Luigi Esposito - Böcker

How has Barack Obama done in his first term as a "progressive president," especially in relation to his campaign assertions? This book analyzes the performance of Obama and his administration in promoting progressive causes in a wide range of policy areas, including the economy, education, immigration, healthcare reform, criminal justice, and foreign affairs.Grading the 44th President: A Report Card on Barack Obama's First Term as a Progressive Leader is written in clear language that is free of jargon and from a leftist perspective, offering a comprehensive analysis and critique of Obama's performance as a progressive president during his first term. The authors provide in-depth analyses with respect to Obama's handling of specific issues, including the economy, education, healthcare, criminal justice policy, the environment, immigration, Iraq and Afghanistan, race relations, gender issues, and gay/lesbian issues, covering topics in detail that general biographies of Obama and examinations of his political career miss. This book presents clear, accessible information for general readers, and contains in-depth discussion of topics useful to high school, college, and university students of sociology, government, political science, philosophy, and history.

Why have mass public shootings in the U.S. become more frequent and lethal over the last two decades? This question cannot be answered by looking exclusively at the biographies, personalities, or mental health problems of individual shooters. Instead, to paraphrase C. Wright Mills, human behavior is never self-contained and must be understood at the intersection between the personal and social realms. Employing a sociological perspective and drawing from various data sources and case studies, this book offers a theoretical analysis of mass public shootings and the structural factors that drive these incidents. Our analysis highlights how neoliberalism—not simply as a set of pro-market policies but as an ideology and governing rationality—is linked to the mass shooting phenomenon in the United States.Since the late 20th century, neoliberalism has not only heightened economic precarity and feelings of despair, but also encouraged ruthlessness, ideological extremism, and the prioritization of personal aims over others’ well-being. These tendencies have been amplified by digital technologies that encourage social isolation and egoistical forms of agency, all of which weaken social bonds, erode empathy, and drive some individuals to kill as an effort to seek respect and recognition—what the classical Greeks called “thymos”—in a society that strips them of their dignity and makes them feel devalued and irrelevant.This book will be an appropriate and useful supplementary text for various types of courses within sociology, criminology, and other social sciences that look at the social dimension of violence. In addition, the book should be of interest to a wider, non-academic audience that seeks a data-driven, sociological analysis of this phenomenon that is written in clear, accessible language.

Why have mass public shootings in the U.S. become more frequent and lethal over the last two decades? This question cannot be answered by looking exclusively at the biographies, personalities, or mental health problems of individual shooters. Instead, to paraphrase C. Wright Mills, human behavior is never self-contained and must be understood at the intersection between the personal and social realms. Employing a sociological perspective and drawing from various data sources and case studies, this book offers a theoretical analysis of mass public shootings and the structural factors that drive these incidents. Our analysis highlights how neoliberalism—not simply as a set of pro-market policies but as an ideology and governing rationality—is linked to the mass shooting phenomenon in the United States.Since the late 20th century, neoliberalism has not only heightened economic precarity and feelings of despair, but also encouraged ruthlessness, ideological extremism, and the prioritization of personal aims over others’ well-being. These tendencies have been amplified by digital technologies that encourage social isolation and egoistical forms of agency, all of which weaken social bonds, erode empathy, and drive some individuals to kill as an effort to seek respect and recognition—what the classical Greeks called “thymos”—in a society that strips them of their dignity and makes them feel devalued and irrelevant.This book will be an appropriate and useful supplementary text for various types of courses within sociology, criminology, and other social sciences that look at the social dimension of violence. In addition, the book should be of interest to a wider, non-academic audience that seeks a data-driven, sociological analysis of this phenomenon that is written in clear, accessible language.

The human body has recently emerged as a central concept of social theory. Social scientists, philosophers, and scholars in other disciplines now routinely argue that abstract concepts such as class and gender should be understood by examining how they are expressed in the body's everyday practices. Such an approach has humanized social theory by emphasizing the role that concretely situated human beings play in acting out or redefining social norms. How will this emphasis on human embodiment transform methods of social inquiry? The volume takes up this question by examining how the recognition of human embodiment entails reworking standard models of social research. Individual chapters focus on such topics as communication theory, ethics, policy science, globalization and cultural changes, gerontology, and pedagogical practice.