Child Welfare for the Twenty-first Century


Book Description

This up-to-date and comprehensive resource by leaders in child welfare is the first book to reflect the impact of the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) of 1997. The text serves as a single-source reference for a wide array of professionals who work in children, youth, and family services in the United States-policymakers, social workers, psychologists, educators, attorneys, guardians ad litem, and family court judges& mdash;and as a text for students of child welfare practice and policy. Features include: * Organized around ASFA's guiding principles of well-being, safety, and permanency * Focus on evidence-based "best practices" * Case examples integrated throughout * First book to include data from the first round of National Child and Family Service Reviews Topics discussed include the latest on prevention of child abuse and neglect and child protective services; risk and resilience in child development; engaging families; connecting families with public and community resources; health and mental health care needs of children and adolescents; domestic violence; substance abuse in the family; family preservation services; family support services and the integration of family-centered practices in child welfare; gay and lesbian adolescents and their families; children with disabilities; and runaway and homeless youth. The contributors also explore issues pertaining to foster care and adoption, including a focus on permanency planning for children and youth and the need to provide services that are individualized and culturally and spiritually responsive to clients. A review of salient systemic issues in the field of children, youth, and family services completes this collection.




African Families in the Twenty-first Century


Book Description

African Families in the Twenty-First Century explores the idea that the family is the basic unit of society and an enduring multifunctional institution in Africa. The functions and structures of African families, as well as the multiple roles played by Africa's women, are undergoing structural changes. The ways in which education, employment, and current economic conditions reshape these complex roles are immense. The challenges facing African families and their members-such as globalization, war, poverty, economic restructuring, reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, harmful traditional practices, aging, and care and support of the elderly-have magnified due to a series of economic, social, political, religious, ecological, and other related factors. Author Aderanti Adepoju explores the vulnerability and resilience of African families in the face of these crises and challenges. He also looks at the opportunities facing African families in the new millennium. Because of the importance of African families to the development process, African Families in the Twenty-First Century is essential reading for planners, policy makers, activists, academics, and students.




Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century


Book Description

Winner of the 2014 John Collier Jr. Award Winner of the Jo Anne Stolaroff Cotsen Prize Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century cross-cuts the ranks of important books on social history, consumerism, contemporary culture, the meaning of material culture, domestic architecture, and household ethnoarchaeology. It is a distant cousin of Material World and Hungry Planet in content and style, but represents a blend of rigorous science and photography that these books can claim. Using archaeological approaches to human material culture, this volume offers unprecedented access to the middle-class American home through the kaleidoscopic lens of no-limits photography and many kinds of never-before acquired data about how people actually live their lives at home. Based on a rigorous, nine-year project at UCLA, this book has appeal not only to scientists but also to all people who share intense curiosity about what goes on at home in their neighborhoods. Many who read the book will see their own lives mirrored in these pages and can reflect on how other people cope with their mountains of possessions and other daily challenges. Readers abroad will be equally fascinated by the contrasts between their own kinds of materialism and the typical American experience. The book will interest a range of designers, builders, and architects as well as scholars and students who research various facets of U.S. and global consumerism, cultural history, and economic history.







Africa in the 21st Century


Book Description

Africa in the 21st Century: Toward a New Future brings together some of the finest Pan African and Afrocentric intellectuals to discuss the possibilities of a new future where the continent claims its own agency in response to the economic, social, political, and cultural problems which are found in every nation. The volume is structured around four sections: I. African Unity and Consciousness: Assets and Challenges; II. Language, Information, and Education; III. African Women, Children and Families; and IV. Political and Economic Future of the African World. In original essays, the authors raise the level of discourse around the questions of integration, pluralism, families, a federative state, and good governance. Each writer sees in the continent the potential for greatness and therefore articulates a theoretical and philosophical approach to Africa that constructs a victorious consciousness from hard concrete facts. This book will interest students and scholars of the history and politics of Africa as well as professional Africanists, Africologists, and international studies scholars who are inclined toward Africa.




