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The article examines aspects of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmediinejad's centralization of power of the media, focusing particularly on the effects re the Internet and blogs. The author provides some background on social media in Iran, and discusses the dynamic in relation to the June 2009 election, the candidate's and the public's reactions, and the outcry from the murder of Neda Agha Soltan. Then the article discusses how social media became increasingly important to the Green movement, especially after communication via Internet and SMS was cut in Iran in December. The author concludes with discussion on Majid Tavakoli, the support received, and how social media assists the human rights and resistance movements in Iran, and ever growing global collaboration. Photos. M. Diem

"Rewriting the Chicano Movement is an insightful new history of the Chicano Movement that expands the meaning and understanding of this seminal historical period in Chicano history. The essays introduce new individuals and struggles previously omitted from Chicano Movement history."--

The figure of Melville's monomaniacal captain, who would subdue all the forces of the world to the exigencies of his tormented mind, and who at any rate drives the living community on board the Pequod into oblivion in his obsessive hunt for "his" white whale, would not appear to be the obvious character to introduce a work of political analysis. But in Bruce Jesson's Only Their Purpose is Mad (1999) – the title is a loose adaptation of a line spoken by Ahab – this classic character makes a striking appearance. In seeing the nineteenth-century Ahab as representative of certain problems in our times, Jesson is as much interested in the role and influence of ideas as he is in examining the political causes of what he sees as New Zealand's on-going social ills. And in using this potently emblematic character from Melville's novel to illustrate his concerns, Jesson refreshes the seemingly outdated notion that literature – and the range of ideas generated therein – allows us revealing glimpses into the complex experience of our lives through altering the perceptual light through which we view our social-historical atmospheres. That Jesson's trenchant analysis is political in content and intent breathes vigour into his methods and prompts us be alert to the changes occurring around us. Looking at contemporary New Zealand in the presence, as it were, of the towering figure Captain Ahab, I found myself thinking more and more of John Mulgan's novel Man Alone and how this too, although aesthetically and stylistically opposite to Melville's massive tome, offers an interesting perspective on the present situation.

This paper examines the developments in German social work theory from the 1970s to the 1990s. It starts with an analysis of socio‐economic relations which have given rise to a division of society as well as a consumerist approach of "service orientation" for the social services which presents a challenge both for social work theory and professional practice.Against this background, major themes in the development of social work theory are identified. The authors observe a trend towards a greater recognition of the individual and her or his life‐world. Although presented in the ideological context of neoliberalism, they argue that the core of the consumerist approach of "service orientation"– the privileging of the consumer – provides a basis for a paradigm shift in social work theory which will be an adequate response to "reflexive modernization" of society if taken out of the consumerist context and reformulated for the public services.In the final section of the paper the authors present an outline of a theory of ldquo;social work as service" as a professional mode of action in the public sector of social service provision. It starts from a conceptual analysis of the service relation, examines the structural elements of the service context and discusses the necessary societal conditions. It is the thesis of the paper that the dialectical relationship of professional and service user represented in the conceptualization of social work as service will be the foundation for a new professionalism.

In a world where chattel slavery is outlawed everywhere, so that nobody, anywhere, is legally ascribed the status of 'slave', what do campaigners and politicians mean by the term 'modern slavery'? This article explores 'new abolitionist' efforts to define 'slavery', observing that it follows a tradition of liberal thought in which the singular wrong of slavery is held to be that it converts persons into things, an assumption that has also informed one strand of the historical literature on slavery in the Atlantic World. It then considers another strand of slavery scholarship, as well as some historical evidence, that alerts us to serious flaws in accounts that frame slavery through reference to the conceptual opposition of persons and things. In reality, Atlantic World slaves had a 'bifurcated existence' as both 'things' and 'persons', as Saidiya Hartman puts it. The article asks what closer attention to the history of the slave's double character might teach us about serious and heavy restraints on freedom in the contemporary world.

This book offers an innovative account of social-control and behaviorist thinking in social policies and welfare systems and the impact it has had on disadvantaged groups. The contributors review various controls and impulsions that have been applied to individuals and households and how such interventions have narrowed social rights.

Age of Revolutions, 1820-1850. The Revolution of '76 Extending Itself across the Seas: Southern Analysis of European Revolutions -- Antebellum Sectionalism, 1850-1860. Let the South Take Warning: Slavery and Expansion in an International Context ; A Tool Wherewith to Promote Agitation: European Revolutionaries and Sectional Tension -- Secession, 1860-1861. Equal among the Other Nations: Secessionists' Liberal International Perspective ; Without a Parallel and Without a Rival: Secessionists' Conservative International Perspective ; Disunion ... Is Fatal in the End: Southern Unionists' International Perspective -- Wartime Realities, 1861-1865. Of What Avail Are the Appeals of the South: The Evolution of the Liberal Confederate International Perspective ; We Stand Alone: The Evolution of the Conservative and Unionist International Perspectives.