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El cambio climático y la crisis de extinción entrelazados se prestan a la economía política. Joseph Henry Vogel ha construido un argumento a favor de llevar a los países ricos en carbono, pero pobres económicamente, a través del cuello de botella de la economía de vaquero y hacia el “comercio en el derecho de emisiones” de los países Anexo I del Protocolo de Kioto. Ecuador sirve como el modelo. “La economía de la Iniciativa Yasuní-ITT” es un contrapunto a muchos niveles a “El Informe Stern” por Sir Nicholas Stern. En el nivel más básico, Vogel sostiene que Stern se equivoca por su falta de reconocimiento de la naturaleza del cambio climático como termodinámica, con lo cual pierde de vista la apropiación del Norte del sumidero atmosférico. El cambio a la termodinámica pone de relieve la legitimidad de una “deuda de carbono”, que comienza a hacer tictac con el primer informe del Grupo Intergubernamental de Expertos sobre Cambio Climático ((IPCC) por sus siglas en inglés) en 1990. A través del lente de la teoría económica, la intransigencia comprensible de los países pobres para asumir el “tope” en el “comercio en el derecho de emisiones” es una distorsión del sistema económico. No obstante, acorde con esa misma economía, una distorsión puede justificar otra. Esa otra distorsión es el pago que Ecuador busca por no perforar en la Reserva de la Biosfera Yasuní. Haciendo caso de la llamada de Deirdre (antes Donald) McCloskey de que la economía necesita más humor, Vogel ha escrito una crítica penetrante sobre la economía convencional que a su vez entretiene.

This book demonstrates that redistributive land reform can transform the lives of poor peasants by removing distortions in the land ownership structure which allows them access to land and other natural resources which are critical for their social reproduction strategies and livelihood security. Furthermore, it shows that the benefits of land reform go beyond gaining access to land in order to farm; off-farm activities such as artisanal gold mining are a key part of rural livelihoods as they provide capital for further agricultural investments. The fact that a large number of peasants engaged in off-farm activities who utilize income gained from such activities to further agricultural investments demonstrates that off-farm activities are inextricably linked to future agrarian investments.

The book further demonstrates that the land reform was a process underpinned by many dynamics which were often localized in character. This means that any analysis of its outcomes must take into account this diversity of experiences. Overall, important lessons can be drawn from the Mhondoro Ngezi case study presented in this book. First, land reform can address historical injustices in the land ownership structure by allowing landless peasants to access land and other natural resources formerly enclosed under the previous agrarian structure. However, the process is not without challenges; a large-scale resettlement of people requires the provision of social infrastructure and other support such as farming inputs. Without such support, it is difficult for land beneficiaries to quickly make investments on their land. Second, and this is linked to the first point, the benefits of land reform are long term; their impact is likely to take longer to realise. Third, redistributive land reform has the potential to radicalize poor peasants, to demand their rights and entitlements to land and natural resources previously enclosed under an unjust land ownership structure and socio-economic relations. Fourth, a radical transformation of property rights in favour of peasants, such as the one undertaken in Zimbabwe, is likely to attract an international backlash from global capital as it is seen as a direct challenge to the neo-liberal regime of property rights.

This book demonstrates that redistributive land reform can transform the lives of poor peasants by removing distortions in the land ownership structure which allows them access to land and other natural resources which are critical for their social reproduction strategies and livelihood security. Furthermore, it shows that the benefits of land reform go beyond gaining access to land in order to farm; off-farm activities such as artisanal gold mining are a key part of rural livelihoods as they provide capital for further agricultural investments. The fact that a large number of peasants engaged in off-farm activities who utilize income gained from such activities to further agricultural investments demonstrates that off-farm activities are inextricably linked to future agrarian investments.

The book further demonstrates that the land reform was a process underpinned by many dynamics which were often localized in character. This means that any analysis of its outcomes must take into account this diversity of experiences. Overall, important lessons can be drawn from the Mhondoro Ngezi case study presented in this book. First, land reform can address historical injustices in the land ownership structure by allowing landless peasants to access land and other natural resources formerly enclosed under the previous agrarian structure. However, the process is not without challenges; a large-scale resettlement of people requires the provision of social infrastructure and other support such as farming inputs. Without such support, it is difficult for land beneficiaries to quickly make investments on their land. Second, and this is linked to the first point, the benefits of land reform are long term; their impact is likely to take longer to realise. Third, redistributive land reform has the potential to radicalize poor peasants, to demand their rights and entitlements to land and natural resources previously enclosed under an unjust land ownership structure and socio-economic relations. Fourth, a radical transformation of property rights in favour of peasants, such as the one undertaken in Zimbabwe, is likely to attract an international backlash from global capital as it is seen as a direct challenge to the neo-liberal regime of property rights.

Over the past decade India has witnessed a number of new land wars that have centred crucially on the often forcible transfer of land from small farmers or indigenous groups to private companies. Among these many localized and dispersed land conflicts, the land war that erupted in Singur, West Bengal, in 2006, went on to make national headlines and become paradigmatic of many of the challenges and social conflicts that arise when a state-led policy of swiftly transferring land to private sector companies encounters resistance on the ground.

‘Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India’ is about the movement of Singur’s unwilling farmers to retain and reclaim their farmland. The book analyses the practical, representational and political work that the unwilling farmers engaged in as they have sought to mobilize public opinion; represent and justify their claims to land to a larger public; forge useful political alliances; engage and manoeuvre the legal system; navigate internal differences and discrepant interests; and simply keep the movement together on the ground. How did Singur’s unwilling farmers frame their movement to save the farmland? Which notions of development and justice did they draw on? How did they navigate everyday social cleavages and conflicts along the lines of caste, class and gender? Who led, who followed, and who was silenced? By engaging these questions through the prism of everyday politics, ‘Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India’ makes an important empirical and ethnographic contribution to the still-limited anthropological understanding of the localized dynamics of India’s new land wars.

As a specialist on India, the economist Daniel Thorner is remembered for his deep commitment to the cause of Indian nationalism, and his understanding of the country's social, economic and political complexity. As a tribute to Thorner's wide-ranging and far-reaching contributions to Indian economics, Thorner's wife, Alice Thorner, and his good friend, P. N. Haksar, have put together a series of lectures in association with the Indian Statistical Institute. This collection reflects the breadth of Thorner's own range of interests, encompassing themes in the social sciences and issues in the fields of public policy and human rights. This book comprises nine lectures, together with a hitherto-unpublished paper by Thorner himself, and an introduction by Utsa Patnaik, Professor of Economics at Jawarhlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

As a specialist on India, the economist Daniel Thorner is remembered for his deep commitment to the cause of Indian nationalism, and his understanding of the country's social, economic and political complexity. As a tribute to Thorner's wide-ranging and far-reaching contributions to Indian economics, Thorner's wife, Alice Thorner, and his good friend, P. N. Haksar, have put together a series of lectures in association with the Indian Statistical Institute. This collection reflects the breadth of Thorner's own range of interests, encompassing themes in the social sciences and issues in the fields of public policy and human rights. This book comprises nine lectures, together with a hitherto-unpublished paper by Thorner himself, and an introduction by Utsa Patnaik, Professor of Economics at Jawarhlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

This book is a collection of 15 essays on important themes in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, divided into three sections. The first section is about philosophy of language, in particular Wittgenstein’s key idea of linguistic normativity: his conception of rules and grammatical propositions.

The second section is mainly concerned with important Wittgensteinian contributions to the philosophy of mind and action: his analysis of sensation language, the concept of understanding and the explanation of human behaviour by reasons, as opposed to causal explanations. There is also an essay on Wittgenstein’s famous discussion of aspect perception, and a critical discussion of the idea of ‘hinge propositions’ drawn from his remarks in On Certainty.

The final section focusses on questions of value, mainly in aesthetics, but also in ethics and religion. In particular, the book gives a detailed account of Wittgenstein’s account of aesthetic judgements as based on a ‘cultured taste’, informed by detailed knowledge of a certain genre of aesthetically interesting objects, a set of conventional rules and a certain consistency. Aesthetics is compared and contrasted with ethics and with psychological investigations. The final essay is on Wittgenstein’s distinctive account or religious belief.

This collection brings together the research papers of Patrick Olivelle, published over a period of about ten years. The unifying theme of these studies is the search for historical context and developments hidden within words and texts. Words – and the cultural history represented by words – that scholars often take for granted as having a continuous and long history are often new and even neologisms, and thus provide important clues to cultural and religious innovations. Olivelle’s book on the Asramas, as well as the short pieces included in this volume, such as those on ananda and dharma, seek to see cultural innovation and historical changes within the changing semantic fields of key terms. Closer examination of numerous Sanskrit terms taken for granted as central to ‘Hinduism’ provide similar results. Indian texts have often been studied in the past as disincarnate realities providing information on an ahistorical and unchanging culture. This volume is a small contribution towards correcting that method of textual study.

Late Victorian Orientalism is a work of scholarly research pushing forward disciplines into new areas of enquiry. This collection of essays tries to redefine the task of interpreting the East in the late nineteenth century taking as a starting point Said’s Orientalism in order to investigate the visual, fantasised, and imperialist representations of the East, as well as the most exemplary translations of Oriental poems. The Victorians envisioned the East in many different modes or Orientalisms since as Said suggested ‘[t]here were, perhaps, as many Orientalisms as Orientalists.’ 

By combining together Western and Oriental modes of art, this study is not only aimed at filling a gap in Victorian and Oriental studies but also at broadening the audiences it is intended for. Edward FitzGerald, William Bell Scott, the Brontë sisters, William Holman Hunt, D. G. Rossetti, William Morris, John La Farge, Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, the anonymous author of the Hongkong and the Hongkonians, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats, Wilfred Thesiger, and Eric Newby play such a prominent role in the Oriental debate. By offering an extended discussion of their Oriental writings, this book will appeal to and benefit a wider range of audiences.

The subject range of this volume of essays on late Victorian Orientalism explores nineteenth-century modes of art which position themselves as instruments of knowledge of the Orient. The contributors deploy variegated tools derived from textual studies and visual culture research in order to explore the many ways in which the late Victorians envisioned the East. It is this combined approach which makes possible the reconsideration of Orientalist literature, art and cinema.

