have developed to analyze the known world. Featuring leading feminist theorists from diverse regions of the globe, this collection delves into forty-nine subject areas, demonstrating the complexity of feminist challenges to established knowledge, while also engaging areas of contestation within feminist theory. Demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of feminist theory, the chapters offer innovative analyses of topics central to social and political science, cultural studies and humanities, discourses associated with medicine and science, and issues in contemporary critical theory that have been transformed through feminist theorization. The handbook identifies limitations of key epistemic assumptions that inform traditional scholarship and shows how theorizing from women's and men's lives has profound effects on the conceptualization of central categories, whether the field of analysis is aesthetics, biology, cultural studies, development, economics, film studies, health, history, literature, politics, religion, science studies, sexualities, violence, or war.

This study investigates the extent to which personal welfare state experiences affect general political orientations and attitudes. What are the political effects when a person is discontent with some aspect of, say, the particular health services or the public kindergartens that she has been in personal contact with? Do they lose faith in the welfare state or in leftist ideas about large-scale state intervention in society? Do they take their negative experiences as a sign that the political system and its politicians are not functioning satisfactorily? Will their inclination to support the governing party drop? And if so, how strong are the political effects of personal welfare state experiences compared to those of other, more well-known, explanatory factors? Addressing these and other questions, this study develops a theoretical framework that incorporates insights from a multitude of research traditions, including research on the welfare state, voting behaviour, social psychology, rational choice theory, political psychology, and institutional theory. The framework is tested empirically using Swedish primary survey data collected under the auspices of the 1999 West Sweden SOM Survey, and the 1999 Swedish European Parliament Election Study.

In an era of the radicalization of political ideologies in Europe, long-lasting societal remnants of the economic breakdown, and the neoliberalist consolidation of capitalist values, it is ethically relevant to critically reconceptualise the meaning and role of European feminisms and the challenges they have to confront today, both locally and transnationally. In the face of ubiquitous beliefs about feminism having exhausted itself, such a rethinking of the place and priorities of feminist politics within and outside academia is urgently needed. The popularization of the so-called faux-feminisms, assuming attained emancipation in the present-day neoliberal environment of advanced capitalism, calls for close examination and creative counter-strategies. Bearing in mind that the patterns of oppression still prevail, becoming even more and more insidious and complex, it is all the more necessary to identify, scrutinize, and contest the vicissitudes of the dominant apparatus of control and subjugation, and to demystify the purportedly gender-inclusive operations of the regime. As such, the book seeks to renew an academic and political interest in the epistemological tradition of context-created knowledge. Bringing together authors from diverse geopolitical locations, this volume constitutes a forum for fruitful encounters across generations and national and cultural differences, contributing to a better understanding of the complexities of patriarchal ideologies and to the creation of a more sustainable communal future. The book offers a collection of chapters introducing situated perspectives which adopt intersectional optics in order to analyze the transformations of the contemporary socio-political realm and reflect research priorities within present-day feminist scholarship.

The eminent political scientist Manfred Halpern (1924-2001) viewed politics as belonging to each of us, as part of the nature of being human. In A Comprehensive Philosophy of Transformation, his magnum opus, Halpern elucidates the interconnected "four faces of our being" the political, personal, historical, and sacred. This momentous volume identifies several modes of political activity, warns against the dangers of leaving politics to professional politicians, and urges us to build networks of compassion that include everyone in a just society. Overall, Halpern calls for a transformative politics achieved through enhanced participation and understanding.

The Personal and the Political presents three fables written by social commentator and political thinker Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brede et de Montesquieu: The Temple of Cnidus (on eros and justice), Lysimachus (on philosophy and imperial ambition), and Dialogue de Sylla et d'Eucrate (on the limits of political ambition). This work is author W.B. Allen's response to attempts that collapse Montesquieu's analysis of modern political philosophy into a general discussion of virtue and morality by raising anew the issues of true and false happiness and pleasures. Allen maintains that Montesquieu's fables demonstrate the continuing relevance of the issue of philosophical morality, and offer a reconciliation of the tension between philosophical morality and political morality. The Personal and the Political provides a translation of each fable (with parallel French text), a brief introduction and commentaries to develop the context in which each is written and the situations that they address. Each fable is suited to introduce Montesquieu's conceptions of ancient virtues and vices, and what they contribute to modern sensibilities.

