Qualitative comparative methods – and specifically controlled qualitative comparisons – are central to the study of politics. They are not the only kind of comparison, though, that can help us better understand political processes and outcomes. Yet there are few guides for how to conduct non-controlled comparative research. This volume brings together chapters from more than a dozen leading methods scholars from across the discipline of political science, including positivist and interpret...

Despite being one of the world's most vibrant democracies, police estimate between five and ten percent of the murders in South Africa result from vigilante violence. This is puzzling given the country's celebrated transition to democracy and massive reform of the state's legal institutions. Where most studies explain vigilantism as a response to state or civic failure, in Contradictions of Democracy, Nicholas Rush Smith illustrates that vigilantism is actually a response to the p...

Often considered peculiarly American, lynching in fact takes place around the world. In the first book of a two-volume study, Michael J. Pfeifer collects essays that look at lynching and related forms of collective violence in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Understanding lynching as a transnational phenomenon rooted in political and cultural flux, the writers probe important issues from Indonesia--where a long history of public violence now twines with the Internet--to South Africa, wi...

Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure is a revised second edition of the volume that guided students and scholars through the intellectual demands of comparative politics. Retaining a focus on the field's research schools, it now pays parallel attention to the pragmatics of causal research. Mark Lichbach begins with a review of discovery, explanation and evidence and Alan Zuckerman argues for explanations with social mechanisms. Ira Katznelson, writing on structuralist ...

Over the past two decades anthropologists have been challenged to rethink the nature of ethnographic research, the meaning of fieldwork, and the role of ethnographers. Ethnographic fieldwork has cultural, social, and political ramifications that have been much discussed and acted upon, but the training of ethnographers still follows a very traditional pattern; this volume engages and takes its point of departure in the experiences of ethnographers-in-the-making that encourage alternative m...

Policies concerning language use are increasingly tested in an age of frequent migration and cultural synthesis. With conflicting factors and changing political climates influencing the policy-makers, Elana Shohamy considers the effects that these policies have on the real people involved. Using examples from the US and UK, she shows how language policies are promoted and imposed, overtly and covertly, across different countries and in different contexts.Concluding with arguments f...

Like any other valued resource, emotions are distributed unequally. Moreover, emotions are a generalized resource because they give people the confidence, or lack of confidence, to secure additional types of resources. Thus, this distribution of emotions roughly corresponds to the shares of others kinds of resources that members of various social classes possess. The level of positive and negative emotional energy evident among members of different social classes has large consequences for...

This timely and critical look at the teaching of English shows how language is used to create hierarchies of cultural privilege in public schools across the United States. Drawing on the work of four ESL teachers who pursued anti-racist pedagogical practices during their first year of teaching, the author provides a compelling account of how new teachers might gain agency for culturally responsive teaching in spite of school cultures that often discourage such approaches. She combines curr...

In this volume scholars from around the world focus on how a Bourdieusian stance can enable a powerful socicultural and cultural analysis of literacy education theory and practice and serve as an effective tool in analyzing relations of hierarchy and domination. Although there has been a growing body of Bourdieusian-inspired research in various sectors of education, this book is the first to present both theoretical and practical articulation of his ideas in the field of literacy education...

In contrast to other disciplines, social psychology has been slow in responding to the questions posed by the issue of ethnicity. The Social Psychology of Ethnic Identity, Second Edition, demonstrates the important and diverse contribution that social psychology can make.Comprehensively updated to include the latest research on dual and multiple identities, mutual links between sense of ethnic identity and social contexts, and the development of ethnic identity in adolesce...

This Oxford Handbook challenges basic concepts that have informed the study of sociolinguistics since its inception in the 1960s. In 27 chapters, the book challenges the modernist positivist perspective of the field that has treated languages and speech communities as bounded and the idealized native speaker as the ultimate authority. Instead, it offers a critical poststructuralist perspective that examines the socio-historical context that led to the emergence of dominant socioli...

Scholars of politics have sought in recent years to make the discipline more hospitable to qualitative methods of research. Lauding the results of this effort and highlighting its potential for the future, Political Ethnography makes a compelling case for one such method in particular. Ethnography, the contributors amply demonstrate in a wide range of original essays, is uniquely suited for illuminating the study of politics.Situating these pieces within the context of dev...