For long, Latin America had the conceit of considering itself as “the middle class of nations”—not as rich as prosperous as the North Atlantic countries but certainly more so than those of Africa and Asia. This notion was always a bit of an artifice. Yet, it is one that has become especially apparent as the region descends from periphery to marginality, and “diplomatic eclipse”, in the words of Alain Rouquié. What to do to revert this trend? 

In this book, some of the region’s leading analysts and foreign policymakers argue that Active Non-Alignment is the path to follow if the region is to realize its full potential and occupy its rightful place in the concert of nations. Steeped in the best traditions of the Global South, but sharply attuned to the imperatives of the new century, Active Non Alignment constitutes a guide to foreign policy action in a world in turmoil, in which those not present at the high table charting a new path and shaping the new system will be left behind.

Charting the change from the old Third World’s cahiers des doleances diplomacy championing the New International Economic Order (NIEO) to the current new collective financial statecraft of the New South, reflected in entities like the Asian Investment and Infrastructure Bank (AIIB) and the New Development Bank, the book opens new vistas for a Latin America. The latter has diversified its diplomatic, trade, investment and financial links and will not let itself be cajoled back to the days of the Monroe Doctrine. Yet, the forging of collective action will require a much more concerted effort at regional cooperation that has been extant until now. For those purposes, Active Non Alignment provides the right set of tools.

For long, Latin America had the conceit of considering itself as “the middle class of nations”—not as rich as prosperous as the North Atlantic countries but certainly more so than those of Africa and Asia. This notion was always a bit of an artifice. Yet, it is one that has become especially apparent as the region descends from periphery to marginality, and “diplomatic eclipse”, in the words of Alain Rouquié. What to do to revert this trend? 

In this book, some of the region’s leading analysts and foreign policymakers argue that Active Non-Alignment is the path to follow if the region is to realize its full potential and occupy its rightful place in the concert of nations. Steeped in the best traditions of the Global South, but sharply attuned to the imperatives of the new century, Active Non Alignment constitutes a guide to foreign policy action in a world in turmoil, in which those not present at the high table charting a new path and shaping the new system will be left behind.

Charting the change from the old Third World’s cahiers des doleances diplomacy championing the New International Economic Order (NIEO) to the current new collective financial statecraft of the New South, reflected in entities like the Asian Investment and Infrastructure Bank (AIIB) and the New Development Bank, the book opens new vistas for a Latin America. The latter has diversified its diplomatic, trade, investment and financial links and will not let itself be cajoled back to the days of the Monroe Doctrine. Yet, the forging of collective action will require a much more concerted effort at regional cooperation that has been extant until now. For those purposes, Active Non Alignment provides the right set of tools.

● Who leads the next $100 trillion in GDP growth?
● Are we developing leaders for a more sustainable future?
● What does the next generation of leaders need to know to build a more sustainable future?

Leading a sustainable organization requires more than marketing slogans and good reporting. It requires identifying the value of sustainability for all stakeholders and the development of specific transition and change plans that deliver a different type of organization. Noble aspirations in treaties and policies are a necessary part of the picture, but leaders must create organizations that enable daily actions. Making sustainability happen is a series of leadership choices:
o Creating strategic differentiation to compete on sustainability business opportunities
o Crafting a purpose that inspires employees to give their best
o Building and sharing a knowledge model about why, what, and how to do sustainability
o Ensuring that sustainability efforts are woven into values and ethics
o Deploying a transition plan with clear action steps that move from compliance to alignment
o Making sustainability part of the culture and identity of an organization
o Weaving personal commitment to sustainability into team performance
o Telling the story of sustainable results in all business communication
o Maintaining commitment in the face of inevitable derailment factors
o Future proofing the organization to stay on the sustainability journey with a sense of long-term value creation
● The current generation of leaders has failed to make the progress needed to delay the worst effects of climate change and biodiversity loss, so the challenges become harder. The book offers a chapter-by-chapter blueprint of key actions that can be learned and shared. The goal is to enable business leaders to accelerate action, make better decisions, and ensure that sustainability becomes part of the DNA of any organization.

Franz Neumann was a member of a generation that saw the end of the Kaiserreich and the beginnings of a democratic republic carried by the labor movement. In Neumann’s case, this involved a practical and professional commitment, first, to the trade union movement and, second, to the Social Democratic Party that gave it political articulation. For Neumann, to be a labor lawyer in the sense developed by his mentor, Hugo Sinzheimer, was to engage in a project to displace the law of property as the basic frame of human relations. The defeat of Weimar and the years of exile called many things into question for Neumann, but not the conjunction between a practical democratic project to establish social rights and an effort to find a rational strategy to explain the failures, and to orient a new course of conduct.

"Learning from Franz Neumann" pays special attention to Neumann’s efforts to break down the conventional divide between political theory and the empirical discipline of political science. Neumann was a remarkably effective teacher in the last years of his life, but he was also a gifted learner, whose negotiations with a series of forceful thinkers enabled him to work toward a promising intellectual strategy in political thinking.

This book provides the reader with tips and insights on how they can become better leaders themselves. These insights and tips will be explained by utilizing the context of dogs, with examples featuring various dog breeds used throughout the book. This will emphasize what we can learn from these various dogs’ traits and characteristics. Some of the topics that the book will cover include concepts like ‘resilience’, ‘courage’, ‘patience’, ‘(in)dependence’, ‘respect’, ‘kindness’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘trust’. The various chapters in this book will provide the reader with insight on why it is important for human leaders to embody these various concepts and qualities.

For instance, a concept like ‘resilience’ is of paramount importance for leaders, because not every single plan or decision will be successful, but it is important to stay the course, as a Bloodhound would on the trail of an escaped convict. The book adroitly mixes findings and insights from numerous scholarly sources on leadership and juxtaposes them with examples featuring various dog breed traits and characteristics. The book will be useful for improving one’s knowledge on how to be a better leader, and will also improve one’s knowledge about the numerous varieties and kinds of dog breeds. The book is easy to comprehend and the scholarly concepts in it are explained without any complicated jargon.

This book provides the reader with tips and insights on how they can become better leaders themselves. These insights and tips will be explained by utilizing the context of dogs, with examples featuring various dog breeds used throughout the book. This will emphasize what we can learn from these various dogs’ traits and characteristics. Some of the topics that the book will cover include concepts like ‘resilience’, ‘courage’, ‘patience’, ‘(in)dependence’, ‘respect’, ‘kindness’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘trust’. The various chapters in this book will provide the reader with insight on why it is important for human leaders to embody these various concepts and qualities.

For instance, a concept like ‘resilience’ is of paramount importance for leaders, because not every single plan or decision will be successful, but it is important to stay the course, as a Bloodhound would on the trail of an escaped convict. The book adroitly mixes findings and insights from numerous scholarly sources on leadership and juxtaposes them with examples featuring various dog breed traits and characteristics. The book will be useful for improving one’s knowledge on how to be a better leader, and will also improve one’s knowledge about the numerous varieties and kinds of dog breeds. The book is easy to comprehend and the scholarly concepts in it are explained without any complicated jargon.

Over the last 20 years, the world has gone through economic crisis, geopolitical tensions, a looming climate emergency and most recently, Covid-19, with all that it brought with it. The years 2020 and 2021, in particular, have seen tremendous advances in digitalization while at the same time have seen millions of people leave their jobs for one reason or another.

In these turbulent times many people struggle to chart a career path which will provide for themselves and their families while at the same time give them a real sense of purpose.

Learning to Fly: How to Manage Your Career in a Turbulent and Changing World offers a practical and tested framework with which to chart one’s own path towards the future. The book will challenge assumptions as well as help in thinking about career options that are likely to be future proof. It will also help find balance between career aspirations and other aspects of one’s life that may be more important such as family, health and the purpose for which one is on the planet in the first place.

Beethoven’s Freude theme—or “Ode to Joy”—is perhaps the most iconic melody ever created. This book sets out to show why the Freude theme has acquired this almost mythic status and what its use in the finale of the Ninth Symphony reveals about the mechanics of tonal composition.

This scholarly biography traces the life and art of Lebanese-American neo-expressionist, Nabil Kanso (1940–2019). It explores key moments across the artist’s transnational career by foregrounding his longest-running, internationally toured exhibition, the Journey of Art for Peace (1985–1993). More specifically, it traces the historical trajectory of his 10 × 28 mural-scale painting, Lebanon, from the circumstances of its production at the height of the Lebanese Civil War in 1983, through its short-lived exhibition history with the Split of Life series in the few years that followed. The book scaffolds an understanding of the artist as an activist and works toward offering distinctly spatial readings of his painterly practice, of which the act of bearing witness is highlighted as permeating the entirety of his oeuvre. It concludes with a contemporary recontextualization of Lebanon in the country’s current social, political, and cultural climate, and emphasizes the artist’s work as essential to the theorization of larger traditions of political and protest art.

The first of its kind and the result of a research fellowship wherein the author was invited to be the first to work through the artist’s unpublished archive, this book lays the groundwork for scholarship on the art of Nabil Kanso—an essential yet hitherto unstudied pioneer of the neo-expressionist art movement of the 1960s. It draws extensively on primary source material, including personal notes, diaries, sketchbooks, correspondences, paintings, watercolors, photographs, recorded interviews, and the like. To best animate that source material within the context of this publication, each chapter is prefaced with short narrative anecdotes inspired by the artist’s personal notes to better ground the subsequent research and scholarship in the artist’s own terms and experiences.

Born in Beirut, Kanso, like many of his generation, would seek sought refuge abroad from political instability in his home country. It is through this intrinsic proximity to, yet physical distance from, the cycles of violence and corruption in Lebanon that Kanso would go on to create his grandest greatest mural-scale series. This book, more than anything, explores the artist’s oeuvre as an attempt to bear witness and offer testimony to those moments, an inclination that would see the artist grapple with some of the most ferocious crimes against humanity committed throughout his lifetime. As such, this book pairs close readings of Kanso’s art and personal practice with both historical and contemporary context meant to animate the relevance of his vast yet never-before-seen artistic archive.

A poignant exploration of the impact of histories of displacement and the subsequent marginalisations this causes on children’s experiences in post-apartheid South Africa

The book explores themes of power, ideology, and identity formation, particularly through a post-structuralist lens. It examines how the state influences the well-being of its citizens, focusing on children living in marginalized circumstances. By following the lives of several children exposed to pervasive violence, the author illustrates how these experiences shape their identities and the broader societal context.

