Political Study

The 2016 election of Donald J. Trump exposed a deep divide in American politics and culture, one that pollsters and pundits didn't seem to realize was there. But Trump did, and he used it to his advantage in ways that surprised nearly everyone, even those who voted for him. Perhaps the biggest question on many people's minds is how, exactly, did a crass, unrepentant reality TV star and cutthroat business tycoon secure the majority of the religious conservative vote?

John Locke's theory of toleration is generally seen as advocating the privatization of religion. This interpretation has become conventional wisdom: secularization is widely understood as entailing the privatization of religion, and the separation of religion from power. This audiobook turns that conventional wisdom on its head and argues that Locke secularizes religion, that is, makes it worldly, public, and political. In the name of diverse citizenship, Locke reconstructs religion as persuasion, speech, and fashion.

This book focuses on the constant tension between democracy and conspiratorial behavior in the new global order. It addresses the prevalence of conspiracy theories in the phenomenon of Donald Trump and Trumpism, and the paranoid style of American politics that existed long before, first identified with Richard Hofstadter. Hellinger looks critically at both those who hold conspiracy theory beliefs and those who rush to dismiss them.

In What I Believe, Ramadan attempts to set the record straight, laying out the basic ideas he stands for in clear and accessible prose. He describes the book as a work of clarification, directed at ordinary citizens, politicians, journalists, and others who are curious (or skeptical) about his positions. Aware that that he is dealing with emotional issues, Ramadan tries to get past the barriers of prejudice and misunderstanding to speak directly, from the heart, to his Muslim and non-Muslim readers alike.

There is one question Canadians have asked Jody Wilson-Raybould more than any other: What can I do to help advance reconciliation? This has been true from her time as a leader of British Columbia’s First Nations, as a Member of Parliament, as Minister of Justice and Attorney General, within business communities, and when having conversations with people. Whether speaking as individuals, communities, organizations, or governments, people want to take concrete and tangible action that will make real change. They just need to know how to get started, or to take the next step.

It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.

In Truth: How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape Our Reality, Hector Macdonald explores how truth is used and abused in politics, business, the media and everyday life. He shows how a clearer understanding of truth's many faces renders us better able to navigate our world and more influential within it. Combining great storytelling with practical takeaways and a litany of fascinating, funny, and insightful case studies, Truth is a sobering and engaging listen about how profoundly our mindsets and actions are influenced by the truths that those around us choose to tell.

Pearl K. Ford Dowe argues that ambition for Black women cannot be measured only by political candidacies and ascents of the political chain of power. Black women are uniquely positioned within their communities to influence politics and public policy, which stems from unique variables of socialization, gender and racial identity, and marginalization that shape the political attitudes of Black women. Thus, Dowe asserts that Black women's political ambition often manifests outside formal politics, in activism and community building, a process that is linked to a wider radical vision.

Since Victoria Woodhull launched her symbolic bid for the presidency in 1872, dozens of women have sought the presidency over the past 150 years. Their quest began long before women won the vote, and it unfolded over decades when a woman's pursuit of any higher political office was met with prejudice, mockery, and hostility. Even after women started voting in 1920, they remained shut out of rooms where presidential candidacies were often born.

On 6 February 1918, after campaigning for over 50 years, British women were finally granted the vote. In November 1919, the first woman MP, Lady Nancy Astor, was elected to the House of Commons. History was made. A hundred years on, it is time to reflect on the daring and painful struggle women undertook to break into a political system that excluded them.

William Jefferson Clinton was the 42nd president of the United States. Learn about his childhood, education, and work as president.

Embodiment is not an easy business. From violence to illness, sexuality to racism, the fact of a body can be impossibly hard to inhabit. Olivia Laing draws on her own background in protest and alternative medicine to investigate the reasons why. Laing’s exploration of the complexities of bodily life takes in some of the most significant and beguiling figures of the past century, among them the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, the painters Francis Bacon and Agnes Martin and the singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone.

Former Internet entrepreneur Andrew Keen was among the earliest to write about the dangers that the Internet poses to our culture and society. His 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur was critical in helping advance the conversation around the Internet, which has now morphed from a tool providing efficiencies and opportunities for consumers and business to an elemental force that is profoundly reshaping our societies and our world.

Social justice work is more crucial than ever, but it can be physically and emotionally draining. Longtime activist Denise Collazo offers three keys to help Latinas keep their focus, morale, and energy high. Doing the work of social change is hard. Waking up every day to take on the biggest challenges of our time can be overwhelming, and sometimes progress is hard to see. She understands that Latina and all women of color activists do their best work when they are thriving, not simply surviving.

When conflicts become entrenched over generations, the language of war infiltrates everyday life, concealing destruction and hardening positions. Nowhere is this truer than in the Middle East. Award-winning author Raja Shehadeh explores the politics of language and the language of politics in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, reflecting on the walls that they create - legal and cultural - that confine today's Palestinians just like the borders, checkpoints and so-called "Separation Barrier".

Our civilisation is no longer run by humans, but by profit. Society has become a money machine with no blood, no pulse, and no other preoccupation than to monetize itself and the original humans who created it. Within this dystopian context, even humans themselves have become products: they need to be bought and sold so that they can exist. They need to be used to have a purpose. And they need to lie about themselves in order to be loved. As witnessed during the industrial revolution, aggressive commoditisation across manufacturing resulted in inferior quality consumer goods, significant ...

Travis Ridout and Michael Franz examine how political advertisements function in various kinds of campaigns and how voters are influenced by them. The authors particularly study where ads are placed, asserting that television advertising will still be relevant despite the growth of advertising on the Internet.

Scholars have long debated the meaning of the pursuit of happiness, yet have tended to define it narrowly, focusing on a single intellectual tradition, and on the use of the term within a single text, the Declaration of Independence. In this insightful volume, Carli Conklin considers the pursuit of happiness across a variety of intellectual traditions, and explores its usage in two key legal texts of the Founding Era, the Declaration and William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.

In Just Faith, progressive Christian activist and writer Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons explains how a strong religious left has accompanied every major progressive advance in our society, and he resurrects the long but forgotten history of progressive Christianity in the United States that can and must link arms with progressive Muslims and Jews to make the moral case for pluralism, human dignity, and the common good. Graves-Fitzsimmons provides a blueprint for this type of resurrection based on his advocacy work at the intersection of religion and American politics.

What does contemporary China's diverse and exciting fiction tell us about its culture, and the relationship between art and politics? The Subplot takes us on a lively journey through a literary landscape like you’ve never seen before: a vast migrant-worker poetry movement, homoerotic romances by “rotten girls,” swaggering literary popstars, millionaire e-writers churning out the longest-ever novels, underground comics, the surreal works of Yu Hua, Yan Lianke, and Nobel laureate Mo Yan, and what is widely hailed as a golden age of Chinese science fiction.