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The book examines a number of emerging family-relations practices engaged in contemporary China. In doing so, it draws attention to new patterns of behavior and expectations related to transformation of the family since the advent of marketization. It also shows why exploration of family-related themes is important in understanding the nature of society, the forces that underpin social relationships more broadly, and the basis and nature of social change. It fills a gap in the literature by examining such heretofore unrecognized topics as the practices related to giving a child a surname. It also examines the previously unrecognized migratory movement of rural and small-town grandparents who join adult children who have relocated to urban areas for employment, providing childcare so that both of the child’s parents can earn an income—thus becoming part of the massive “floating” population that characterizes China’s workforce today. Three other aspects of family life that are underexplored in the literature are also examined—namely, spousal intimacy, divorce, and remarriage and cohabitation in later life. In all of these cases empirical material is refracted through new insights and theoretical developments. Research for this book is based on semistructured in-depth interviews with 178 men and women. The interviews were conducted between 2015 and 2017 in Beijing, Changshu, Dongguan, Guangzhou, Hefei, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong.

This book examines how housing market professionals—including housing developers, real estate agents, mortgage lenders, and appraisers—construct twenty-first-century urban housing markets in ways that contribute to or undermine racial segregation. Drawing on extensive ethnographic and interview data collected in Houston, Texas, the book shows that housing market professionals play a key role in connecting people—or refusing to connect people—to housing resources and opportunities. They make these brokering decisions through reference to racist or equitable, people-affirming ideas. Typically, White housing market professionals draw from racist ideas that rank order people and neighborhoods according to their perceived economic and cultural housing market value, entwining racism with their housing market activities and interactions. Racialized housing market routines encourage this entwinement by naturalizing racism as a professional tool. The book tracks how professionals broker racism across the housing exchange process—from the home’s construction to real estate brokerage, mortgage lending, and home appraisals. In doing so, it shows that professionals make housing exchange a racialized process that contributes to neighborhood inequality and racial segregation. However, in contrast to the racialized status quo, a small number of housing market professionals—almost all of color—draw on equitable, people-affirming ideas and strategies to extend equal opportunities to individuals and neighborhoods, denaturalizing housing market racism. The book highlights the imperative to interrupt the racism that pervades White housing market professionals’ work, dismantle the racialized routines that underwrite such racism, and cultivate a fair housing market.

“Disenchantment” is a key term in the self-understanding of modernity. But what exactly does this concept mean? What was its original meaning when Max Weber introduced it? And can the conventional meaning or Max Weber’s view really be defended, given the present state of knowledge about the history of religion? This book attempts to divest this concept of its enduring enchantment. The first chapters of the book deal with three empirical disciplines—history, psychology, and sociology of religion—to develop an understanding of religion that then lays the groundwork for chapter 4, which amounts to the most thorough study ever undertaken of Weber’s views on disenchantment. It turns out that Weber’s use of this term was highly ambiguous and that his grand narrative leading from the prophets of ancient Judaism to the crisis of meaning on the eve of World War I collapses when we recognize this ambiguity. This makes it possible to construct an alternative that takes into account the dynamics of ever new sacralizations, their normative evaluation in light of a universalist morality, and the dangers of the misuse of religion in connection with the formation of power. This book constitutes a challenge—for believers and nonbelievers alike.

For a city in India’s northeast that has been embroiled in the everyday militarization and violence of Asia’s longest-running armed conflict, Dimapur remains ‘off the map’. With no ‘glorious’ past or arenas where events of consequence to mainstream India have taken place, Dimapur’s essence is experienced in oral histories of events, visual archives of everyday life, lived realities of military occupation, and anxieties produced in making urban space out of tribal space. Ceasefire City captures the dynamics of Dimapur. It brings together the fragmented sensibilities granted and contested in particular spaces and illustrates the embodied experiences of the city. The first part explores military presence, capitalist growth, and urban expansion in Dimapur. The second part presents an ethnographic account of lived realities and the meanings that are forged in a frontier city.

Digital nomads are knowledge workers who actively seek a lifestyle of freedom, using technology to perform their work remotely, traveling far and wide, and moving as often as they like. They have left their local coffee shops behind and now proudly post their “office of the day” photos from exotic locales, but what do their lives really look like? This book takes readers into an expatriate digital nomad community in Bali, Indonesia, and presents new manifestations of classic questions about community, creativity, and the role of place in the modern human ecosystem. It explains why digital nomads leave their creative class cities behind, arguing that creative class workers, though successful, often feel that their “world class cities” and desirable jobs are anything but paradise. This book follows nomads’ work transitions into freelancing, entrepreneurship, and remote jobs. Then, it explains how digital nomads create a fluid but intimate place-based community abroad in the company of like-minded others. It shows why and how individuals blend in-person and online activity in their pursuit of community and freedom. This book provides insights into individuals’ efforts to live lives and create work identities that balance freedom, community, and creative fulfillment in the digital age, and it provides insights into a larger cultural discourse about the future of cities, work, and community.

