In this landmark work of investigative reporting, former Financial Times correspondent Alexandra Harney uncovers a story of immense significance to us all: how China's factory economy gains a competitive edge by selling out its workers, environment, and future. Harney's firsthand reporting brings us face-to-face with a world in which intense pricing pressure from Western companies combines with ubiquitous corruption and a lack of transparency to exact a staggering toll in human misery and environmental damage. This eye-opening expose offers, for the first time, an intimate look at the defining business story of our time.
• Full-color guide to 50 trails, many of them within city limits • Routes rated for fitness for walkers, runners, and hikers San Francisco is home to more than 800,000 residents and hosts more than 17 million business and leisure travelers each year. But few visitors—or locals, for that matter—realize that there are more than 220 premier parks and 70 miles of hiking trails in the city itself. Urban Trails: San Francisco is the only guide available that details so many trails within the boundaries of the city, including mainland San Francisco and the city’s four islands: Alcatraz, Angel, Treasure, and Yerba Buena. With a focus on parks and trails, here you’ll find 50 routes for walkers, runners, and hikers. Other features include: • Trailhead directions, including public transit options • Info for families and dog owners • Trail distance, high point, estimated time, amenities, and more • Sidebars on area history, nature, tips, and sights
Following the Introduction, the emergence of lifelong learning as the central strategy in the EU’s education and training policy is described in Chapter Two. Illustrated in a historical and international context, it reveals where the idea of lifelong learning has come from and how it has developed up to the present day. A particular focus is on EU policy after the mid-1990s as well as on the EU’s concept of lifelong learning and its objectives. Since lifelong learning is a complex concept, the provision of a broad perspective on VET in Germany and England seems inevitable in order to examine how VET fosters lifelong learning. Therefore, Deißinger’s concept of qualification styles, which explicitly aims at providing a multidimensional approach that reveals the complexities and singularities of VET systems, serves as the basis of Chapter Three to describe the main patterns of VET in Germany and England. The focus lies on initial training, though the whole system is taken into account. Chapter Four explicitly builds on Chapter Three. It examines the role of VET in promoting lifelong learning in Germany and England. The six Key Messages of the EU’s Memorandum on Lifelong Learning serve as the analytical framework for the investigation. Chapter Five summarises the findings and draws conclusions. It reveals that the approaches for promoting lifelong learning as well as the perceptions of lifelong learning differ. These findings are embedded in the wider context of EU education and training policy. The EU policy on lifelong learning is regarded critically, and attention is drawn to further research questions. Appendices provide additional information to illustrate specific aspects of some of the issues in the main text in greater detail.
This book highlights the exigency of student success and how higher education institutions are addressing this call. On the heels of the COVID-19 global pandemic, institutions have been challenged further to manage student satisfaction issues, enrollment and financial insecurities, equity, inclusion and access. As starting point to these ongoing priorities, this book aims to raise awareness, questions and suggestions based on examples of courageous leadership that support retention and completion agendas but more so visionary and actionable approaches to ensure student success. The book addresses the various tensions among education stakeholders, the impressions of change, the expanded realities of competition, the casualties of silos, the value of examining and understanding data in advancing options, and the merits of collaboration, and opportunity thinking. Cases and interviews with thought leaders who candidly share experiences and realizations about ensuring student success provide insight about what else can be done to move the needle forward.
Listening in Detail is an original and impassioned take on the intellectual and sensory bounty of Cuban music as it circulates between the island, the United States, and other locations. It is also a powerful critique of efforts to define "Cuban music" for ethnographic examination or market consumption. Contending that the music is not a knowable entity but a spectrum of dynamic practices that elude definition, Alexandra T. Vazquez models a new way of writing about music and the meanings assigned to it. "Listening in detail" is a method invested in opening up, rather than pinning down, experiences of Cuban music. Critiques of imperialism, nationalism, race, and gender emerge in fragments and moments, and in gestures and sounds through Vazquez's engagement with Alfredo Rodríguez's album Cuba Linda (1996), the seventy-year career of the vocalist Graciela Pérez, the signature grunt of the "Mambo King" Dámaso Pérez Prado, Cuban music documentaries of the 1960s, and late-twentieth-century concert ephemera.
Anticolonial Form: Literary Journals at the End of Empire addresses the relationship between culture and politics in two journals published in Europe by African writers: Présence Africaine, launched in Paris in 1947, and Mensagem, published between 1948 and 1964 in Lisbon. Grounded in extensive archival work, the book argues for a comparative and transnational approach to postcolonial literary studies, for the significance of the literary journal as a key form in the development of African writing in French, Portuguese, and English, and for a historically and geographically contingent understanding of the relationships between literature, culture, and politics. This book takes up the idea of articulation (drawn from the cultural theorist Stuart Hall) to bring forward the contingent and fugitive connections that networks of literary journals fostered between francophone, anglophone, and lusophone writers in the conjuncture of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that comparison as a praxis and a method was central to the anticolonial charge of those journals, on whose pages we see an iterative back and forth between writing from and about different parts of the colonial world, a recursive effort to establish how ideas and analyses developed in one part of the colonial world could travel, and be adopted and adapted in others. Reza figures this back and forth between sameness and difference as a comparative practice and argues that different journals formalized this comparative thrust through the techniques of juxtaposition and translation. This anticolonial comparative sensibility, enabled by the journal form, produced a powerful analytic for understanding different European colonialisms together, not in mononational, monoimperialist terms as disaggregated and radically separate, but as connected in material and ideological terms. Many scholars have argued convincingly that the institutionalised practice of comparison in the academic field of comparative literature is itself imbricated with histories of colonialism. Reza's argument, which is richly historicized and substantiated with extensive archival work, takes on a particular significance in the context of that critique as the anticolonial comparison she focuses on offers a different tradition of relational praxis from which to think about connection and comparison itself.
