This compelling volume analyzes the wide-scale societal impact of neoliberal economic policy on contemporary life and behavior. Synthesizing perspectives from politics and economics with insights from psychology and linguistics, it argues that market-driven public institutions promote antisocial thinking, discourage critical reflection, and inure individuals to inequity and cruelty. Chapters cite the ubiquity of violence in modern society, from the marketing of the military to impersonal mass upheavals in the job market, as devaluing human worth and thus self-worth. But the editors also assert that these currents are not terminal, and the book concludes by identifying conditions potentially leading to a more civil and egalitarian future. Included in the coverage: The language of current economics: social theory, the market, and the disappearance of relationships. Neoliberalism and education: the disfiguration of students. Slicing up societies: commercial media and the destruction of social environments. Neoliberalism and the transformation of work. Economics, the network society, and the ontology of violence. A new economic order without violence. Given the centrality of economic events on the global stage, Neoliberalism, Economic Radicalism, and the Normalization of Violence stands out as both a springboard for discussion and a call to action, to be read by political and cultural economists, political scientists, and sociologists.

This book challenges the dominant narrative of young people being a uniquely violent group. Instead, the book critically examines how young people become violent as they enact and resist the available violent performativities in youth. It focuses on the experiences of 28 young people in Australia who are subjected to violence, who use violence and who resist violence. A critical analysis of these young people’s “messy” stories facilitates a reframing of the physical violence routinely attributed to young people as a product of violating systems and structures. The author constructs a converging theoretical landscape to re-examine youth, violence and resistance at the intersection of the sociology of violence and the sociology of youth. Drawing on interviews with young Australians, the book makes a valuable contribution to contemporary international scholarship on youth and violence, while also examining the potential for complicity to violence in youth research and practice. In doing so it offers youth scholars and practitioners a framework for reassessing their theoretical frameworks and methods for studying and working with young people in connection with violence.

This book explores the consequences of unbridled expansion of neoliberal values within India through the lens of popular film and culture. The focus of the book is the neoliberal self, which, far from being a stable marker of urban, liberal, millennial Indian identity, has a schizophrenic quality, one that is replete with contradictions and oppositions, unable to sustain the weight of its own need for self-promotion, optimism, and belief in a narrative of progress and prosperity that has marked mainstream cultural discourse in India. The unstable and schizophrenic neoliberal identity that is the concern of this book, however, belies this narrative and lays bare the sense of precarity and inherent inequality that neoliberal regimes confer upon their subjects. The analysis is explicitly political and draws upon theories of feminist media studies, popular culture analyses, and film studies to critique mainstream Hindi cinema texts produced in the last two decades. Rele Sathe also examine a variety of other peripheral ‘texts’ in her analysis such as the film star, the urban space, web series, YouTube videos, and social media content.

While many American superheroes have multiple powers and complex gadgets, the Flash is simply fast. This simplicity makes his character easily comprehendible for all audiences, whether they are avid comic fans or newcomers to the genre, and in turn he has become one of the most iconic figures in the comic-book industry. This collection of new essays serves as a stepping-stone to an even greater understanding of the Flash, examining various iterations of his character--including those of Jay Garrick, Barry Allen, Wally West and Bart Allen--and what they reveal about the era in which they were written.

Education is about human flourishing and explores meaning, purpose and values. As a holistic and integral practice for developing sustained attention and concentration, education is profoundly antithetical to the market and it is not a technological domain. The combination of markets and technology in the pursuit of efficiency destroys the potential of education to help societies nurture well-being. This book dives deeply into the overlapping crises of education today. The author draws on decades of experience and many disciplines to celebrate the spirit of education and to frame it as a gift.

This important two-volume set unapologetically documents how capitalism results in the oppression of animals ranging from fish and chickens to dogs, elephants, and kangaroos as well as in environmental destruction, vital resource depletion, and climate change. Most traditional narratives portray humanity's use of other animals as natural and necessary for human social development and present the idea that capitalism is generally a positive force in the world. But is this worldview accurate, or just a convenient, easy-to-accept way to ignore what is really happening—a systematic oppression of animals that simultaneously results in environmental destruction and places insurmountable obstacles in the path to a sustainable and peaceful future? David Nibert's Animal Oppression and Capitalism is a timely two-volume set that calls into question the capitalist system at a point in human history when inequality and the imbalance in the distribution of wealth are growing domestically and internationally. Expert contributors show why the oppression of animals—particularly the use of other animals as food—is increasingly being linked to unfavorable climate change and the depletion of fresh water and other vital resources. Readers will also learn about the tragic connections between the production of animal products and global hunger and expanded regional violence and warfare, and they will understand how many common human health problems—including heart attacks, strokes, and various forms of cancer—develop as a result of consuming animal products.

The thoroughly revised and updated second edition of the Routledge Handbook of Cultural Sociology provides an unparalleled overview of sociological and related scholarship on the complex relations of culture to social structures and everyday life. With 70 essays written by scholars from around the world, the book brings diverse approaches into dialogue, charting new pathways for understanding culture in our global era. Short, accessible chapters by contributing authors address classic questions, emergent issues, and new scholarship on topics ranging from cultural and social theory to politics and the state, social stratification, identity, community, aesthetics, and social and cultural movements. In addition, contributors explore developments central to the constitution and reproduction of culture, such as power, technology, and the organization of work. This handbook is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in a wide range of subfields within sociology, as well as cultural studies, media and communication, and postcolonial theory.