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SOCIAL SCIENCES

Social sciences examine human behavior, social structures, and interactions in various settings. Fields such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, and economics study social relationships, cultural norms, and institutions. By using different research methods, social scientists seek to understand community dynamics, the effects of policies, and factors driving social change. This field is important for tackling current issues, guiding public discussions, and developing strategies for social progress and innovation.

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Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research

By Nancy D. Campbel

lDiscovering Addiction brings the history of human and animal experimentation in addiction science into the present with a wealth of archival research and dozens of oral-history interviews with addiction researchers. Professor Campbell examines the birth of addiction science---the National Academy of Sciences's project to find a pharmacological fix for narcotics addiction in the late 1930s---and then explores the human and primate experimentation involved in the succeeding studies of the "opium problem," revealing how addiction science became "brain science" by the 1990s.
Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007. 337p.

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The Spectacle of the False Flag: Parapolitics from JFK to Watergate

By Eric Wilson

"Eric Wilson’s work poses crucial challenges to social theory, unsettling our understanding of the nature of the liberal democratic state. In The Spectacle of the False Flag, he urges the reader to examine the, often unconsidered, deep state practices that confound conventional notions of the state as monolithic or uniform. This compelling volume traces deep state conflicts and convergences through central cases in the development of American political economic power — JFK/Dallas, LBJ/Gulf of Tonkin, and Nixon/Watergate. Rigorously documented and unflinchingly analyzed, “The Spectacle of the False Flag” provides a stunning example of a new criminological practice—one that takes the state seriously, making the inner workings of the state rather than its effects the primary object of study. Drawing upon a wealth of historical records and developing the theoretical insights of Guy Debord’s writings on spectacular society, Wilson offers a glimpse into a necessary criminology to come."

Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2014. 348p.

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Mapping the Ideological Landscape of Extreme Misogyny

By Arie Perliger, Catherine Stevens, and Eviane Leidig

Despite the growing complexity of the online misogynist landscape and important efforts to study some misogynist groups through singular case studies, scholars have a limited understanding of the distinctions between the various relevant misogynist communities in terms of their rhetorical, operational, and social facets. The current research aims to address this gap by employing a multi-layered analytical framework of different misogynist communities. We begin with a comprehensive literature review conceptualising extreme misogyny with an overview of the current misogynist spaces and ideological narratives. Consequently, we sample the online ecosystem of extreme misogyny both within and across these communities while utilising a multi-categorical tool in order to identify the discursive, organisational, and operational distinctions between various misogynist communities. Our findings reflect substantial differences between the various misogynist communities in terms of their legitimacy to violence, the conceptualisation of their adversaries, ideological vision’s time orientation, and overall operational discourse.The 

The Hague: International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT), 2023. 36p

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The Power of Morality in Movements: Civic Engagement in Climate Justice, Human Rights, and Democracy

Edited by Anders Sevelsted and Jonas Tougol

This Open Access book explores the role of morality in social movements. Morality has always been central to social movements whether it be in the form of the moral foundations of movement claims, politics and ideologies, the values motivating participation, the new moral principles envisioned and practiced among movement participants, or the overall struggle over society’s moral values that movements engage in. This is evident in movements emerging from recent interlinked crises: the crisis of human rights, the climate crisis, and the developing crisis of democracy. In analyzing these current events through a variety of theoretical, methodological, and empirical lenses, this book brings morality to the forefront of the discussion, allowing for a rethinking of its role. The book is divided into five parts. The first part introduces and explores the central concept of the book, outlining the dominant existing approaches to morality and ethics in the extant movement and civil society literature. The following three parts investigate morality in relation to topics and movements that are either prominent to contemporary politics or salient to the question of morality. In these empirically informed parts, the authors apply a diverse selection of methods spanning fieldwork, historiography, traditional and novel statistical analytical methods, and big data analysis to a diverse selection of data. Topics discussed include refugee solidarity movements, male privilege and anti-feminism movement, environmental and climate justice movements, and religious activism. The fifth and closing part of the book focuses on the more abstract theoretical question of the relationship between morality and ethics and activist practices and points to future research agendas. This book will be of general interest to students, scholars and academics within the disciplines of political sociology, -science and -anthropology and of particular interest to academics in the subfields of social movement and civil society studies.

Cham: Springer Nature, 2023. 334p.