This latest title in the highly successful Ancient Textiles series is the first substantial monograph-length historiography of early medieval embroideries and their context within the British Isles. The book brings together and analyses for the first time all 43 embroideries believed to have been made in the British Isles and Ireland in the early medieval period. New research carried out on those embroideries that are accessible today, involving the collection of technical data, stitch analysis, observations of condition and wear-marks and microscopic photography supplements a survey of existing published and archival sources. The research has been used to write, for the first time, the ‘story’ of embroidery, including what we can learn of its producers, their techniques, and the material functions and metaphorical meanings of embroidery within early medieval Anglo-Saxon society. The author presents embroideries as evidence for the evolution of embroidery production in Anglo-Saxon society, from a community-based activity based on the extended family, to organized workshops in urban settings employing standardized skill levels and as evidence of changing material use: from small amounts of fibers produced locally for specific projects to large batches brought in from a distance and stored until needed. She demonstrate that embroideries were not simply used decoratively but to incorporate and enact different meanings within different parts of society: for example, the newly arrived Germanic settlers of the fifth century used embroidery to maintain links with their homelands and to create tribal ties and obligations. As such, the results inform discussion of embroidery contexts, use and deposition, and the significance of this form of material culture within society as well as an evaluation of the status of embroiderers within early medieval society. The results contribute significantly to our understanding of production systems in Anglo-Saxon England and Ireland.
Guided by the historical semantics developed in Raymond Williams' pioneering study of cultural vocabulary, Modernism: Keywords presents a series of short entries on words used with frequency and urgency in “written modernism,” tracking cultural and literary debates and transformative moments of change. Short-listed for The Modernist Studies Association 2015 Book Prize for an Edition, Anthology, or Essay Collection Highlights and exposes the salient controversies and changing cultural thought at the heart of modernism Goes beyond constructions of “plural modernisms” to reveal all modernist writing as overlapping and interactive in a simultaneous and interlocking mix Draws from a vast compilation of more than a thousand sources, ranging from vernacular prose to experimental literary forms Spans the “long” modernist period, from its incipient beginnings c.1880 to its post-WWII aftermath Approaches English written modernism in its own terms, tempering explanations of modernism often derived from European poets and painters Models research techniques based on digital databases and collaborative work in the humanities
In the early twentieth century, people in the southwestern Pacific nation of Vanuatu experienced rapid population decline, while in the early twenty-first century, they experienced rapid population growth. From colonial governance to postcolonial sovereignty, Moral Figures shows that despite attempts to govern population size and birth, reproduction in Vanuatu continues to exceed bureaucratic economization through Ni-Vanuatu insistence on Indigenous relationalities. Through Alexandra Widmer’s examination of how reproduction is made public, she demonstrates how population sciences have a naturalized focus on women’s fertility and privileged issues of wage labour over women’s land access, as well as broader social relations of reproduction. Widmer draws on oral histories with retired village midwives and massage healers on the changes to care for pregnancy and birth, as well as ethnographic research in a village outside the capital of Port Vila. Locating the Pacific Islands in global histories of demographic science and the medicalization of birth, the book presents archival material in a way that emphasizes bureaucratic practices in how colonial documents attempted to render Indigenous relationalities of reproduction governable. While demographic imaginaries and biomedical practices increasingly frame fertility control as an investment in the reproductive health of individual bodies, the Ni-Vanuatu worlds presented in Moral Figures show that relationships between people, land, knowledge, kin, and care make reproduction a distributed and assisted process.
Birnbaum travel guides are "excellently organized for the casual traveler who is looking for a mix of recreation and cultural insight" (Washington Post) and "the information they offer is up-to-date, crisply presented" (New York Times). "No other guide has as much to offer . . . a pleasure to read".--Today Show.
A landmark eyewitness exposŽ of how China's factory economy competes for Western business by selling out its workers, its environment, and its future In The China Price, acclaimed Financial Timescorrespondent Alex Harney uncovers the truth about how China is able to offer such amazingly low prices to the rest of the world. What she has discovered is a brutal, Hobbesian world in which intense pricing pressure from Western companies combines with ubiquitous corruption and a lack of transparency to exact an unseen and unconscionable toll in human misery and environmental damage. In a way, Harney shows, what goes on in China is inevitable. In a country with almost no transparency, where graft is institutionalized and workers have little recourse to the rule of law, incentives to lie about business practices vastly outweigh incentives to tell the truth. Harney reveals that despite a decade of monitoring factories, outsiders all too often have no idea of the conditions under which goods from China are made. She exposes the widespread practice of using a dummy or model factory as a company's false window out to the world, concealing a vast number of illegal factories operating completely off the books. Some Western companies are better than others about sniffing out such deception, but too many are perfectly happy to embrace plausible deniability as long as the prices remain so low. And in the gold-rush atmosphere that's infected the country, in which everyone is clamoring to get rich at once and corruption is rampant, it's almost impossible for the Chinese government's own underfunded regulatory mechanisms to do much good at all. But perhaps the most important revelation in The China Priceis how fast change is coming, one way or another. A generation of Chinese flocked from the rural interior of the country to its coastline, where its factory work largely is, in the largest mass migration in human history. But that migration has slowed dramatically, in no small part because of widespread disenchantment with the way of life the factories offer. As pollution in China's industrial cities worsens and their infrastructure buckles, and grassroots activism for more legal recourse grows, pressures are mounting on the system that will not dissipate without profound change. Managing the violence of that change is the greatest challenge China faces in the near future, and managing its impact on the world economy is the challenge that faces us all.
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