Cultural Validity in Assessment: Addressing Linguistic and Cultural Diversity (repost)

María del Rosario Basterra, Elise Trumbull, “Cultural Validity in Assessment: Addressing Linguistic and Cultural Diversity”
2011 | ISBN-10: 0415999790, 0415999804 | 320 pages | PDF | 2 MB

What is assessment and how is it a cultural practice? How does failure to account for linguistic and cultural variation among students jeopardize assessment validity? What is required to achieve cultural validity in assessment? This resource for practicing and prospective teachers – as well as others concerned with fair and valid assessment – provides a thorough grounding in relevant theory, research, and practice. The book lays out criteria for culturally valid assessment and recommends specific strategies that teachers can use to design and implement culturally valid classroom assessments.

Assessment plays a powerful role in the process of education in the US and has a disproportionately negative impact on students who do not come from mainstream, middle-class backgrounds. Given the significance of testing in education today, cultural validity in assessment is an urgent issue facing educators. This book is essential reading for addressing this important, relevant topic.

Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times

Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (Critical Cultural Communication) by Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser
English | 2012 | ISBN: 0814764002, 0814764010 | 314 pages | PDF | 3,2 MB

Buying (RED) products—from Gap T-shirts to Apple—to fight AIDS. Drinking a “Caring Cup” of coffee at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf to support fair trade. Driving a Toyota Prius to fight global warming. All these commonplace activities point to a central feature of contemporary culture: the most common way we participate in social activism is by buying something.

Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser have gathered an exemplary group of scholars to explore this new landscape through a series of case studies of “commodity activism.” Drawing from television, film, consumer activist campaigns, and cultures of celebrity and corporate patronage, the essays take up examples such as the Dove “Real Beauty” campaign, sex positive retail activism, ABC’s Extreme Home Makeover, and Angelina Jolie as multinational celebrity missionary.

Exploring the complexities embedded in contemporary political activism, Commodity Activism reveals the workings of power and resistance as well as citizenship and subjectivity in the neoliberal era. Refusing to simply position politics in opposition to consumerism, this collection teases out the relationships between material cultures and political subjectivities, arguing that activism may itself be transforming into a branded commodity.

Cultural Revolution in Iran: Contemporary Popular Culture in the Islamic Republic

Cultural Revolution in Iran: Contemporary Popular Culture in the Islamic Republic by Annabelle Sreberny and Massoumeh Torfeh
English | 2013 | ISBN: 1780760892, 1784535133 | 296 pages | PDF | 25 MB

The Islamic Republic of Iran has entered its fourth decade, and the values and legacy of the Revolution it was founded upon continue to have profound and contradictory consequences for Iranian life. Despite the repressive power of the current regime the immense creativity of popular cultural practices, that negotiate and resist a repressive system, is a potent and dynamic force. This book draws on the expertise and experience of Iranian and international academics and activists to address diverse areas of social and cultural innovation that are driving change and progress. While religious conservatism remains the creed of the establishment, this volume uncovers an underground world of new technology, media and entertainment that speaks to women seeking a greater public role and a restless younger generation that organizes and engages with global trends online.

A Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title selection.

A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics

A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics by Mady Schutzman
English | Jan. 15, 2006 | ISBN: 0415322936, 0415322944 | 224 Pages | PDF | 1 MB

A Boal Companion looks at the cultural practices which inform TO and explore them within a larger frame of cultural politics and performance theory. The contributors put TO into dialogue with complexity theory – Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, race theory, feminist performance art, Deleuze and Guattari, and liberation psychology – to name just a few, and in doing so, the kinship between Boal’s project and multiple fields of social psychology, ethics, biology, comedy, trauma studies and political science is made visible.

Case Studies of Building Pathology in Cultural Heritage

Case Studies of Building Pathology in Cultural Heritage
Springer | Civil Engineering | May 25, 2016 | ISBN-10: 9811006385 | 251 pages | pdf | 12.5 mb

Editors: Delgado, João M.P.Q. (Ed.)

Bridges the gap between current approaches to the surveying of buildings and the detailed study of defect diagnosis, prognosis, and remediation
Features a number of concrete case studies and detailed set of references
Covers a variety of engineering disciplines such as civil, materials, and mechanical engineering

This book highlights new developments in the field of building pathology and rehabilitation, taking an in-depth look into current approaches to the surveying of buildings and the study of defect diagnosis, prognosis and remediation. Including a number of real-world case studies and a detailed set of references for further reading, the book will appeal to a wide readership of scientists, practitioners, students and lecturers.

Number of Illustrations and Tables

39 b/w illustrations, 212 illustrations in colour

Topics

Building Materials

Structural Materials

Engineering Thermodynamics, Heat and Mass Transfer

Cultural Heritage

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Thomas Barfield - Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History [Repost]

Thomas Barfield – Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History
2010 | ISBN: 0691145687 | English | 400 pages | EPUB | 1 MB

Afghanistan traces the historic struggles and the changing nature of political authority in this volatile region of the world, from the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth century to the Taliban resurgence today. Thomas Barfield introduces readers to the bewildering diversity of tribal and ethnic groups in Afghanistan, explaining what unites them as Afghans despite the regional, cultural, and political differences that divide them. He shows how governing these peoples was relatively easy when power was concentrated in a small dynastic elite, but how this delicate political order broke down in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Afghanistan’s rulers mobilized rural militias to expel first the British and later the Soviets. Armed insurgency proved remarkably successful against the foreign occupiers, but it also undermined the Afghan government’s authority and rendered the country ever more difficult to govern as time passed. Barfield vividly describes how Afghanistan’s armed factions plunged the country into a civil war, giving rise to clerical rule by the Taliban and Afghanistan’s isolation from the world. He examines why the American invasion in the wake of September 11 toppled the Taliban so quickly, and how this easy victory lulled the United States into falsely believing that a viable state could be built just as easily.

Afghanistan is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how a land conquered and ruled by foreign dynasties for more than a thousand years became the “graveyard of empires” for the British and Soviets, and what the United States must do to avoid a similar fate.