Austerities and Aspirations

Austerities and Aspirations PDF Author: Béla Tomka
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 963386352X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
This monograph provides an analysis of the economic performance and living standard in Czechoslovakia and its successor states, Hungary, and Poland since 1945. The novelty of the book lies in its broad comparative perspective: it places East Central Europe in a wider European framework that underlines the themes of regional disparities and European commonalities. Going beyond the traditional growth paradigm, the author systematically studies the historical patterns of consumption, leisure, and quality of life—aspects that Tomka argues can best be considered in relation to one other. By adopting this “triple approach,” he undertakes a truly interdisciplinary research drawing from history, economics, sociology, and demography. As a result of Tomka’s three-pillar comparative analysis, the book makes a major contribution to the debates on the dynamics of economic growth in communist and postcommunist East Central Europe, on the socialist consumer culture along with its transformation after 1990, and on how the accounts on East Central Europe can be integrated into the emerging field of historical quality of life research.

Austerities and Aspirations

Austerities and Aspirations PDF Author: Béla Tomka
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 963386352X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

Get Book Here

Book Description
This monograph provides an analysis of the economic performance and living standard in Czechoslovakia and its successor states, Hungary, and Poland since 1945. The novelty of the book lies in its broad comparative perspective: it places East Central Europe in a wider European framework that underlines the themes of regional disparities and European commonalities. Going beyond the traditional growth paradigm, the author systematically studies the historical patterns of consumption, leisure, and quality of life—aspects that Tomka argues can best be considered in relation to one other. By adopting this “triple approach,” he undertakes a truly interdisciplinary research drawing from history, economics, sociology, and demography. As a result of Tomka’s three-pillar comparative analysis, the book makes a major contribution to the debates on the dynamics of economic growth in communist and postcommunist East Central Europe, on the socialist consumer culture along with its transformation after 1990, and on how the accounts on East Central Europe can be integrated into the emerging field of historical quality of life research.

Celebrity, Aspiration and Contemporary Youth

Celebrity, Aspiration and Contemporary Youth PDF Author: Heather Mendick
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474294227
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Celebrity, Aspiration and Contemporary Youth uses the lens of celebrity to explore how young people think about their futures under austerity. Based on an interdisciplinary study, the book offers fresh insights into contemporary youth aspirations and inequalities. It helps us to understand young people's transitions into adulthood at a time of socio-economic 'crisis'. Drawing on original data, the authors examine what it means for young people to be forming their aspirations within the context of 'austere meritocracy'. The book addresses three central questions: What kinds of futures do young people desire and imagine for themselves? What is required of young people in the process of achieving these futures? And how are inequalities embedded and reproduced within these? Using young people's 'celebrity talk' to explore their aspirations, the authors challenge stereotypes of young people as a fame-hungry, get-rich-quick generation. Instead, they show how young people engage critically with celebrity and its discourses. Key chapters focus on how young people talk about youth, work, authenticity, success, happiness, money and fame in relation to their own lives and those of celebrities. Each of these chapters contains a case study of an international celebrity, including, Beyoncé, Will Smith, Bill Gates, Prince Harry and Kim Kardashian. The authors conclude with possibilities for social change. They show that celebrity offers an important way of working with young people to critically explore what futures are possible and for whom.

Austerity Across Europe

Austerity Across Europe PDF Author: Sarah Marie Hall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429576900
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Drawing together multidisciplinary research exploring everyday life in Europe during times of economic crisis, this book explores the ways in which austerity policies are lived and experienced - often alongside other significant social, political and personal change. With attention to the inequalities produced by these processes and the measures used by individuals, families and communities to help them ‘get by’, it also envisages hopeful, affirmative socio-political futures. Arranged around the themes of intergenerational relations and exchanges, ways of coping through crises, and community, civic and state infrastructures, Austerity Across Europe will appeal to social scientists with interests in everyday life, family practices, neoliberal state policy, poverty and socio-economic inequalities.

Class Inequality in Austerity Britain

Class Inequality in Austerity Britain PDF Author: W. Atkinson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137016388
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
When the Coalition Government came to power in 2010 in claimed it would deliver not just austerity, as necessary as that apparently was, but also fairness. This volume subjects this pledge to critical interrogation by exposing the interests behind the policy programme pursued and their damaging effects on class inequalities. Situated within a recognition of the longer-term rise of neoliberal politics, reflections on the status of sociology as a source of critique and current debates over the relationship between the cultural and economic dimensions of social class, the contributors cover an impressively wide range of relevant topics, from education, family policy and community to crime and consumption, shedding new light on the experience of domination in the early 21st Century.

