Frozen Justice: Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Failed Transitional Justice Strategy

Jared O. Bell

In May 1993 the United Nations Security Council founded the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Based in the Hague, Netherlands, the ICTY was formed with the objective of prosecuting those who had committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia during the early to mid-90s. During its mandate (1993-2017), the tribunal heard many cases and tried numerous perpetrators, from those who carried out the killings to those who orchestrated and ordered them. In spite of its accomplishments, the ICTY is considered to be highly controversial. It is debated if the ICTY did enough to foster healing and reconciliation in many of the conflict-torn societies. Many scholars argue that the tribunal operated adequately within their mandate and sought to promote justice and reconciliation, however, those who lived through the brutal wars would argue that there has simply been no justice. Importantly, Bosnia and Herzegovina still remains a country divided by issues of post-conflict justice, among other things. In 2010 a government-led strategic plan emerged that was intended to deal with the unfinished “business” of justice and promote reconciliation throughout the country. However, it failed to do this, and there is currently no political will or momentum to revive it. But, was this strategy doomed to failure from the beginning? In the form of a quantitative study, this book examines the possibility of reconciliation being achieved in Bosnia and Herzegovina through the methods fostered by the strategy. Focusing on three major cities, Sarajevo, Mostar, and Banja Luka, Dr. Jared Bell surveyed nearly 500 people in order to shed light on the subject of the national transitional justice strategy and reconciliation from the perspective of the everyday populace.

In the making: Digital fabrication and disability

Ursula Kate Hurley, University of Salford

Digital fabrication combines virtual and material worlds; transforming thoughts into things, and things into data. It fosters complex and varied communities while enabling the pursuit of unique individual outputs. Current literature on digital fabrication concentrates on its technical and economic potential, with little attention yet being paid to the fundamental questions of how the technology might affect our understanding of identity, embodiment, or creative processes. Using case studies and experiences gained from ground-breaking fieldwork, "In the Making" explores these processes and their products from both cultural and aesthetic perspectives; with emphasis on its human interactions, not on technology. Embracing the absence of established methodologies in their emerging area of investigation, this volume offers a series of wide-ranging and original interdisciplinary framings which arise from the materials themselves. That very act of imagining, of selecting and committing to an envisaged but not yet physically present product, offers insights into needs and desires. What is the story of that design? How did it come to be? The basic principles of digital fabrication – the transformation from concept to physical entity – offer intriguing possibilities for aesthetic and cultural readings, particularly from the perspectives of disability. Online, open access maker communities mean that anyone with an internet connection and a desktop 3D printer is able to download and print a wide variety of replicable and customisable objects. What might this mean for disabled people? As digital fabrication technologies enter mainstream society, In the making poses urgently applicable questions about presence, existence, and authenticity and begins to suggest how we might explore them.

A Threatened Rural Idyll? Informal social control, exclusion and the resistance to change in the English countryside

Nathan Aaron Kerrigan, Centre for Advances in Behavioural Science, Coventry University, UK

Issues concerning globalisation, protection of identity and resistance to change at the national level (e.g., Brexit) have been the cause of much public and scholarly debate. With this in mind, this book demonstrates how these national, and indeed global narratives, have impacted on and are influenced by ‘going-ons’ in local contexts. By situating these national narratives within a rural context, Kerrigan expertly explores, through ethnographic research, how similar consequences of informal social control and exclusion are maintained in rural England in order to protect rural identity from social and infrastructural change. Drawing on observation, participant observation, and in-depth interviews, ‘A Threatened Rural Idyll’ illustrates how residents from a small but developing rural town in the South of England perceived changes associated with globalisation, such as population growth, inappropriate building developments, and the influx of service industries. For many of the residents, particularly those of middle-class status and long-standing in the town, these changes were seen as a direct threat to the rural character of the town. The investigation highlights how community dynamics and socio-spatial organisation of daily life work to protect the rural traditions inherent in the social and spatial landscape of the town and to maintain the dominance of its largely white, middle-class character. As a result, Kerrigan contends that the resistance to change has the consequence of constructing a social identity that attempts to reinforce the notions of a rural idyll to the exclusion of processes and people seen as representing different values and ideals.

