Meghan Kallman's Books

Building Something Better

Environmental Crises and the Promise of Community Change

By: Stephanie A. Malin,Meghan Elizabeth Kallman

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Building Something Better

Environmental Crises and the Promise of Community Change

By: Stephanie A. Malin,Meghan Elizabeth Kallman

As the turmoil of interlinked crises unfolds across the world—from climate change to growing inequality to the rise of authoritarian governments—social scientists examine what is happening and why. Can communities devise alternatives to the systems that are doing so much harm to the planet and people? Sociologists Stephanie A. Malin and Meghan Elizbeth Kallman offer a clear, accessible volume that demonstrates the ways that communities adapt in the face of crises and explains that sociology can help us understand how and why they do this challenging work. Tackling neoliberalism head-on, these communities are making big changes by crafting distributive and regenerative systems that depart from capitalist approaches. The vivid case studies presented range from activist water protectors to hemp farmers to renewable energy cooperatives led by Indigenous peoples and nations. Alongside these studies, Malin and Kallman present incisive critiques of colonialism, extractive capitalism, and neoliberalism, while demonstrating how sociology’s own disciplinary traditions have been complicit with those ideologies—and must expand beyond them. Showing that it is possible to challenge social inequality and environmental degradation by refusing to continue business-as-usual, Building Something Better offers both a call to action and a dose of hope in a time of crises.

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Page Count

231

Publisher

Rutgers University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1978823703

ISBN 13

9781978823709

The Conceivable Future

Planning Families and Taking Action in the Age of Climate Change

By: Meghan Elizabeth Kallman,Josephine Ferorelli

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The Conceivable Future

Planning Families and Taking Action in the Age of Climate Change

By: Meghan Elizabeth Kallman,Josephine Ferorelli

This reassuring consideration of a deeply personal matter teams seamlessly with a reasoned, emphatic call to action." - Booklist, Starred Review • ABooklist Top 10 Book on the Environment & Sustainability 2024 Explore the ways in which the climate crisis is affecting our personal decisions about family planning, parenting, and political action. In The Conceivable Future, authors Meghan Elizabeth Kallman and Josephine Ferorelli explore the ways in which the climate crisis is affecting our personal decisions about family planning, parenting, and political action. This book offers fresh, timely answers to questions such as: How do I decide to have a baby when there's the threat of environmental collapse? How do I parent a child in the middle of the climate crisis? What can I actually do to help stop global warming? Drawing from their decade of work with the organization Conceivable Future, Kallman, a sociologist and Rhode Island State Senator, and Ferorelli, an activist and former Climate Bureau editor, offers both informed perspective and practical steps for taking meaningful action in combating the climate crisis, while also making smart, balanced decisions when it comes to starting and maintaining a family. First, The Conceivable Future explores what the real threats are to reproductive, gestational, and infant health (spoiler: it's inequality, heat, and fossil fueled pollution), and debunks the myths of personal carbon footprint, and the harmful legacy of population control. The authors examine the successes and impediments of women-led movements around the world and share what they've learned through ten years of organizing to bring attention to the reproductive crisis that is climate change. Finally, the book looks at what can be done about the climate crisis today. By taking these steps, we can both understand the crisis on its own terms, and stay rooted in the human scale, where our lives retain their full meaning. The Conceivable Future is a must-read for all who want to make a difference in the world--and secure a sustainable future for all our families.

