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in finding evidence that President Obama made an effort to address issues of concern to African Americans. Was the Obama Administration attempting to set the agenda on racial concerns in specific issue domains? To the extent that comparative data is available, did Obama Administration officials attend to racial issues more or less often than their predecessors? First, I conduct a comparative analysis of the substance of executive orders in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Administrations. Next, I examine press releases from four Cabinet departments: Labor, Education
use services that receive their funding. The move to television acted as a stimulus for rethinking verbatim theatre as cultural intervention. This necessarily brief comparative analysis reveals the intricate politics of remediation that verbatim theatre undergoes in the hands of television practitioners. As this chapter has argued, Bolter and Grusin’s thesis of ‘the double logic of remediation
Recent pressures for change in France have impacted upon a country which, from 1945 to 1975, had featured both unprecedented economic growth and the building of a powerful state. Drawing upon a plethora of social science research and data, this book sets out what has been made in France since that period and, as importantly, what this ‘made’ the French. By examining the institutions and asymmetric power relations that have structured French society, together with the ‘political work’ that has changed or reproduced them, in seven chapters the book takes the reader ‘from the cradle to the grave’ to assess whether and where significant change has occurred over the last four decades, then explain the outcomes identified. Overall, the book provides a comprehensive account of French society and politics, while proposing an original generic analytical framework that is applicable to other nations and their comparative analysis.
Globalized urban precarity in Berlin and Abidjan examines urban youth’s practices of making do in digital economies, to understand how precarious working conditions reverberate in the coming of age in contemporary cities. Through a comparative analysis of the perspectives of young men working as airtime sellers in Abidjan and food delivery riders in Berlin, the book provides innovative analytical lenses to understand urban inequalities against the backdrop of current digital urban developments. Essentially, this ethnography challenges the easy conflation of instability with insecurity, and overcomes the centrality of wage labour in research on urban livelihood, by looking at a broader set of economic practices and relational mechanisms. The analysis shows how accruing symbolic capital, a feel for the game in contexts of ambiguity, and access to care are fundamental for explaining the unequal distribution of risks for socio-material insecurities in unstable work settings.
Bringing together leading authorities on Irish women and migration, this book offers a significant reassessment of the place of women in the Irish diaspora. It demonstrates the important role played by women in the construction of Irish diasporic identities, comparing Irish women's experience in Britain, Canada , New Zealand and the United States. The book considers how the Catholic Church could be a focal point for women's Irish identity in Britain. It examines how members of the Ladies' Orange Benevolent Association (LOBA) maintained a sense of Irish Protestant identity, focused on their associational life in female Orange lodges. The book offers a lens on Irish society, and on countries where they settled, and considerable scope for comparative analysis of the impact of different cultures and societies on women's lives. It reviews key debates in Transnational Studies (TS) and Diaspora Studies (DS) before discussing the particular contribution of DS in framing 1990s study of migrant and non-migrant Irish women. Feminist and queer theory scholarship in Irish DS has begun to address the gender and sexual politics of diaspora by attending to the dynamics of boundary expansion, queering and dissolution. The book suggests that religion can be both a 'bright' and a 'blurry' boundary, while examining how religious identities intersect with ethnicity and gender. It also includes the significance of the categories of gender and generation, and their intersection with ethnicity in the context of the official London St Patrick's Day Festival.
This is a detailed study of the various ways in which London and India were imaginatively constructed by British observers during the nineteenth century. This process took place within a unified field of knowledge that brought together travel and evangelical accounts to exert a formative influence on the creation of London and India for the domestic reading public. Their distinct narratives, rhetoric and chronologies forged homologies between representations of the metropolitan poor and colonial subjects—those constituencies that were seen as the most threatening to imperial progress. Thus the poor and particular sections of the Indian population were inscribed within discourses of western civilization as regressive and inferior peoples. Over time, these discourses increasingly promoted notions of overt and rigid racial hierarchies, the legacy of which remains to this day. This comparative analysis looks afresh at the writings of observers such as Henry Mayhew, Patrick Colquhoun, Charles Grant, Pierce Egan, James Forbes and Emma Roberts, thereby seeking to rethink the location of the poor and India within the nineteenth-century imagination. Drawing upon cultural and intellectual history, it also attempts to extend our understanding of the relationship between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’.
