Constructionist theory describes and analyzes social problems as emerging through the efforts of claimsmakers who bring issues to public attention. By typifying a problem and characterizing it as a particular sort, claimsmakers can shape policymaking and public response to the problem. Th is new edition of Images of Issues addresses claimsmaking in the 1990s, featuring such issues as fathers' rights, stalking, sexual abuse by the clergy, hate crimes, multicultural education, factory farming, and concluding with an expanded discussion of the theoretical debate over constructionism.

Internet addiction. Cell-phone-distracted drivers. Teen suicide. Economic recession. The health risks of trans fats. The carefully selected collection of case studies in Making Sense of Social Problems is designed to help students understand and critically evaluate a wide range of contemporary social issues.

Images, Issues, and Attacks explores important differences between incumbents and challengers in the uses of televised advertising in modern presidential elections. Elections since 1956 can be divided into three categories: elections with strong incumbents, the incumbent wins; elections with weak incumbents, the incumbent loses; and elections with surrogate incumbents, the vice president runs. Incumbent and challenger advertising emphasizes personal imagery, links the imagery to specific issues, and attacks rivals for opposing those images and issues. The first part of the book describes how incumbents and challengers used these themes in the elections from 1980 to 2000. The second part applies those findings to the 2004 election and shows how George W. Bush presented himself as a strong incumbent and how he and his challengers varied their mix of images, issues, and attacks over different periods of the election campaign.

The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.

Effigy examines the images of a capital defendant portrayed during the guilt and penalty phases of a capital trial, the trial tactics used by attorneys to impart these images, and the consequences that result from the jury's attempt to reconcile contradictory images to place one in permanent record as a verdict. These images are starkly contrasted against the backdrop of a brutal murder in which the stereotypes of American fear are realized: Donta Page, the defendant, is an African American male from a low-income segment of society while Peyton Tuthill, the victim, was a Caucasian female from a middle-income suburb. The prosecuting attorneys depict the defendant as a "savage beast," juxtaposing their image against that of a "troubled youth" as Page is portrayed by the defense attorneys. Slowly and methodically developed as figures with diametrically opposed features, none of which overlap or congeal, both of the images are portrayed as real (buttressed by the testimony of witnesses) rather than constructed. The jury is expected to render a verdict that accepts one and rejects the other: there is no middle ground. Book jacket.

The Association for the Study of Play (TASP) is the sponsor of this eighth volume in the Play & Culture Studies series. TASP is a professional group of researchers who study play. The focus of this eighth volume of the Play & Culture Studies series is on how play takes many forms as it cuts across species, ages, and cultures. The articles in this volume present current theoretical and empirical research on play and culture from a variety of disciplines including psychology, education, animal studies, and sociology. Applications to practice and policy implications are presented as well. Volume 8 continues the tradition of the Play & Culture series by presenting a view of play that is broad in scope both in terms of the subjects of study and the ways in which researchers approach the study of these diverse forms of play.

As time passes, personal memories of the Great Depression die with those who lived through the desperate 1930s. In the absence of firsthand knowledge, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and the photographs produced for the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) now provide most of the images that come to mind when we think of the 1930s. That novel and those photographs, as this book shows, share a history. Fully exploring this complex connection for the first time, Picturing Migrants offers new insight into Steinbeck’s novel and the FSA’s photography—and into the circumstances that have made them enduring icons of the Depression. Looking at the work of Dorothea Lange, Horace Bristol, Arthur Rothstein, and Russell Lee, it is easy to imagine that these images came straight out of the pages of The Grapes of Wrath. This should be no surprise, James R. Swensen tells us, because Steinbeck explicitly turned to photographs of the period to create his visceral narrative of hope and loss among Okie migrants in search of a better life in California. When the novel became an instant best seller upon its release in April 1939, some dismissed its imagery as pure fantasy. Lee knew better and traveled to Oklahoma for proof. The documentary pictures he produced are nothing short of a photographic illustration of the hard lives and desperate reality that Steinbeck so vividly portrayed. In Picturing Migrants, Swensen sets these lesser-known images alongside the more familiar work of Lange and others, giving us a clearer understanding of the FSA’s work to publicize the plight of the migrant in the wake of the novel and John Ford’s award-winning film adaptation. A new perspective on an era whose hardships and lessons resonate to this day, Picturing Migrants lets us see as never before how a novel and a series of documentary photographs have kept the Great Depression unforgettably real for generation after generation.