65+. The Best Years of Your Life

With lessons for people of every age

Peter Bowden, University of Sydney

What is the key to happiness in later life? Since the time of the ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, the human race has questioned and written about what makes us happy. But with the rise of life expectancy and rapidly ageing populations, happiness in later life has become a major topic of debate. Drawing on three sources, the lessons of history, a survey of 150 people aged over 65 and the findings of the present-day positive psychologists, this book analyses and considers what it means to be in happy in later life and how it can be achieved. Bowden reflects on our many and differing views of life after retirement and finds lessons that can also contribute to our happiness in earlier years. Importantly, this book also asks, and answers, what role governments and our social institutions play in bringing about happiness. This valuable and well-informed insight into happiness in later life leaves the reader with little doubt that the post-65 years can indeed be your best.

Conversations on Irving Street: Josiah Royce’s Contribution to Symbolic Interactionism

Edited by Corey Reiner and Frank Tridico

What influence did Josiah Royce’s academic work (1913-1917) have on the development of classical Symbolic Interactionist thought? And which philosophical influences shaped Royce’s social and philosophical thought? This book provides a holistic approach to Royce’s academic work and the social philosophy that shaped Symbolic Interactionist theory. By critically evaluating the works of Royce, this book reveals how his ideas and social philosophy made significant contributions to both Symbolic Interactionist thought and sociological theory. Situating his contributions within a socio-historical time frame, Royce’s social philosophy is compared and contrasted to the major concepts of George Herbert Mead (Mind, Self, and Society) and Herbert Blumer’s core synthesized components of classical symbolic interactionist thought (Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method). Thus, demonstrating that Royce’s later academic works closely resemble not only the basic ideas of Mead but also have a strong correspondence with Blumer’s synthesis of the three basic premises and eight root images that outline the theoretical core of Symbolic Interactionist thought. For those looking to investigate or discover new aspects of symbolic interactionist theory from a classical viewpoint, this book offers a unique insight into an American philosopher whose contribution to the development of Symbolic Interactionism has been largely unnoticed.

New Perspectives on African Childhood

Constructions, Histories, Representations and Understandings

Edited by Charles Quist-Adade, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada et al.

What does it mean to be a child in Africa? In the detached Western media, narratives of penury, wickedness and death have dominated portrayals of African childhood. The hegemonic lens of the West has failed to take into account the intricacies of not only what it means to be an African child in local and culturally specific contexts, but also African childhood in general. Challenging colonial discourses, this edited volume guides the reader through different comprehensions and perspectives of childhood in Africa. Using a blend of theory, empiricism and history, the contributors to this volume offer studies from a range of fields including African literature, Afro-centric psychology and sociology. Importantly, in its eclectic geographical coverage of Africa, this book unashamedly presents the good, the bad and the ugly of African childhood. The resilience, creativity, pains and triumphs of African childhood are skilfully woven together to present the myriad of lived experiences and aspirations of children from across Africa. As an important contribution to African childhood studies, this book has the potential to be used by policymakers to shape, sustain or change socio-cultural, economic and education systems that accommodate African childhood dynamics and experiences at different levels.

Monsters, Monstrosities, and the Monstrous in Culture and Society

Edited by Diego Compagna, University of Applied Sciences Munich, Germany and Stefanie Steinhart, University of Klagenfurt, Austria

Existing research on monsters acknowledges the deep impact monsters have especially on Politics, Gender, Life Sciences, Aesthetics and Philosophy. From Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ to Scott Poole’s ‘Monsters in America’, previous studies offer detailed insights about uncanny and immoral monsters. However, our anthology wants to overcome these restrictions by bringing together multidisciplinary authors with very different approaches to monsters and setting up variety and increasing diversification of thought as ‘guiding patterns’. Existing research hints that monsters are embedded in social and scientific exclusionary relationships but very seldom copes with them in detail. Erving Goffman’s doesn’t explicitly talk about monsters in his book ‘Stigma’, but his study is an exceptional case which shows that monsters are stigmatized by society because of their deviations from norms, but they can form groups with fellow monsters and develop techniques for handling their stigma. Our book is to be understood as a complement and a ‘further development’ of previous studies: The essays of our anthology pay attention to mechanisms of inequality and exclusion concerning specific historical and present monsters, based on their research materials within their specific frameworks, in order to ‘create’ engaging, constructive, critical and diverse approaches to monsters, even utopian visions of a future of societies shared by monsters. Our book proposes the usual view, that humans look in a horrified way at monsters, but adds that monsters can look in a critical and even likewise frightened way at the very societies which stigmatize them.

