Lichtenberg argues for a practical and moral approach to reducing poverty, exploring concepts such as altruism, responding to criticisms of the effectiveness of aid, and asking whether and how the world's richer populations should assist. This book is for those interested in ethics, political theory, public policy and development studies.
What does it mean to live in the modern world? How different is that world from those that preceded it, and when did we become modern? In Distant Strangers, James Vernon argues that the world was made modern not by revolution, industrialization, or the Enlightenment. Instead, he shows how in Britain, a place long held to be the crucible of modernity, a new and distinctly modern social condition emerged by the middle of the nineteenth century. Rapid and sustained population growth, combined with increasing mobility of people over greater distances and concentrations of people in cities, created a society of strangers. Vernon explores how individuals in modern societies adapted to live among strangers by forging more abstract and anonymous economic, social, and political relations, as well as by reanimating the local and the personal.
This book provides a philosophical critique of legal relations between the EU and 'distant strangers' neither located within, nor citizens of, its Member States. Starting with the EU's commitment in Articles 3(5) and 21 TEU to advance democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in 'all its relations with the wider world', Ganesh examines in detail the salient EU and international legal materials and thereafter critiques them in the light of a theory of just global legal relations derived from Kant's philosophy of right. In so doing, Ganesh departs from comparable Kantian scholarship on the EU by centering the discussion not around the essay Toward Perpetual Peace, but around the Doctrine of Right, Kant's final and comprehensive statement of his general theory of law. The book thus sheds light on areas of EU law (EU external relations law, standing to bring judicial review), public international law (jurisdiction, global public goods) and human rights (human rights jurisdiction), and also critiques the widespread identification of the EU as a Kantian federation of peace. The thesis on which this book was based was awarded the 2020 René Cassin Thesis Prize (English section).
In an extraordinary blend of narrative history, personal recollection, & oral testimony, the author presents a sweeping history of Asian Americans. He writes of the Chinese who laid tracks for the transcontinental railroad, of plantation laborers in the canefields of Hawaii, of "picture brides" marrying strangers in the hope of becoming part of the American dream. He tells stories of Japanese Americans behind the barbed wire of U.S. internment camps during World War II, Hmong refugees tragically unable to adjust to Wisconsin's alien climate & culture, & Asian American students stigmatized by the stereotype of the "model minority." This is a powerful & moving work that will resonate for all Americans, who together make up a nation of immigrants from other shores.
What does it mean to devote yourself wholly to helping others? In Strangers Drowning, Larissa MacFarquhar seeks out people living lives of extreme ethical commitment and tells their deeply intimate stories; their stubborn integrity and their compromises; their bravery and their recklessness; their joys and defeats and wrenching dilemmas. A couple adopts two children in distress. But then they think: If they can change two lives, why not four? Or ten? They adopt twenty. But how do they weigh the needs of unknown children in distress against the needs of the children they already have? Another couple founds a leprosy colony in the wilderness in India, living in huts with no walls, knowing that their two small children may contract leprosy or be eaten by panthers. The children survive. But what if they hadn't? How would their parents' risk have been judged? A woman believes that if she spends money on herself, rather than donate it to buy life-saving medicine, then she's responsible for the deaths that result. She lives on a fraction of her income, but wonders: when is compromise self-indulgence and when is it essential? We honor such generosity and high ideals; but when we call people do-gooders there is skepticism in it, even hostility. Why do moral people make us uneasy? Between her stories, MacFarquhar threads a lively history of the literature, philosophy, social science, and self-help that have contributed to a deep suspicion of do-gooders in Western culture. Through its sympathetic and beautifully vivid storytelling, Strangers Drowning confronts us with fundamental questions about what it means to be human. In a world of strangers drowning in need, how much should we help, and how much can we help? Is it right to care for strangers even at the expense of those we are closest to? Moving and provocative, Strangers Drowning challenges us to think about what we value most, and why.
The planets Earth and Vulcan experience a mysterious first contact in this fascinating Star Trek novel featuring the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Years before the formal first contact between Earth and another planet’s inhabitants, a Vulcan space vessel crash landed in the South Pacific, forcing humanity to decide whether to offer the hand of friendship, or the fist of war. Complicating matters is a second visitation: a group of people from two hundred years in the future, who serve on a starship called Enterprise. Discover the astonishing truth about this heretofore unknown first contact and the nightmares that plague Admiral James T. Kirk. Dreams of his dead comrades, of his earliest days aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise, and of a forgotten past in which he somehow changed the course of history and destroyed the Federation before it began.
Twenty-first-century media and political discourse sometimes makes "strangers" - refugees, immigrants, minorities - the scapegoats for social and economic disorder. In this heated climate, theatre has the potential to promote greater compassion and empathy for outsiders. A study of cultural difference in contemporary Canadian theatre, Staging Strangers considers how theatre facilitates an understanding of distant places and issues. Theatre in Canada, and especially in Toronto, has long been a place for communities to celebrate their traditions, but it is now emerging as a forum for staging stories that stretch beyond the local and the national. Combining archival research and performance analysis, Barry Freeman analyzes the possibilities and hazards of representing strangers, and the many ways the stranger on stage may be fetishized or domesticated, marked for assimilation, or turned into an object of fear. A fresh look at ways to cultivate ethical responsibility for global issues, Staging Strangers imagines a role for theatre in creating a more tolerant, caring, and cooperative world.
A woman is trying to contact Kasama Tsuneo at a crisis point in his life. But she won't reveal her identity. Kasama is an immigration officer in Tokyo, struggling to live a 'normal' life after an event that happened eight years previously, when he lived in the USA. His arranged marriage is looming, and he's seized by a strange emotional fit. And then the disembodied voice begins. All Tsuneo can do is desperately chase this woman, and the mystery behind what happened eight years earlier over the sea.
Every once in a while, we have to reconsider the perennial questions concerning human nature: What are the special human behaviours, social practices, and psychological structures that make us particularly human? The field of evolution, psychology and cognitive science is the most expanding, inter-disciplinary area of this field for the time being, uniting different sciences under the same evolutionary paradigm and keeping them occupied by the same eternal questions stated above. Relevant data and theoretical considerations are piling up, but an overview is needed. To facilitate this a large inter-disciplinary conference entitled “Human Mind—Human Kind” was held at Aarhus University, Denmark. The studies fall into three well defined sections: 1) Evolution and Cognition—Comparative and Developmental Perspectives, 2) Human Sociality, Morality and Religiosity, 3) Human Sexuality and Mating Strategies. Specifying the differences between our own species and the rest of the animal world always provokes debate. But these demarcations simply have to be drawn once and again. They focus attention and stimulate research, exactly because they provoke and challenge other researchers to take up the glove and prove us wrong.
Winner of the 2023 International Political Sociology Book Award The seamy underside of humanitarianism What does it mean when humanitarianism is the response to death, injury and suffering at the border? This book interrogates the politics of humanitarian responses to border violence and unequal mobility, arguing that such responses mask underlying injustices, depoliticise violent borders and bolster liberal and paternalist approaches to suffering. Focusing on the diversity of actors involved in humanitarian assistance alongside the times and spaces of action, the book draws a direct line between privileges of movement and global inequalities of race, class, gender and disability rooted in colonial histories and white supremacy and humanitarian efforts that save lives while entrenching such inequalities. Based on eight years of research with border police, European Union officials, professional humanitarians, and grassroots activists in Europe’s borderlands, including Italy and Greece, the book argues that this kind of saving lives builds, expands and deepens already restrictive borders and exclusive and exceptional identities through what the book calls humanitarian borderwork.