Reimagining Rural: Urbanormative Portrayals of Rural Life examines the ways in which rural people and places are being portrayed by popular television, reality television, film, literature, and news media in the United States. It is also an examination of the social processes that reinforce urbanormative standards that normalize urban life and render rural life as something unusual, exotic, or deviant. This includes exploring the role of the media as agenda setting agent, informing people ...

This volume considers the rise of a new mode of creating, spreading, and encountering moral claims and ideas as they are expressed within spectacles. Brian M. Lowe explains how spectacles emerge when we are saturated with mediated representations—including pictures, texts, and videos—and exposed to television and movies and the myriad stories they tell us. The question of which moral issues gain our attention and which are neglected increasingly relates to how societal concerns are support...

For centuries, rabbits have been used as a food commodity. And yet even today when there are millions of families keeping rabbits as domestic companions, the parallel perception of those prey animals as commodity remains equally dominant in public discourse.In Nobody Wants to Eat Them Alive, authors Gayane Torosyan and Brian Lowe use semiotic analysis to explore the changes occurring in societal perception of rabbits as commodity animals as juxtaposed to their increasing popularity...

**“If I could give each of you a graduation present, it would be this—the most inspiring book I've ever read."—Bill Gates (May, 2017)Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year**The author of Rationality and Enlightenment Now offers a provocative and surprising history of violence.Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in t...

What began as a public-health project by a Harvard medical student evolved into an intimate, ambitious, six-year study of the brothel ecosystem and a book that puts an unforgettable face on America’s maligned and caricatured subculture.“A fascinating glimpse into a hidden lifestyle.... It's an instantly gratifying page-turner.... It emerges as a personality-filled memoir about an unforgettable group of women." —Seattle Weekly

This longawaited book by a pioneer in brain research offers a new model of our emotions- their origins, their power, and their malleability.For more than thirty years, Richard Davidson has been at the forefront of brain research. Now he gives us an entirely new model for understanding our emotions, as well as practical strategies we can use to change them.Davidson has discovered that personality is composed of six basic emotional "styles," including resilie...

A practical guide to the art of theorizing in the social sciencesIn the social sciences today, students are taught theory by reading and analyzing the works of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and other foundational figures of the discipline. What they rarely learn, however, is how to actually theorize. The Art of Social Theory is a practical guide to doing just that.In this one-of-a-kind user's manual for social theorists, Richard Swedberg explains how theor...

THE NEW ASTROLOGY™ FOR THE 21ST CENTURY (Updated and Revised By The Author) is INGENIOUS! Suzanne White's revolutionary book of astral character study offers her readers A Unique Blend Of Chinese and Western Astrology. Indeed there are not 12 but 144 signs of the zodiac! By blending the two zodiacs, White has hatched a synthesis of the World's Two Greatest Astrological systems. White's accuracy with character reading is positively uncanny! You will wonder if she has been reading your mail....

Advances in the social sciences have emerged through a variety of research methods: field-based research, laboratory and field experiments, and agent-based models. However, which research method or approach is best suited to a particular inquiry is frequently debated and discussed. Working Together examines how different methods have promoted various theoretical developments related to collective action and the commons, and demonstrates the importance of cross-fertilization involv...

Building upon the success of the first edition, Statistics Using Stata uses the latest version of Stata to meet the needs of today's students. Engaging and accessible for students from a variety of mathematical backgrounds, this textbook integrates statistical concepts with the Stata (version 16) software package. It aligns Stata commands with examples based on real data, enabling students to understand statistics in a way that reflects statistical practice. Capitalizing on Stata's menu-dr...

This book provides a narrative of how R can be useful in the analysis of public administration, public policy, and political science data specifically, in addition to the social sciences more broadly. It can serve as a textbook and reference manual for students and independent researchers who wish to use R for the first time or broaden their skill set with the program. While the book uses data drawn from political science, public administration, and policy analyses, it is written so that s...

Through the use of careful explanations and examples, Berry shows the reader how to consider whether the assumptions of multiple regression are actually satisfied in a particular research project. Beginning with a brief review of the regression assumptions as they are typically presented in textbooks, Berry moves on to explore in detail the "substantive" meaning of each assumption (such as lack of measurement error, absence of specification error, linearity, homoscedasticity, and lack of a...