Free Download Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative By Patrick O'Donnell
2000 | 208 Pages | ISBN: 0822325586 | PDF | 2 MB
Latent Destinies examines the formation of postmodern sensibilities and their relationship to varieties of paranoia that have been seen as widespread in this century. Despite the fact that the Cold War has ended and the threat of nuclear annihilation has been dramatically lessened by most estimates, the paranoia that has characterized the period has not gone away. Indeed, it is as if-as O'Donnell suggests-this paranoia has been internalized, scattered, and reiterated at a multitude of sites: Oklahoma City, Waco, Ruby Ridge, Bosnia, the White House, the United Nations, and numerous other places.O'Donnell argues that paranoia on the broadly cultural level is essentially a narrative process in which history and postmodern identity are negotiated simultaneously. The result is an erasure of historical temporality-the past and future become the all-consuming, self-aware present. To explain and exemplify this, O'Donnell looks at such books and films as Libra, JFK, The Crying of Lot 49, The Truman Show, Reservoir Dogs, Empire of the Senseless, Oswald's Tale, The Executioner's Song, Underworld, The Killer Inside Me, and Groundhog Day. Organized around the topics of nationalism, gender, criminality, and construction of history, Latent Destinies establishes cultural paranoia as consonant with our contradictory need for multiplicity and certainty, for openness and secrecy, and for mobility and historical stability.Demonstrating how imaginative works of novels and films can be used to understand the postmodern historical condition, this book will interest students and scholars of American literature and cultural studies, postmodern theory, and film studies.

Free Download Globally-Minded Marketing: A Cultural Approach to Building Iconic Brands by Carlos J. Torelli , Maria A. Rodas
English | PDF EPUB (True) | 2024 | 199 Pages | ISBN : 3031508114 | 7.6 MB
This textbook shows students how to conduct strategic marketing with a global mindset, rather than just with an international focus. It illustrates how companies can take advantage of the opportunities and address the challenges associated with the increasing globalization of markets.

Free Download Lene Arnett Jensen, "Bridging Cultural and Developmental Approaches to Psychology: New Syntheses in Theory, Research, and Policy"
English | ISBN: 0195383435 | 2010 | 360 pages | PDF | 6 MB
This cutting-edge book brings together eminent experts who propose ways to bridge cultural and developmental approaches to human psychology. The experts heed the call of cultural psychology to study different peoples around the world and to recognize that culture profoundly impacts how we think, feel, and act. At the same time, they also take seriously the developmental science perspective that humans everywhere share common life stage tasks and ways of learning. Doing what has not previously been done, the experts integrate key insights and findings from cultural and developmental research. The result is a book brimming with new and creative syntheses for theory, research, and policy.

Free Download E. Deidre Pribram, "A Cultural Approach to Emotional Disorders: Psychological and Aesthetic Interpretations "
English | ISBN: 1138018295 | 2016 | 180 pages | PDF | 1027 KB
In her latest contribution to the growing field of emotion studies, Deidre Pribram makes a compelling argument for why culturalist approaches to the study of emotional "disorders" continue to be eschewed, even as the sociocultural and historical study of mental illness flourishes. The author ties this phenomenon to a tension between two fundamentally different approaches to emotion: an individualist approach, which regards emotions as the property of the individual, whether biologically or psychologically, and a culturalist approach, which regards emotions as collective, social processes with distinctive histories and meanings that work to produce particularized subjects. While she links a strong preference for the individualist construct in Western culture to the rise of the psychological and psychiatric disciplines at the turn of the twentieth century, Pribram also engages with a diverse set of case studies tied to psychological and aesthetic discourses on emotions. These range from Van Gogh's status as emotionally disordered to the public, emotional aesthetics of 19th century melodrama to the diagnostic categories of the DSMs and the fear of "globalizing" emotional disorders in the 21st century. This genuinely interdisciplinary approach makes for a text with potential application in a wide range of disciplines within cultural studies, including sociocultural and historical analysis of psychiatry and psychology, gender theory, subject and identity theory, popular culture studies, and history and theory of the arts.

Free Download Andrea S. Wiley, "Re-imagining Milk: Cultural and Biological Perspectives"
English | 2010 | ISBN: 0415806569, 0415806577 | PDF | pages: 138 | 23.6 mb
Written explicitly for undergraduates, Re-imagining Milk demonstrates how a particular commodity can be used to illustrate ethnocentric beliefs about the universal goodness of milk; biological variation in human populations; political and economic processes that inform dietary policies, nutrition education, and current trends in globalization; the utility of a biocultural approach to the study of food; the cultural construction of a commodity that is consumed by many students on a daily basis, or if not, certainly is one that students "know" they "should" consume daily.

