Civil society and civic engagement have increasingly become topics of discussion at the national and international level. The editors of this volume ask, does the concept of "civil society" include gender equality and gender justice? Or, to frame the question differently, is civil society a feminist concept? Conversely, does feminism need the concept of civil society? This important volume offers both a revised gendered history of civil society and a program for making it more egalitarian in the future. An interdisciplinary group of internationally known authors investigates the relationship between public and private in the discourses and practices of civil societies; the significance of the family for the project of civil society; the relation between civil society, the state, and different forms of citizenship; and the complex connection between civil society, gendered forms of protest and nongovernmental movements. While often critical of historical instantiations of civil society, all the authors nonetheless take seriously the potential inherent in civil society, particularly as it comes to influence global politics. They demand, however, an expansion of both the concept and project of civil society in order to make its political opportunities available to all.
The claim that all human thought involves "interpretation," that all human thought is in some way relative to a contingent context of cognitive, theoretical, practical, and aesthetic considerations, has become widely accepted, but what we understand by "truth" and how we should best pursue it are questions raised with renewed force once a hermeneutical starting point has been embraced. Brice R. Wachterhauser's collection Hermeneutics and Truth is an attempt to contribute to this conversation. No thinkers have wrestled with the issue of truth and interpretation in more illuminating ways for the Continental tradition of philosophy than Heidegger and Gadamer. Hermeneutics and Truth is a dual focus on Heidegger and Gadamer, but it concentrates primarily on Gadamer's efforts to think through the issue of truth for hermeneutics and only secondarily on Heidegger's thought on this issue.
"This book culminates a career-long search for justice. I felt it important to understand what it is and where it came from as a feature of human society, of human life. I wound up in a department of education, perhaps quite fortuitously, for education enabled me to examine how experiences of justice or injustice in various educational settings shape children and young people's values, behaviors, and chances for living a decent future life"--
Women's increased role in the labour market has combined with concerns about the damaging effects of long working hours to push time-related issues up the policy agenda in many Western nations. This wide-ranging and accessible book assesses policy alternatives in the light of feminist theory and factual evidence. The book introduces mainstream ideas on the nature and political significance of time and re-frames them from a feminist perspective to provide a critical overview of policies in Western welfare states. Themes covered include gender differences in time use and the impact of 'time poverty' on women's citizenship; the need to value time spent giving and receiving care; the social meanings of time and whether we can talk about 'women's time' and 'men's time'; and the role of the past in framing policy options today. The book is essential reading for all those interested in gender inequality, time-use or work/rest-of-life balance. It will be an invaluable resource for students and academics throughout the social sciences.
Marriage, Sexuality, and Gender examines contemporary debates about the meaning and value of marriage. The book analyzes arguments for traditional marriage, including those of neonaturalists, utilitarians, and communitarians or virtue theorists. The volume also considers a range of feminist, welfarist, and liberationist arguments for ending the institution altogether. It evaluates two major reform movements: one focused on expanding marriage to include same-sex couples and the other focused on the use of law to render marriage more internally just. The book concludes with a plea to activists to redirect "marriage equality" movements toward the creation of an entirely secular "civil union law" that would respect a broader range of private life-long commitments, including but not limited to same- and opposite-sex couples, without threatening the role of religious marriage in the lives of those who embrace it and without penalizing nonparticipants.
Timely and original, this book examines gender equality in schooling as an aspiration of global social justice. With nearly one billion people having little or no schooling and women and girls comprising nearly two-thirds of this total, this book analyses the historical, sociological, political and philosophical issues involved as well as exploring actions taken by governments, Inter-Government Organisations, NGOs and women’s groups since 1990 to combat this injustice. Written by a recognised expert in this field, the book is organised clearly into three parts: the first provides a background to the history of the provision of schooling for girls worldwide since 1945 and locates the challenges of gender inequality in education the second examines different views as to why questions of gender and schooling should be addressed globally, contrasting arguments based on human capital theory, rights and capabilities the third analyses how governments, Inter-Government Organisations and NGOs have put policy into practice. Addressing the urgent global challenges in gender and schooling, this book calls for a new connected approach in policy and practice. It is essential reading for all those interested in education, along with developmental studies, sociology, politics and women’s studies.
Norms, Values, and Society is the second Yearbook of the Vienna Circle Institute, which was founded in October 1991. The main part of the book contains original contributions to an international symposium the Institute held in October 1993 on ethics and social philosophy. The papers deal among others with questions of justice, equality, just social institutions, human rights, the connections between rationality and morality and the methodological problems of applied ethics. The Documentation section contains previously unpublished papers by Rudolf Carnap, Philipp Frank, Charles W. Morris and Edgar Zilsel, and the review section presents new publications on the Vienna Circle. The Vienna Circle Institute is devoted to the critical advancement of science and philosophy in the broad tradition of the Vienna Circle, as well as to the focusing of cross-disciplinary interest on the history and philosophy of science in a social context. The Institute's Yearbooks will, for the most part, document its activities and provide a forum for the discussion of exact philosophy, logical and empirical investigations, and analysis of language.
This book explores the relation between redistribution and recognition, two key paradigms in the contemporary discourse on justice. Combining insights from the traditions of critical social theory and analytical political philosophy, the volume offers a multifaceted exploration of this incredibly inspiring conceptual couple from a plurality of perspectives. The chapters engage with concepts such as universal basic income, property-owning democracy, poverty, equality, self-respect, pluralism, care, and work, all of which have an impact on individuals’ recognition as well as on distributive policies. An important contribution to the field of political and social philosophy, the volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of politics, law, human rights, economics, social justice, as well as policymakers.
This insightful and original book is the first to examine the relationship between families and the state in the United States, both in theory and in practice, using child support policy as a lens of analysis. Josephson cogently presents the origins, evolution, and organization of federal child support programs and persuasively demonstrates how some child support enforcement policies, rather than increasing women's access to economic resources, expand government and social control over the beneficiaries. Drawing on the literature of both feminist political theory and public policy implementation, Josephson analyzes the impact of family law and social welfare policies through several empirical case studies. This is important reading for anyone interested in political theory, public policy, and women's relationship to the state.
This collection highlights and extends contemporary women's and gender studies by presenting theoretical analyses and innovative research conceptualizations, applications and methodologies via a diverse variety of popular-in-the-classroom topics, such as changing masculinities; comedic/dramatic portrayals of ethnicity and discrimination; stigma and differences within mainstream media gender stereotypes; intersections of gendered and sexual identities in social media and fundamental institutions. These topics emphasize relevant issues and nuances within popular culture, identities and perceptions and social problems and illustrate the breadth of gender studies and its applications, while the diverse methodologies like historical comparisons; ethnographic, demographic and statistical analyses, demonstrate its epistemology. Each chapter remains solidly founded in gender theory while making significant innovative contributions to the overall field.
At a time when same-sex marriage, gay adoption, and the rise of single-parent households challenge traditional views of the family, this innovative volume helps readers put such issues into social and legal perspective. Engster and Metz bring together essential readings in political and legal theory and organise them to illuminate pressing contemporary debates on the family: gender and justice, parents and children, the state and globalisation. Justice, Politics, and the Family is an engaging and a diverse addition to the area of critical legal theory and sociology.