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Mission AI: The New System Technology

By Haroon Sheikh; Corien Prins; Erik Schrijvers

This open access book offers a strategic perspective on AI and the process of embedding it in society. After decades of research, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now entering society at large. Due to its general purpose character, AI will change society in multiple, fundamental and unpredictable ways. Therefore, the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) characterizes AI as a system technology: a rare type of technologies that have a systemic impact on society. Earlier system technologies include electricity, the combustion engine and the computer. The history of these technologies provides us with useful insights about what it takes to direct the introduction of AI in society. The WRR identifies five key tasks to structurally work on this process: demystification, contextualisation, engagement, regulation and positioning. By clarifying what AI is (demystification), creating a functional ecosystem (contextualisation), involving diverse stakeholders (engagement), developing directive frameworks (regulation) and engaging internationally (positioning), societies can meaningfully influence how AI settles. Collectively, these activities steer the process of co-development between technology and society, and each representing a different path to safeguard public values. Mission AI - The New System Technology was originally published as an advisory report for the government of the Netherlands. The strategic analysis and the outlined recommendations are, however, relevant to every government and organization that aims to take up 'misson AI' and embed this newest system technology in our world.

Cham: Springer Nature, 2023. 410p.

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Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads through Society

By Aaron Lynch

From the Preface:” This book introduces a new branch of science dealing with the evolution of ideas that program f for their own retransmission. These self-spreading ideas have been called memes ever since zoologist Richard Dawkins coined the term in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. After ten chapters on genetic evolution, he devoted the closing chapter to the nongenetic evolution of memes. Two years later, I independently reinvented this theory of self-propagating ideas, and realized that ti would someday warrant a whole book. I had coined a different neologism back then, but later adopted the term meme after a friend told me about Dawkins's meme chapter.”

NY. Basic Books, 1996. 194p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

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The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

By Richard Dawkins

From the Preface: “he first chapter does some of the work of a Preface, in explaining what the book does and does not set out to accomplish, so I can be brief here. It si not a textbook, nor an introduction to an established field. It is a personal look at the evolution oflife, and in particular at the logic of natural selection and the level in the hierarchy of life at which natural selection can be said toact. I happen to be an ethologist, but I hope preoccupations with animal behaviour will not be too noticeable.The intended scope of the book is wider. The readers for whom I am mainly writing are my professional colleagues. evolutionary biologists, ethologists and sociobiologists, ecologists, and philosophers and humanists interested in evolutionary science, including, of course, graduate and undergraduate students in all these disciplines. 'Therefore, although this book is in some ways the sequel to my previous book, The Selfish Gene, it assumes that the reader has professional knowledge of evolutionary biology and its technical terms. On the other hand it is possible to enjoy a professional book as a spectator, even if not a participant in the profession.

Oxford. New York. Oxford University Press. 1982. 319p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

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The Selfish Gene

By Richard Dawkins

From the Preface: “This book should be read almostas though it were science fiction. It is designed to appeal to the imagination. But it is not science fiction: it is science. Cliché or not, 'stranger than fiction' expresses exactly how I feel aboutt h etruth. We are survivalmachinesr o b o t vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is atruth which still fils me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it. One of my hopes is that I may have some success in astonishing others.”

Oxford New York. Oxford University Press. 1976. 360p. CONTAINS MARK=UP

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Adaptation In Cultural Evolution An Approach To Medical Anthropology

By Alexander Alland, Jr.

From the Preface: “My interest in human ecology, particularly its medical aspects, developed during my first field experience in the Ivory Coast, West Africa. There I was struck by the wide range of behaviors which made good sense in terms of basic hygiene. Among these were the use of pit latrines, apparently before European contact, frequent and thor- ough bathing, isolation of the sick in the case of certain highly contagious diseases, and the thorough cooking of food. The situation was, of course, by no means perfect, and many tropical diseases could be found in the popu- lation. Still, these people who had no concept of preven- tive medicine other than the use of charms to ward off disease had developed a basically sound set of hygiene practices.”

