Flood Control

Author(s):  
Lon Kurashige

This chapter addresses the social forces in the U.S. that came together after World War I to pave the way for Japanese exclusion in 1924. Congress held hearings across the West Coast about Japanese immigration in 1920, which revealed the intensity of the issue as hundreds of persons testified. Many favored Japanese exclusion, but a surprising number opposed it. As it had done earlier with both the Chinese and the Japanese, California lead the way towards exclusion, in this case through approving a ballot measure the strengthened the state’s alien land law. Votes in this measure revealed splits about Japanese exclusion within the state and within various neighborhoods within Los Angeles, the state’s largest city. A cadre of political leaders and private citizens in California, including V.S. McClatchy, James D. Phelan, and Senator Hiram Johnson, led the anti-Japanese campaign. In the end, the federal government’s approval of Japanese exclusion was not a sure thing, and throughout the process its backers were never certain of their success.

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nompumelelo Bernadette Zondi

Although viewed (and dismissed) by many as primarily a tool for communication, language (and literature) cannot be understood only in relation to what it communicates. A study of how it is shaped uncovers the social forces that provide its broad and complex template in the acts of reading and writing. This article focuses on the utility and meaning of African languages and literatures in higher education, with Benedict Wallet Vilakazi’s (1906–1947) poetry at the centre. It argues how, by resurrecting “black archives”, in this article epitomised by revisiting the work of one iconic writer and scholar, Vilakazi, we could give further impetus to the prospect of intellectual efforts in African languages. In this context, the article upholds the value and meaning of this scholar while offering perspectives on the saliency of his work for inter alia the meanings and location of African languages and literatures with regard to epistemic diversity, the “transformation” of curricula, tradition versus modernity, gender, the meaning of identity, and the broader humanist project. In essence, therefore, the article suggests that in an academic context, African languages and literatures require a serious engagement with the “implied reader”, “the native subject” and consequently necessitates greater troubling, unsettling in the way we teach, the way we write, and the way we read. It suggests that acts of rereading (albeit preliminary) are an important intervention in the project of the intellectualisation of our discipline.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 88-93
Author(s):  
Catherine Gudis

Based in Los Angeles’s Skid Row and comprised largely of the area’s formerly homeless, the Los Angeles Poverty Department creates performances from the writings, stories, and experiences of its participants. The mission of LAPD (yes, their acronym is purposeful) is to illuminate the social forces that shape the lives and communities of people living in poverty. This article describes, and includes excerpts from, State of Incarceration, an LAPD production that taps the inside knowledge of core company members, including Kevin Michael Key, Riccarlo Porter, Anthony Taylor, and Ronnie Walker, and roomfuls of other participants, some from parolee reentry programs in the area.


2013 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Andrés Bartolomé Leal

In contrast with many of the films said to belong to the ‘hood films’ cycle of the nineties, John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood (1991) sober and realistically portrays the hardships of blacks’ existence in the Los Angeles’ neighbourhood of South Central. For the film, as this paper aims to demonstrate, the inability of the ‘hood residents to escape the geographical and social constrains of their environment is a direct outcome of the longdistance control that the mainly white dominant elites exert over their existence. Through the confronting lifestyles that the characters embody, the film exemplifies the different possible attitudes towards the place/race-biased identities that the life in the ‘hood motivates. In order to contest the social determinism that seems to dominate the life of the residents of the ‘hood, Tre’s character stands out as epitome of the film’s ideology in favour of education and respect, and not violence, as the way to survive this socialpolitical scheme.


Author(s):  
John M. Cooper

This chapter discusses the Aristotelian way of life. For Aristotle, philosophy is not a way of life, as it was for Socrates. It is two distinct ones. Aristotle's contemplatives are, of course, complete philosophers. They lead lives of practical virtue in just the way other private citizens who possess those virtues in full measure do. The contemplative is both a philosopher of human affairs and a theoretical philosopher. Contemplatives live their philosophy in a double way. Still, the life they lead is correctly called a contemplative one, not one of practical virtue. It is one of the two ways that for Aristotle philosophy is a way of life. But for those “philosophers of human affairs”—virtuous political leaders, fully virtuous ordinary citizens—who are not also accomplished theoretical philosophers, philosophy is nonetheless just as much their way of life. The thinking and analysis and systematic argument, and systematically organized understanding, that belong to philosophy as a whole, both practical and theoretical, as its defining and distinctive characteristic, are engaged and expressed in all the thoughts that give rise to and direct all the choices, actions, and activities constituting the whole of their lives.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.


