Virtual Library

In the early twentieth century, a time of political fragmentation and social upheaval in China, poverty became the focus of an anguished national conversation about the future of the country. Investigating the lives of the urban poor in China during this critical era, Guilty of Indigence examines the solutions implemented by a nation attempting to deal with society's most fundamental problem. Interweaving analysis of shifting social viewpoints, the evolution of poor relief institutions, and the lived experiences of the urban poor, Janet Chen explores the development of Chinese attitudes toward urban poverty and of policies intended for its alleviation.

Chen concentrates on Beijing and Shanghai, two of China's most important cities, and she considers how various interventions carried a lasting influence. The advent of the workhouse, the denigration of the nonworking poor as social parasites, efforts to police homelessness and vagrancy--all had significant impact on the lives of people struggling to survive. Chen provides a crucially needed historical lens for understanding how beliefs about poverty intersected with shattering historical events, producing new welfare policies and institutions for the benefit of some, but to the detriment of others.

Drawing on vast archival material, Guilty of Indigence deepens the historical perspective on poverty in China and reveals critical lessons about a still-pervasive social issue.

The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is a three-volume non-fiction text written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was first published in 1973, and translated into English, and French, the following year. An undisputed masterpiece of world literature, The Gulag Archipelago covers life in what is often known as the Gulag, the Soviet forced labour camp system. Drawing on his own experience before, during and after his eleven years of incarceration and exile, on evidence provided by more than 200 fellow prisoners, and on Soviet archives, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn reveals with torrential narrative and dramatic power the entire apparatus of Soviet repression, the state within the state that once ruled all-powerfully with its creation by Lenin in 1918. 

Habeas Viscus focuses attention on the centrality of race to notions of the human. Alexander G. Weheliye develops a theory of "racializing assemblages," taking race as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This disciplining, while not biological per se, frequently depends on anchoring political hierarchies in human flesh. The work of the black feminist scholars Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter is vital to Weheliye's argument. Particularly significant are their contributions to the intellectual project of black studies vis-à-vis racialization and the category of the human in western modernity. Wynter and Spillers configure black studies as an endeavor to disrupt the governing conception of humanity as synonymous with white, western man. Weheliye posits black feminist theories of modern humanity as useful correctives to the "bare life and biopolitics discourse" exemplified by the works of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, which, Weheliye contends, vastly underestimate the conceptual and political significance of race in constructions of the human. Habeas Viscus reveals the pressing need to make the insights of black studies and black feminism foundational to the study of modern humanity.

Lawyers argue the UN should compensate victims of the disease allegedly spread by its peacekeepers.

The Handmaid's Tale is a novel of such power that the reader will be unable to forget its images and its forecast. First published in 1985 and set in the near future, it describes life in what was once the United States and is now called the Republic of Gilead, a monotheocracy that has reacted to social unrest and a sharply declining birthrate by reverting to, and going beyond, the repressive intolerance of the original Puritans. The regime takes the Book of Genesis absolutely at its word, with bizarre consequences for the women and men in its population.

The story is told through the eyes of Offred, one of the unfortunate Handmaids under the new social order. In condensed but eloquent prose, by turns cool-eyed, tender, despairing, passionate, and wry, she reveals to us the dark corners behind the establishment's calm facade, as certain tendencies now in existence are carried to their logical conclusions. The Handmaid's Tale is funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing. It is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and a tour de force. It is Margaret Atwood at her best.

What factors determine whether and how deeply countries will commit to the international human rights regime? Using data for up to 142 countries between 1966 and 2000, this article analyzes patterns of membership to the International Human Rights Covenants. The analysis produced two main conclusions. First, the potential costs associated with joining a treaty, rather than its substantive content, motivates the decision to join. Treaties that protect different rights but establish comparable implementation mechanisms exhibit similar patterns of membership, whereas treaties that protect identical rights but establish different implementation provisions exhibit dissimilar patterns of membership. Second, rates of treaty membership differ by level of commitment. Countries that sign human rights treaties differ from countries that ratify. Results are interpreted with respect to four theories of commitment and compliance: realism, liberalism, constructivism, and sociological institutionalism. Theories that emphasize the importance of a treaty’s costs (realism and institutionalism) fare better than theories that prioritize a treaty’s content (liberalism and constructivism).

As far back as we know, there have been individuals incapacitated by memories that have filled them with sadness and remorse, fright and horror, or a sense of irreparable loss. Only recently, however, have people tormented with such recollections been diagnosed as suffering from “post-traumatic stress disorder.” Here Allan Young traces this malady, particularly as it is suffered by Vietnam veterans, to its beginnings in the emergence of ideas about the unconscious mind and to earlier manifestations of traumatic memory like shell shock or traumatic hysteria. In Young’s view, PTSD is not a timeless or universal phenomenon newly discovered. Rather, it is a “harmony of illusions,” a cultural product gradually put together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, and treated and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments mobilizing these efforts.

This book is part history and part ethnography, and it includes a detailed account of everyday life in the treatment of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. To illustrate his points, Young presents a number of fascinating transcripts of the group therapy and diagnostic sessions that he observed firsthand over a period of two years. Through his comments and the transcripts themselves, the reader becomes familiar with the individual hospital personnel and clients and their struggle to make sense of life after a tragic war. One observes that everyone on the unit is heavily invested in the PTSD diagnosis: boundaries between therapist and patient are as unclear as were the distinctions between victim and victimizer in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Most Internet users are familiar with trolling—aggressive, foul-mouthed posts designed to elicit angry responses in a site’s comments. Less familiar but far more serious is the way some use networked technologies to target real people, subjecting them, by name and address, to vicious, often terrifying, online abuse. In an in-depth investigation of a problem that is too often trivialized by lawmakers and the media, Danielle Keats Citron exposes the startling extent of personal cyber-attacks and proposes practical, lawful ways to prevent and punish online harassment. A refutation of those who claim that these attacks are legal, or at least impossible to stop, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace reveals the serious emotional, professional, and financial harms incurred by victims.

Persistent online attacks disproportionately target women and frequently include detailed fantasies of rape as well as reputation-ruining lies and sexually explicit photographs. And if dealing with a single attacker’s “revenge porn” were not enough, harassing posts that make their way onto social media sites often feed on one another, turning lone instigators into cyber-mobs.

Hate Crimes in Cyberspace rejects the view of the Internet as an anarchic Wild West, where those who venture online must be thick-skinned enough to endure all manner of verbal assault in the name of free speech protection, no matter how distasteful or abusive. Cyber-harassment is a matter of civil rights law, Citron contends, and legal precedents as well as social norms of decency and civility must be leveraged to stop it.

This anthology, compiled by four of the top scholars in the field, gives a global view of public health. The editors begin with an introduction to public health and move on to legal, economic, and political implications. The editors also include contextual essays for each of the four sections.

From the Publisher Modern human rights, born in the aftermath of the Second World War and crystallized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, reflect a broader, societal, approach to the complex problem of well-being. While health is mentioned only once in the document, human rights are about the societal preconditions for physical, mental and social well-being. Health care professionals are generally unaware of the key concepts, meaning and content of modern human rights. But they are learning that promoting and protecting human rights may be essential for promoting and protecting health. Health and Human Rights: A Reader, including contributions by doctors, lawyers and government representatives, is the first comprehensive anthology of essays in this new field to address the balance between public health and human rights awareness. The essays in this collection cover issues including ethnic cleansing, world population policies, women's reproductive choices, the Nuremburg Code and AIDS and HIV policies and treatments. It is an essential introduction to the developing field of health and human rights.