The study identifies key themes such as the effects of forced removals, displacement, marginalization, and the prevalence of violence in Blue Waters Refugee Camp Site C and Symphony Way Temporary Relocation Area. By examining pathways and patterns related to identity, embodiment, health and illness, as well as the expressive nature of theatre, the research yielded rich ethnographic data on children’s experiences in these settings. Central to this study, and to the broader field of children and childhood studies, is the understanding that children are perceptive, active agents in shaping their own unfolding narratives.Taking into account the violence that permeates through everyday life in South Africa, this book makes an essential contribution to future housing policy design and implementation by deepening our understanding of the socioeconomic structures that exacerbate divisions based on geography, race and class. Evidently, for children living in frequent and forced mobility, their experiences are suffused with violent tensions that follow them across the changing landscapes generated by frequent mobility.

This book proposes a radical new way of thinking about our democratic future, our ecological survival, and our ways to keep economies fair. It shows that adopting upper limits to wealth and income; replacing elections with local direct democracy and legal duty involving randomly selected citizens; and replacing welfare and redistribution policies with pre-distribution and reparations promises new solutions to political apathy, discontent, manipulation, economic inequality, unfairness, unequal opportunities, and looming ecological disaster.

Most public debates today focus on the poor, on minorities, and on immigrants when discussing the problems of our democracies. The poor, minorities and immigrants, however, are not our problem. They had no say in designing the kinds of systems that threaten our planet, our wellbeing, and our social and communal lives. They consume very little and thus have a minimal ecological footprint. It is the super-rich who threaten justice, fairness, equal opportunity, and ecological sustainability.

This book proposes a radical new way of thinking about our democratic future, our ecological survival, and our ways to keep economies fair. It shows that adopting upper limits to wealth and income; replacing elections with local direct democracy and legal duty involving randomly selected citizens; and replacing welfare and redistribution policies with pre-distribution and reparations promises new solutions to political apathy, discontent, manipulation, economic inequality, unfairness, unequal opportunities, and looming ecological disaster.

Most public debates today focus on the poor, on minorities, and on immigrants when discussing the problems of our democracies. The poor, minorities and immigrants, however, are not our problem. They had no say in designing the kinds of systems that threaten our planet, our wellbeing, and our social and communal lives. They consume very little and thus have a minimal ecological footprint. It is the super-rich who threaten justice, fairness, equal opportunity, and ecological sustainability.

Over the next decade, states will be carrying out large-scale registrations in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which aim to provide more than one billion people around the world with evidentiary proof of their legal and, increasingly, digital existence. 'Legal Identity, Race and Belonging: From Citizen to Foreigner' is an important book which identifies a connection between the role of international actors, such as the World Bank and the United Nations, in promulgating the universal provision of legal identity and links these with arbitrary measures to restrict access to citizenship paperwork from (largely) Haitian-descended people born and living in the Dominican Republic. The book provides the definitive analysis of the events leading up to the controversial 2013 Constitutional Tribunal ruling that rendered the Dominican plaintiff Juliana Deguis Pierre stateless. Hayes de Kalaf illustrates how measures that purposely blocked people of Haitian ancestry from accessing their legal identity not only affected undocumented and stateless populations – persons living at the fringes of citizenship – but also had a major impact on documented people; Dominicans already in possession of a state-issued birth certificate, national identity card and/or passport. The book illustrates the complex and contradictory ways in which digital identity systems are experienced, thus challenging the assumption within current development policy that the provision of ID to everyone, everywhere will lead to the inclusion of all citizens.

Over the next decade, states will be carrying out large-scale registrations in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which aim to provide more than one billion people around the world with evidentiary proof of their legal and, increasingly, digital existence. 'Legal Identity, Race and Belonging: From Citizen to Foreigner' is an important book which identifies a connection between the role of international actors, such as the World Bank and the United Nations, in promulgating the universal provision of legal identity and links these with arbitrary measures to restrict access to citizenship paperwork from (largely) Haitian-descended people born and living in the Dominican Republic. The book provides the definitive analysis of the events leading up to the controversial 2013 Constitutional Tribunal ruling that rendered the Dominican plaintiff Juliana Deguis Pierre stateless. Hayes de Kalaf illustrates how measures that purposely blocked people of Haitian ancestry from accessing their legal identity not only affected undocumented and stateless populations – persons living at the fringes of citizenship – but also had a major impact on documented people; Dominicans already in possession of a state-issued birth certificate, national identity card and/or passport. The book illustrates the complex and contradictory ways in which digital identity systems are experienced, thus challenging the assumption within current development policy that the provision of ID to everyone, everywhere will lead to the inclusion of all citizens.

Few are aware that since antiquity, there has always been the philosophy of love at the core of Western culture. It articulates what makes life meaningful and worthwhile, and how we can live a good life together through an ethic of love. This book fills this significant gap, not only reconnecting the reader with such important wisdom, and more crucially, also reorienting our socio-economic institutions and collective actions towards more loving and caring, and more concerned with the qualities of our lived experiences. 

By re(dis)covering the gifts of love, we may challenge the existing systemic dehumanisation, and draw from knowledge and understanding already present in our culture. This is timely because the global crises we are facing are catastrophic, especially when it comes to climate change. Therefore we must respond from a place of love rather than fear. Whether it is reducing the use of fossil fuels, lowering greenhouse emission, choosing the right food to eat, or advocating for structural transformation, our concerted endeavours start with an appropriate appreciation of the nature of our well-being which includes the planet’s well-ness. This book highlights a clear pathway forward: to ensure collective healing and co-flourishing with nature, we must practise the art of loving. 

Although introducing conceptions of love developed throughout Western history of thought, this book is not a book of philosophy. Instead, it makes philosophical ideas of love more accessible to anyone who is interested in developing a better understanding of love and its evolution. It intends to awaken the reader to such claims about love that have been quietly speaking to humanity from the depth of the Western culture. In doing so, this book invites the reader to become curious about how and why love has been side-lined if not almost forgotten in the contemporary Western socio-economic systems and national and international politics. Ultimately, by re-familiarising ourselves with these articulations of love, this book urges us to embark on the paths of love and engage in those activities, processes, experiences and relationships that constitute the good life, and embrace the practices of love.

Few are aware that since antiquity, there has always been the philosophy of love at the core of Western culture. It articulates what makes life meaningful and worthwhile, and how we can live a good life together through an ethic of love. This book fills this significant gap, not only reconnecting the reader with such important wisdom, and more crucially, also reorienting our socio-economic institutions and collective actions towards more loving and caring, and more concerned with the qualities of our lived experiences. 

By re(dis)covering the gifts of love, we may challenge the existing systemic dehumanisation, and draw from knowledge and understanding already present in our culture. This is timely because the global crises we are facing are catastrophic, especially when it comes to climate change. Therefore we must respond from a place of love rather than fear. Whether it is reducing the use of fossil fuels, lowering greenhouse emission, choosing the right food to eat, or advocating for structural transformation, our concerted endeavours start with an appropriate appreciation of the nature of our well-being which includes the planet’s well-ness. This book highlights a clear pathway forward: to ensure collective healing and co-flourishing with nature, we must practise the art of loving. 

Although introducing conceptions of love developed throughout Western history of thought, this book is not a book of philosophy. Instead, it makes philosophical ideas of love more accessible to anyone who is interested in developing a better understanding of love and its evolution. It intends to awaken the reader to such claims about love that have been quietly speaking to humanity from the depth of the Western culture. In doing so, this book invites the reader to become curious about how and why love has been side-lined if not almost forgotten in the contemporary Western socio-economic systems and national and international politics. Ultimately, by re-familiarising ourselves with these articulations of love, this book urges us to embark on the paths of love and engage in those activities, processes, experiences and relationships that constitute the good life, and embrace the practices of love.

The present book examines the internationally facilitated peace process between the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in order to provide critical insights on contemporary attempts at crafting liberal peace in intrastate conflicts. The general argument is for a broadened political perspective on conflict resolution, extending the focus from the narrow confines of formal peace negotiations and elitist crafting of liberal peace, to the contextual politics of state reforms for group rights and power-sharing and the associated politics of economic reforms for neoliberal development. In examining the contextual politics of state and market reforms in Sri Lanka, the book highlight the tensions between liberal peace and Sinhalese and Tamil nationalisms, demonstrated in the contestations over political exclusion vs. inclusion in peace negotiations, individual human rights vs. group rights, territorial power sharing vs. state sovereignty and neoliberal development vs. social welfare.

Weighing up the costs and benefits of economic interdependence in a finance-driven world from a development perspective, this book argues that globalization, understood and promoted as absolute freedom for all forms of capital, has been oversold to the Global South, and that the South should be as selective about globalization as the North, rebalance domestic and external sources of growth, and better manage integration into unstable international finance.

‘Liberalization, Financial Instability and Economic Development’ brings together a range of essays from Yılmaz Akyüz’s recent work, refuting the myth that emerging economies have now successfully decoupled from the North and have become new engines of growth. The book challenges the orthodoxy on the link between financial deepening and economic growth, as well as the relationship between the efficiency of financial markets and the benefits of liberalization. Rather, Akyüz’s work urges developing countries to use all possible tools to control capital flows and asset bubbles in order to prevent financial fragility and crises, and recommends regional policy options while recognizing the challenges posed by the institutional structures already in place.

Weighing up the costs and benefits of economic interdependence in a finance-driven world from a development perspective, this book argues that globalization, understood and promoted as absolute freedom for all forms of capital, has been oversold to the Global South, and that the South should be as selective about globalization as the North, rebalance domestic and external sources of growth, and better manage integration into unstable international finance.

‘Liberalization, Financial Instability and Economic Development’ brings together a range of essays from Yılmaz Akyüz’s recent work, refuting the myth that emerging economies have now successfully decoupled from the North and have become new engines of growth. The book challenges the orthodoxy on the link between financial deepening and economic growth, as well as the relationship between the efficiency of financial markets and the benefits of liberalization. Rather, Akyüz’s work urges developing countries to use all possible tools to control capital flows and asset bubbles in order to prevent financial fragility and crises, and recommends regional policy options while recognizing the challenges posed by the institutional structures already in place.

In November 2007, Romain Lannuzel Erasmus, student at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​mysteriously disappeared without a trace. This case remains unsolved, when the novel begins with another mysterious disappearance of Costantinu Iliescu, a Romanian student. His girlfriend and two of his Erasmus colleagues sound the alarm and move heaven and earth to find him, but both police and university officials believe that Iliescu has left voluntarily and refuse to get involved. However, they will soon have to change their minds as the events that occur after the disappearance of the Romanian student reveal that something terrible, dark and macabre is happening at the college.

