Growth Fetish

Growth Fetish PDF Author: Clive Hamilton
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1741150949
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
Accessible critique of Western society under capitalism by leading scholar.

Growth Fetish

Growth Fetish PDF Author: Clive Hamilton
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1741150949
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
Accessible critique of Western society under capitalism by leading scholar.

The Growth Delusion

The Growth Delusion PDF Author: David Pilling
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 052557252X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
A provocative critique of the pieties and fallacies of our obsession with economic growth We live in a society in which a priesthood of economists, wielding impenetrable mathematical formulas, set the framework for public debate. Ultimately, it is the perceived health of the economy which determines how much we can spend on our schools, highways, and defense; economists decide how much unemployment is acceptable and whether it is right to print money or bail out profligate banks. The backlash we are currently witnessing suggests that people are turning against the experts and their faulty understanding of our lives. Despite decades of steady economic growth, many citizens feel more pessimistic than ever, and are voting for candidates who voice undisguised contempt for the technocratic elite. For too long, economics has relied on a language which fails to resonate with people's actual experience, and we are now living with the consequences. In this powerful, incisive book, David Pilling reveals the hidden biases of economic orthodoxy and explores the alternatives to GDP, from measures of wealth, equality, and sustainability to measures of subjective wellbeing. Authoritative, provocative, and eye-opening, The Growth Delusion offers witty and unexpected insights into how our society can respond to the needs of real people instead of pursuing growth at any cost.

The Hegemony of Growth

The Hegemony of Growth PDF Author: Matthias Schmelzer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131653135X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 397

Get Book Here

Book Description
In modern society, economic growth is considered to be the primary goal pursued through policymaking. But when and how did this perception become widely adopted among social scientists, politicians and the general public? Focusing on the OECD, one of the least understood international organisations, Schmelzer offers the first transnational study to chart the history of growth discourses. He reveals how the pursuit of GDP growth emerged as a societal goal and the ways in which the methods employed to measure, model and prescribe growth resulted in statistical standards, international policy frameworks and widely accepted norms. Setting his analysis within the context of capitalist development, post-war reconstruction, the Cold War, decolonization, and industrial crisis, The Hegemony of Growth sheds new light on the continuous reshaping of the growth paradigm up to the neoliberal age and adds historical depth to current debates on climate change, inequality and the limits to growth.

The Fetish Revisited

The Fetish Revisited PDF Author: J. Lorand Matory
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478002433
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since the early-modern encounter between African and European merchants on the Guinea Coast, European social critics have invoked African gods as metaphors for misplaced value and agency, using the term “fetishism” chiefly to assert the irrationality of their fellow Europeans. Yet, as J. Lorand Matory demonstrates in The Fetish Revisited, Afro-Atlantic gods have a materially embodied social logic of their own, which is no less rational than the social theories of Marx and Freud. Drawing on thirty-six years of fieldwork in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, Matory casts an Afro-Atlantic eye on European theory to show how Marx’s and Freud’s conceptions of the fetish both illuminate and misrepresent Africa’s human-made gods. Through this analysis, the priests, practices, and spirited things of four major Afro-Atlantic religions simultaneously call attention to the culture-specific, materially conditioned, physically embodied, and indeed fetishistic nature of Marx’s and Freud’s theories themselves. Challenging long-held assumptions about the nature of gods and theories, Matory offers a novel perspective on the social roots of these tandem African and European understandings of collective action, while illuminating the relationship of European social theory to the racism suffered by Africans and assimilated Jews alike.

Confronting Desire

Confronting Desire PDF Author: Ilan Kapoor
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501751743
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Get Book Here

Book Description
By applying psychoanalytic perspectives to key themes, concepts, and practices underlying the development enterprise, Confronting Desire offers a new way of analyzing the problems, challenges, and potentialities of international development. Ilan Kapoor makes a compelling case for examining development's unconscious desires and in the process inaugurates a new field of study: psychoanalytic development studies. Drawing from the work of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, as well as from psychoanalytic postcolonial and feminist scholarship, Kapoor analyzes how development's unconscious desires "speak out," most often in excessive and unpredictable ways that contradict the outwardly rational declarations of its practitioners. He investigates development's many irrationalities—from obsessions about growth and poverty to the perverse seductions of racism and over-consumption. By deploying key psychoanalytic concepts—enjoyment, fantasy, antagonism, fetishism, envy, drive, perversion, and hysteria—Confronting Desire critically analyzes important issues in development—growth, poverty, inequality, participation, consumption, corruption, gender, "race," LGBTQ politics, universality, and revolution. Confronting Desire offers prescriptions for applying psychoanalysis to development theory and practice and demonstrates how psychoanalysis can provide fertile ground for radical politics and the transformation of international development.

