Browse results

You are looking at 1 - 10 of 234 items for :

  • American Studies x
  • Social Sciences x
  • Primary Language: English x
  • Search level: Titles x
Clear All
In Public Health Systems in the Age of Financialization, Ana Carolina Cordilha unpacks policy shifts that have transformed public health systems into vehicles for financial speculation and capital accumulation. While it is commonly thought that these systems are being cut back in the period of financialization, the author shows that current changes in public health financing go far beyond budget cuts and privatization measures. She examines how public health systems are adopting financial instruments and participating in financial accumulation strategies, with harmful impacts on transparency, democratic accountability, and health service provision. With an in-depth study of both the French and Brazilian systems, Cordilha explores the different ways in which this process unfolds in central and peripheral countries.
In Agrarian History of the Cuban Revolution, the Brazilian historian Joana Salém Vasconcelos presents in clear language the complicated challenge of overcoming the condition of Latin America’s underdevelopment through a revolutionary process. Based on diverse historical sources, she demonstrates why the sugar plantation economic structure in Cuba was not entirely changed by the 1959 Revolution.

The author narrates in detail the three dimensions of Cuban agrarian transformation during the decisive 1960s — the land tenure system, the crop regime, and the labour regime —, and its social and political actors. She explains the paths and detours of Cuban agrarian policies, contextualized in a labour-intensive economy that needs desperately to increase productivity and, at the same time, promised widely to emancipate workers from labour exploitation. Cuban agrarian and economic contradictions are well-synthetized with the concept of Peripheral Socialism.
What were the changes in the international position of the Brazilian state during the Lula and Cardoso administrations? How were the classes and class fractions represented? These are the questions that Tatiana Berringer's work seeks to answer. Using the theoretical instruments of the Marxist Nicos Poulantzas, the book identifies the class interests that directed the international action of the Brazilian state. With notable originality, the text presents, theoretically and empirically, a truly consistent Marxist analysis of Brazilian foreign policy, as well as a rich interpretation of the class struggle in current Brazilian politics. The author offers the reader her reflections on the political crisis of 2016 and the foreign policy of the Dilma, Temer, and Bolsonaro governments.
Sports Semiotics applies semiotics (and other disciplines, secondarily) to analyse the social, cultural, economic and psychological significance of sports. It includes a primer on semiotic theory, sections on the analysis of wrestling by Roland Barthes in his book Mythologies, as well as sections on football and the sacred, the Super Bowl, and the semiotics of televised baseball.
Brazil in the Work of Lorenzo Dow Turner, E. Franklin Frazier and Frances and Melville Herskovits, 1935-1967
Author:
This book offers a new perspective on the making of Afro-Brazilian, African-American and African studies through the interrelated trajectory of E. Franklin Frazier, Lorenzo Dow Turner, Frances and Melville Herskovits in Brazil. The book compares the style, network and agenda of these different and yet somehow converging scholars, and relates them to the Brazilian intellectual context, especially Bahia, which showed in those days much less density and organization than the US equivalent. It is therefore a double comparison: between four Americans and between Americans and scholars based in Brazil.
In this latest work by the prolific Mexican theorist Adrián Sotelo Valencia, the COVID-19 pandemic is shown to have merely exacerbated the profound world capitalist crisis rooted in the 1970s structural exhaustion of the third industrial revolution. Sotelo explains how the current 4.0 revolution whose articulating axis is the development and expansion of artificial intelligence, Big Data, algorithms, 3D printing, the Internet of Things, and digital platforms constitutes a global strategy of capital and the state aimed at detaining the global capitalist crisis. The Digital Revolution heralds a new international division of labour with severe repercussions for labour, especially in dependent countries like Mexico. The foreword by Andrés Piqueras of the Universidad Jaume I de Castellón underlines the urgency to heed this insightful analysis.
In Lawfare: The Criminalization of Democratic Politics in the Global South, Zaffaroni, Caamaño and Vegh Weis offer an account of the misuse of the law to criminalize progressive political leaders in Latin America. Indeed, more and more popular political leaders in the region are being imprisoned or prosecuted, even while in power. Inacio Lula da Silva is the quintaessential case of this worrying process. Despite the centrality of this juridical-political phenomenon in Latin America, it is little known to the Anglo-Saxon public. This book aims to fill this gap. In an accessible style, the authors deconstruct the legal language and the main problematics of lawfare, drawing attention to the fact that it may end up destroying the rule of law in order to promote the most cruel forms of neoliberalism.