How the Personal became Political brings together new research on the feminist and sexual revolutions of the 1970s in Australia. It addresses the political and theoretical significance of these movements, asking how and why did matters previously considered private and personal, become public and political? These movements produced a series of changes that were both interconnected and profound. The pill became generally available and sexuality was both celebrated and flaunted. Homosexuality was gradually decriminalized. Gay liberation and Women’s Liberation erupted. Activists established women’s refuges, rape crisis centres, and counselling services. Crucially, in Australia, these developments coincided with the election of progressive governments, who appointed women’s advisors and expanded the role of the state in the provision of childcare and other services. It was a decade of contestation and transformation. This book addresses the political and theoretical significance of these 1970s revolutions, and poses key questions about the nature of sweeping change. What were the key policy shifts? How were protests connected to legislative reforms? How did Australia fit into the broader transnational movements for change? What are the legacies of these movements and what can activists today learn from them? Scholars from several disciplines offer fresh insight into this wave of social revolution, and its contemporary relevance. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Australian Feminist Studies.

These essays follow a veteran teacher educator and school reform activist as he tries to understand an enterprise he calls "mysterious and immeasurable." By focusing on the authentic experiences of teaching and learning that he has lived over the past 15 years, Bill Ayers reconsiders, argues, reflects, and searches for ways to break through the routine and the ordinary to see teaching as the important and extraordinary work it is. Covering a range of issues—standards, equity, testing, professionalism—this book shows us teaching as an achingly personal calling, and ultimately as a social and a political act. With these essays, Bill Ayers invites teachers into a wonderful conversation about the meaning of teaching as craft, as art, as vocation. He reminds us that an active kind of hope is at the core of teaching,seeing things both as they are and as they could be.

Psychiatry and psychology have constructed a mental health system that does no justice to the problems it claims to understand and creates multiple problems for its users. Yet the myth of biologically-based mental illness defines our present. The book rethinks madness and distress reclaiming them as human, not medical, experiences.

Conventional philosophical wisdom holds that no agent can invoke its own moral integrity — no agent can invoke fidelity to its deepest ethical commitments — as an independent moral consideration. This is because moral integrity simply consists in doing what is, all-things-considered, the right thing. Integrity argues that this conventional wisdom is mistaken with regard to individual agents, but is especially misguided with regard to liberal democracies as collective agents. Even more than individual persons, liberal democracies as collective agents often face integrity considerations of independent moral force, affecting the moral status of actual political decisions. After defending this philosophical thesis, this book illustrates its practical value in thinking through a wide range of practical policy problems. These problems range from 'dirty' national security policies, through the moral status of political honours celebrating political figures of questionable integrity, to the 'clean hands' dilemmas of political operatives who enable media demagogues to scapegoat vulnerable ethnic and racial minorities.

Within the political sphere, a political actor is often judged by what he or she says, with their verbal performance often perceived as representative of the individual. Hearers accept that, as individuals, they possess a lifetime of experiences and actions which inform, but may also undermine, their aspirations in gaining political capital. Additionally, as representatives of a political party and its ideology, these actors do not exist in isolation; they are members and, at times, potential candidates of a particular party with its own agenda which may, in turn, cause them to modify their personal speech to align with espoused policies of the party. The various contributions contained in this volume examine the discourse of political actors through the lenses of positionality and stance. Throughout its chapters, clearly defined theoretical perspectives and specified social practices are employed, enabling the authors to elucidate how political actors can situate themselves, their party, and their opponents toward their ostensive public. This book successfully demonstrates how espoused perspectives relate to, or reflect on, the nature of the individual political actor and their truth, the party they represent and its ideology, and the pandering to popular public opinion to gain support and co-operation. This book will hold particular appeal for postgraduate students, researchers, and scholars of discourse studies, pragmatics, political science, as well as other areas in humanities and the social sciences.