Requiem for a Species

Requiem for a Species PDF Author: Clive Hamilton
Publisher: Earthscan
ISBN: 1849710813
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
First Published in 2010. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Affluenza (EasyRead Super Large 20pt Edition)

Affluenza (EasyRead Super Large 20pt Edition) PDF Author:
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1458764451
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 430

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Ideology of Competition in School Music

The Ideology of Competition in School Music PDF Author: Sean Robert Powell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197570836
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 185

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Ideology of Competition in School Music explores competition as a structuring force in school music and provides critiques of that system from multiple philosophical and theoretical perspectives. Competition is seen by many music teachers, students, and supporters as natural and inevitable--a taken-for-granted aspect of music education or an irresistible force, rather than a choice. This book uncovers this ideological nature of competition and examines its effect on student learning, teacher agency, and equity within music education. It considers ways in which music educators might reconsider the role of competition in their teaching practice and offers alternative frameworks for organizing school music. In this book, author Sean Robert Powell views competition as a microcosm of the wider neoliberal capitalist society, in which subjects are interpellated in an antagonistic competitive field as market logic dictates a system of accountability, reduction, and audit culture. Music teachers, students, and education administrators, consciously and unconsciously, reinforce, replicate, and sustain the competitive structure, even if they do so while expressing a cynical disavowal. Powell considers competition broadly, including, for example: formal competitions between schools in which ensembles are given numerical scores and ranked; "festivals" in which groups are given ratings based on pre-given criteria; state, regional, and national honor ensembles; hierarchical arrangements within school music programs; or simply the pursuit of social prestige, reputation, and ever-higher performance standards. Although the book provides examples from the competitive landscape of school music in the United States (and, especially, Texas, considered a "hyper" example of competitive culture), Powell's analyses and discussions are relevant to readers in any context around the world. Although the degree to which competitive achievement as an explicitly-stated aim of instruction varies from program to program and location to location, the "realism" of neoliberal capitalism--and its effect on all aspects of education--is a global phenomenon.

An Introduction to Sustainability

An Introduction to Sustainability PDF Author: Martin Mulligan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134548826
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 395

Get Book Here

Book Description
An Introduction to Sustainability provides students with a comprehensive overview of the key concepts and ideas which are encompassed within the growing field of sustainability. The book teases out the diverse but intersecting domains of sustainability and emphasises strategies for action. Aimed at those studying the subject for the first time, it is unique in giving students from different disciplinary backgrounds a coherent framework and set of core principles for applying broad sustainability principles within their personal and professional lives. These include: working to improve equality within and across generations, moving from consumerism to quality of life goals and respecting diversity in both nature and culture. Areas of emerging importance such as the economics of happiness and wellbeing stand alongside core topics including: Energy and society Consumption and consumerism Risk and resilience Waste, water and land. Key challenges and applications are explored through international case studies and each chapter includes a thematic essay drawing on diverse literature to provide an integrated introduction to fundamental issues. Launched with the brand-new Routledge Sustainability Hub, the book’s companion website contains a range of features to engage students with the interdisciplinary nature of Sustainability. Together these resources provide a wealth of material for learning, teaching and researching the topic of sustainability. This textbook is an essential companion to any sustainability course.

Ecology and Existence

Ecology and Existence PDF Author: Matthew C. Ally
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739182897
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 563

Get Book Here

Book Description
This study explores the increasingly troubled relationship between humankind and the Earth, with the help of a simple example and a complicated interlocutor. The example is a pond, which, it turns out, is not so simple as it seems. The interlocutor is Jean-Paul Sartre, novelist, playwright, biographer, philosopher, and, despite his several disavowals, doyen of twentieth-century existentialism. Standing with the great humanist at the edge of the pond, the author examines contemporary experience in the light of several familiar conceptual pairs: nature and culture, fact and value, reality and imagination, human and nonhuman, society and ecology, Earth and world. The theoretical challenge is to reveal the critical complementarity and experiential unity of this family of ideas. The practical task is to discern the heuristic implications of this lived unity-in-diversity in these times of social and ecological crisis. Interdisciplinary in its aspirations, the study draws upon recent developments in biology and ecology, complexity science and systems theory, ecological and Marxist economics, and environmental history. Comprehensive in its engagement of Sartre’s oeuvre, the study builds upon his best-known existentialist writings, and also his critique of colonialism, voluminous ethical writings, early studies of the imaginary, and mature dialectical philosophy. In addition to overviews of Sartre’s distinctive inflections of phenomenology and dialectics and his unique theories of praxis and imagination, the study also articulates for the first time Sartre’s incipient philosophical ecology. In keeping with Sartre’s lifelong commitment to freedom and liberation, the study concludes with a programmatic look at the relative merits of pragmatist, prefigurative, and revolutionary activism within the burgeoning global struggle for social and ecological justice. We learn much by thinking with Sartre at the water’s edge: surprising lessons about our changing humanity and how we have come to where we are; timely lessons about the shifting relation between us and the broader community of life to which we belong; difficult lessons about our brutal degradation of the planetary system upon which life depends; and auspicious lessons, too, about a participatory path forward as we work to preserve a habitable planet and build a livable world for all earthlings.