Books by Stephen Steinberg

Until recently, there has been a widespread view that we must give up amenities of modern life in order to achieve environmental sustainability. While newspapers and other popular media tend to focus on the negative aspects of environmental change, this volume examines the alternative notion of 'positive ecology'. Initially gleaned from the orientation of 'positive psychology', this argues that environmental science has been all too focused on analysing negative 'pathologies' and forgetting to provide more positive analysis and activism for sustainability. Bringing together a wide range of 'positive ecology' orientated case studies for the first time, the book discusses the wider contexts of how humanity is dependent on a functioning, biodiverse ecosphere of which we are only one part. It provides an original and previously undervalued approach to sustainability, and suggests that work towards sustainability is not only a necessity for our children's future, but necessary, sensible and meaningful in the present.

Winner of the ASA, Oliver Cox Award for Anti-Racist ScholarshipFrom the author of The Ethnic Myth comes this cogent analysis of how social science has placed a liberal gloss on racism and failed to champion civil rights. From a powerful critique of Gunnar Myrdal's classic An American Dilemma to a new epilogue that dismantles the myth of black progress, Turning Back offers a challenge to liberals as well as conservatives, blacks as well as whites, who have fueled the current backlash by providing a spurious intellectual cover for gutting affirmative action and other policies designed to advance the cause of racial justice.

This analysis and overview of the American academic profession aims to break the code of silence that hangs over it, as well as address some of the criticisms levelled at it. It asks can a society truly understand its universities when it has moved too quickly from admiration to complaint.