Target Africa


Book Description

Since the end of colonization Africa has struggled with socio-economic and political problems. These challanges have attracted wealthy donors from Western nations and organizations that have assumed the roles of helper and deliverer. While some donors have good intentions, others seek to impose their ideology of sexual liberation. These are the ideological neocolonial masters of the twenty-first century who aggressively push their agenda of radical feminism, population control, sexualisation of children, and homosexuality. The author, a native of Nigeria, shows how these donors are masterful at exploiting some of the heaviest burdens and afflictions of Africa such as maternal mortality,unplanned pregnancies, HIV/AIDS pandemic, child marriage,and persistent poverty. This exploitation has put many African nations in the vulnerable position of receiving funding tied firmly to ideological solutions that are opposed tothe cultural views and values of their people. Thus many African nations are put back into the protectorate positions of dependency as new cultural standards conceived in the West are made into core policies in African capitals. This book reveals the recolonization of Africa that is rarely talked about. Drawing from a broad array of well-sourced materials and documents, it tells the story of foreign aid with strings attached, the story of Africa targeted and recolonized by wealthy, powerful donors.




The Anthropology of Africa: Challenges for the 21st Century


Book Description

In 1999 (August 30 - September 2) the Pan African Anthropological Association (PAAA) marked the 10th anniversary of its creation by holding its 9th Annual Conference in Yaounde, Cameroon - the city and country of its birth. The conference, themed "The Anthropology of Africa: Challenges for the 21st Century", was attended by some seventy participants, mostly African. Among the international participants was Dr Sydel Silverman, President of the Wenner Gren Foundation at the time - a long term partner of the PAAA; she was present at the inaugural conference in 1988. The conference proceedings were initially published in 2000 with very limited circulation. Given the continued relevance of the papers presented, and in view of the call by the President of the PAAA for African anthropologists to reunite anthropological theory and practice in the teaching programmes of African universities, the PAAA is pleased to republish the proceedings of its landmark 9th Annual Conference. The book consists of forty three divided into eight parts, namely: i) teaching anthropology in the decades ahead; ii) Health Challenges: HIV/AIDS Anthropological Perspectives; iii) NGOS: Use and Misuse of Anthropology; iv) Anthropological Focus on Environment; v) Some Applied Issues in Anthropology; vi) The African Family in Crisis; vii) Ethnicity and Ethnic Conflicts; and viii) Population issues and anthropology: Fertility Crisis. Paul Nkwi concludes his introduction to the volume with these words: "The Anthropology of Africa will remain for a long time, fundamentally applied if it is to meet the challenges of the 21st Century."




African Women


Book Description

African women's history is a topic as vast as the continent itself, embracing an array of societies in over fifty countries with different geographies, social customs, religions, and historical situations. In African Women: Early History to the 21st Century, Kathleen Sheldon masterfully delivers a comprehensive study of this expansive story from before the time of records to the present day. She provides rich background on descent systems and the roles of women in matrilineal and patrilineal systems. Sheldon's work profiles elite women, as well as those in leadership roles, traders and market women, religious women, slave women, women in resistance movements, and women in politics and development. The rich case studies and biographies in this thorough survey establish a grand narrative about women's roles in the history of Africa.




Global Africa


Book Description

Global Africa is a striking, original volume that disrupts the dominant narratives that continue to frame our discussion of Africa, complicating conventional views of the region as a place of violence, despair, and victimhood. The volume documents the significant global connections, circulations, and contributions that African people, ideas, and goods have made throughout the world—from the United States and South Asia to Latin America, Europe, and elsewhere. Through succinct and engaging pieces by scholars, policy makers, activists, and journalists, the volume provides a wholly original view of a continent at the center of global historical processes rather than on the periphery. Global Africa offers fresh, complex, and insightful visions of a continent in flux.




The New Black Middle Class in the Twenty-First Century


Book Description

Although past research on the African American community has focused primarily on issues of discrimination, segregation, and other forms of deprivation, there has always been some recognition of class diversity within the black population. The New Black Middle Class in the Twenty-First Century is a significant contribution to the continuing study of black middle class life. Sociologist Bart Landry examines the changes that have occurred since the publication of his now-classic The New Black Middle Class in the late 1980s, and conducts a comprehensive examination of black middle class American life in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Landry investigates the educational and occupational attainment, income and wealth, methods of child-rearing, community-building priorities, and residential settlement patterns of this growing yet still-understudied segment of the U.S. population.