The Insecure American
The Insecure American

Author: Hugh Gusterson

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2009-11-24

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0520945085

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Americans are feeling insecure. They are retreating to gated communities in record numbers, fearing for their jobs and their 401(k)s, nervous about their health insurance and their debt levels, worrying about terrorist attacks and immigrants. In this innovative volume, editors Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman gather essays from nineteen leading ethnographers to create a unique portrait of an anxious country and to furnish valuable insights into the nation's possible future. With an incisive foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich, the contributors draw on their deep knowledge of different facets of American life to map the impact of the new economy, the "war on terror," the "war on drugs," racial resentments, a fraying safety net, undocumented immigration, a health care system in crisis, and much more. In laying out a range of views on the forces that unsettle us, The Insecure American demonstrates the singular power of an anthropological perspective for grasping the impact of corporate profit on democratic life, charting the links between policy and vulnerability, and envisioning alternatives to life as an insecure American.

The Insecure American
The Insecure American

Author: Hugh Gusterson

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2009-11-24

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0520945085

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Americans are feeling insecure. They are retreating to gated communities in record numbers, fearing for their jobs and their 401(k)s, nervous about their health insurance and their debt levels, worrying about terrorist attacks and immigrants. In this innovative volume, editors Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman gather essays from nineteen leading ethnographers to create a unique portrait of an anxious country and to furnish valuable insights into the nation's possible future. With an incisive foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich, the contributors draw on their deep knowledge of different facets of American life to map the impact of the new economy, the "war on terror," the "war on drugs," racial resentments, a fraying safety net, undocumented immigration, a health care system in crisis, and much more. In laying out a range of views on the forces that unsettle us, The Insecure American demonstrates the singular power of an anthropological perspective for grasping the impact of corporate profit on democratic life, charting the links between policy and vulnerability, and envisioning alternatives to life as an insecure American.

American Insecurity
American Insecurity

Author: Adam Seth Levine

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-05-09

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0691176248

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Why economic insecurity spurs so little collective political action Americans today face no shortage of threats to their financial well-being, such as job and retirement insecurity, health care costs, and spiraling college tuition. While one might expect that these concerns would motivate people to become more politically engaged on the issues, this often doesn't happen, and the resulting inaction carries consequences for political debates and public policy. Moving beyond previously studied barriers to political organization, American Insecurity sheds light on the public's inaction over economic insecurities by showing that the rhetoric surrounding these issues is actually self-undermining. By their nature, the very arguments intended to mobilize individuals—asking them to devote money or time to politics—remind citizens of their economic fears and personal constraints, leading to undermobilization and nonparticipation. Adam Seth Levine explains why the set of people who become politically active on financial insecurity issues is therefore quite narrow. When money is needed, only those who care about the issues but are not personally affected become involved. When time is needed, participation is limited to those not personally affected or those who are personally affected but outside of the labor force with time to spare. The latter explains why it is relatively easy to mobilize retirees on topics that reflect personal financial concerns, such as Social Security and Medicare. In general, however, when political representation requires a large group to make their case, economic insecurity threats are uniquely disadvantaged. Scrutinizing the foundations of political behavior, American Insecurity offers a new perspective on collective participation.

America and the Politics of Insecurity
America and the Politics of Insecurity

Author: Andrew Rojecki

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2016-06-15

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1421419610

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An innovative analysis of polarized politics post-9/11. In America and the Politics of Insecurity, Andrew Rojecki assesses the response of citizens and politicians to a series of crises that confronted the United States during the first decade of the twenty-first century. This period brought Americans face to face with extraordinarily difficult problems that were compounded by their origin in seemingly uncontrollable global forces. Rojecki establishes a theoretical framework for understanding how these new uncertainties contribute to increasingly polarized political discourse. Analyzing three domains of American insecurity—economic, environmental, and existential—Rojecki examines responses to the Great Recession by groups like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street; considers why the growing demand for fossil fuels makes people disregard global warming; and explores the desire for security measures that restrict personal freedom in the age of terrorism. Ultimately, he explains why the right has thus far held an edge over the left in the politics of insecurity. Rojecki concludes that in order to address these broad-scale political problems, we must reframe domestic issues as reactions to undiagnosed global conditions. Bringing the psychology of uncertainty together with contemporary case studies, this book is a sweeping diagnostic for—and antidote to—ineffective political discourse in a globalized world that imports bads as well as goods.

