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There are people dedicated to improving the way we eat, and people dedicated to improving the way we give birth. A Bun in the Oven is the first comparison of these two social movements. In this book Barbara Katz Rothman traces the food and the birth movements through three major phases over the course of the 20th century in the United States: from the early-20th-century era of scientific management; through to the consumerism of post–World War II with its “turn to the French” in making things gracious; to the late-20th-century counterculture midwives and countercuisine cooks. Katz Rothman then looks at today’s world of risk management in both arenas. The book explores the tension throughout all of these eras between the industrial demands of mass management and profit making, and the social movements—composed largely of women coming together from very different feminist sensibilities—that are working to expose the harmful consequences of industrialization, and make birth and food both meaningful and healthy. In both movements, issues of the natural, the authentic, and the importance of “meaningful” and “personal” experiences get balanced against discussions of what is sensible, convenient, and safe, operating in a context of commercial and corporate interests that place profit and efficiency above individual experiences and outcomes. A Bun in the Oven brings new insight into the relationship between our most intimate, embodied personal experiences, the industries that control them, and the social movements that resist the industrialization of life and seek to birth change.

This book considers whether there has been a religious resurgence of global dimensions in recent decades. It represents an interdisciplinary intervention in the continuing and ever-transforming discussion of the post-secular and the role of religion and secularism in today's world. Foregrounding the most urgent and compelling questions raised by the place of religion in the social sciences, past and present, the book restores religion to a more central place in social scientific thinking about the world, helping to move scholarship “beyond unbelief.”

While the decline of communism in the late twentieth century brought democracy, political freedom, and better economic prospects for many people, it also produced massive social dislocation and engendered social problems that were far less pronounced under the old regimes. The fall of state socialism led to enormously complex political, economic, social, and cultural transformations, and while political liberalization was a lofty goal, it was neither uniform in its effects nor unqualified in its benefits. This book foregrounds the diversity of the historical experiences and current realities of people in the postcommunist region in examining how they are responding to these monumental changes at home. The chapters lay out a bold new approach to research on the postcommunist region, and to democratization studies more broadly, that focuses on the social and cultural microprocesses behind political and economic transformation. Case studies are included to demonstrate the limitations of current democratization paradigms and suggest ways of building categories of research that more closely capture the role of vernacular knowledge in demanding, creating, and adapting to institutional change. A novel approach to understanding one of the greatest political and social transformations in recent history, the book explores not just how citizens respond to political and economic restructuring engineered at the top but also how people enact their own visions of life, politics, and justice by responding to daily challenges.

This book brings together a select group of scholars to investigate the societal ramifications of the present-day concern with security in diverse contexts and geographies. The book claims that discourses and practices of security actually breed insecurity, rather than merely being responses to the latter. By relating the binary of security/insecurity to the binary of neoliberalism/neoconservatism, the book reveals the tensions inherent in the proliferation of individualism and the concurrent deployment of techniques of societal regulation around the globe. Chapters explore the phenomena of indistinction, reversal of terms, ambiguity, and confusion in security discourses. Scholars of diverse backgrounds interpret the paradoxical simultaneity of the suspension and enforcement of the law through a variety of theoretical and ethnographic approaches, and explore the formation and transformation of forms of belonging and exclusion. Ultimately, the book aims to understand one crucial question: whether securitized neoliberalism effectively spells the end of political liberalism as we know it today.

In this book a group of leading Russian intellectuals and social scientists join with top researchers from around the world to examine the social, political, and economic transformation in Russia. The book makes clear that neither politics nor economics alone holds the key to Russia's future, presenting critical perspectives on challenges facing Russia, both in its domestic policies and in its international relations. It also explores how global order—or disorder—may develop over the coming decades.

Recently, a wall was built in eastern Germany. Made of steel and cement blocks, topped with razor barbed wire, and reinforced with video monitors and movement sensors, this wall was not put up to protect a prison or a military base, but rather to guard a three-day meeting of the finance ministers of the Group of Eight (G8). The wall manifested a level of security that is increasingly commonplace at meetings regarding the global economy. The authors of this book have directly observed and participated in more than twenty mass actions against globalization in North America and Europe, beginning with the watershed 1999 WTO meetings in Seattle and including the 2007 G8 protests in Heiligendamm. This is the first book to conceptualize the social control of dissent in the era of alterglobalization. Based on direct observation of more than twenty global summits, the book demonstrates that social control is not only global, but also preemptive, and that it relegates dissent to the realm of criminality. The charge is insurrection, but the accused have no weapons. The book documents how social control forecloses the spaces through which social movements nurture the development of dissent and effect disruptive challenges.