A team of policemen, including Deputy Inspector Manuela Vazquez, open an in-depth investigation and the potential suspects multiply. In the minds of teachers, police officers and students, the thick shadow of what appears to be a meticulous and bloodthirsty murderer looms.

Carme Riera endorses the best elements of the thriller genre to create a state of tension and suspense that is maintained until the last page. The prose is evocative, almost cinematic and knows how to combine brilliantly intrigue, irony and social criticism.

‘Life Chances, Education and Social Movements’ explains the sociology of life chances, the opportunities and experiences of different generations in Australia, the United States and the UK, and how the differential distribution of life-enhancing opportunities affects our well-being. It is now four decades since the publication of Ralf Dahrendorf’s ‘Life Chances: Approaches to Social and Political Theory’ (1979), a surprisingly neglected work that has much to offer by way of explaining some of the social and political challenges of the present era. Dahrendorf’s life-chances theory is an expanded and innovative analysis of Max Weber’s original notion of ‘Lebenschancen’ and is used to support the theoretical and empirical arguments in Lyle Munro’s book. Dahrendorf defines life chances as a function of options (provisions and entitlements) and ligatures (networks that provide a sense of solidarity and belonging). For Dahrendorf, education is arguably the most important option individuals can utilise for improving their well-being and for overcoming social and economic disadvantages. While there are countless sociological accounts of inequality, Munro’s study takes a different and novel approach based on Dahrendorf’s model according to which education and social movements and their networks function to enhance the life chances of individuals and social groups respectively.

Munro emphasises the necessity of formal education and its transformative power in the lives of individuals; he stresses the importance of an individual’s life chances of achieving satisfactory levels of literacy, numeracy and oracy during a decade or more of formal schooling. While this might seem self-evident, the evidence in Australia indicates there is a disturbingly large number of students who leave school without these basic skills, the consequences of which are often dire.

At a broader level, ‘Life Chances, Education and Social Movements’ stresses the importance of education movements in improving the lives of disadvantaged social groups. This is a topic that rarely features in the social movement literature, as a content search of the leading journals in the field reveals. Education movements, including the controversial widening participation movement and the lifelong learning movement and its several subsidiaries, such as VET and adult education, are advocated as alternatives to university, which for many students has proven to be either out of reach, beyond their means or a costly mistake. Munro is critical of the widening participation movement whenever it privileges university learning at the expense of technical and vocational education.

The last part of the book focuses on five social movements that seek to sustain the lives of human and nonhuman animals. The first movement to be analysed is the social justice movement that campaigns against racism, sexism and classism, the much-studied trinity in the discipline of sociology. Followers of Peter Singer’s ‘Animal Liberation’ regard speciesism as the missing relative in race, gender and class relations and nonhuman animals as arguably the most vulnerable members of society. For an increasing number of movement theorists, speciesism – the prejudice and practice that posits the interests of members of one’s own species against the interests of members of other species – is seen as animal abuse, a social problem on a par with elder abuse, child abuse and the like.

The second movement against risks to our collective life chances seeks to protect human and nonhuman animals from some of the most dangerous developments confronting the planet such as climate change, environmental degradation, terrorism and nuclear war. Two of the most challenging risks to both people and animals – pandemics and climate change – and the link between them are discussed in some detail, since the link between human and nonhuman animals tends to be ignored by most commentators on ‘the risk society’.

Finally, student, worker and citizen movements are engaged in a quest to improve the lives of their constituents and more broadly as part of a proposed mass mobilisation against the corporate elites who are responsible for most of the social, economic and environmental problems we face in the current era. The book is predominantly about Australia, with comparative examples and case studies from the UK, Europe and the United States.

Written in reverse, the chapters go backwards. The book starts from present (approximately Chapter 50, 2020, back 30 years, to Chapter 20, 1990). The story coincides with an imbedded “road itinerary.” Years are rarely mentioned in the text; and, in most cases, only initials are used for all characters. People, places and things are all real in relation to the timeline. The work involves the interpolation of common conversations—from sources such as texting and emails—to shed light on the fallibility of human relations. To a large degree, and within reason, the length of conversations are meant to be overbearing, countered by other aspects of the writing. Ron Westray’s father and grandfather’s stories are imbedded in the work. His mother’s free-verse-poetry is the muse/soul that binds the work together like a second, invisible narrator.

This book looks at how Renaissance poets ended their poetic lines. It considers a range of strategies and argues that line endings are crucial to our understanding of the poems. It begins with an introduction summarizing the work that has already been done in this area and demonstrating the author’s own method. While many of the devices the book highlights have been discussed before and while there has been some scholarship on the poetic line as a unit, how lines end has not received much critical attention, and particularly not in the critical work on Renaissance poetry.

The main part of the book is divided into three chapters: one on rhyme; one on enjambment; and one on the sestina. Rhyme is perhaps the most obvious kind of line ending; it was a contentious subject in the English Renaissance. Scholars then debated whether rhyme was necessary or even advisable. Enjambment, in which the end of a line occurs part of the way through a phrase, was especially common in dramatic poetry. In lyric poetry as well, however, it was an important tool for poets. The sestina is a complex form in which matters are the (usually unrhymed) end words, which vary according to a set scheme. There are other technically demanding forms in the Renaissance that focus on end words, but the sestina is the most extreme.

These are the most significant kinds of line endings used by English Renaissance poets. Each chapter provides one or two main poetic examples, but the book considers a range of poems from the period. The book ends with a brief afterword, wherein the author’s findings are summarized.

Today, high-end inequality in America and peer countries is at Gilded Age levels. These matters are too important and complicated to be left just to economists. A broader sociological and humanistic approach is necessary. Great works of literature, such as those by the likes of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton, are among the resources that can help us to better understand high-end inequality’s broader, culturally contingent, ramifications – not just in the authors’ own eras but today.

Daniel Shaviro’s Literature and Inequality offers a unique and accessible interdisciplinary take on how a number of great and beloved works from the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries help shed light on modern high-end inequality. In particular, Shaviro helps us to understand the relevance both of cultural differences between America and peer countries such as England and France, and of cultural commonalities between America’s First Gilded Age in the late-nineteenth century and its currently ongoing Second Gilded Age.

Today, high-end inequality in America and peer countries is at Gilded Age levels. These matters are too important and complicated to be left just to economists. A broader sociological and humanistic approach is necessary. Great works of literature, such as those by the likes of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton, are among the resources that can help us to better understand high-end inequality’s broader, culturally contingent, ramifications – not just in the authors’ own eras but today.

Daniel Shaviro’s Literature and Inequality offers a unique and accessible interdisciplinary take on how a number of great and beloved works from the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries help shed light on modern high-end inequality. In particular, Shaviro helps us to understand the relevance both of cultural differences between America and peer countries such as England and France, and of cultural commonalities between America’s First Gilded Age in the late-nineteenth century and its currently ongoing Second Gilded Age.

This book is an inquiry of how the reading of imaginative literature may be experienced as life changing. Previous research has shown that many readers have found a particular work of fiction to be of significant help to them in dealing with personal issues. Furthermore, experimental studies reveal that readers experience self-modifying feelings during the act of reading. Research in psychological aesthetics indicates that the hitherto neglected phenomenon of being moved may be central to transformative experiences with art, and may be a more productive point of departure than emotion-based approaches. How may transformative aesthetic experiences produce lasting change and become integrated into the person’s life-story, and how is such subjective change related to the experience of being moved? The aim of this book is, through interviews with readers who have experienced life-changing encounters with particular works of fiction, to present new knowledge about transformative reading experiences and the relationships between life-crises, affective modes of transaction with literary works, and qualitative change experiences. Such knowledge will contribute to our understanding of the affective aspects of reading and life-stories of change. This theoretical knowledge may also have practical application for the intermediation of literature. The investigation has a trans-disciplinary orientation towards reader response studies, literary scholarship, psychological aesthetics and narrative psychology.

The method developed, intimate reading, is a hermeneutically oriented narrative inquiry. The process of data production is envisaged as subservation, using a form of open interview which combines facilitating the participant’s relating their experience with a shared reading of selected significant passages of the work in question. Furthermore, it involves presenting the participant’s narrative in full. The logic of inquiry rests on anteroduction, which is argued as a particular circular mode of inference implicit in modern hermeneutics. The collected data were subjected to a critical selection process in which the construct of life-changing fiction-reading experiences was determined through comparative narrative analysis. Five narratives are presented and interpreted in-depth. These interpretations are structured around the tripartite division into life-crisis, transaction with literary work (affective realisation and mode of engagement) and resolution.

The works that have changed the participants in this inquiry are highly diverse; this confirms previous research. The present inquiry contributes new knowledge about the kinds of life-crises that may be resolved through transformative encounters with fiction, and the kinds of qualitative changes that may result. The mode of engagement was found to be one that combines bodily and affective aspects, in which metaphors related to nourishment and the heart were prominent. Accordingly, I have named this transaction reading by heart, or lexithymia. These qualitative descriptions add to our knowledge of the affective aspects of reading, and can serve to expand the critical vocabulary for discussing affection. From this understanding of varieties, commonalities and typical characteristics of life-changing reading experiences I have, through a process of abduction, sought to develop a theory of transformative affective patterns that combine life-crises, aesthetics and literary protogenres to form a comprehensive and exhaustive system of transformative relations. The inquiry concludes that the transformative reading experience is one of being deeply moved, and being moved is a catalyst for altering aspects of the self. The subjective change is thus a reflective process of integrating the alteration into the self-concept and may subsequently be experienced as ‘shaping’ the life-story.

This book is an inquiry of how the reading of imaginative literature may be experienced as life changing. Previous research has shown that many readers have found a particular work of fiction to be of significant help to them in dealing with personal issues. Furthermore, experimental studies reveal that readers experience self-modifying feelings during the act of reading. Research in psychological aesthetics indicates that the hitherto neglected phenomenon of being moved may be central to transformative experiences with art, and may be a more productive point of departure than emotion-based approaches. How may transformative aesthetic experiences produce lasting change and become integrated into the person’s life-story, and how is such subjective change related to the experience of being moved? The aim of this book is, through interviews with readers who have experienced life-changing encounters with particular works of fiction, to present new knowledge about transformative reading experiences and the relationships between life-crises, affective modes of transaction with literary works, and qualitative change experiences. Such knowledge will contribute to our understanding of the affective aspects of reading and life-stories of change. This theoretical knowledge may also have practical application for the intermediation of literature. The investigation has a trans-disciplinary orientation towards reader response studies, literary scholarship, psychological aesthetics and narrative psychology.