Help is just a click away: Social Network Sites and Support for Parents of Children with Special Needs

I-Jung Grace Lu, University of Manchester, UK

Feeling alone, searching for help, searching for a sense of belonging and identity: parents of children with special needs face various difficulties in their daily lives. But help and support can be extremely hard to obtain for these parents since they are limited by resources, location and time. However, things started to change when the World Wide Web began to connect people together. We now live in an era when networks of power can be achieved and maintained through virtual connections on the internet, where instant communication can be a form of power. This book hopes to shed light on how the simple act of “clicking” can empower (and, contrariwise, in some cases, disempower) parents to locate help and support. This book also discusses the shifting role of these parents from those seeking help to those who provide help for other parents through the virtual networks they have built on various social networking sites. When examining these issues, this book takes into consideration the Asian concept of Face, in which identity is an image agreed by society. This book will offer insights for parents, researchers and social workers, as well as for anyone else who hopes to understand what is taking place on the ‘net’ and how to be involved in the networking process of providing support for people around you. It allows the readers to see how support nowadays can really be just a click away.

Culture-Led Urban Regeneration in South Korea

Milyung Son, The University of Sheffield

There is a continuing academic and policy interest in the potential for culture-based urban regeneration across the world. Such regeneration is intended to attract investment, re-imagine spaces and create employment, business and urban planning opportunities. This book seeks to examine the use of culture and arts in the urban regeneration sphere of South Korea. Specifically, a one-year-long cultural event (Culture City of East Asia) is used as a case study for exploring wider debates around and understandings of the relationships between culture-led urban regeneration initiatives and the impacts on communities in South Korea. Despite the proliferation of culture-led initiatives aiming to tackle broad social issues, there is a lack of in-depth research into the efficacy of such urban regeneration. Previous researches have asked such questions as: What benefits can cultural elements (e.g. mega-events or signature buildings) bring into a city? What is the role of culture in economic development (e.g. tourism and internal investment)? What is the economic value of cultural goods and services? This is not to say that such questions should be the only concerns in assessing a culture-led urban regeneration strategy. However, the evaluation process of culture-led regeneration frequently fails to ask questions about the impact on human communities: Are cultural resources being used to spread culture, or just to focus on economic development? Are cultural initiatives like mega-events being used to benefit local citizens? How can residents shape a culture-led regeneration strategy? This book is intent on examining residents’ opinions and perspectives about culture-led urban regeneration. It recognizes how culture-led regeneration schemes interact with local communities, focusing on the actual views of local people rather than being coldly theoretical.

No Laughing Matter: Race Joking and Resistance in Brazilian Social Media

Luiz Valério P. Trindade, IPIE – International Panel on the Information Environment, Switzerland

‘No Laughing Matter: Race Joking and Resistance in Brazilian Social Media’ examines the social phenomenon of construction and dissemination of colonial-like racist discourses fostered against upwardly-mobile black women through disparagement humour on social media platforms, adopting a fresh and innovative perspective. In this book, Luiz Valério P. Trindade explores the idea that disparagement humour might not be as exempt of social impact as the jokers might believe, and that, in fact, this kind of humour reveals the hidden facet of deep-seated colonial ideologies still present in Brazilian society despite being hailed as a unique model of a post-racial society. The author argues that these ideologies establish and naturalise superior social positions and symbolic privileges to whites while undermining and delegitimising black women’s upward social mobility. Social media platforms enable the proponents of these beliefs not only to engage in the practice of online hate speech but also to attract a considerable number of like-minded people, creating a long-lasting echo chamber effect in the cyberspace. This way, they manage to amplify the reach and reverberation of their racist discourses in the online environment in ways not commonly seen in Brazilian offline social contexts. This monograph is of great interest and relevance to students, scholars, and researchers across a variety of disciplines, most notably Critical Race Studies, Media Communication Studies and Critical Humour Studies, and also academics in other areas such as Critical Discourse Analysis, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies and Latin American Studies.