New York and London. Columbia University Press. 1970. 208p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

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Plan and Purpose in Nature

By George C. Williams

“'Eyes are for seeing and ears for hearing, but what is life itself for? Does it serve any purpose, or did it spring quite by chance from the primeval soup?' Sunday Telegraph

'Anyone with even a casual interest in evolution can enjoy and profit by Williams's book. It can be read like a novel, a novel of ideas. It is a great way to find out what a leading evolutionist is thinking about' Nature

London. Weidenfeld & Nicholson. 1996. 258p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

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The Evolution of Desire:Strategies of Human Mating

By David M. Buss

From the Introduction: “Human Mating Behavior delights and amuses us and galvanizes our gossip, but it is also deeply disturbing. Few domains of human activity generate as much discussion, as many laws, or such elaborate rituals in al cultures. Yet the elements of human mating seem to defyunder- standing. Women and men sometimes find themselves choosing mates who abuse them psychologically and physically. Efforts to attract mates often backfire. Conflicts eruptwithin couples, producing downward spirals of blame and despair. Despite their best intentions and vows of life- long love, half of all married couples end up divorcing.

Pain, betrayal, and loss contrast sharply with the usual romantic notions of love. We grow up believing in true love, in finding our "one and only." We assume that once we do, we will marry in bliss and live happily ever after. But reality rarely coincides withour beliefs.Even a cursory look at the divorce rate, the 30 to 50 percent incidence of extramarital affairs, and the jealous rages that rack so many relation- ships shatters these illusions.”

NY. Basic Books. 1994. 265p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

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The Origins of Virtue

By Matt Ridley

From the Introduction. This is a book about human nature, and in particular the surprisingly social nature of the human animal. We live in towns, work in teams, and our lives are spiders' webs of connections - linking us to relatives, colleagues, companions, friends, superiors, inferiors. We are, misanthropes not withstanding, unable to live without each other. Even on a practical level, it is probably a million years since any human being was entirely and convincingly self-sufficient: able to survive without trading his skills for those of his fellow humans.We are far more dependent on other members of our species than any other ape or monkey. We are more like ants or termites who live as slaves to their societies. We define virtue almost exclusively as pro-social behaviour, and vice as anti-social behaviour. Kropotkin was right to emphasize the huge role that mutual aid plays in our species, but wrong and anthropomorphic to assume that therefore it applied to other species as well. One of the things that marks humanity out from other species, and accounts for our ecological success, is our collection of hyper-social instincts.

London. Penguin,. 1996.294p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

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The Theory of Evolution

By John Maynard Smith

From the cover: Al living plants and animals, including man, are the modified descendants of one or a few simple living things. A hundred years ago Darwin and Wallace in their theory of natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, explained how evolution could have happened, in terms of processes known to take place today. In this book, John Maynard Smith describes how their theory has been confirmed, but at the same time transformed, by recent research, and ni particular by the discovery of the laws of inheritance.

Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1975. 371p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

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The Blind Watchmaker: Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design

By Richard Dawkins

From the introduction: “Darwinism encompasses all of life- human, animal, plant, bacterial, and, fi I am right in the last chapter of this book, extraterrestrial. It provides the only satisfying explanation forwhy we all exist, why we are the way that we are. It is t h ebedrock on which rest all t h edisciplines known as the humanities. I do not mean that history, literarycriticism, and the law should be recast in a specifically Darwinian mould. Far fromit, very far. But all human works are the products of brains, brainsare evolved data processing devices, and we shall misunderstand their works if we forget this fundamental fact. If more doctors understood Darwinism, humanity would not now be facing a crisis of antibiotic resistance. Darwinian evolution, as onereviewer has observed, 'is the most portentous natural truth that science has yet discovered'. I'd add, o'r is likely to discover.”

London. Norton. 1986. 360p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

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Optimising Emotions, Incubating Falsehoods: How to Protect the Global Civic Body from Disinformation and Misinformation

By Vian Bakir and Andrew McStay

This open access book deconstructs the core features of online misinformation and disinformation. It finds that the optimisation of emotions for commercial and political gain is a primary cause of false information online. The chapters distil societal harms, evaluate solutions, and consider what must be done to strengthen societies as new biometric forms of emotion profiling emerge. Based on a rich, empirical, and interdisciplinary literature that examines multiple countries, the book will be of interest to scholars and students of Communications, Journalism, Politics, Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, and Information Science, as well as global and local policymakers and ordinary citizens interested in how to prevent the spread of false information worldwide, both now and in the future.

Cham: Springer, 2022. 280p.