The method developed, intimate reading, is a hermeneutically oriented narrative inquiry. The process of data production is envisaged as subservation, using a form of open interview which combines facilitating the participant’s relating their experience with a shared reading of selected significant passages of the work in question. Furthermore, it involves presenting the participant’s narrative in full. The logic of inquiry rests on anteroduction, which is argued as a particular circular mode of inference implicit in modern hermeneutics. The collected data were subjected to a critical selection process in which the construct of life-changing fiction-reading experiences was determined through comparative narrative analysis. Five narratives are presented and interpreted in-depth. These interpretations are structured around the tripartite division into life-crisis, transaction with literary work (affective realisation and mode of engagement) and resolution.

The works that have changed the participants in this inquiry are highly diverse; this confirms previous research. The present inquiry contributes new knowledge about the kinds of life-crises that may be resolved through transformative encounters with fiction, and the kinds of qualitative changes that may result. The mode of engagement was found to be one that combines bodily and affective aspects, in which metaphors related to nourishment and the heart were prominent. Accordingly, I have named this transaction reading by heart, or lexithymia. These qualitative descriptions add to our knowledge of the affective aspects of reading, and can serve to expand the critical vocabulary for discussing affection. From this understanding of varieties, commonalities and typical characteristics of life-changing reading experiences I have, through a process of abduction, sought to develop a theory of transformative affective patterns that combine life-crises, aesthetics and literary protogenres to form a comprehensive and exhaustive system of transformative relations. The inquiry concludes that the transformative reading experience is one of being deeply moved, and being moved is a catalyst for altering aspects of the self. The subjective change is thus a reflective process of integrating the alteration into the self-concept and may subsequently be experienced as ‘shaping’ the life-story.

The use of smartphones displays many facets of contemporary mobility. Smartphones and those applications downloaded to the device enhance connectivity in regard to socialisation, entertainment, transactions, networking, activism, and mobilisation. While the device and applications help community building and boost a sense of belonging, they also generate alienation, exclusion and marginalisation. Such online mobility of capital, commodity, idea and emotion visualised on smartphones cannot take place without the parallel existence of technological, sociopolitical and economic infrastructure that is established in the physical world offline. In this light, this book argues that the use of smartphones, and the constant switch between online and offline, has meshed virtual, social and physical mobilities together. However, such inseparability is yet to break down the boundary that marks their distinctive and discrete existence. Put simply, the absence, loss, outage, switch-off, unaffordability, or confiscation of the device can easily obstruct this meshed mobility. Interrogating what causes these obstructions will highlight the indispensable role played by the material and social infrastructure in this meshed mobility as well as the embedded structural constraints. It is equally important to look at migration and mobility beyond the points of departure and destination and trace the process in between, as scholarship in migration studies has advocated. Thus, this book offers an insight into the compression and tension between online and offline and the interlaced modes of mobility. On the whole, the articles included in this book aim to answer two critical questions: (1) How does the use of smartphones by migrants and the people connected with them generate new modes of mobility? (2) How do online activities and offline infrastructure interact and result in this compression? 

In answering these two questions, the authors seek to understand how the online–offline divide and the shift between physical and virtual worlds affect East Asian migrants’ activities. They investigate how these migrants’ mobility patterns are changing through such compression and tension between online and offline. The book will show how smartphones and the associated applications facilitate the expression of emotions and search for intimate relationships, expedite the movement of capital and commodity, enable public communication and social action and solicit political allegiance to the state or political parties. This spontaneous mobility in the virtual space visualised on smartphones obscures the physical separation between origin and destination. It also generates the space in between for network making and mobilisation. On the other hand, physical and virtual mobilities continue to be constrained by the tangible and intangible infrastructure created and administered by the state and the market. That is, not only is the ability of people, capital, commodities and ideas to cross borders regulated by the state, but the transmission of data related to these movements, in the forms of text, sound, image, graphics, or video, is also at the mercy of the operation of the infrastructure built by the state and the market. In sum, opportunities and resources emerge from this parallel between online and offline. However, their constant compression also limits personal agency and generates new restrictions or reifies existing constraints.

Lockdown, a measure enforced by governments around the world to suppress the spread of Covid-19, has made the compression between online and offline a daily reality. Whilse contemporary mobility continues to be overshadowed by this ‘new normal’, this edited volume seeks to re-examine the mobility and migration in the increasingly overlapping virtual, social and physical spaces. To achieve this goal, this volume offers an interdisciplinary lens through which to grasp the symbiosis between migration and ICT and underlines how countries in East Asia, Europe and North America are connected via migrants’ use of smartphones. Owing to this compression between the virtual and physical worlds, migrants, with their various skills, class, gender, sexuality and age, perform their intimacy, entrepreneurship and activism in relation to their fellow migrants, family members, partners, clients and the state at the crossroads between online and offline spaces. The use of smartphones enables them to exert their agency, empower others and conduct businesses not only for financial gains but also to satisfy their sense of care and morality, and interact with their governments’ political agendas. Presenting these cutting-edge findings drawn from East Asian migrants’ everyday experiences and practices, this book will make a lasting contribution to an emerging migration scholarship intersecting transnationalism, virtuality and mobility. 

This book explores ethnographically moments when the issue of poverty and ‘being poor’ feature in everyday lives and interactions in Harpurhey. The book begins by situating the production of poverty outside the everyday lives of people in Harpurhey to better focus on its lived effects.
The chapters that follow provide a nuanced understanding of what it means for people in Harpurhey to live with poverty. Each chapter provides intimate ethnographic insights into the ways in which relationships are forged, maintained, ended and re-emerge in the context of the lived experience of poverty, and in the knowledge that welfare reforms, public spending cuts and social and political stigma will remain enduring issues for them into the future. The relationships between persons and between persons and the state that are explored in this book are necessarily unstable and contingent. The expression of personal needs, circumstances, moral frameworks and imaginations of the future in an ever-changing post-welfare landscape are at the centre of analysis.
Whether individuals are navigating the interstices of the state for (largely) financial support or the intricate interpersonal relationships and obligations they have with each other for moral, social and financial support, the viability of the person to take control over their own assets and futures, and to be recognised in so doing, is paramount to the sociality and moral reckoning of everyday life. By exploring the everyday lives of people who are managing to make ends meet whilst living with poverty, this book asks how poverty and multiple interdependencies are experienced, negotiated and used in the maintenance, dissolution and recuperation of dynamic kinship, and neighbourly and friendship relations of support.

‘Lloyd George at War, 1916–1918’ provides a much needed re-evaluation of this charismatic prime minister’s wartime leadership. Calling on a wide range of primary sources and focussing on Lloyd George’s role in the war cabinet, Cassar compellingly argues that George’s reputation as the “man who won the war” was wholly unmerited. Instead Cassar shows that Lloyd George’s heavy handed leadership was often detrimental to the Allied cause. From his wholehearted support for the disastrous Nivelle offensive, to his pursuit of a peripheral strategy that diverted troops away from the critical theatre of war on the Western Front, Cassar shows that Lloyd George consistently bucked the advice of his generals in preference for ineffectual and dangerous military strategies. Cassar’s approach also differs from that of other studies of Lloyd George by adopting a thematic approach in preference to a chronological narrative, thereby allowing a closer evaluation of Lloyd George’s handling of complex issues.

‘Lloyd George at War, 1916–1918’ provides a much needed re-evaluation of this charismatic prime minister’s wartime leadership. Calling on a wide range of primary sources and focussing on Lloyd George’s role in the war cabinet, Cassar compellingly argues that George’s reputation as the “man who won the war” was wholly unmerited. Instead Cassar shows that Lloyd George’s heavy handed leadership was often detrimental to the Allied cause. From his wholehearted support for the disastrous Nivelle offensive, to his pursuit of a peripheral strategy that diverted troops away from the critical theatre of war on the Western Front, Cassar shows that Lloyd George consistently bucked the advice of his generals in preference for ineffectual and dangerous military strategies. Cassar’s approach also differs from that of other studies of Lloyd George by adopting a thematic approach in preference to a chronological narrative, thereby allowing a closer evaluation of Lloyd George’s handling of complex issues.

‘Locating Australian Literary Memory’ explores sites which are explicitly connected with Australian authors through material forms of commemoration such as houses, graves, statues and assorted artefacts. The focus is on eleven Australian authors – Adam Lindsay Gordon, Joseph Furphy, Henry Handel Richardson, Henry Lawson, A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Nan Chauncy, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Eleanor Dark, P. L. Travers, Kylie Tennant and David Unaipon. Each of these writers offers different perspectives on the conventions of literary commemoration from the nineteenth century onwards.

Australian heritage terrain has been thoroughly mapped by nationalist heritage practices which may no longer relate to contemporary values. As elsewhere, the focus is moving towards a greater recognition of the contributions of women authors, migrants, expatriates and First Nations peoples. There is an often unacknowledged dissonance between imported modes of commemoration and the unceded lands onto which they have been introduced. The designation of ‘author countries’ is especially problematic in a postcolonial context because it ‘overwrites’ Indigenous Country, obscuring it from the view of non-Indigenous Australians.

Rather than advocating for the creation of more literary monuments, or the further preservation of memorials that currently exist, ‘Locating Australian Literary Memory’ seeks to reveal the many blind spots, contradictions, challenges and eccentricities of literary commemoration in Australia. While observing the value of literary memorials and the voluntary labour that enables their construction, this book argues for an expanded repertoire of practices to recognise authors and storytellers who have been hitherto overlooked.

Ruskin Bond's life - and, for that matter, his semi-autobiographical works - are allegories of the colonial aftermath. His is an odd but exemplary attempt at absorption as a member of the Anglo-Indian ethnic minority, a community whose role in the shaping of the postcolonial Indian psyche has yet to be systematically analysed. This study explores the dialogue between the biographical and authorial selves of Ruskin Bond, whose subjectivity is informed by the fantasies of space and time.