This book examines the way schizophrenia is shaped by its social context: how life is lived with this madness in different settings, and what it is about those settings that alters the course of the illness, its outcome, and even the structure of its symptoms. Until recently, schizophrenia was perhaps our best example—our poster child—for the “bio-bio-bio” model of psychiatric illness: genetic cause, brain alteration, pharmacologic treatment. We now have direct epidemiological evidence that people are more likely to fall ill with schizophrenia in some social settings than in others, and more likely to recover in some social settings than in others. Something about the social world gets under the skin. This book presents twelve case studies written by psychiatric anthropologists that help to illustrate some of the variability in the social experience of schizophrenia and that illustrate the main hypotheses about the different experience of schizophrenia in the west and outside the west--and in particular, why schizophrenia seems to have a more benign course and outcome in India. We argue that above all it is the experience of “social defeat” that increases the risk and burden of schizophrenia, and that opportunities for social defeat are more abundant in the modern west. There is a new role for anthropology in the science of schizophrenia. Psychiatric science has learned—epidemiologically, empirically, quantitatively—that our social world makes a difference. But the highly structured, specific-variable analytic methods of standard psychiatric science cannot tell us what it is about culture that has that impact. The careful observation enabled by rich ethnography allows us to see in more detail what kinds of social and cultural features may make a difference to a life lived with schizophrenia. And if we understand culture’s impact more deeply, we believe that we may improve the way we reach out to help those who struggle with our most troubling madness.


2019 ◽  
Vol 101 (4) ◽  
pp. 357-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saty Satya-Murti ◽  
Jennifer Gutierrez

The Los Angeles Plaza Community Center (PCC), an early twentieth-century Los Angeles community center and clinic, published El Mexicano, a quarterly newsletter, from 1913 to 1925. The newsletter’s reports reveal how the PCC combined walk-in medical visits with broader efforts to address the overall wellness of its attendees. Available records, some with occasional clinical details, reveal the general spectrum of illnesses treated over a twelve-year span. Placed in today’s context, the medical care given at this center was simple and minimal. The social support it provided, however, was multifaceted. The center’s caring extended beyond providing medical attention to helping with education, nutrition, employment, transportation, and moral support. Thus, the social determinants of health (SDH), a prominent concern of present-day public health, was a concept already realized and practiced by these early twentieth-century Los Angeles Plaza community leaders. Such practices, although not yet nominally identified as SDH, had their beginnings in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social activism movement aiming to mitigate the social ills and inequities of emerging industrial nations. The PCC was one of the pioneers in this effort. Its concerns and successes in this area were sophisticated enough to be comparable to our current intentions and aspirations.


Author(s):  
Volodymyr Reznik

The article discusses the conceptual foundations of the development of the general sociological theory of J.G.Turner. These foundations are metatheoretical ideas, basic concepts and an analytical scheme. Turner began to develop a general sociological theory with a synthesis of metatheoretical ideas of social forces and social selection. He formulated a synthetic metatheoretical statement: social forces cause selection pressures on individuals and force them to change the patterns of their social organization and create new types of sociocultural formations to survive under these pressures. Turner systematized the basic concepts of his theorizing with the allocation of micro-, meso- and macro-levels of social reality. On this basis, he substantiated a simple conceptual scheme of social dynamics. According to this scheme, the forces of macrosocial dynamics of the population, production, distribution, regulation and reproduction cause social evolution. These forces force individual and corporate actors to structurally adapt their communities in altered circumstances. Such adaptation helps to overcome or avoid the disintegration consequences of these forces. The initial stage of Turner's general theorizing is a kind of audit, modification, modernization and systematization of the conceptual apparatus of sociology. The initial results obtained became the basis for the development of his conception of the dynamics of functional selection in the social world.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-46
Author(s):  
Stanislava Varadinova

The attention sustainability and its impact of social status in the class are current issues concerning the field of education are the reasons for delay in assimilating the learning material and early school dropout. Behind both of those problems stand psychological causes such as low attention sustainability, poor communication skills and lack of positive environment. The presented article aims to prove that sustainability of attention directly influences the social status of students in the class, and hence their overall development and the way they feel in the group. Making efforts to increase students’ attention sustainability could lead to an increase in the social status of the student and hence the creation of a favorable and positive environment for the overall development of the individual.


Author(s):  
Alexander M. Sharipov

On the activity of the International Ilyin Committee (IIC) on preparation and celebration of 130-th Anniversary of I.A.Ilyin, the great scientist and patriot of Russia.


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