Caught in the Crossfire (Cultural Politics & the Promise of Democracy) - Softcover

Grossberg, Lawrence

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1594511136 ISBN 13: 9781594511134

Publisher: Routledge, 2005

Synopsis

Caught in the Crossfire reveals how the United States has been gradually changing from a society that celebrates childhood into one that is hostile to and afraid of its own children. Today kids are often seen as a threat to our social and moral values. In schools, some behavior is criminalized, and growing numbers of kids find themselves in penal and psychiatric confinement. This breakdown is often too readily attributed to bad parenting, the crisis of the family, or the greed of capitalism. Grossberg offers a new and original understanding of the changes transforming contemporary America, and of the choices Americans face about their future. He documents the relations between economic ideologies and economic realities and explores what is going on in the "culture wars" as well as on the Internet and other new media. Caught in the Crossfire argues that all of these changes and tn struggles, including those involving the state of kids, only make sense as integral parts of a larger transformation to define America's uniqueness and to develop its own sense of modern culture. Part of the Cultural Politics and the Promise of Democracy Series.

About this title

About the Author:

Lawrence Grossberg is the Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communications and Cultural Studies and director of the University Program in Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author most recently of Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies (Duke University Press 1997).

Review:

Equally at ease in the registers of social movements and public policy, this is a book that deserves to be widely read and taught.... a valuable resource for expanding our political space is its analytic embrace of so many spheres of social life. --Randy Martin, New York University

I relish this book. This is the wisest analysis of America's state and trends . . . since Reagan's turning point. It is loaded with shrewd observations and on-target syntheses. 'Third modernity' will probably enter the canon of all thought about all things American. --Zygmunt Bauman

Grossberg has a more original and insightful angle on the prevailing conservative climate than almost any other social commentator. Breathtaking in its range of reference and argument, Caught in the Crossfire is his most provocative and accomplished analysis of the forces confronting youth today. --ANDREW ROSS, author of Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1594511136
• ISBN 13: 9781594511134
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 406