The Engaged University is a comprehensive empirical account of the global civic engagement movement in higher education. In universities around the world, something extraordinary is underway. Mobilizing their human and intellectual resources, institutions of higher education are directly tackling community problems – combating poverty, improving public health, and restoring environmental quality. This book documents and analyzes this exciting trend through studies of civic engagement and social responsibility at twenty institutions worldwide. This timely volume offers three special contributions to the literature on higher education policy and practice: a historical overview of the founding purposes of universities, which almost invariably included a context-specific element of social purpose, together with a survey of how these "founding" intentions have fared in different systems of higher education; a contemporary account of the policy and practice of universities – all over the world – seeking to re-engage with this social purpose; and an overview of generic issues which emerge for the "engaged university.
Leveraging Big Data and 21st century technology to renew cities and citizenship in America The Responsive City is a guide to civic engagement and governance in the digital age that will help leaders link important breakthroughs in technology and data analytics with age-old lessons of small-group community input to create more agile, competitive, and economically resilient cities. Featuring vivid case studies highlighting the work of pioneers in New York, Boston, Chicago and more, the book provides a compelling model for the future of governance. The book will help mayors, chief technology officers, city administrators, agency directors, civic groups and nonprofit leaders break out of current paradigms to collectively address civic problems. The Responsive City is the culmination of research originating from the Data-Smart City Solutions initiative, an ongoing project at Harvard Kennedy School working to catalyze adoption of data projects on the city level. The book is co-authored by Professor Stephen Goldsmith, director of Data-Smart City Solutions at Harvard Kennedy School, and Professor Susan Crawford, co-director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg penned the book’s foreword. Based on the authors’ experiences and extensive research, The Responsive City explores topics including: Building trust in the public sector and fostering a sustained, collective voice among communities; Using data-smart governance to preempt and predict problems while improving quality of life; Creating efficiencies and saving taxpayer money with digital tools; and Spearheading these new approaches to government with innovative leadership.
Overcoming a past of deteriorating homes, empty storefronts, and corrupt city administrations, Somerville, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, today proudly defines itself as a longtime immigrant city, a historically blue collar town, and a hip new urban center with a progressive city government. In Citizenship and Governance in a Changing City, Susan Ostrander shows how beneath current high levels of engagement by Somerville residents lies a struggle about who should be the city's elected leaders and how they should conduct the city's affairs. It is a struggle waged bet.
In Public Pensions, Susan M. Sterett traces the legal and constitutional structures underlying early social welfare programs in the United States. Sterett explains the status of state and local government payments for public servants and the poor from the mid-nineteenth century until the Great Depression. The most visible public payments for service in the United States were directed to soldiers, who risked death for the nation. However, firemen, not soldiers, first captured local governments— attention; social welfare programs for soldiers were modeled on firemen's pensions. The dangerous work of firefighting and of combat provided the fundamental legal analogy for courts as governments expanded pensions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nothing about the state court doctrine approving payments for dangerous, local service would allow pensions for indigent mothers and for the elderly, which states began to consider after 1910. Counties and railroads that objected to the new taxes could fight programs based on the old doctrine, established for firefighters, soldiers, and finally civil servants. State litigation provided one of the many grounds for contesting expanded welfare states in the early twentieth-century United States. Sterett demonstrates that state courts maintained a gendered division between the service that marked citizenship and the dependence that marked indigence, even during the promising ferment of the early twentieth century.
Rewriting Citizenship provides an interdisciplinary approach to antebellum citizenship. Interpreting citizenship, particularly how citizenship intersects with race and gender, is fundamental to understanding the era and directly challenges the idea of Jacksonian Democracy. Susan J. Stanfield uses an analysis of novels, domestic advice, essays, and poetry, as well as more traditional archival sources, to provide an understanding of both the prescriptions for womanhood espoused in print culture and how those prescriptions were interpreted in everyday life. While much has been written about the cultural marker of true womanhood as a gender ideology of white middle-class women, Stanfield reveals how it served an even more significant purpose by defining racial difference and attaching civic purpose to the daily practices of women. Black and white women were actively engaged in redefining citizenship in ways that did not necessarily call for suffrage rights but did claim a relationship to the state. The prominence of true womanhood relied upon a female-focused print culture. The act of publication gave power to the ideology and allowed for a shared identity among white middle-class women and those who sought to emulate them. Stanfield argues that this domestic literature created a national code for womanhood that was racially constructed and infused with civic purpose. By defining women’s household practices as an obligation not only to their husbands but also to the state, women could reimagine themselves as citizens. Through print sources, women publicized their performance of these defined obligations and laid claim to citizenship on their own behalf.
