Böcker av Mariana Valverde

Toronto prides itself on being the world's most diverse city, and its officials seek to support this diversity through programs and policies designed to promote social inclusion. The author brings to light the often unexpected ways that the development and implementation of policies shape everyday urban life.

These essays represent an exciting breakthrough in women's studies, expanding the borders of the discipline while breaking down barriers between mainstream and women's history.

Features an anthology designed to provide legal and socio-legal scholars with a sense of the wide range of projects and questions.

This is a sociological investigation of the history and uses of alcoholic beverages. It explores the notion of free will versus determinism and includes original research from the US, UK, Canada and Australia. It will appeal to readers in legal studies, criminology, sociology, psychology, social theory and the history of medicine.

Focuses on the forces of law and order - how they visualize and represent danger and criminality. Besides covering basic terms and tools in the study of culture and representation, this book also looks at conflicts regarding the legal admissibility of 'gruesome pictures' to reflect on the importance of the visual in our everyday experiences.

If knowledge is power, then the power of law can be studied through the lens of knowledge. This book opens up a substantive new area of legal research--knowledge production--and presents a series of case studies showing that the hybridity and eclecticism of legal knowledge processes make it unfruitful to ask questions such as, "e;Is law becoming more dominated by science?"e; Mariana Valverde argues that legal decision making cannot be understood if one counterposes science and technology, on the one hand, to common knowledge and common sense on the other. The case studies of law's flexible collage of knowledges range from determinations of drunkenness made by liquor licensing inspectors and by police, through police testimony in "e;indecency"e; cases, to how judges define the "e;truth"e; of sexuality and the harm that obscenity poses to communities. Valverde emphasizes that the types of knowledge that circulate in such legal arenas consist of "e;facts,"e; values, and codes from numerous incompatible sources that combine to produce interesting hybrids with wide-ranging legal and social effects. Drawing on Foucaultian and other analytical tools, she cogently demonstrates that different modes of knowledge, and hence various forms of power, coexist happily. Law's Dream of a Common Knowledge underlines the importance of analyzing dynamically how knowledge formation works. And it helps us to better understand the workings of power and resistance in a variety of contemporary contexts. It will interest scholars and students from disciplines including law, sociology, anthropology, history, and science-and-technology studies as well as those concerned with the particular issues raised by the case studies.

This study uncovers a little known dimension of Canadian social history and shows that moral reform was not the project of a marginal puritanical group but was central to the race, class, and gender organization of modern English Canada.