Free Download Edward Behrend-Martínez, "A Cultural History of Marriage in the Age of Enlightenment "
English | ISBN: 1350001880 | 2021 | 192 pages | PDF | 7 MB
Could an institution as sacred and traditional as marriage undergo a revolution? Some people living during the so-called Age of Enlightenment thought so. By marrying for that selfish, personal emotion of love rather than to serve religious or family interests, to serve political demands or the demands of the pocketbook, a few but growing number of people revolutionized matrimony around the end of the eighteenth century. Marriage went from being a sacred state, instituted by the Church and involving everyone to - for a few intrepid people - a secular contract, a deal struck between two individuals based entirely on their mutual love and affection.

Free Download Shaun Rein, Bill Roberts (Narrator), "The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends that Will Disrupt the World"
English | ASIN: B08C5N7ZW2 | 2020 | MP3@64 kbps | ~07:21:00 | 208 MB
An exposé on how the rise of China will affect the American way of life, The End of Cheap China is a fun, riveting, must-listen audiobook not only for people doing business in China but for anyone interested in understanding the forces that are changing the world.
Many Americans know China for manufacturing cheap products, thanks largely to the country's vast supply of low-cost workers. But China is changing, and the glut of cheap labor that has made everyday low prices possible is drying up as the Chinese people seek not to make iPhones, but to buy them. Shaun Rein, Founder of the China Market Research Group, puts China's continuing transformation from producer to large-scale consumer - a process that is further along than most economists think - under the microscope, examining eight megatrends that are catalyzing change in China and posing threats to Americans' consumption-driven way of life.

Free Download Stefan Mertens, "Representations of Islam in the News: A Cross-Cultural Analysis "
English | ISBN: 1498509878 | 2016 | 296 pages | EPUB | 2 MB
The representation of Islam is unquestionably a critical test for comparing journalistic reporting across countries and cultures. The Islamic religion has weight in international reporting (defining what we termed "foreign Islam"), but it is also the religion of numerically important minority groups residing in Europe ("national Islam"). The first part of the book is "setting the scene." Three chapters provide insights in dominant patterns of the representation of Islam as detected by various authors and studies involved with Islam representation in Europe. Part two, the core section of the book, contributes to the development of the field of comparative journalism studies by comparing several countries and six media systems in Western Europe: the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium (Flanders), the French-speaking part of Belgium (Wallonia), the Netherlands, France, Germany, and the U.K. Part three of this book presents two reception studies, one qualitative and the other quantitative. Equally important, as the bulk of attention goes to Western Europe, is the extension towards the representation of Muslims and Islam outside Western Europe. Part four of the book is devoted to the representation of Islam in some of the so-called BRICs-countries: Russia, China, and India.

Free Download Christina Simmons, "A Cultural History of Marriage in the Modern Age "
English | ISBN: 1350001902 | 2021 | 232 pages | PDF | 24 MB
Spanning cultures across the 20th century, this volume explores how marriage, especially in the West, was disestablished as the primary institution organizing social life. In the developing world, the economic, social, and legal foundations of traditional marriage are stronger but also weakening. Marriage changed because an industrial wage economy reduced familial patriarchal control of youth and women and spurred demands and possibilities for greater autonomy and choice in love. After the Second World War, when more married women pursued education and employment, and gays and lesbians gained visibility, feminism and gay liberation also challenged patriarchal and restrictive gender roles and helped to reshape marriage. In 1920 most people married for life; in the twenty-first century fewer marry, and serial monogamy prevails. Marriage is more diverse and flexible in form but also more fragile and optional than it once was.

Free Download Hassan Bashir, "Deconstructing Global Citizenship: Political, Cultural, and Ethical Perspectives"
English | ISBN: 149850258X | 2015 | 342 pages | EPUB | 1209 KB
The success of individual nation states today is often measured in terms of their ability to benefit from and contribute to a host of global economic, political, socio-cultural, technological, and educational networks. This increased multifaceted international inter-dependence represents an intuitively contradictory and an immensely complex situation. This scenario requires that national governments, whose primary responsibility is towards their citizenry, must relinquish a degree of control over state borders to constantly developing trans and multinational regimes and institutions. Once state borders become permeable all sorts of issues related to rights earned or accrued due to membership of a national community come into question. Given that neither individuals nor states can eschew the influence of the growing interdependence, this new milieu is often described in terms of shrinking of the world into a global village. This reshaping of the world requires us to broaden our horizons and re-evaluate the manner in which we theorize human personhood within communal boundaries. It also demands us to acknowledge that the relative decline of Euro-American economic and political influence and the rise of Asian and Latin American states at the global level have created spaces in which a de-territorialized and a de-historicized notion of citizenship and state can now be explored. The essays in this volume represent diverse disciplinary, analytical, and methodological approaches to understand what the implications are of being a citizen of both a nation state and the world simultaneously. In sum, Deconstructing Global Citizenship explores the question of whether a synthesis of contradictory national and global tendencies in the term "global citizenship" is even possible, or if we are better served by fundamentally reconsidering our ideas of "citizenship," "community," and "politics."