Saturday, April 12, 2014

Leftover Women (Asian Arguments)

Leftover Women
Leftover Women (Asian Arguments)
Leta Hong Fincher (Author)

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Human Rights

After the 1949 revolution in China, Chairman Mao famously proclaimed that "women hold up half the sky." In the early years of the People’s Republic, the Communist Party sought to transform gender relations with expansive initiatives. Yet those gains are being eroded in China’s post-socialist era.

Contrary to many claims made in the media, women in China have experienced a dramatic rollback of rights and gains relative to men. Leftover Women lays out the structural discrimination against women and speaks to broader problems with China’s economy, politics, and development.

  • Rank: #46199 in eBooks
  • Published on: 2014-04-10
  • Released on: 2014-04-10
  • Format: Kindle eBook

Friday, April 11, 2014

The American Legal System and Civic Engagement: Why We All Should Think Like Lawyers

The American Legal System and Civic Engagement
The American Legal System and Civic Engagement: Why We All Should Think Like Lawyers
Kenneth Manaster (Author)

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Human Rights

In recent years there has been a widely-recognized and serious lack of rational and civil public discussion about current issues. In The American Legal System and Civic Engagement, Manaster asserts that ordinary citizens can form their opinions on public issues more intelligently, confidently, and responsibly if they have some guidance on how to do it. Drawing from the tools and traditions of the American legal system, he offers guidance to aid citizens in understanding public issues and participating in the type of responsible public debate these challenging issues deserve. From analyzing the influence of the media in informing the public, to examining the role of the citizen as a juror, The American Legal System and Civic Engagement is a practical and informative guide to how Americans can better perform the civic duty that modern democracy requires.

  • Rank: #66624 in Books
  • Published on: 2013-09-12
  • Released on: 2013-09-12
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Dimensions: .70" h x 5.50" w x 8.60" l,
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 228 pages

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Survivors of Slavery: Modern-Day Slave Narratives

Survivors of Slavery
Survivors of Slavery: Modern-Day Slave Narratives
Laura T. Murphy (Author)

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Human Rights

Slavery is not a crime confined to the far reaches of history. It is an injustice that continues to entrap twenty-seven million people across the globe. Laura Murphy offers close to forty survivor narratives from Cambodia, Ghana, Lebanon, Macedonia, Mexico, Russia, Thailand, Ukraine, and the United States, detailing the horrors of a system that forces people to work without pay and against their will, under the threat of violence, with little or no means of escape. Representing a variety of circumstances in diverse contexts, these survivors are the Frederick Douglasses, Sojourner Truths, and Olaudah Equianos of our time, testifying to the widespread existence of a human rights tragedy and the urgent need to address it.

Through storytelling and firsthand testimony, this anthology shapes a twenty-first-century narrative that many believe died with the end of slavery in the Americas. Organized around such issues as the need for work, the punishment of defiance, and the move toward activism, the collection isolates the causes, mechanisms, and responses to slavery that allow the phenomenon to endure. Enhancing scholarship in women's studies, sociology, criminology, law, social work, and literary studies, the text establishes a common trajectory of vulnerability, enslavement, captivity, escape, and recovery, creating an invaluable resource for activists, scholars, legislators, and service providers.

  • Rank: #73541 in Books
  • Published on: 2014-03-25
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Dimensions: .70" h x 6.00" w x 8.90" l, 1.00 pounds
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 344 pages

Monday, April 7, 2014

Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States

Life Interrupted
Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States
Denise Brennan (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars(1)

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Human Rights

Life Interrupted introduces us to survivors of human trafficking who are struggling to get by and make homes for themselves in the United States. Having spent nearly a decade following the lives of formerly trafficked men and women, Denise Brennan recounts in close detail their flight from their abusers and their courageous efforts to rebuild their lives. At once scholarly and accessible, her book links these firsthand accounts to global economic inequities and under-regulated and unprotected workplaces that routinely exploit migrant laborers in the United States. Brennan contends that today's punitive immigration policies undermine efforts to fight trafficking. While many believe trafficking happens only in the sex trade, Brennan shows that across low-wage labor sectors—in fields, in factories, and on construction sites—widespread exploitation can lead to and conceal forced labor. Life Interrupted is a riveting account of life in and after trafficking and a forceful call for meaningful immigration and labor reform.

