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Arguments in Context

Contributor: Robinson

Publisher: Muhlenberg College

License: CC BY-NC

Arguments in Context is a comprehensive introduction to critical thinking that covers all the basics in student-friendly language. Intended for use in a semester-long course, the text features classroom-tested examples and exercises that have been chosen to emphasize the relevance and applicability of the subject to everyday life. Three themes are developed as the text proceeds from argument identification and analysis, to the standards and techniques of evaluation: (i) the importance of asking the right questions, (ii) the influence of biases, cognitive illusions, and other psychological factors, and (iii) the ways that social situations and structures can enhance and impoverish our thinking. On this last point, the text includes sustained discussion of disagreement, cooperative dialogue, testimony, trust, and social media. Overall, the text aims to equip readers with a set of tools for working through important decisions and disagreements, and to help them become more careful and active thinkers.

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Impact of Materials on Society

Contributors: Acord, Jones, and Bryant

Publisher: University of Florida

License: CC BY-NC

This textbook supports the Impact of Materials on Society course and teaching materials, developed with the Materials Research Society. The textbook offers an exploration into materials (including ceramics, clay, concrete, glass, metals, and polymers) and the relationship with technologies and social structures. The textbook was developed by an interdisciplinary team from Engineering and Liberal Arts and Sciences, including anthropologists, sociologists, historians, media studies experts, Classicists, and more.

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The Environmental Politics and Policy of Western Public Lands

Contributors: Wolters and Steel

Publisher: Oregon State University

License: CC BY-NC

In this volume, Erika Allen Wolters and Brent Steel have brought together the experts who can explain the evolution of public lands policies and politics in all their complexities. While their subject is complex, their prose is clear, and while their subject is torn by some of the most viciously self-interested, deceitful arguments in politics today, their prose is calm, factual, and evenhanded. No one should underestimate what a rare and valuable gift this is.

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Political Ideologies and Worldviews: An Introduction

Contributor: Vézina

Publisher: Kwantlen Polytechnic University

License: CC BY-NC

Political Ideologies and Worldviews: An Introduction takes a “pluralist” approach and, in addition to being the first open textbook on its subject, also pushes back against the Eurocentric tendencies of standard textbooks by including chapters on Indigenous worldviews and Confucianism. Providing the latest scholarship on “classical ideologies” (liberalism, conservatism, socialism, anarchism, etc.), the textbook also includes innovative chapters on populism, feminism, and multiculturalism, as well as looking at the future of ideologies in a globalized world. Joining together scholars from Canada and beyond, the text also contains discussion questions to help students and readers to think further.

(4 reviews)

Graduate research methods in social work

Contributors: DeCarlo, Cummings, and Agnelli

Publisher: Open Social Work Education

License: CC BY-NC-SA

We designed our book to help graduate social work students through every step of the research process, from conceptualization to dissemination. Our textbook centers cultural humility, information literacy, pragmatism, and an equal emphasis on quantitative and qualitative methods. It includes extensive content on literature reviews, cultural bias and respectfulness, and qualitative methods, in contrast to traditionally used commercial textbooks in social work research.

(1 review)

Knowing Home: Braiding Indigenous Science with Western Science Book 1

Contributors: Snively and Williams

Publisher: University of Victoria

License: CC BY-NC-SA

Knowing Home attempts to capture the creative vision of Indigenous scientific knowledge and technology that is derived from an ecology of a home place. The traditional wisdom component of Indigenous Science—the values and ways of decision-making—assists humans in their relationship with each other, the land and water, and all of creation. Indigenous perspectives have the potential to give insight and guidance to the kind of environmental ethics and deep understanding that we must gain as we attempt to solve the increasingly complex problems of the 21st century.

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Climate Lessons: Environmental, Social, Local

Contributor: Bakermans

Publisher: Worcester Polytechnic Institute

License: CC BY-NC

Anthropogenic climate change is one of the, if not the most, pressing issues of our times. The problems that it causes range across many social and environmental domains from habitat and species loss and displacement to the more human and social concerns and issues of access to water, sea level rise that affects coastal communities, to economic degradation as a result of the aforementioned and other connected issues such as increased frequency of storms, droughts, wildfires, and the like. We also know that the affects of climate change are not distributed evenly across populations- that many will and do feel the negative effects of this slow developing problem earlier and more intensely than others based on where they are located both geographically and within economic and other socio-cultural hierarchies. We also know that recently, there is a marked effort to begin to move away from simply decrying the horrors of climate change to a continued recognition of those horrors as they exist now and into the future alongside attempts to begin to come to terms with the changing climate and to rethink the ways that our social and environmental relations and communities are organized with an eye toward both adapting to these changes and mitigating further damage. There is, however, much work to be done. This book was co-authored by undergraduate students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute while exploring the influences of Earth systems and human systems on climate change and the communities at most risk in an interdisciplinary project-based first year course. This course attempts to bring together knowledge of the science of ecological and climate systems and their changing status with knowledge of the social and communal structures within which these systems are embedded and through which they have been influenced. The book highlights key interests and insights of current students in their quest to think through these issues and to create a better world.

(3 reviews)

Principles of Social Psychology - 1st International Edition

Contributors: Jhangiani, Tarry, and Stangor

Publisher: BCcampus

License: CC BY-NC-SA

Helping students organize their thinking about social psychology at a conceptual level.

(3 reviews)

Humans R Social Media Open Textbook - Edition Winter 2022

Contributor: Daly

Publisher: The University of Arizona

License: CC BY

Social media and humans exist in a world of mutual influence, and humans play central roles in how this influence is mediated and transferred. Originally created by University of Arizona Information scholar Diana Daly, this Winter 2022 Edition of the book Humans R Social Media uses plain language, audio and video, embedded questions and active learning activities, and contributions by students to help readers actively understand how we as humans shape social media, and how social media shapes our world in turn. The authors and contributors examine digitally mediated identity, microcelebrity, and relationships through sociological and feminist perspectives, and visualize networked publics and online spaces using historic forms of communication. Dynamic coverage by Daly and contributors also examines the #metoo movement, Black Lives Matter, and conversations around race and radicalism. Most notably, the world of information is examined through simple explanations of algorithms, types of misinformation, and spreadable media including memes. Designed for beginning college students, Humans are Social Media offers a unique, multimedia overview of social media in relationships with users and human cultures. (Cover design by Jacquie Kuru featuring work by iVoices Media Lab students. Top row, from left: Aditya Kumar, Anonymous, Alora, Preston Pierce Kerstin. Row 2: Jenna N Wing, Anna, Brenda Dolores Perea, Kennedy. Row 3: Jillian Bandler, Emilee Gustafson, Anonymous, Bianca. Row 4: Abby Arnold, Ashlyn Geaslen, Malia, Nellie Youssef. Row 5: Blaze Mutware, Luis A. Ruiz, Rachel Rojas, Sydney)

(2 reviews)

Language and Culture in Context - A Primer on Intercultural Communication

Contributor: Godwin-Jones

Publisher: Virginia Commonwealth University

License: CC BY-NC

The text introduces some of the key concepts in intercultural communication as traditionally presented in (North American) courses and textbooks, namely the study of differences between cultures, as represented in the works and theories of Edward Hall and Geert Hofstede. Common to these approaches is the prominence of context, leading to a view of human interactions as dynamic and changeable, given the complexity of language and culture, as human agents interact with their environments.

(3 reviews)