52,547 research outputs found
The Forgotten -ism
“I’d rather not. I don’t like to talk to old people. They make me uncomfortable. They kind of smell weird and make me think about death. Some of them are even racist, so I’d just rather not.”
As part of my internship this summer, in which I helped to coordinate the Friday evening dinners at the Gettysburg Senior Center, putting out advertisements to “hang out with old people” wasn’t exactly an easy task. [excerpt
The rise of cosmopolitanism in the 20th-century West: a comparative-historical perspective on the United States and European Union
The Orange Order in Scotland since 1860: a social analysis
Book synopsis: Irish immigrants and their descendants have made a vital contribution to the creation of modern Scotland. This book is the first collection of essays on the Irish in Scotland for almost twenty years, and brings together for the first time all the leading authorities on the subject. It provides a major reassessment of the Irish immigrant experience and offers social, cultural and religious development of Scotland over the past 200 years
Acceleration-induced nonlocality: kinetic memory versus dynamic memory
The characteristics of the memory of accelerated motion in Minkowski
spacetime are discussed within the framework of the nonlocal theory of
accelerated observers. Two types of memory are distinguished: kinetic and
dynamic. We show that only kinetic memory is acceptable, since dynamic memory
leads to divergences for nonuniform accelerated motion.Comment: LaTeX file, 6 PS figures, 34 page
The Northern Ireland peace process in an age of austerity
The steady drip of dissident Republican attacks forms the backdrop to this special issue of Political Quarterly. Moreover, this comes at a time of economic austerity, when Northern Ireland faces unprecedented cuts to its public sector-dominated economy. The economic crisis in the South adds an additional layer of uncertainty to the picture. In the past, economic deprivation has been associated with conflict in Northern Ireland and elsewhere. Might the peace dividend and constitutional settlement which have underpinned the Northern Ireland 'miracle' since 1994# be under threat? Or is there now sufficient momentum in both of Northern Ireland's main ethnic communities that such an outcome can be safely averted? This paper summarises the thinking of our symposium and special issue on this topic, updating our picture of the Northern Ireland peace process
Modern formation, ethnic reformation: the social sources of the American nation
The question, 'When is the nation?', ranks second in importance only to the related query, 'Why is the nation?' in the contemporary social science and humanities literature on nationalism. This issue is confronted by this essay, which considers Anthony Smith's important perennialist-modernist dichotomy through the lens of the American experience. Along the way, it will address the related but independent question of whether nations are 'top-down' artefacts constructed by the modern state, or 'bottom-up' social formations generated by ethnic groups within civil society. The importance of this theoretical question lies not merely with the antiquarian interest in how our world system of nations emerged, but with the more pressing question of why it is persistently re-created, and, for idealists, how it may be superseded
Nativist cosmopolitans: institutional reflexivity and the decline of “double-consciousness” in American nationalist thought
Debate in the field of historical sociology on the subject of American citizenship and nationality tends to support one of two theories. The exceptionalist argument holds that American nationalist discourse has historically been based on the universal ideals of liberty enshrined in the Constitution, and has been inclusive in character. Critics contend that this was not the case – arguing that the narrative of American national identity has typically been grounded on exclusive ethno-cultural criteria like race, religion or language. This essay attempts to demonstrate that the truth encompasses, yet transcends, both positions. This is not because there were conflicting parties in the nineteenth century nationality debate – indeed, there was a great deal of elite consensus as to the meaning of American nationhood prior to the twentieth century which simultaneously affirmed both the universalist and particularist dimension of Americanism. How to explain this apparent contradiction, which Ralph Waldo Emerson termed "double-consciousness?" This paper suggests that the nineteenth century popularity of dualistic statements of American nationhood, and the eclipse of such conceptions in the twentieth, is a complex sociological phenomenon that can only fully be explained by taking into account the development of institutional reflexivity in the United States
Dominant ethnicity and integration: the Estonian case
From introduction: On October 18-19, 2007, the Tallinn Conference on Conceptualising Integration was held that focused on the Estonian integration policy. While
being in the middle of composing the new state
programme for the years 2008-2013 at the time of
the conference, I’m glad that the conference gave
us an opportunity to share our ideas with others
and at the same time learn form the experience of
other countries
Liberal ethnicity: beyond liberal nationalism and minority rights
This article tries to make the case for a variant of the good life based on a synthesis of liberalism and ethnicity. Liberal communitarianism's treatment of ethnicity tends to fall under the categories of either liberal culturalism or liberal nationalism. Both, it is argued, fail to come to terms with the reality of ethnic community, preferring instead to define ethnicity in an unrealistic, cosmopolitan manner. By contrast, this essay squarely confronts four practices that are central to ethnic communities: symbolic boundary-maintenance; exclusive and inflexible mythomoteurs ; the use of ancestry and race as boundary markers; and the desire among national groups to maintain their ethnic character. This article argues that none of these practices need contravene the tenets of liberalism as long as they are reconstructed so as to minimize entry criteria and decouple national ethnicity from the state. The notion of liberal ethnicity thereby constitutes an important synthesis of liberal and communitarian ends
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