The Dynamics of Bride Price in Zimbabwe and the UK Diaspora

Ottis Mubaiwa

The tradition of Bride Price has been at the heart of marriage for many centuries in numerous cultures across the globe. The Dynamics of Bride Price presents new research data from Zimbabwe and the UK highlighting the transnational dimension of the practice, its diversity in different contexts and across generations, and its influence on the structure of gender relationships and inequalities. The transnational element of its investigation into the institution and traditions of African marriage sets this book apart from existing study and offers its readers a nuanced and complex understanding of the perceptions and experiences of Bride Price across diverse contexts. This original contribution will be of great interest to those studying and teaching courses on Gender and Development, as well as researchers and policymakers of cultural practices.

Entangled Bodies: Art, Identity and Intercorporeality

Edited by Tammer El-Sheikh, York University

Organ transplantation is a medical innovation that has offered the potential to enhance and save lives since the first successful procedure in the 1950s. Subsequent developments in scientific knowledge and advances in surgical techniques have allowed for more efficient and refined procurement, minimal surgical complications, and increased success rate. However, procedures such as organ transplantation raise questions about the nature of our relationship with our own bodies; about our embodiment and personal and corporeal identity. This book is comprised of academic essays, personal reflections, and creative writing from researchers and artists involved in an ongoing collaborative art-science project about the experience and culture of heart transplantation. The writings and reflections included discuss embodiment, what it means to inhabit a body and define oneself in relation to it, including struggles with identity formation; set in both clinical and private spaces. The uniqueness of this volume consists in the authors’ aim of connecting the specific experience of heart transplantation to the more widely shared experience of relating to the world and one another through the body’s physical, perceived, and imagined boundaries. Such boundaries and the commonly held beliefs in personal autonomy that are associated with them are a subject of ongoing philosophical and scientific debate. What’s more, the resources of art and culture, including popular culture, literature, historical and contemporary art, are extremely useful in revising our views of what it means for the body’s boundaries to be philosophically ‘leaky.’ Following the discussion initiated by contributor Margrit Shildrick, this book contributes to the field of inquiry of the phenomenon of embodiment and inter-corporeality, the growing body of literature emerging from collaborative art-science research projects, and the wider area of disability studies. This book will be of particular interest to those with personal, scholarly, and creative interests in the experience of transplantation, or illness in general.

Identity in Question: The Study of Tibetan Refugees in the Indian Himalayas

Swati Akshay Sachdeva, Sikkim University, India and Yumnam Surjyajeevan, Sikkim Manipal University, India

"Identity in Question: The Study of Tibetan Refugees in Indian Himalayas" focuses on the socio-economic profile and the question of identity among the diasporic Tibetan communities, particularly those settled in Indian Himalaya. Through incorporating the notion of integration, essential in the formation and formulation of an individual’s identity, this book explores Tibetan refugees’ feelings as to whether a shared consensus between themselves and others exists, or whether a sense of dislocation is experienced. This important and timely work also sheds light on the question of identity crisis among Tibetan youths as well as conflicting gender role identity of the Tibetan women refugees. Delving into such topics is essential for the increased understanding of the various situations encountered by the diasporic communities of Tibet. Therefore, individuals who are seeking to understand the issue by means of academic engagement and through a policy framework process will benefit from this work.

Solutions to knife crime: a path through the red sea?

Sue Roberts, University of Portsmouth

This book addresses one of the UK’s most persistent and serious concerns: knife crime. While research diagnosing the cause of rising knife crime abounds, few studies articulate effective solutions to this complex social problem. Drawing on data from cities across the UK, Sue Roberts suggests concrete forms of collaboration that may just spare future generations from the worst of this terrifying scourge. “Solutions to knife crime: a path through the red sea?” will fascinate law-enforcers, policy-makers, criminologists and other specialists both within and outside academia. It will also appeal to anyone who’s been affected, or is simply concerned, by this blight on British society.

