The Truth or Talking Politics

The Truth (with Jokes)

Author: Al Franken

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Talking Politics

Author: William A Gamson

Those who analyze public opinion have long contended that the average citizen is incapable of recounting consistently even the most rudimentary facts about current politics; that the little the average person does know is taken at face value from the media reports, and that the consequence is a polity that is ill-prepared for democratic governance. Yet social movements, comprised by and large of average citizens who have become exercised about particular issues, have been a prominent feature of the American political scene throughout American history and they are experiencing a resurgence in recent years.William Gamson asks the question, how is it that so many people become active in movements if people are so generally uninterested and badly informed about issues? The conclusion he reaches in this book is a striking refutation of the common wisdom about the public's ability to reason about politics. Rather than relying on survey data, as so many studies of public opinion do, Gamson reports on his analysis of discussions among small groups of working-class people on four controversial issues: affirmative action, nuclear power, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the troubles in American industry. Excerpts from many of these discussions are transcribed in the book.Gamson analyzes how these same issues have been treated in a range of media material, from editorial opinion columns to political cartoons and network news programs, in order to determine how closely the group discussions mimic media discourse. He finds that the process of opinion formation is more complex than it has usually been depicted and that people condition media information with reflection on their ownexperience or that of people they know. The discussions transcribed in this book demonstrate that people are quite capable of conducting informed and well-reasoned discussions about issues and that although most people are not inclined to become actively involved in politics, the seeds of political action are present in the minds of many. With the appropriate stimulation, this latent political consciousness can be activated, which accounts for the continual creation of social movements.

Subjectivity Identity Difference or Notes from Toyota land

Subjectivity, Identity, Difference: Retrieving Experience for Feminist Politics

Author: Sonia Kruks

In Retrieving Experience, Sonia Kruks engages critically with the postmodern turn in feminist and social theory. She contends that, although postmodern analyses yield important insights about the place of discourse in constituting subjectivity, they lack the ability to examine how experience often exceeds the limits of discourse. To address this lack and explain why it matters for feminist politics, Kruks retrieves and employs aspects of postwar French existential theory—a tradition that, she argues, postmodernism has obscured by militantly rejecting its own genealogy.

Kruks seeks to refocus our attention on the importance for feminism of embodied and "lived" experiences. Through her original readings of Simone de Beauvoir and other existential thinkers—including Sartre, Fanon, and Merleau-Ponty—and her own analyses inspired by their work, Kruks sheds new light on central problems in feminist theory and politics. These include debates about subjectivity and individual agency; questions about recognition and identity politics; and discussion of whether embodied experiences may sometimes facilitate solidarity among groups of different women.

About the Author:
Sonia Kruks is Robert S. Danforth Professor of Politics and has served as the Director of the Women's Studies Program at Oberlin College. She is the author of The Political Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Situation and Human Existence: Freedom, Subjectivity and Society and coeditor of Promissory Notes: Women in the Transition to Socialism.

Interesting textbook: Whats Cooking with Mavis or Classic Main Courses

Notes from Toyota-land: An American Engineer in Japan

Author: Darius Mehri

In 1996, Darius Mehri traveled to Japan to work as a computer simulation engineer within the Toyota production system. Once there, he found a corporate experience far different from what he had expected. Notes from Toyota-land, based on a diary that Mehri kept during his three years at an upper-level Toyota group company, provides a unique insider's perspective on daily work life in Japan and charts his transformation from a wide-eyed engineer eager to be part of the "Japanese Miracle" to a social critic, troubled by Japanese corporate practices.

Mehri documents the sophisticated "culture of rules" and organizational structure that combine to create a profound control over workers. The work group is cynically used to encourage employees to work harder and harder, he found, and his other discoveries confirmed his doubts about the working conditions under the Japanese Miracle. For example, he learned that male employees treated their female counterparts as short-term employees, cheap labor, and potential wives. Mehri also describes a surprisingly unhealthy work environment, a high rate of injuries due to inadequate training, fast line speeds, crowded factories, racism, and lack of team support. And in conversations with his colleagues, he uncovered a culture of intimidation, subservience, and vexed relationships with many aspects of their work and surroundings. As both an engaging memoir of cross-cultural misunderstanding and a primer on Japanese business and industrial practices, Notes from Toyota-land will be a revelation to everyone who believes that Japanese business practices are an ideal against which to measure success.

Author Bio:Darius Mehri lives in Jersey City, New Jersey. Robert Perrucci is Professor of Sociology at Purdue University.

Children of Global Migration or Dred Scott and the Politics of Slavery

Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes

Author: Rhacel Salazar Parreenas

In the Philippines, a dramatic increase in labor migration has created a large population of transnational migrant families. Thousands of children now grow up apart from one or both parents, as the parents are forced to work outside the country in order to send their children to school, give them access to quality health care, or, in some cases, just provide them with enough food. While the issue of transnational families has already generated much interest, this book is the first to offer a close look at the lives of the children in these families.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with the family members left behind, the author examines two dimensions of the transnational family. First, she looks at the impact of distance on the intergenerational relationships, specifically from the children’s perspective. She then analyzes gender norms in these families, both their reifications and transgressions in transnational households. Acknowledging that geographical separation unavoidably strains family intimacy, Parreñas argues that the maintenance of traditional gender ideologies exacerbates and sometimes even creates the tensions that plague many Filipino migrant families.

Book about: Frommers Alaska Cruises Ports of Call 2009 or Jeff Shaaras Civil War Battlefields

Dred Scott and the Politics of Slavery

Author: Earl M Maltz

The slave Dred Scott claimed that his residence in a free state transformed him into a free man. His lawsuit took many twists and turns before making its way to the Supreme Court in 1856. But when the Court ruled against him, the ruling sent shock waves through the nation and helped lead to civil war. Writing for the 7-to-2 majority, Chief Justice Roger Taney asserted that blacks were not and never could be citizens. Taney also ruled that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional, upsetting the balance of slave and free states. Earl Maltz now offers a new look at this landmark case, presenting Dred Scott as a turning point in an already contentious national debate. Maltz's accessible account depicts Dred Scott as both a contributing factor to war and the result of a political climate that had grown so threatening to the South that overturning the Missouri Compromise was considered essential. As the nation continued its rapid expansion, Southerners became progressively more fearful of the free states' growing political clout. In that light, the ruling from a Court filled with justices sympathetic to the Southern cause, though far from surprising helped light the long fuse that eventually exploded into Civil War. Maltz offers an uncommonly balanced look at the case, taking Southern concerns seriously to cast new light on why proponents of slavery saw things as they did. He presents the arguments of all the parties impartially, tracks the sequence of increasingly strained compromises between pro- and anti-slavery forces, and demonstrates how political and sectional influences infiltrated the legal issues. He then traces the impact of the case on Northern and Southernpublic opinion, showing how a decision meant to resolve the question of slavery in the territories only aggravated sectional animosity.

Table of Contents:

Editors' Preface     vii
Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction     1
The Politics of Slavery, 1785-1842     4
The Supreme Court and Slavery, 1825-1842     19
Slavery in the Territories, 1842-1856     34
The Road to the Supreme Court     60
The Supreme Court in 1856     76
Arguments and Deliberations     101
The Opinions of the Justices     118
The Impact of Dred Scott     140
Dred Scott and the Limits of Judicial Power     155
Chronology     157
Bibliographic Essay     161
Index     169