The role of national machineries, as a way to promote the status of women, acquired international relevance during the World Conference on the International Women's Year, in Mexico City in 1975. This book reflects Division for the Advancement of Women's (DAW) long-standing interest in the area of national machineries, bringing together the experiences, research and insights of experts. The first part of the book sets out the major issues facing national machineries at the conceptual level. It reflects upon five aspects of democratization: devolution or decentralization; the role of political parties; monitoring and auditing systems; and the importance of increasing the presence of women within institutions of the state and government. The second part is a comparative analysis and sets out the major issues facing national machineries at the political level. A combination of factors, including civil society, state bodies and political actors, need to come together for national machineries to function effectively in the interest of gender equality. Next comes the 'lessons learned' by national machineries in mainstreaming gender. National machineries should have an achievable agenda, an important part of which must be 'a re-definition of gender issues. The third part contains case studies that build upon the specific experiences of national machineries in different countries. The successful experience of Nordic countries in gender mainstreaming is also discussed.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the European Union (EU) stands out as an important regional organization. This book focuses on the influence of the World Bank on the EU development cooperation policy, with special emphasis on the Lomé Convention. It explains the influence of trade liberalisation on EU trade preferences and provides a comparative analysis of the content and direction of the policies developed towards the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP), the Mediterranean, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. It looks at the trade-related directorates and their contribution to the phenomenon referred as 'trade liberalisation'. This includes trends towards the removal or elimination of trade preferences and the ideology underlying this reflected in and created by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organisation (GATT/WTO). The book examines the role of the mass media because the media are supposed to play a unique role in encouraging political reactions to humanitarian emergencies. The bolting on to development 'policy' of other continents, and the separate existence of a badly run Humanitarian Office (ECHO), brought the lie to the Maastricht Treaty telling us that the EU really had a coherent development policy. The Third World in general, and Africa in particular, are becoming important components in the EU's efforts to develop into a significant international player. The Cotonou Agreement proposes to end the preferential trade margins accorded to non-least developed ACP states in favour of more liberal free trade agreements strongly shaped by the WTO agenda.
This book represents the first attempt to write a comprehensive account of performance art in Eastern Europe - the former communist, socialist and Soviet countries of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe - since the 1960s. It demonstrates performance art, which encompasses a range of genres, among them body art, happenings, actions and performance. In exploring the manifestations and meanings of performance art, the book highlights the diversity of artistic practice, moments and ways in which performance emerged, and its relationship to each country's sociopolitical climate. The book discusses 21 countries and over 250 artists, exploring the manner in which performance art developed concurrently with the genre in the West. It examines how artists used their bodies in performance to navigate the degrees of state control over artistic production and cultivate personalised forms of individual integration and self-expression of body, gender, politics, identity, and institutional critique. A comparative analysis of examples of performance art addressing gender-related issues from across the socialist and post-socialist East is then presented. The themes addressed provide local cultural and historical references in works concerning beauty, women's sexuality and traditional notions of gender. Artists' efforts to cope with the communist environment, the period of transition and the complexities of life in the post-communist era are highlighted. Artists during the communist period adopted performance art as a free-form, open-ended means of expression to give voice to concepts, relationships and actions that otherwise would not have been possible in the official realm of art.
Whiteness, as a lived experience, is both gendered and racialised. This book seeks to understand the overlapping imbrication of whiteness in shaping the diverse material realities of women of European origin. The analysis pertains to the English-speaking slave-based societies of the Caribbean island of Barbados, and North Carolina in the American South. The book represents a comparative analysis of the complex interweaving of race, gender, social class and sexuality in defining the contours of white women's lives during the era of slavery. Despite their gendered subordination, their social location within the dominant white group afforded all white women a range of privileges, shaping these women's social identities and material realities. Conscious of the imperative to secure the racial loyalty of poor whites in order to assure its own security in the event of black uprisings, elite society attempted to harness the physical resources of the poor whites. The alienation of married women from property rights was rooted in and reinforced by the prevailing ideology of female economic dependence on men. White Barbadian women's proprietary rights as slave-owners were upheld in the law courts, even the poorest slaveholding white women could take recourse to the law to protect their property. White women's access to property was determined primarily by their marital status. The book reveals the strategies deployed by elite and poor white women in these societies to resist their gendered subordination, challenge the constraints that restricted their lives to the private domestic sphere, secure independent livelihoods and create meaningful existences.