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Primate Aggression, Territoriality, And Xenophobia: A Comparative Perspective

Edited By Ralph L. Holloway

From the Cover: This book is a truly wide-ranging comparative account of primate aggression. It covers the a gressive behavior of all primate taxa - from tree shrews to man - and incorporates not only social, behavioral, and physiological (i.e., endo- crinological and neurological) data, but also the broader ecological and evolutionary approaches. Each contributor is active in research in hisfield, and each fully develops his own particular view- point rather than attempting an artificial "syn- thesis of the whole field. The book will be of great interest and value to those in all of the behavioral sciences, e.g., psychobiology, anthropology, primatology, eth- ology, and psychology, as well as those in many of the life sciences, such as neurobiology, endocrinology, and zoology.

NY. Academic Press. 1974. 509p. CONTAINS MARK-UP.

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Antisemitism in North America: New World, Old Hate

Edited by Steven K. Baum, Neil J. Kressel, Florette Cohen-Abady and Steven Leonard Jacobs

In Antisemitism in North America, leading scholars offer a wide variety of perspectives on why the Jews in North America have sometimes faced considerable bigotry but have, in general, found a home far more hospitable than the ones they left behind in Europe. ; Readership: Those who are interested in a scholarly understanding of prejudice antisemitism, Jewish studies, hate studies, religious studies, cultural studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, social psychology and social sciences.

Leiden; Boston:  Brill: 2016. 476p.

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Narkomania: Drugs, HIV, and Citizenship in Ukraine

By Jennifer J. Carroll

Against the backdrop of a post-Soviet state set aflame by geopolitical conflict and violent revolution, Narkomania considers whether substance use disorders are everywhere the same and whether our responses to drug use presuppose what kind of people those who use drugs really are. Jennifer J. Carroll's ethnography is a story about public health and international efforts to quell the spread of HIV. Carroll focuses on Ukraine where the prevalence of HIV among people who use drugs is higher than in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and unpacks the arguments and myths surrounding medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in Ukraine. What she presents in Narkomania forces us to question drug policy, its uses, and its effects on "normal" citizens. Carroll uses her findings to explore what people who use drugs can teach us about the contemporary societies emerging in post-Soviet space. With examples of how MAT has been politicized, how drug use has been tied to ideas of "good" citizenship, and how vigilantism towards people who use drugs has occurred, Narkomania details the cultural and historical backstory of the situation in Ukraine. Carroll reveals how global efforts supporting MAT in Ukraine allow the ideas surrounding MAT, drug use, and HIV to resonate more broadly into international politics and echo into the heart of the Ukrainian public.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. 251p.

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Totemism

By Claude Levi-Strauss

From the cover: 'This work is significant not only for students of anthropolgy but for students of philosophy and psychology as well. The distinguished anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss examines here the great variety of beliefs encompassed by totemism, the attacks to which it has been subject, and the constant attempts to restore useful meaning to it. His account deals with the views of such renowned anthropologists as Boas, van Gennep, Elkin, Fortes, Firth, Evans-Pritchard, and Radcliffe- Brown; it also brings to light some neglected observations by Bergson and Rousseau. In reviewing the major theories about totemism, the author notes that ti has gradually come to be understood not as a distinctive institution, but as a way of thinking which is as characteristic of our own thinking as it is of the "primitives" for whom totemism was an integral part of life.

London. Beacon Press. 1963. 120p . CONTAINS MARK-UP.

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Marginal People in Deviant Places: Ethnography, Difference, and the Challenge to Scientific Racism

By Janice M. Irvine

Marginal People in Deviant Places revisits early- to mid-twentieth-century ethnographic studies, arguing that their focus on marginal subcultures—ranging from American hobos, to men who have sex with other men in St. Louis bathrooms, to hippies, to taxi dancers in Chicago, to elderly Jews in Venice, California—helped produce new ways of thinking about social difference more broadly in the United States. Irvine demonstrates how the social scientists who told the stories of these marginalized groups represented an early challenge to then-dominant narratives of scientific racism, prefiguring the academic fields of gender, ethnic, sexuality, and queer studies in key ways. In recounting the social histories of certain American outsiders, Irvine identifies an American paradox by which social differences are both despised and desired, and she describes the rise of an outsider capitalism that integrates difference into American society by marketing it.

Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2022. 349p.

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