Bond's experiences of socio-political discrimination underwrite his repressed concerns. He seeks to allay his anxieties through an attempt to signify defiance of the functional agencies of those parameters, which ironically become more active as he attempts a symptomatic mastery of their inductive agencies. Nevertheless, for a nostalgic writer the unconscious - which is shaped by the impressions of the experiences of negotiation between double inheritances - exerts a problematic yet discerning influence on Bond's literary self. This study offers a chronological reading of Bond's texts, seeking to bring out the constant presence of this repressed anxiety and the psychological compulsion to dramatize the Self-Other dynamics as a symptomatic method to acquire a conviction of the self.

This renewed edition of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, exactly a century after Wittgenstein’s release, presents the text in a hierarchical manner, “which is the way in which the book was composed and in which Wittgenstein arranged (selected and supplemented) the best of the philosophical remarks that he had been writing since 1913” (Peter Hacker). That tree-like reading is recommended by Wittgenstein himself in the sole footnote of his book, in which he suggests that the inner logical structure of the text is set by the decimal numbers of its propositions. “They alone – the Author will add – give the book perspicuity and clearness, and without this numbering it would be an incomprehensible jumble”. Indeed, the compact and intricate sequence of the traditional presentation is only a rigorous logical bet, but only a logical machine or a robot can unravel the tangle: for an ordinary human understanding that does not exploit its numbering, the book remains “an incomprehensible jumble”.

In the present disposition, instead, all horizontal and vertical references become directly manifest and any reader can enjoy the fine architecture and the elegant reasoning of Wittgenstein's work. Every page is an actual reading unit, perfectly coherent and complete. The Tractatus becomes comprehensible also to unskilled readers, of course at more or less deep levels, while a scholar or a more practised reader can detect suggestions and meanings that had remained, until now, completely hidden. A historical note shows in which manner the new structural perspective sheds new light also in the compositional manuscript we have, which “writing units” are very similar, actually, to the pages of the present edition. Besides, this allows to rebuild the list of “Supplements” (here in the Appendix) that Wittgenstein gathered after he roughly finished his manuscript, but that he used very little in the final book.

Printing the Tractatus following Wittgenstein's decimal prescriptions required meticulous philological care and some discretional conventions: for instance, at the top of each page the commented-upon proposition is printed again, to make the sight complete and self-sufficient. On the other hand, some forcing of the text by the translators in their sequential reading could be eliminated, restoring a more literal translation. Also the famous and intriguing picture of the eye and its visual field (5.6331) has been restored as Wittgenstein drafted it, making the entire page perfectly understandable and coherent. This documented and editorial work on one of the most referenced books of the last century was conceived to obtain, and in fact gained, a perspicuous and crystal clear text, philologically faithful and relaxingly readable at the same time.

This renewed edition of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, exactly a century after Wittgenstein’s release, presents the text in a hierarchical manner, “which is the way in which the book was composed and in which Wittgenstein arranged (selected and supplemented) the best of the philosophical remarks that he had been writing since 1913” (Peter Hacker). That tree-like reading is recommended by Wittgenstein himself in the sole footnote of his book, in which he suggests that the inner logical structure of the text is set by the decimal numbers of its propositions. “They alone – the Author will add – give the book perspicuity and clearness, and without this numbering it would be an incomprehensible jumble”. Indeed, the compact and intricate sequence of the traditional presentation is only a rigorous logical bet, but only a logical machine or a robot can unravel the tangle: for an ordinary human understanding that does not exploit its numbering, the book remains “an incomprehensible jumble”.

In the present disposition, instead, all horizontal and vertical references become directly manifest and any reader can enjoy the fine architecture and the elegant reasoning of Wittgenstein's work. Every page is an actual reading unit, perfectly coherent and complete. The Tractatus becomes comprehensible also to unskilled readers, of course at more or less deep levels, while a scholar or a more practised reader can detect suggestions and meanings that had remained, until now, completely hidden. A historical note shows in which manner the new structural perspective sheds new light also in the compositional manuscript we have, which “writing units” are very similar, actually, to the pages of the present edition. Besides, this allows to rebuild the list of “Supplements” (here in the Appendix) that Wittgenstein gathered after he roughly finished his manuscript, but that he used very little in the final book.

Printing the Tractatus following Wittgenstein's decimal prescriptions required meticulous philological care and some discretional conventions: for instance, at the top of each page the commented-upon proposition is printed again, to make the sight complete and self-sufficient. On the other hand, some forcing of the text by the translators in their sequential reading could be eliminated, restoring a more literal translation. Also the famous and intriguing picture of the eye and its visual field (5.6331) has been restored as Wittgenstein drafted it, making the entire page perfectly understandable and coherent. This documented and editorial work on one of the most referenced books of the last century was conceived to obtain, and in fact gained, a perspicuous and crystal clear text, philologically faithful and relaxingly readable at the same time.

The essays in Logos and Life, the earliest written in 2001 but mainly dating from 2014 and later, cover topics in philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, ethics and philosophy of language. There are discussions of the voluntary and the involuntary; reasons for action; the idea of an ‘inner state’; pleasure; the nature of ethics; justice; necessity and possibility; and a number of other topics. Numerous strands connect these four areas, which Roger Teichmann highlights: in this sense the collection exhibits thematic unity as well as diversity.

Several of the essays take as their starting points the ideas and philosophical methods of Wittgenstein and of Elizabeth Anscombe, and so will be of interest to anyone studying those philosophers. Anscombe was a friend and pupil of Wittgenstein, and Teichmann was fortunate enough to be a friend and pupil of Anscombe. He is now a leading authority on her philosophy.

A newly written Introduction serves to indicate the main themes and arguments of the book, and provide an overall statement of Teichmann’s philosophy. 

The essays in Logos and Life, the earliest written in 2001 but mainly dating from 2014 and later, cover topics in philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, ethics and philosophy of language. There are discussions of the voluntary and the involuntary; reasons for action; the idea of an ‘inner state’; pleasure; the nature of ethics; justice; necessity and possibility; and a number of other topics. Numerous strands connect these four areas, which Roger Teichmann highlights: in this sense the collection exhibits thematic unity as well as diversity.

Several of the essays take as their starting points the ideas and philosophical methods of Wittgenstein and of Elizabeth Anscombe, and so will be of interest to anyone studying those philosophers. Anscombe was a friend and pupil of Wittgenstein, and Teichmann was fortunate enough to be a friend and pupil of Anscombe. He is now a leading authority on her philosophy.

A newly written Introduction serves to indicate the main themes and arguments of the book, and provide an overall statement of Teichmann’s philosophy. 

Anthem's Travel Classics presents Thomas Holmes' masterpiece of early-twentieth-century social journalism: a quirky, engaging and witty look at London's criminal and social underworld of 1912. Holmes investigates the seedy intentions of the pickpockets, prostitutes, prisoners, drunks and murderers that comprise the capital's criminal element, all of whom he rather tends to admire! A more reflective and progressive theme also runs through this work, as the author considers the serious social problems faced by women, the disabled and the unemployed. Both a thrilling exposé and a considered anthropological review, 'London's Underworld' is driven by the author's conflicting feelings of admiration for the rebellious spirit which frees these criminals from the laws of reserved Victorian Society and also pity for the restless, violent attitudes which leave them stranded there alone. Introduced by a modern luminary, 'London's Underworld' is a revealing look at the crooked past of the great city.

'London: A Pilgrimage' was conceived in 1868 by the journalist and playwright Blanchard Jerrold. Accompanied by the famous artist Gustave Doré, Jerrold prowled every corner of the heaving metropolis, sometimes with plain-clothes police for protection. 'London: A Pilgrimage' is a forgotten classic of social journalism, a frank and brutal look at the poverty striken, gin-swilling London of the nineteenth century, written in a perceptive, bold and gripping style.

180 incredible etchings by Doré escort Jerrold on his odyssey through the pulsating city, into the Lambeth gas works, seedy opium dens and grubby bathing houses; peering curiously into the desperate lives of the flower sellers, lavender girls and organ grinders. 'London: A Pilgrimage' is an enlightening work that brings to life the chaotic and gloomy past of a great city on the cusp of modern times.

Peter Ackroyd's excellent introduction sheds further light on the period and the context in which Jerrold and Doré felt compelled to reveal to the world the squalor into which London was slowly sinking.

A stock boy is found to have made an expensive Matsusaka cow vanish from the cattle house right before shipment. But the question remains: How and why did the boy make a 700kg cow disappear?

Jukichi is a seasoned fisherman who can row a fishing boat with proficiency and catch an abundance of fish in the traditional way – until he comes across “naméso,” a sea beast. What will be the fate of the old fisherman, who has been on the sea for 80 years?

With its bright red pincers kept high above its head, a crab called Aka moves slowly along the highway. Can Shinichi, a lonely boy, help Aka reach the sea?

Irako, a cruel and heartless woman, murders a philandering and neglectful doctor by radiation exposure, thereby sealing her own fate. In her dying days, an unusual group of animals gather around Irako to provide solace as she fades away. Can their uncanny companionship transform her demon heart?

“Lost Souls, Sacred Creatures” features four stories written by award-nominated author Juko Nishimura.

Gayle DeLong was a well-known activist in the autism community, the ‘Warrior Mom’ of two autistic daughters. She worked closely with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on vaccine injury issues. This book is a record (based largely on her diaries) of her happy marriage to Jonathan Rose, from their first date in 1994 to her untimely death from breast cancer in January 2022.

Love in the Age of Autism does not sugarcoat the stresses and heartbreak of raising autistic children: it is more honest about that than most other books on the subject. But it is also an inspiring love story, which can help autism parents find profound joys in spite of all the pains. It offers practical advice and models for sharing the burdens and pleasures of life, based on a strong sense of family values. Many autism moms give up their careers to care for their children, but Gayle was a determined professional woman, and her arrangements with Jonathan allowed her to continue working.

She also refused to give up one of her favourite sports – sex. This book frankly (and with an earthy sense of humour) illustrates how autism parents can continue to enjoy passionate, monogamous physical love – and it also explains how to provide sex education for autistic girls (who can easily be taken advantage of). In this book, the girl dies in the end, as she often does in love stories, but the tale is intensely romantic and life-affirming.