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Page Count

389

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield

Published Date

ISBN 10

1538179709

ISBN 13

9781538179703

The Death of Idealism

Development and Anti-Politics in the Peace Corps

By: Meghan Elizabeth Kallman

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The Death of Idealism

Development and Anti-Politics in the Peace Corps

By: Meghan Elizabeth Kallman

Peace Corps volunteers seem to exemplify the desire to make the world a better place. Yet despite being one of history’s clearest cases of organized idealism, the Peace Corps has, in practice, ended up cultivating very different outcomes among its volunteers. By the time they return from the Peace Corps, volunteers exhibit surprising shifts in their political and professional consciousness. Rather than developing a systemic perspective on development and poverty, they tend instead to focus on individual behavior; they see professions as the only legitimate source of political and social power. They have lost their idealism, and their convictions and beliefs have been reshaped along the way. The Death of Idealism uses the case of the Peace Corps to explain why and how participation in a bureaucratic organization changes people’s ideals and politics. Meghan Elizabeth Kallman offers an innovative institutional analysis of the role of idealism in development organizations. She details the combination of social forces and organizational pressures that depoliticizes Peace Corps volunteers, channels their idealism toward professionalization, and leads to cynicism or disengagement. Kallman sheds light on the structural reasons for the persistent failure of development organizations and the consequences for the people involved. Based on interviews with over 140 current and returned Peace Corps volunteers, field observations, and a large-scale survey, this deeply researched, theoretically rigorous book offers a novel perspective on how people lose their idealism, and why that matters.

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Page Count

154

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

023154846X

ISBN 13

9780231548465

The Third Sector

Community Organizations, NGOs, and Nonprofits

By: Meghan Kallman,Terry Clark

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The Third Sector

Community Organizations, NGOs, and Nonprofits

By: Meghan Kallman,Terry Clark

Civil society organizations, nonprofits, national and international nongovernmental organizations, and a variety of formal and informal associations have coalesced into a world political force. Though the components of this so-called third sector vary by country, their cumulative effects play an ever-greater role in global affairs. Looking at relief and welfare organizations, innovation organizations, social networks, and many other kinds of groups, Meghan Elizabeth Kallman and Terry Nichols Clark explore the functions, impacts, and composition of the nonprofit sector in six key countries. Chinese organizations, for example, follow the predominantly Asian model of government funding that links their mission to national political goals. Western groups, by contrast, often explicitly challenge government objectives, and even gain relevance and cache by doing so. In addition, Kallman and Clark examine groups in real-world contexts, providing a wealth of political-historical background, in-depth consideration of interactions with state institutions, region-by-region comparisons, and suggestions for how groups can borrow policy options across systems. Insightful and forward-seeing, The Third Sector provides a rare international view of organizations and agendas driving change in today's international affairs.

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Page Count

364

Publisher

University of Illinois Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0252098854

ISBN 13

9780252098857

An Analysis of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish

By: Meghan Kallman,Rachele Dini

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An Analysis of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish

By: Meghan Kallman,Rachele Dini

Michel Foucault is famous as one of the 20th-century’s most innovative thinkers – and his work on Discipline and Punish was so original and offered models so useful to other scholars that the book now ranks among the most influential academic works ever published. Foucault’s aim is to trace the way in which incarceration was transformed between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. What started as a spectacle, in which ritual punishments were focused on the prisoner’s body, eventually became a matter of the private disciplining of a delinquent soul. Foucault’s work is renowned for its original insights, and Discipline and Punish contains several of his most compelling observations. Much of the focus of the book is on making new connections between knowledge and power, leading Foucault to sketch out a new interpretation of the relationship between voir, savoir and pouvoir – or, ‘to see is to know is to have power.’ Foucault also dwells in fascinating detail on the true implications of a uniquely creative solution to the problems generated by incarcerating large numbers of criminals in a confined space – Jeremy Bentham’s ‘panopticon,’ a prison constructed around a central tower from which hidden guards might – or might not – be monitoring any given prisoner at any given time. As Foucualt points out, the panopticon creates a prison in which inmates will discipline themselves, for fear of punishment, even when there are no guards present. He goes on to apply this insight to the manner in which all of us behave in the outside world – a world in which CCTV and speed cameras are explicitly designed to modify our behavior. Foucault’s highly original vision of prisons also ties them to broader structures of power, allowing him to argue that all previous conceptions of prison are misleading, even wrong. For Foucault, the ultimate purpose of incarceration is neither to punish inmates, nor to reduce crime. It is to produce delinquency as a way of enabling the state to control and of structure crime.

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