American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability
American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability

Author: Russ Castronovo

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2023-09-26

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0691249857

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An incisive critique that examines the origins of contemporary American ideas about surveillance, terrorism, and white supremacy For more than three centuries, Americans have pursued strategies of security that routinely make them feel vulnerable, unsafe, and insecure. American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability probes this paradox by examining American attachments to the terror of the sublime, the fear of uncertainty, and the anxieties produced by unending racial threat. Challenging conventional approaches that leave questions of security to policy experts, Russ Castronovo turns to literature, philosophy, and political theory to show how security provides an organizing principle for collective life in ways that both enhance freedom and limit it. His incisive critique ranges from frontier violence and white racial anxiety to insurgent Black print culture and other forms of early American terror, uncovering the hidden logic of insecurity that structures modern approaches to national defense, counterterrorism, cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy. Drawing on examples from fiction, journalism, tracts, and pamphlets, Castronovo uncovers the deep affective attachments that Americans have had since the founding to the sources of fear and insecurity that make them feel unsafe. Timely and urgent, American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability sheds critical light on how and why the fundamental political desire for security promotes unease alongside assurance and fixates on risk and danger while clamoring for safety.

Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought
Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought

Author: Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-01-26

Total Pages: 520

ISBN-13: 1137547901

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Through a collection of critical essays, this work explores twelve keywords central in Latin American and Caribbean Studies: indigenismo, Americanism, colonialism, criollismo, race, transculturation, modernity, nation, gender, sexuality, testimonio, and popular culture. The central question motivating this work is how to think—epistemologically and pedagogically—about Latin American and Caribbean Studies as fields that have had different historical and institutional trajectories across the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States.

Unequal America
Unequal America

Author: Anthony R. DiMaggio

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-09

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1000258459

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This book examines Americans and their beliefs about the class divide in the United States. It argues that Americans’ beliefs about class and the economic divide develop through a multistep process. Economic affluence influences the development of worldview, measured in terms of ideology, partisanship, and self-identified class consciousness. Class consciousness in turn affects how people look at political and economic issues. This book is intended for scholars and students at every level who study inequality from a political, economic, or sociological position, along with general readers with a growing interest in and awareness of the effects of inequality on our democracy, especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the resulting economic contraction, and the protests over racial injustice erupting throughout the world in 2020.

Political Antislavery Discourse and American Literature of the 1850s
Political Antislavery Discourse and American Literature of the 1850s

Author: David Grant

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2012-03-22

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1611493846

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Appalled and paralyzed. Abandoned and betrayed. Cowed and bowed. Thus did Frederick Douglass describe the North in the wake of the compromise measures of 1850 that seemed to enshrine concessions to slavery permanently into the American political system. This study discovers in a feature of political anti-slavery discourse—the condemnation of an enfeebled North—the key to a wide variety of literary works of the 1850s. Both the political discourse and the literature set out to expose the self-chosen degradation of compromise as a threat at once to the personal foundation of each individual Northerner and to the survival of the people as an actor in history. The book fills a gap in literary criticism of the period, which has primarily focused on abolitionist discourse when relating anti-slavery thought to the literature of the decade. Though it owed a debt to the abolitionists, political anti-slavery discourse took on the more focused mission of offering a challenge to the people. Would the North submit to the version of self-discipline demanded by the Slave Power’s Northern minions, or would it tap the energy of the nation’s founding until it embodied defiance in its very constitution? Would the North remain a type for the future slave empire it could not prevent, or would it prophesy national freedom in the simple recovery of its own agency? Literary works in both poetry and prose were well suited to making this political challenge bear its full weight on the nation—fleshing out the critique through narrative crises that brought home the personal stake each Northerner held in what George Julian called an exodus from the bondage of compromise. By the end of 1860 this exodus had been completed, and that accomplishment owed much to the massive ten year cultural project to expose the slavery-accommodating definition of nationality as a threat to the republican selfhood of each Northerner. Stowe, Whittier, Willis, and Whitman, among others, devoted their literary works to this project.

Rebellion in America
Rebellion in America

Author: Anthony DiMaggio

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-02-21

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1351247204

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In a time of rising inequality and plutocratic government, citizens’ movements are emerging with growing frequency to offer populist challenges to the declining living standards of masses of Americans, and to protest the conditions through which individuals suffer in poor communities across the country. This book looks at the progression of modern social uprisings in the post-2008 period, including the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Bernie Sanders “Revolution,” Trump’s populism, the anti-Trump revolt, and #MeToo. A key theme is that populism and mass anger at the political-economic status quo take different forms depending on whether the protests are progressive-left or right-wing in orientation. Employing theories of elite politics and pluralism, and using a mixed methods approach, Anthony DiMaggio harnesses his rich experience with movement politics and his engagement with a wide range of media and public opinion data to explain where we are today and how we got here – always with an eye on moving ahead. Aimed at courses on social movements wherever they’re taught, this book also offers general readers insight into contemporary politics and protest.

On Shaky Ground? Income Instability and Economic Insecurity in Europe
On Shaky Ground? Income Instability and Economic Insecurity in Europe

Author: OECD

Publisher: OECD Publishing

Published: 2023-12-12

Total Pages: 94

ISBN-13: 926480532X

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Recognising that individuals’ jobs and circumstances can change multiple times in a year, this report uses novel techniques to identify who is most exposed to income instability in European OECD countries and examines the effects it has on their lives, social mobility, and inequality.