Some theorists claim that democracy cannot work without trust. According to this argument, democracy fails unless citizens trust that their governing institutions are serving their best interests. Similarly, some assert that democracy works best when people trust one another and have confidence that politicians will look after citizen interests. Questioning such claims, Democracy and the Culture of Skepticism, by Matthew Cleary and Susan Stokes, suggests that skepticism, not trust, is the hallmark of political culture in well-functioning democracies. Drawing on extensive research in two developing democracies, Argentina and Mexico, Democracy and the Culture of Skepticism shows that in regions of each country with healthy democracies, people do not trust one another more than those living in regions where democracy functions less well, nor do they display more personal trust in governments or politicians. Instead, the defining features of the healthiest democracies are skepticism of government and a belief that politicians act in their constituents' best interest only when it is personally advantageous for them to do so. In contrast to scholars who lament what they see as a breakdown in civic life, Cleary and Stokes find that people residing in healthy democracies do not participate more in civic organizations than others, but in fact, tend to retreat from civic life in favor of private pursuits. The authors conclude that governments are most efficient and responsive when they know that institutions such as the press or an independent judiciary will hold them accountable for their actions. The question of how much citizens should trust politicians and governments has consumed political theorists since America's founding. In Democracy and the Culture of Skepticism, Matthew Cleary and Susan Stokes test the relationship between trust and the quality of governance, showing that it is not trust, but vigilance and skepticism that provide the foundation for well-functioning democracies. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust
From curriculum standards and testing to school choice and civic learning, issues in American education are some of the most debated in the United States. The Institutions of American Democracy , a collection of essays by the nation's leading education scholars and professionals, is designed to inform the debate and stimulate change.In association with the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands and the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, The Institutions of American Democracy is the first in a series of books commissioned to enhance public understanding of the nature and function of democratic institutions. A national advisory board--including, among others, Nancy Kassebaum Baker, David Boren, John Brademas, Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, David Gergen, and Lee Hamilton--will guide the vision of the project, which includes future volumes on the press and the three branches of government.Each essay in The Institutions of American Democracy addresses essential questions for policymakers, educators, and anyone committed to public education. What role should public education play in a democracy? How has that role changed through American history? Have the schools lost sight of their responsibility to teach civics and citizenship? How are current debates about education shaping the future of this democratic institution?Among the contributors are William Galston, Director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland;Clarence Stone, Professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland - College Park and editor of Changing Urban Education and Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988 (University Press of Kansas, 1998).; Susan Moore Johnson, Pforzheimer Professor of Education in Learning and Teaching, Harvard University; Michael Johanek, Executive Director of K-12 Professional Development, College Board; Kathy Simon, co-executive director of the Coalition for Essential Schools and author of Moral Questions in the Classroom (Yale University Press, 2001); and Jennifer Hochschild, Professor of Government and Professor of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University and author of Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (Princeton University Press, 1995).
Nelson Mandela is a courageous figure who fought against the unjust regime of apartheid in his homeland of South Africa. Despite being imprisoned for his beliefs for twenty-seven years, Mandela worked tirelessly as an activist, philanthropist, and eventually as president of South Africa. Through accessible text and historic photographs, this book chronicles Mandela's incredible life and work while providing important background information on apartheid, the African National Congress, and nonviolent resistance. Mandela's struggles and ultimate triumph over adversity will resonate with readers as a heroic example of not giving up when all the odds are stacked against you.
For her time, Mira Lloyd Dock was an exceptional woman: a university-trained botanist, lecturer, women’s club leader, activist in the City Beautiful movement, and public official—the first woman to be appointed to Pennsylvania’s state government. In her twelve years on the Pennsylvania Forest Commission, she allied with the likes of J. T. Rothrock, Gifford Pinchot, and Dietrich Brandis to help bring about a new era in American forestry. She was also an integral force in founding and fostering the Pennsylvania State Forest Academy in Mont Alto, which produced generations of Pennsylvania foresters before becoming Penn State's Mont Alto campus. Though much has been written about her male counterparts, Mira Lloyd Dock and the Progressive Era Conservation Movement is the first book dedicated to Mira Lloyd Dock and her work. Susan Rimby weaves these layers of Dock’s story together with the greater historical context of the era to create a vivid and accessible picture of Progressive Era conservation in the eastern United States and Dock’s important role and legacy in that movement.
Service-Learning and Social Justice provides everything administrators and teachers need to build service-learning programs that prepare students as engaged citizens committed to equity and justice. Cipolle describes practical strategies for classroom teachers along with the theoretical framework so readers can deftly move beyond the book to a meaningful program for their schools. Writing in a conversational style, the author explains service-learning's unlimited potential in terms of student empowerment and academic achievement and as tool in developing a student's a lifetime commitment to service and social justice. This book's contribution to new knowledge and practice is three-fold as it promotes (a) understanding of how individuals become committed to social justice, (b) identification of how one's orientation to service-learning and social justice changes as one develops a more critical consciousness, and (c) practical strategies that teachers can use to support and guide students as they become more critically aware. Practitioners will improve their service-learning programs and have a framework for preparing students for their experiences, as well as ideas for reflection activities. Educators will gain a better understanding of the psychology and sociology of developing a commitment to service for social justice.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., is one of the most famous pieces of civic architecture in the world. But most people are not as familiar with the reserved college student who entered and won the design competition to build it. This accessible biography tells the story of Maya Lin, from her struggle to stick with her vision of the memorial to the wide variety of works she has created since then. The carefully researched text, paired with ample photos, crosses multiple interests—American history, civic activism, art history, and cultural diversity—and offers a timely celebration of the memorial's 35th anniversary as well as providing an important contribution to the current discussion of the role of women and minorities in society.