All royalties from this book will be donated to the nonprofit Survivor Leadership Training Fund administered through the Freedom Network.
 

  • Rank: #386175 in Books
  • Published on: 2014-03-18
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Dimensions: .0" h x .0" w x .0" l, .0 pounds
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 304 pages

Saturday, April 5, 2014

The Undesirables: Inside Nauru

The Undesirables
The Undesirables: Inside Nauru
Mark Isaacs (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars(1)

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Human Rights

'How long will we be here?' one man asked.

Nobody could answer him. Nobody knew. The intention was clear: this was the No Advantage policy. Take them to a distant island, lock them away, punish them, forget about them. Criminals were given a sentence to serve; these men were not even given that. Lost hope ebbed out of the men in uncontrollable sobs and tears.

Queue jumper, boat person, illegals. Asylum seekers are contentious front-page news but obtaining information about Australia’s regional processing centres is increasingly difficult. We learn only what the government wants us to know.

Mark Isaacs worked for the Salvation Army inside the Nauru Detention Centre soon after it re-opened in 2012. He provided humanitarian aid to the men interned in the camp. What he saw there moved him to speak out.

The Undesirables chronicles his time on Nauru detailing daily life and the stories of the men held there; the self-harm, suicide attempts, and riots; the rare moments of joy; the moments of deep despair.

Mark's eyewitness account humanises a political debate usually ruled by misleading rhetoric.

About the author

Mark Isaacs became impassioned by the asylum seeker debate after a visit to Villawood Detention Centre while writing for Oxfam. Months later, in October 2012, Mark was employed by the Salvation Army to work at the regional processing centre in Nauru. While there, Mark established the Recreations program and Oceans program for asylum seekers. He eventually resigned from the Salvation Army in June 2013 and spoke out publicly against the government's No Advantage policy.

  • Rank: #50907 in eBooks
  • Published on: 2014-03-15
  • Released on: 2014-03-15
  • Format: Kindle eBook

Thursday, April 3, 2014

Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (American Encounters/Global Interactions)

Paper Cadavers
Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (American Encounters/Global Interactions)
Kirsten Weld (Author)

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Human Rights

In Paper Cadavers, an inside account of the astonishing discovery and rescue of Guatemala's secret police archives, Kirsten Weld probes the politics of memory, the wages of the Cold War, and the stakes of historical knowledge production. After Guatemala's bloody thirty-six years of civil war (1960–1996), silence and impunity reigned. That is, until 2005, when human rights investigators stumbled on the archives of the country's National Police, which, at 75 million pages, proved to be the largest trove of secret state records ever found in Latin America.

The unearthing of the archives renewed fierce debates about history, memory, and justice. In Paper Cadavers, Weld explores Guatemala's struggles to manage this avalanche of evidence of past war crimes, providing a firsthand look at how postwar justice activists worked to reconfigure terror archives into implements of social change. Tracing the history of the police files as they were transformed from weapons of counterinsurgency into tools for post-conflict reckoning, Weld sheds light on the country's fraught transition from war to an uneasy peace, reflecting on how societies forget and remember political violence.
  • Rank: #29721 in Books
  • Published on: 2014-03-21
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Dimensions: .80" h x 6.00" w x 9.00" l, 1.05 pounds
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 352 pages

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (Critical Human Rights)

Archiving the Unspeakable
Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (Critical Human Rights)
Michelle Caswell (Author)

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Human Rights

Roughly 1.7 million people died in Cambodia from untreated disease, starvation, and execution during the Khmer Rouge reign of less than four years in the late 1970s. The regime’s brutality has come to be symbolized by the multitude of black-and-white mug shots of prisoners taken at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, where thousands of Aenemies of the state” were tortured before being sent to the Killing Fields. In Archiving the Unspeakable, Michelle Caswell traces the social life of these photographic records through the lens of archival studies and elucidates how, paradoxically, they have become agents of silence and witnessing, human rights and injustice as they are deployed at various moments in time and space. From their creation as Khmer Rouge administrative records to their transformation beginning in 1979 into museum displays, archival collections, and databases, the mug shots are key components in an ongoing drama of unimaginable human suffering.

  • Rank: #36756 in Books
  • Published on: 2014-04-01
  • Released on: 2014-04-01
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Dimensions: .66" h x 6.30" w x 9.04" l, .73 pounds
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 246 pages