The Indian diaspora is increasingly engaging with the homeland by forming a range of migrant organizations—organizations constituting a growing sector of non-State actors who engage with the host country and the country of origin in a sustained and profound way. Research on migrant organizations tends to focus only transnational migrant organizations in host countries. Indian Migrant Organizations analyses a set of local and transnational organizations formed by Indian migrants, whose activities include mobilizing resources and connections and engaging in numerous development initiatives in India, and studies their engagement particularly in the Indian healthcare and education sectors. In particular, the book discusses how these organizations have evolved, what kind of healthcare and educational projects and activities they are carrying out, and how such collective efforts are affecting development dynamics in India.

In a conversation about youth agency, the most common discourses that come up are of acts of liberation, resistance, and deviance. However, this perspective is fairly narrow and runs the risk of reinforcing pervasive and often polarizing depictions of youth. In order to broaden the understanding of young people’s collective actions and their potential social implications, it is necessary to ask: What types of agency do young people demonstrate? This book aims to scrutinize some of the conceptual ideas that underlie prevalent visions of youth as agents of social change and as a source of hope for a better future. As a part of the Education and Society in South Asia series, it provides insightful accounts of students’ daily routines on and around a public university campus in Kathmandu, Nepal, and calls attention to a group of non-elite university students who have remained less visible in scholarly and public debates about student activism, youth unemployment, and international migration. By placing different strands of literature on youth, aspiration, and mobility into conversation, In Search of a Future unveils new and important perspectives on how young people navigate competing social expectations, educational inequalities, and limited job prospects.

Crime stories attract audiences and social buzz, but they also serve as prisms for perceived threats. As immigration, technological change, and globalization reshape our world, anxiety spreads. Because journalism plays a role in how the public adjusts to moral and material upheaval, this unease raises the ethical stakes. Reporters can spread panic or encourage reconciliation by how they tell these stories. Murder in Our Midst uses crime coverage in select North American and Western European countries as a key to examine culturally constructed concepts like privacy, public, public right to know, and justice. Working from close readings of news coverage, codes of ethics and style guides, and personal interviews with almost 200 news professionals, this book offers fertile material for a provocative conversation. The findings divide the ten countries studied into three media models. The book explores what the differing coverage decisions suggest about underlying attitudes to criminals and crime and how justice in a democracy is best served. Today, journalists’ work can be disseminated around the world without any consideration of whether what’s being told (or how) might dissolve cultural differences or undermine each community’s right to set its own standards to best reflect its citizens’ values. At present, unique reporting practices persist among the three models, but the Internet and social media threaten to dissolve distinctions and the cultural values they reflect. There is a need for a journalism that both opens local conversations and bridges differences among nations. This book is a first step in that direction.

The norms and expectations of father involvement have changed rapidly within one to two generations. Socially and economically marginalized fathers are being exposed to these messages through popular culture and the media; in state welfare, child protection, and probation offices; in jails, prisons, and post-release programs; and in child support and family courts. Moreover, they are being told that it is up to them to make better choices, to get themselves together, and to be involved fathers. Based on life history interviews with 138 low-income fathers, Black and Keyes show that fathers have internalized these messages and sound determined. After all, there is social worth in fatherhood, hope for creating meaningful lives or new beginnings, the fantasy of leaving something of value behind in the world, and a stake in resisting stigmatizing labels like the deadbeat dad. Most will, however, fall short for several reasons: first, while the expectations for father involvement were increasing, state and economic support for low-income families was decreasing; second, vulnerable fathers often lack viable models to guide them; third, living in dangerous neighborhoods compromises fatherhood and leaves fathers at odds with dominant institutional narratives about being nurturing fathers; and fourth, the dark side of poverty, inscribed on bodies and minds, leaves some struggling with childhood traumas and unhealthy routines to mitigate or numb these painful developmental disruptions. Consequently, the authors assert that without transformative economic, political, and social change that would facilitate and support engaged and nurturing fatherhood, these fathers are being “set up.”

Heartland Blues provides a new perspective on union decline by revisiting the labor movement at its historical peak in the 1950s and analyzing campaigns over right-to-work laws and public-sector collective bargaining rights in the industrial Midwest. The focus on 1950s labor conflicts, including union failures, departs from popular and academic treatments of the period that emphasize consensus, an accord between capital and labor in collective bargaining, or the conservative drift and bureaucratization of the labor movement. The state campaigns examined in Heartland Blues instead reveal a labor movement often beset by dysfunctional divisions, ambivalent political allies, and substantial employer opposition. Drawing on social movement theories, the book shows how many of the key ingredients necessary for activist groups to succeed, including effective organization and influential political allies, were not a given for labor at its historical peak but instead varied in important ways across the industrial heartland. These limits slowed unions in the 1950s. Not only did labor fail to crack the Sunbelt, it never really conquered the industrial Midwest, where most union members resided in the mid-twentieth century. This diminished union influence within the Democratic Party and in society. The 1950s are far more than an interesting side story. Indeed, the labor movement never solved many of these basic problems. The labor movement’s social and political isolation and its limited responses to employer mobilization became a death knell in the coming decades as unions sought organizational and legislative remedies to industrial decline and the rising anti-union tide.