In June 1992 the High Court of Australia ruled in favour of a claim by a group of Indigenous Australians, led by Eddie Koiki Mabo, to customary, “native title” to land. In recognising prior Indigenous occupation of the continent, the Mabo decision shook the foundations of white Australia’s belief in the legitimate settlement of the continent by the British. Indeed, more than any other event in Australia’s legal, political and cultural history, the Mabo decision challenged previous ways of thinking about land, identity, belonging, the nation and history. Now, more than a quarter of a century after Mabo, this book examines the broader impacts of this ground-breaking legal decision on Australian culture and select forms of cultural practice. If Mabo represents a “psychological” turning point (Behrendt), a “paradigm shift” (Collins and Davis) in Australian historical consciousness, if we are meant to be living in “the age of Mabo” (Attwood) or in a “post-Mabo imaginary” (Gelder and Jacobs), how is this shift or this contemporary imaginary being reflected, refracted and articulated in Australian film, fiction, poetry, biography and other forms of cultural expression? To what extent has the discussion and the practice of history, linguistics, anthropology and other branches of the humanities been challenged or transformed by Mabo? While a number of individual studies have focussed on Mabo’s impact on law, politics, film or literature, no single book provides an overview of the diverse impact and discursive influence of Mabo on various fields of artistic endeavour and cultural practice in Australia today. This book fills that gap in literary and cultural enquiry.

In considering the cultural legacies of the High Court’s landmark decision this book also engages in a critical dialogue with Mabo and post-Mabo discourse. While a number of Indigenous Australians have benefited, legally and politically from the Mabo decision, the majority of Indigenous peoples have gained nothing, materially, from subsequent native title rulings. In honouring Eddie Mabo’s achievement, then, the contributors also recognise that Indigenous sovereignty over the continent was denied by the High Court in Mabo, and that the struggle for the recognition of better and wider land rights recognition – indeed, of First Nations sovereignty, via a treaty, treaties or similar agreements – continues ‘beyond’ Mabo. 

Keeping such an acknowledgement of Indigenous sovereignty in mind, this interdisciplinary book offers a transnational perspective of Mabo’s cultural legacy by presenting the work of scholars based in Australia, continental Europe and the UK.

‘Mad Tales from the Raj’ is an extensively researched study of mental illness within the context of British colonialism in early nineteenth-century India. The author challenges the assumption that western medical psychology was impartial and highlights the extent to which it reflected British colonial ideology and practice. This long overdue reprint makes available in easily accessible form an authoritative assessment of western, institution-based psychiatry during the East India Company’s period. It includes a fully revised introduction that locates the work in relation to recent scholarly discourse in the field of history of colonial medicine as well as additional material on the treatment of the 'native insane'. The book provides the first comprehensive account of official attitudes and practices in relation to both Indian and European patients at a time when the dictum of the 'civilising mission' guided colonial social policy towards the colonized, and mental illness among the colonizers was seen to tarnish the prestige of the ruling race. Based on archival sources and reports by medical experts, the book provides a highly readable and illuminating account of contemporary psychiatric treatment and colonial policies. It will be fascinating reading not only to students of colonial history, medical sociology and related disciplines, but to all those with a general interest in life in the colonies.

‘Mad Tales from the Raj’ is an extensively researched study of mental illness within the context of British colonialism in early nineteenth-century India. The author challenges the assumption that western medical psychology was impartial and highlights the extent to which it reflected British colonial ideology and practice. This long overdue reprint makes available in easily accessible form an authoritative assessment of western, institution-based psychiatry during the East India Company’s period. It includes a fully revised introduction that locates the work in relation to recent scholarly discourse in the field of history of colonial medicine as well as additional material on the treatment of the 'native insane'. The book provides the first comprehensive account of official attitudes and practices in relation to both Indian and European patients at a time when the dictum of the 'civilising mission' guided colonial social policy towards the colonized, and mental illness among the colonizers was seen to tarnish the prestige of the ruling race. Based on archival sources and reports by medical experts, the book provides a highly readable and illuminating account of contemporary psychiatric treatment and colonial policies. It will be fascinating reading not only to students of colonial history, medical sociology and related disciplines, but to all those with a general interest in life in the colonies.

The essays gathered in Magazines and Modernity in Brazil explore transnational topics such as architecture; cosmopolitanism and universalism; antisemitism, anti-war movements; visual artistic movements; advertising; anti-racism; avant-garde; class; consumer society; design; ethnicity and race; fascism and anti-fascism; intellectual elites; literature; modernity; publishing; translation, as well as book and periodical exchange, which is the main focus of this collection.

Together, these essays propose a critique of traditional comparatist approaches, promoting instead the study of contact zones and intersections, highlighting the place of production and reception of cultural products, as well as the role of mediators. What guide these analyses of magazines are concepts such as connected and shared histories, which emphasize transnational interactions. Within the spectrum of global history, this collection is related to a recent body scholarship on cultural transfers, which opened a fertile field for new research based on the analysis of transnational movements not only of ideas but also of networks and magazines.

Organized chronologically, the chapters explore a period from the mid-nineteenth century to the aftermath of World War II, always having key magazines as the focus of analysis. The authors deliberately move away from traditional comparative approaches, in which two or more nations are set as a parameter, leading to emphasize their similarities and differences in a rigid framework that does not take into account interactions and cross-pollination of cultures and ideas. Some of the keywords that appear here are transnational models, global, circulation, mediation, hybridity, mestizaje, as well as histories that are shared and connected. These keywords help the authors to analyse the formation and development of the participation of Brazil in the global, modern periodical print culture. However, it should be noted that the purpose of this book is not to suggest a supposed singularity of the Brazilian case. The contribution of this volume of essays is precisely the opposite of this, showing how modernity in Brazil, including what is conventionally called modernism, is a complex expression of transnational movements and cross-cultural exchanges.

This book presents the very first analysis of male homosexuality in modern rural Thailand that is based on sociological/anthropological research directly with 25 young same-sex attracted men. It explores changes in the way men view and describe their sexuality over time by interviewing them three times over a period of around 18 months. The men are followed during an important transition in their lives: the end of their high school years and the end (in most cases) of their life as a child with parents or extended family at a rural home. Nearly all decided to move to a city to continue their education or to find work. Some also had stints with sex work in one of Thailand’s well-known centers for prostitution. For nearly all men, this transition brought them into contact with new ideas about gender and sexuality, and many experienced an abrupt increase in their opportunities to have sex, leading to a readjustment of their moral universes. The young men in the study were still in the process of figuring out who they were/wanted to be, and many contradictions emerged in their narratives over the period of data collection. These contradictions, and the way they were resolved, presented an opportunity to critically explore the way the social structures in which these young men operate influence the way they think and explain their own sexual/gendered selves, and how changes in these social structures affect their sense of self.

A number of explanatory ‘lenses’ are used in the different book chapters that zoom in on different structuring/explanatory frameworks for making sense of gender and sexuality in Thai cultural contexts, as used and applied by the study participants. The first is Buddhism. Buddhist beliefs and traditional ideas about karma, fate, hierarchy, family, masculinity and femininity played important roles in the young men’s childhood understandings about homosexuality and same-sex relations–  especially in terms of their cause and morality. The second lens for understanding male homosexuality in Thailand is gender, where men are divided into feminine-oriented bottoms and masculine-oriented tops. A third lens is modernity/the desire to develop and grow, closely linked to Thailand’s globalizing economy and the increasing role of the Internet and social media. The Internet functioned as an important ‘playground’, a platform for trying-out different presentations of the self via Facebook and chat applications – and in many men this resulted in a rejection of their previous self-presentation as effeminate, which they gradually started to associate with being backwards, rural and ‘traditional’. The fourth lens is related to economy. Many of the young men in the study searched for romantic relationships based on complementarity and were looking for boyfriends who had something they did not have—money, a better position in society, or ‘wisdom’/the ability to guide. Most of the more effeminate men saw their sexuality as valuable, and several of the study participants described in this book – especially those coming from poor families – engaged in sex work and used their youth and beauty to find a wealthy long-term partner, in the hope of lifting their families out of poverty, towards a more prosperous future. The fifth lens is nationalism, or more specifically the concept of ‘being a good Thai’; gradually the young men learned that the Thai sense of self and the importance of performing one’s role as a ‘good’ son in public can be used as a strategy to cover-up private behaviors and desires. The sixth and final lens is family. Being ‘good’, respecting elders and elder siblings, financially supporting (grand-)parents, having good manners, meaning ‘acting appropriately in time and space’, gave the young men a way to retain the respect and support of elders and seniors, and determined how they dealt with (non-)disclosure of their sexuality to their families and others and explained their ability and desire to remain part of the mainstream of society. In the final chapter, a discussion about three critical concerns pertaining the health and wellbeing of same-sex attracted Thai men are discussed in the light of this proposed model: the ongoing HIV epidemic, mental health and LGBTI rights. 

Overall, this book presents significant new insights about the Thai sex/gender system, particularly on how it is affected by processes of globalization and the ascent of the Internet and mobile phones as tools for dating and romance.

This book presents the very first analysis of male homosexuality in modern rural Thailand that is based on sociological/anthropological research directly with 25 young same-sex attracted men. It explores changes in the way men view and describe their sexuality over time by interviewing them three times over a period of around 18 months. The men are followed during an important transition in their lives: the end of their high school years and the end (in most cases) of their life as a child with parents or extended family at a rural home. Nearly all decided to move to a city to continue their education or to find work. Some also had stints with sex work in one of Thailand’s well-known centers for prostitution. For nearly all men, this transition brought them into contact with new ideas about gender and sexuality, and many experienced an abrupt increase in their opportunities to have sex, leading to a readjustment of their moral universes. The young men in the study were still in the process of figuring out who they were/wanted to be, and many contradictions emerged in their narratives over the period of data collection. These contradictions, and the way they were resolved, presented an opportunity to critically explore the way the social structures in which these young men operate influence the way they think and explain their own sexual/gendered selves, and how changes in these social structures affect their sense of self.

