Social Science : Human Geography

Informed by the authors fieldwork experience, the book covers the relation between theory, practice and writing, and demonstrates how methods work in the field, so preparing the first-time ethnographer for the loss of control and direction often experienced. In five short chapters it presents a systematic overview of: - first principles - the role of the detached researcher , the idea of a pure culture - preparing for fieldwork - initiating access, the relation of knowledge to ethics - constructing ethnographic information - participant observation, interviewing, focus groups, filmic approaches - analysing field materials - sifting, sorting, and making sense, relating analysis to fieldwork and to theory - writing - why writing matters, dialogic accounts, narrating research. more...

Price: $44.95

In this book, contributors from across the social sciences focus on everyday objects and how these objects enter our activities over the course of time. Using a combination of different theoretical approaches, the book argues against the standard notion of objects and their properties as inert and meaningless, and for the need to understand the relations between people and objects in terms of process and change. more...

Price: $110.00

The port city of Liverpool, England, is home to one of the oldest Black communities in Britain. Its members proudly date their history back at least as far as the nineteenth century, with the global wanderings and eventual settlement of colonial African seamen. Jacqueline Nassy Brown analyzes how this worldly origin story supports an avowedly local Black politic and identity--a theme that becomes a window onto British politics of race, place, and nation, and Liverpool's own contentious origin story as a gloriously cosmopolitan port of world-historical import that was nonetheless central to British slave trading and imperialism.This ethnography also examines the rise and consequent dilemmas of Black identity. It captures the contradictions of diaspora in postcolonial Liverpool, where African and Afro-Caribbean heritages and transnational linkages with Black America both contribute to and compete with the local as a basis for authentic racial identity. Crisscrossing historical periods, rhetorical modes, and academic genres, the book focuses singularly on "place," enabling its most radical move: its analysis of Black racial politics as enactments of English cultural premises. The insistent focus on English culture implies a further twist. Just as Blacks are racialized through appeals to their assumed Afro-Caribbean and African cultures, so too has Liverpool--an Irish, working-class city whose expansive port faces the world beyond Britain--long been beyond the pale of dominant notions of authentic Englishness. Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail studies "race" through clashing constructions of "Liverpool." more...

Price: $67.50

Preface. 1. Putting Social Sciences Together Again: An Introduction to the Volume, Timothy A. Kohler. 2. Nonlinear and Synthetic Models for Primate Societies, Irenaeus J. A. te Boekhorst and Charlotte K. Hemelrijk. 3. The Evolution of Cooperation in an Ecological Context: An Agent-Based Model, John W. Pepper and Barbara B. Smuts. 4. Evolution of Interference, Brian Skyrms. 5. Trajectories to Complexity in Artificial Societies: Rationality, Belief, and Emotions, Jim E. Doran. 6. MAGICAL Computer Simulation of Mesolithic Foraging, Mark Winter Lake. 7. Be There Then: A Modeling Approach to Settlement Determinants and Spatial Efficiency among Late Ancestral Pueblo Populations of the Mesa Verde Region, U.S. Southwest, Timothy A. Kohler et al. 8. Understanding Anasazi Culture Change through Agent-Based Modeling, Jeffrey S. Dean et al. 9. Anti-Chaos, Common Property, and the Emergence of Cooperation, J. Stephen Lansing. 10. The Political Impact of Marriage in a Virtual Polynesian Society, Cathy A. Small. 11. The Impact of Raiding on Settlement Patterns in the Northern Valley of Oaxaca: An Approach Using Decision Trees, Robert G. Reynolds. 12. The Fractal House of Pharaoh: Ancient Egypt as a Complex Adaptive System, a Trial Formulation, Mark Lehner. 13. Modeling Sociality: The View from Europe, Nigel Gilbert. 14. Agent-Based Modeling of Small-Scale Societies: State of the Art and Future Prospects, Henry T. Wright. Index more...

Price: $74.50

Examines the complex interaction between the English language and the construction of ethnicity in the global English-speaking world. This volume features essays which demonstrate that the constructs of both English and ethnicity are contested sites of identity formation. more...

Price: $79.95