This collection of essays considers some of the conceptual and philosophical contentions that Nancy Fraser’s work has provoked, presenting some compelling examples of its analytical power in a range of contexts.

This volume is based on papers from the second in a series of three conferences that deal with the multi-scalar processes of heritage-making, ranging from the local to the national and international levels, involving different players with different degrees of agency and interests. These players include citizens and civil society, the state, and international organizations and actors. The current volume focuses on the role of citizens and civil society in the politics of heritage-making, looking at how these players at the grass-roots level make sense of the past in the present. Who are these local players that seek to define the meaning of heritage in their everyday lives? How do they negotiate with the state, or contest the influence of the state, in determining what their heritage is? These and other questions will be taken up in various Asian contexts in this volume to foreground the local dynamics of heritage politics.

This book explores the decline of the teaching of epistemic, conceptual knowledge in schools, its replacement with everyday social knowledge, and its relation to changes in the division of labor within the global economy. It argues that the emphasis on social knowledge in postmodern and social constructionist pedagogy compounds the problem, and examines the consequences of these changes for educational opportunity and democracy itself.

This book provides the first foundation of knowledge about the intellectual traditions, contemporary scope and future prospects for the interdisciplinary field of rural gerontology. With a focus on rural regions, small towns and villages, which have the highest rates of population ageing worldwide, Rural Gerontology is aimed at understanding what it means for rural people, communities and institutions to be at the forefront of twenty-first-century demographic change. The book offers important insights from rural ageing studies into today’s most pressing gerontological problems. With chapters from more than 65 established and emerging rural ageing researchers, it is the first synthesis of knowledge about rural gerontology, harnessing a burgeoning interdisciplinary scholarship on the rural dimensions of ageing, old age and older populations. With a view to advancing a critical understanding of rural ageing populations, this book will have an overreaching impact across the social sciences by drawing on advancements in understandings of rural ageing from social, environmental, geographical and critical gerontology to facilitate a comprehensive exploration of the diversity, complexity and implications of the ageing process in rural settings. Bringing together valuable international perspectives, this book makes a timely contribution to gerontology, rural studies and the social sciences, and will appeal to scholars and researchers across USA and Canada, UK and Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, Europe, China and countries in Africa, South America and South-East Asia.

Exploring how difference and multiculturalism take on the arguments of universalist humanism, 13 articles are presented by Lash (sociology, U. of London, UK) and Featherstone (sociology and communication, Nottingham Trent U., UK). Examining the problems posed by multiculturalism from the perspective of cultural sociology and cultural studies, the discuss how questions of recognition of identity and status affect claims to a moral order of justice and how difference (in the sense of flux and indeterminacy) affect questions of recognition. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The following book Social Justice: A Sketch of the West and Islamic World Experiences contains a collection of articles that may be read individually, each concerned with the same issues of social justice. The writers in this book originate from the Western and Islamic World’s countries. All have agreed to explore and contribute to understanding social justice in each pertinent countries’ experiences. The problems being addressed are either descriptive or valuational and, in most cases, are the combination of both. All articles presented in this collection are mainly a reexamination of social justice ideals from the authors’ viewpoints and experiences and how the ideals may be applicable and considered relevant to a particular problem faced by the respective countries. As its generic meaning is commonly recognized, all authors see that social justice is the most fundamental virtue, crucially providential, to be the basis of interpersonal relations ordering and establishing and maintaining a stable political society. While the nature, origin, and legitimate application of social justice are a thing that may be debatable, all authors in this book concur with the notion that there is a need to struggle for a just society. This idea may be best developed to respect persons as free, rational agents without ignoring the particularities of its communities’ challenges, characters, and identities.

A major new reference volume - The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Liberalism is the premier collection of material on a comprehensive range of topics in contemporary liberalism. Liberal theory has been caricatured by its critics as an abstract, unworldly, trivial philosophical navel-gazing pursuit. The Companion counters this view by showing how liberalism can tackle wide-ranging practical concerns that urgently demand attention in twenty-first century politics. Rather than presenting contemporary liberalism simply and narrowly as a survey of what its main academic protagonists have said over the past 30 years, the guiding principle of the volume is to conceptualise it primarily as a set of themes and approaches informed by the challenges to the practice of liberal politics.Issues such as human rights, citizenship, nationalism, feminism, international communities, supranational orders, post-communism and ecocentrism take their place alongside the more familiar and well-worked themes of justice and justification as topics for liberal theorising. The reader is vividly shown the ways in which liberalism engages directly with the problems of practical political life today.This wide-ranging account of contemporary liberal thinking places the emphasis on agenda-setting, showing that contemporary liberalism is live - relevant, proactive, continuously engaged and adaptable - and that the problems faced by the liberal order are sufficiently complex and perplexing to demand the serious, rigorous philosophical reflection offered by contemporary liberal political theory.The Companion allows the reader to explore liberalism's contemporary relevance and to look to its likely future developments. With contributors including Will Kymlicka, Michael Freeden, Richard Bellamy, Rex Martin, Margaret Canovan, Diana T. Meyers, and Kate Soper, this large, definitive edition will be a must-buy for all libraries and a key reference tool for

China's Mongols at University looks at interactions among the government, universities, and minority Mongol students. Zhenzhou Zhao gradually presents and reflects on life stories of seemingly privileged minorities in China's higher education system. The book compares three universities in separate provinces or regions that represent distinct types of higher educational institutions and discusses the issue of educational justice from the perspective of the politics of recognition in market-oriented, globalizing China.

The rhetoric of social justice is commonplace but increasingly it means little more than a tag line or a punctuation point. Reconstructing Social Justice presents a new framework for social justice that will change the way people think about social justice and change the way people implement social justice. This book carves out an intellectual and practical space for social justice that is distinct from political, legal, and economic spheres. While emphasizing a distinct domain for social justice, the author then makes sense of its healing role in terms of the polity, economy, technology, and religion. Drawing from a rich supply of classroom experiences, her research on mosque controversies after September 11, 2001, and then the global examples of truth and reconciliation commissions, Frederking invites the reader to think about the relevance of social justice from the micro to the macro level. Rather than a set of policy outcomes or ideological positions, social justice is a process of social accountability that demands honest and transparent engagement. While disagreement is likely and controversy inevitable, this social justice process reaffirms our connectedness and moves us forward as a collective.

This text provides an account of the important contemporary egalitarian theories. It relates egalitarian theories to contemporary political practice, assessing them with the impact of neoliberalism on welfare states, and the shift from 'social' to 'active' forms of citizenship.