Böcker av Gavin Kitching

In this book the author directly confronts an ever more popular suspicion - that a university education in the humanities and social sciences is actually an 'elitist' indoctrination into 'leftist' or 'liberal' views.

Using largely untapped local press and archive sources, five of these six essays trace the historical emergence of a professionalised sport out of the family of pastimes that were traditional 'football.'The final historical essay recounts the 'Crook Town affair, a once-famous 1920s 'shamateurist' football scandal in County Durham.

Postmodern theory has engaged the hearts and heads of the brightest students because of its apparent political and social radicalism. Despite this Professor Gavin Kitching claims that, ''At the heart of postmodernism is very poor, deeply confused and misbegotten philosophy. As a result even the very best students who fall under its sway produce radically incoherent ideas about language, meaning, truth and reality.''This is not another conservative attack on postmodernism. Rather, it is a carefully considered analysis from a dedicated university teacher who is convinced that we have gone terribly astray. He shows that postmodern theory is at best irrelevant to, and at worst undermining of, persuasive political arguments, and reveals the basic philosophical confusion at its heart which makes this so. Essential reading for any student writing a thesis in the humanities and the social sciences, and for their teachers.

Analyzes why typical postmodern theoretical approaches simply aren't effective tools for dealing with the realities of people and their activities, and he describes the philosophical confusion that lies at the heart of the problem. This book is suitable for students writing a thesis in the humanities and the social sciences and for their teachers.

How do the intellectual origins and historical background of western and other theories of development affect their relevance to contemporary Third-World conditions? This is the central question behind the author's examination of 'development studies' from its origins in the late 1940s through to the contemporary era.