Legal governance of disaster brings both care and punishment to the upending of daily life of place-based disasters. National states use disasters to reorganize how they govern. The collection in Disaster and Sociolegal Studies, edited by Denver University professor Susan Sterett, considers how law is implicated in disaster. The late modern expectation that states are to care for their population makes it particularly important to point out the limits to care—limits that appear less in the grand rhetoric than in the government reports, case-level decisionmaking, administrative rules, and criminalization that make up governing. These insightful essays feature leading scholars whose perspectives range across disasters around the world. Their findings point to reconsidering what states do in disaster, and how law enables and constrains action. The authors analyze sociological and legal issues surrounding disasters and catastrophic events in their many forms: natural, man-made, environmental, human, local, and global. The project was developed as part of the the Oñati Socio-legal Series supported by the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, and is now presented by Quid Pro Books in the Contemporary Society Series. Digital formats feature quality ebook formatting, active Contents, and linked chapter endnotes and URLs.
Reproducing Athens examines the role of romantic comedy, particularly the plays of Menander, in defending democratic culture and transnational polis culture against various threats during the initial and most fraught period of the Hellenistic Era. Menander's romantic comedies--which focus on ordinary citizens who marry for love--are most often thought of as entertainments devoid of political content. Against the view, Susan Lape argues that Menander's comedies are explicitly political. His nationalistic comedies regularly conclude by performing the laws of democratic citizen marriage, thereby promising the generation of new citizens. His transnational comedies, on the other hand, defend polis life against the impinging Hellenistic kingdoms, either by transforming their representatives into proper citizen-husbands or by rendering them ridiculous, romantic losers who pose no real threat to citizen or city. In elaborating the political work of romantic comedy, this book also demonstrates the importance of gender, kinship, and sexuality to the making of democratic civic ideology. Paradoxically, by championing democratic culture against various Hellenistic outsiders, comedy often resists the internal status and gender boundaries on which democratic culture was based. Comedy's ability to reproduce democratic culture in scandalous fashion exposes the logic of civic inclusion produced by the contradictions in Athens's desperately politicized gender system. Combining careful textual analysis with an understanding of the context in which Menander wrote, Reproducing Athens profoundly changes the way we read his plays and deepens our understanding of Athenian democratic culture.
One of the most talked-about books of last year, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Backlash now explores the collapse of traditional masculinity that has left men feeling betrayed. With Backlash in 1991, Susan Faludi broke new ground when she put her finger directly on the problem bedeviling women, and the light of recognition dawned on millions of her readers: what's making women miserable isn't something they're doing to themselves in the name of independence. It's something our society is doing to women. The book was nothing less than a landmark. Now in Stiffed, the author turns her attention to the masculinity crisis plaguing our culture at the end of the '90s, an era of massive layoffs, "Angry White Male" politics, and Million Man marches. As much as the culture wants to proclaim that men are made miserable--or brutal or violent or irresponsible--by their inner nature and their hormones, Faludi finds that even in the world they supposedly own and run, men are at the mercy of cultural forces that disfigure their lives and destroy their chance at happiness. As traditional masculinity continues to collapse, the once-valued male attributes of craft, loyalty, and social utility are no longer honored, much less rewarded. Faludi's journey through the modern masculine landscape takes her into the lives of individual men whose accounts reveal the heart of the male dilemma. Stiffed brings us into the world of industrial workers, sports fans, combat veterans, evangelical husbands, militiamen, astronauts, and troubled "bad" boys--whose sense that they've lost their skills, jobs, civic roles, wives, teams, and a secure future is only one symptom of a larger and historic betrayal.
In this comprehensive, wide-ranging analysis, Susan Lehrer investigates the origins of protective labor legislation for women, exposing the social forces that contributed to its passage and the often contradictory effects it had on those it was designed to protect. A rapidly expanding female work force is prompting both employers and society to rethink attitudes and policies toward working women. Lehrer provides critical insight into current issues affecting female employees—pay equity, equal rights, maternity—that have their roots in past debates about and present realities affecting women workers. Protective labor laws enacted from 1905 to 1925 had the effect of delimiting the position of working women. Lehrer examines the relationship between women's work in the labor force and domestic labor, and the reasons why the government was interested in regulating this relationship. Focusing on the dual need for a continuing labor force (women as producers of children) and cheap labor (women in low-paying jobs), she demonstrates the way in which social reforms worked to the advantage of capitalism even though they materially aided subordinate classes. The principal groups considered herein are social reform organizations (suffragists and the Women's Trade Union League), organized labor (AFL, ILGWU, printing trades' unions), and employers' associations (National Association of Manufacturers and the National Civic Federation). Considered together, this book provides a broad and detailed picture of the forces involved in the issues of protective labor legislation.
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