The Recovery Handbook: Understanding Addictions and Evidenced-Based Treatment Practices

Nicholas D. Young, American International College et al.

Addiction is rapidly becoming one of the most significant challenges to mental health today. According to the latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH, 2018), 19.7 million Americans, aged 12 and older, battled a substance disorder alone in 2017. Additionally, 8.5 million of those individuals also suffered from a mental health disorder, with millions more suffering from a range of other addictive disorders and associated behaviors that interfere with physical, social and emotional health. These alarming statistics highlight the crucial need for mental health providers to be kept up to date with the latest research on the full range of addiction treatment and recovery. ‘The Recovery Handbook: Understanding Addictions and Evidenced-Based Treatment Practices’ provides a comprehensive examination of the various forms of addiction, its physical and mental complexities, and, unlike other sources on addiction, effective evidence-based interventions that promote a healthy recovery. Particular attention is given to the nature of addiction, including environmental, genetic, and developmental factors; with authors examining the short- and long-term effects of a variety of addictions such as drug, alcohol, gambling, food, sex, shopping, work, and video gaming to name a few. This book will serve as a valuable resource for counselors, psychologists, professors, graduate students in the helping professions, as well as families of addicts, co-workers, and those suffering from addiction themselves.

Complex Society: In the Middle of a Middle World

Bojan Radej, Slovenian Evaluation Society, Slovenia and Mojca Golobič, University of Ljubljana; Slovenian Evaluation Society, Slovenia

The decreasing capacity to govern complex social processes results in negative trends that breach system thresholds in all main social domains with extreme economic stratification of society. Independent studies steadily report that a strong majority of the world’s population, between 60% and 80%, already feels excluded and no longer represented by their governments. The two prevailing concepts of complexity seem to overlook the central importance of mesoscopic complexity. Socially complex conditions call for a new kind of social thought specifically developed for a blinded generation that must be as different from modern and postmodern thoughts, as they were different from their middle-age precedents. 'Complex Society: In the Middle of a Middle World', addresses the concerns of the excluded majority by explaining how present complex social conditions work in favor of generational aspirations to achieve a more positive future. In the geometry of thinking, a complex matter is not comprehensible objectively, but only by evaluating overlaps between complexity domains on their periphery, which is in the area of their inconsistencies. The book first develops an evaluative methodology for studying complex social matters and then tests it with three case studies that reflect some of the most pressing problems in contemporary societies: aggregation problem, integration problem, and organization problem. The obtained findings give grounds for the depiction of an outline for the ‘anti-postmodern’ ordering of contemporary societies. This ground-breaking text will be of particular interest for graduate and post-graduate level of social sciences, evaluators of project, program and policy impact evaluation, evaluators of philosophy of science, as well as methodologists of social research and public governance.

Work Appropriation and Social Inequality

Edited by Antonia Kupfer, Technical University Dresden, Germany

This volume is a collection of subject-oriented studies on paid work. Each chapter refers to the social structures that form conditions for peoples’ working contexts and interprets workers’ and employees’ narrations on work. Work appropriation—a process of formation of subjectivity, in which workers and employees relate to the social status of their occupations and the use-value of their work in actively dealing with the work’s content and conditions—serves as a comprehensive concept for each varying subject-oriented approach in the volume. ‘Work Appropriation and Social Inequality’ focuses on social inequality, understood as the distribution of life chances that privilege some and discriminate others and reveals the unequal conditions for, and outcomes of, work appropriation. By analyzing work appropriation, it uses a broader concept than that of ‘meaning of work’ or ‘meaningful work’ as it includes the practice and processes of working. The volume’s subject-oriented approach to work differs from the stream ‘subjectivation’ in going beyond individuals’ desires for self-realization in work and to companies’ requirements of accessing emotional and personal dimensions of their workforce. The volume contains three parts: the first lays out basic approaches to work appropriation and social inequality, the second analyses current threats to work appropriation in the UK and Germany, and the third consists of a philosophical outlook on work in the Anthropocene. The book’s impact lies in pushing forward the debate on how work appropriations are linked to unequal social structures. It will therefore appeal to social scientists interested in social inequality, sociology of work and organization, as well as students and teachers at the undergraduate and graduate level in the areas of social sciences.