Dressing for Austerity

Dressing for Austerity PDF Author: Geraldine Biddle-Perry
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
ISBN: 9781780766287
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
A new look for Austerity...The coldest winter on record, rationing, successive economic crises, bombed out towns and cities; with some justification 'Austerity Britain' in the late 1940s is coloured in the popular imagination in tones of drab. Dressing for Austerity shines a light on alternative visions of post-war optimism and aspiration. It traces how, set against the Labour government's philosophy of 'Austerity by design' in a climate of post-war idealism, the desire for affordable fashionable clothing, access to leisure, and the health, time and money to enjoy them became totemic symbols of post-war ambition that impelled new strategies of state control and consumer agency. The book examines the immediate post-war period - its politics, its fashions and its people - in new ways and on its own terms as a critical tipping point in the making of modern Britain.

Crip Times

Crip Times PDF Author: Robert McRuer
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 147980875X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Contends that disability is a central but misunderstood element of global austerity politics. Broadly attentive to the political and economic shifts of the last several decades, Robert McRuer asks how disability activists, artists and social movements generate change and resist the dominant forms of globalization in an age of austerity, or “crip times.” Throughout Crip Times, McRuer considers how transnational queer disability theory and culture—activism, blogs, art, photography, literature, and performance—provide important and generative sites for both contesting austerity politics and imagining alternatives. The book engages various cultural flashpoints, including the spectacle surrounding the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games; the murder trial of South African Paralympian Oscar Pistorius; the photography of Brazilian artist Livia Radwanski which documents the gentrification of Colonia Roma in Mexico City; the defiance of Chilean students demanding a free and accessible education for all; the sculpture and performance of UK artist Liz Crow; and the problematic rhetoric of “aspiration” dependent upon both able-bodied and disabled figurations that emerged in Thatcher’s England. Crip Times asserts that disabled people themselves are demanding that disability be central to our understanding of political economy and uneven development and suggests that, in some locations, their demand for disability justice is starting to register. Ultimately, McRuer argues that a politics of austerity will always generate the compulsion to fortify borders and to separate a narrowly defined “us” in need of protection from “them.”

A Social History of Twentieth- Century Europe

A Social History of Twentieth- Century Europe PDF Author: Béla Tomka
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415628431
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
A Social History of Twentieth-Century Europe offers a systematic overview on major aspects of social life, including population, family and households, social inequalities and mobility, the welfare state, work, consumption and leisure, social cleavages in politics, urbanization as well as education, religion and culture. It also addresses major debates and diverging interpretations of historical and social research regarding the history of European societies in the past one hundred years. Organized in ten thematic chapters, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach, making use of the methods and results of not only history, but also sociology, demography, economics and political science. Béla Tomka presents both the diversity and the commonalities of European societies looking not just to Western European countries, but Eastern, Central and Southern European countries as well. A perfect introduction for all students of European history.

Crippled

Crippled PDF Author: Frances Ryan
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788739566
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The austerity crisis and threat to disability rights. New updated edition includes the impact of COVID on Britain's 14 million disabled people. In austerity Britain, disabled people have been recast as worthless scroungers. From social care to the benefits system, politicians and the media alike have made the case that Britain’s 12 million disabled people are nothing but a drain on the public purse. In Crippled, journalist and campaigner Frances Ryan exposes the disturbing reality, telling the stories of those most affected by this devastating regime. It is at once both a damning indictment of a safety net so compromised it strangles many of those it catches and a passionate demand for an end to austerity, which hits hardest those most in need.

Dressing for Austerity

Dressing for Austerity PDF Author: Geraldine Biddle-Perry
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786731975
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
A new look for Austerity...The coldest winter on record, rationing, successive economic crises, bombed out towns and cities; with some justification 'Austerity Britain' in the late 1940s is coloured in the popular imagination in tones of drab. Dressing for Austerity shines a light on alternative visions of post-war optimism and aspiration. It traces how, set against the Labour government's philosophy of 'Austerity by design' in a climate of post-war idealism, the desire for affordable fashionable clothing, access to leisure, and the health, time and money to enjoy them became totemic symbols of post-war ambition that impelled new strategies of state control and consumer agency. The book examines the immediate post-war period - its politics, its fashions and its people - in new ways and on its own terms as a critical tipping point in the making of modern Britain.

Civic Virtue and the Sovereignty of Evil

Civic Virtue and the Sovereignty of Evil PDF Author: Derek Edyvane
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415890470
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
There is a growing perception of ethical crisis in public life. This book articulates a new perspective on public morality in uncertain times by defending a radical re-orientation of civic ethics away from the pursuit of the good society and towards the prevention of the great evils of human existence.