Conversations With Food

Edited by Dorothy Chansky, Texas Tech University and Sarah W. Tracy, University of Oklahoma

"Conversations With Food" offers readers an array of essays revealing the power of food (and its absence) to transform relationships between the human and non-human realms; to define national, colonial, and postcolonial cultures; to help instantiate race, gender, and class relations; and to serve as the basis for policymaking. Food functions in these contexts as items in religious or secular law, as objects with which to bargain or over which to fight, as literary trope, and as a way to improve or harm health—individual or collective. The anthology ranges from Ancient Greece to the posthuman fairy underworld; from the codifying of French culinary heritage to the strategic marketing of 100-calorie snacks; from the European famine after the Second World War to the lush and exotic cuisines of culinary tourism today. “Conversations With Food” will engage anyone interested in discovering the disciplinary breadth and depth of food studies. The anthology is ideally suited for introductory and advanced courses in food studies, as it includes essays in a range of humanities and social science disciplines, and each author draws cross-disciplinary linkages between their own work and other essays in the volume. This thematic and conceptual intercalation, when read with the editors’ introduction, makes the collection an exceptionally strong representation of the field of food studies.

Searching for a Self: Identity in Popular Culture, Media and Society

Arthur Asa Berger, San Francisco State University

How do people turn out the way they do? How do they “arrive” at themselves and attain an identity? How are our identities affected by our birth order, our hair color, how tall or short we are, our intelligence, our occupation, our race, our religion, our nationality, the socio-economic level of our parents (or our being raised in a single-parent family), where we are born and where we grow up, the language we learn, the way we use language, our fashion tastes, our gender, our education, our psychological makeup, chance experiences we have, the people we marry (if we marry), and countless other factors? There are numerous matters to consider when dealing with identity, which, as Nigel Denis, the author of 'Cards of Identity', reminds us, “is the answer to everything.” 'Searching for a Self' takes a deep dive into the question of identity formation from various perspectives; it is written in a reader-friendly accessible style and makes use of insightful quotations from seminal thinkers who have dealt with the topic. Split into two parts, the first “Theories of Identity,” offers evaluations of identity from semioticians, psychologists, sociologists and Marxists while the second, “Applications,” offers case studies on topics such as Russian identity, Donald Trump’s identity, fashion and identity, LGBTQIA+ identity, Orthodox Jewish identity, elite university education and identity, tattoos and identity, travel and identity, and politics and identity. Covering a wide array of subject areas, this book will be a valuable resource for undergraduate students taking courses in identity, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, and other related fields.

Disability and the Academic Job Market

Edited by Chris McGunnigle, Seton Hall University

"Disability and the Academic Job Market" examines ableist structures in academia that inherently create obstacles to full-time employment for people with a disability. Based on historical and contemporary scholarship, it has been shown how disclosure of a disability can have profound repercussions for a scholar with a disability. Scholars with a disability are often inhibited from applying to or being promoted in academia because of direct discrimination, negative perception towards people with a disability, inaccessible physical and performance conditions, and social models of disability that characterize disability as unproductive, abnormal, and risky. While scholarship has addressed ableism in academia, it has not strongly focused on the specific difficulties and barriers that a person with a disability faces when applying for a full-time academic position. This book seeks to provide a resource that brings to light ableist conditions in the academic hiring process through the lived experiences of scholars with a disability, with hope to implement change in these situations. This collection presents a combination of personal narrative and scholarship from academics with a disability who have navigated the academic job market, with additional contributions from non-disabled allies who have advocated for change in academic structures. Our collection begins by expressing the concerned experiences of students entering the academic job market, followed by scholars who have more fully lived through the obstacles of the academic market in both contingent and tenure track positions. A vital focus of this collection is on intersectionality as chapters draw from interactions between disability and race, gender, and sexuality across international contexts. Important topics discussed throughout the collection include systemic ableism, disclosure, the job interview, academic workaholism, and lack of accommodations.