A number of explanatory ‘lenses’ are used in the different book chapters that zoom in on different structuring/explanatory frameworks for making sense of gender and sexuality in Thai cultural contexts, as used and applied by the study participants. The first is Buddhism. Buddhist beliefs and traditional ideas about karma, fate, hierarchy, family, masculinity and femininity played important roles in the young men’s childhood understandings about homosexuality and same-sex relations–  especially in terms of their cause and morality. The second lens for understanding male homosexuality in Thailand is gender, where men are divided into feminine-oriented bottoms and masculine-oriented tops. A third lens is modernity/the desire to develop and grow, closely linked to Thailand’s globalizing economy and the increasing role of the Internet and social media. The Internet functioned as an important ‘playground’, a platform for trying-out different presentations of the self via Facebook and chat applications – and in many men this resulted in a rejection of their previous self-presentation as effeminate, which they gradually started to associate with being backwards, rural and ‘traditional’. The fourth lens is related to economy. Many of the young men in the study searched for romantic relationships based on complementarity and were looking for boyfriends who had something they did not have—money, a better position in society, or ‘wisdom’/the ability to guide. Most of the more effeminate men saw their sexuality as valuable, and several of the study participants described in this book – especially those coming from poor families – engaged in sex work and used their youth and beauty to find a wealthy long-term partner, in the hope of lifting their families out of poverty, towards a more prosperous future. The fifth lens is nationalism, or more specifically the concept of ‘being a good Thai’; gradually the young men learned that the Thai sense of self and the importance of performing one’s role as a ‘good’ son in public can be used as a strategy to cover-up private behaviors and desires. The sixth and final lens is family. Being ‘good’, respecting elders and elder siblings, financially supporting (grand-)parents, having good manners, meaning ‘acting appropriately in time and space’, gave the young men a way to retain the respect and support of elders and seniors, and determined how they dealt with (non-)disclosure of their sexuality to their families and others and explained their ability and desire to remain part of the mainstream of society. In the final chapter, a discussion about three critical concerns pertaining the health and wellbeing of same-sex attracted Thai men are discussed in the light of this proposed model: the ongoing HIV epidemic, mental health and LGBTI rights. 

Overall, this book presents significant new insights about the Thai sex/gender system, particularly on how it is affected by processes of globalization and the ascent of the Internet and mobile phones as tools for dating and romance.

Have you ever wondered why many of the over 28 million small businesses in operation in the United States do not survive past the first five years? As a fellow small business owner (and professor of business administration) trying to compete in the global economy, I became interested in understanding the actual reasons that cause many small businesses to fail. This question consumed me to the point that I decided to go back to school and earn a doctorate degree in business to hopefully understand the answer.

Through my studies, I began to suspect that the main cause of failure for small businesses was the lack of understanding between the roles of management and leadership. I soon became very frustrated when I could not find research studies that showed the direct link between the necessary skills needed for small business survival.

With little information or resources to rely on, I knew that if I wanted the answers I would have to conduct my own research study to gain the necessary insight into this ongoing problem that has plagued over 50% of today’s workforce.

For two years, I studied small businesses in the global economy. After completing a comprehensive study, I was able to finally document actual information that proved the management and leadership skills that affect small business survival. Once I understood the effects of management and leadership skills had on small businesses, I wanted to apply my research to helping small business owners improve their business.

I thought about the struggles and how I could not find any books or resources that provided a ‘one stop shop’ with detailed information on how to succeed in small business management and leadership. All I had available was a lot of business books and models that were created for large corporations and had to modify bits and pieces from several resources to hopefully fit my needs. This process was very time consuming and did not give me a good sense of a how everything fit together to help me succeed.

In fact, everything I found I went through starting my own small business and wanted to create a resource guide that provided a quick resource for all small businesses.

Since there are many different types of small businesses in many different markets, it is easy to understand why there were no specific resources. A resource that looked at the primary basic functions and demonstrated the causal links between management and leadership skills had to be created that could apply to small businesses in the trade sector of the market needed to be created. ‘Management and Leadership Skills That Affect Small Business Survival’ was the outcome.

This volume reports on the research completed as part of the multi-year New England Climate Adaptation Project (NECAP), a partnership between the MIT Science Impact Collaborative, the US Government's National Estuarine Research Reserve System, four New England coastal towns, and the Consensus Building Institute. The first half of the book offers a series of chapters that explain how and why climate adaptation requires collective rather than individual risk management. It argues that most of the responsibility for responding to climate risks—including sea level rise, storm intensification, changing patterns of rainfall, and increasing temperature—must be taken by local and regional stakeholders.

While collective action is critical for climate adaptation, many communities are not ready to effectively tackle the adaptation challenge, and need enhanced collaborative capacity to support collective risk management. Using concrete examples, this book offers strategies to increase the readiness of communities to deal effectively with the impacts of climate change. It introduces methods for assessing local climate change risks and describes tools for evaluating the social and political contexts in which collective action can take place. It also shares NECAP research demonstrating that engaging communities in tailored role-play simulations has impacted public understanding of climate risks and local readiness to support collective risk management efforts.

The second half of the book presents the products of NECAP, including stakeholder assessments (showing how key stakeholders think about climate risks), risk assessments (including downscaled forecasts from global climate models presented in a way that is accessible to the public), tailored role play simulations (that other communities can use to engage residents in their locality), community case studies (that provide statistical and qualitative evidence of the before-and-after impact of public engagement in serious games), and the results of public opinion polls following interventions in each community after almost 18 months. 

This volume reports on the research completed as part of the multi-year New England Climate Adaptation Project (NECAP), a partnership between the MIT Science Impact Collaborative, the US Government's National Estuarine Research Reserve System, four New England coastal towns, and the Consensus Building Institute. The first half of the book offers a series of chapters that explain how and why climate adaptation requires collective rather than individual risk management. It argues that most of the responsibility for responding to climate risks—including sea level rise, storm intensification, changing patterns of rainfall, and increasing temperature—must be taken by local and regional stakeholders.

While collective action is critical for climate adaptation, many communities are not ready to effectively tackle the adaptation challenge, and need enhanced collaborative capacity to support collective risk management. Using concrete examples, this book offers strategies to increase the readiness of communities to deal effectively with the impacts of climate change. It introduces methods for assessing local climate change risks and describes tools for evaluating the social and political contexts in which collective action can take place. It also shares NECAP research demonstrating that engaging communities in tailored role-play simulations has impacted public understanding of climate risks and local readiness to support collective risk management efforts.

The second half of the book presents the products of NECAP, including stakeholder assessments (showing how key stakeholders think about climate risks), risk assessments (including downscaled forecasts from global climate models presented in a way that is accessible to the public), tailored role play simulations (that other communities can use to engage residents in their locality), community case studies (that provide statistical and qualitative evidence of the before-and-after impact of public engagement in serious games), and the results of public opinion polls following interventions in each community after almost 18 months. 

‘Managing Coral Reefs’ examines Indonesia’s and Malaysia’s pathways to implementing the international Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), focusing specifically on how regional and national policies in Southeast Asia have fared when implementing the Aichi Targets of the CBD. These targets include safeguarding ecosystems through protection and ensuring that benefits from ecosystems can be enjoyed by all. Kelly Heber Dunning examines CBD implementation through marine protected areas (MPAs) for corals reefs in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Coral reefs, along with mangroves and seagrass, provide stakeholders with livelihoods in fisheries and tourism; they are also efficient natural barriers against extreme weather and climate change–related hazards. While Indonesia uses a co-managed framework, whereby villages and governments share power, to implement its MPAs, Malaysia uses a top-down network of federally managed Marine Parks. Using mixed methods through interviews and surveys as well as coral reef ecology surveys conducted over a year of fieldwork, Dunning argues that co-managed systems are the current best practice for implementing the CBD’s Aichi Targets in tropical developing countries. Not only do they prevent ecosystems from many local forms of degradation, but they also are seen as more legitimate by local resource user stakeholders, allowing them more adaptive capacity to manage the ecosystems under conditions of uncertainty, as well as allowing for a more integrated form of management whereby ecological, economic, and social considerations can be made for management decisions. Centralized MPAs can mimic the successes of co-managed systems through better stakeholder engagement, possibly with greater socio-ecological success in the long run, due to their superior financial, administrative and organizational powers.

In the present day, a young married couple, Asafumi and Shizuka are trying to start a new life, having had to move after losing their jobs. Asafumi decides to join the family business of selling medicines, and a notebook that used to belong to his grandfather Rentarō leads him to explore the mysterious Mandala Road in the hopes of finding his grandfather’s former customers. Shizuka, meanwhile, struggles to resign herself to her new role as a housewife and wonders if she made the right choice in marrying Asafumi.

Following the end of World War II, Saya, a woman from a Malayan native tribe, is on her way to Japan with her seven-year-old son to find Rentarō, who was her wartime lover and the father of her child. When she arrives, however, she discovers that Rentarō has another family and has no place for her. Haunted by memories of torture from the Japanese seeking information about Rentarō and the abuses she suffered working in a brothel, Saya tries to rebuild her life and learn to live with her past.

Both setting out alone on Mandala Road in two different time periods, Asafumi and Rentarō wake up one day having both entered a post-apocalyptic world, where the people seem to have mostly been wiped out by a mysterious “calamity” and the ones that remain are scarcely human. Asafumi, Rentarō, Saya, and Shizuka are all, in their own way, on a private journey to discover and reconcile themselves to the memories of violence, both seen and experienced, as they learn to live with a past that seems always to be too close behind them.

Edited by Professor Neera Chandhoke, 'Mapping Histories' is a fitting tribute to renowned historian Ravinder Kumar, well known for his pioneering work on the social consequences of colonial rule in India, and for founding the Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Here, Fellows of the centre present a collection of historical and contemporary studies on India, which deal with diverse themes from religion to the environment, cultural studies to feminism. Together, these lively and challenging essays offer readings on how we understand India's history and, conversely, how we can use this comprehension of the past to interpret India's complex present.

Edited by Professor Neera Chandhoke, 'Mapping Histories' is a fitting tribute to renowned historian Ravinder Kumar, well known for his pioneering work on the social consequences of colonial rule in India, and for founding the Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Here, Fellows of the centre present a collection of historical and contemporary studies on India, which deal with diverse themes from religion to the environment, cultural studies to feminism. Together, these lively and challenging essays offer readings on how we understand India's history and, conversely, how we can use this comprehension of the past to interpret India's complex present.

Focusing specifically on the poetic construction of India, ‘Mapping the Nation’ offers a broad selection of poetry written by Indians in English during the period 1870–1920. Centering upon the “mapping” of India – both as a regional location and as a poetic ideal – this unique anthology presents poetry from various geographical nodal points of the subcontinent, as well as that written in the imperial metropole of England.

The anthology’s selection defines India in various ways: as being against Britain in loyalty and/or critique; in “exile” in or through memories of England; through a reconstructed past; through satirical or earnest depictions of her contemporary politics; through depictions of the subcontinent’s landscape and scenery; through her various regions and their inhabitants, customs, cultures and religions; or through odes to British and Indian literary figures and politicians. This rich bounty of content is complemented by an equally detailed array of auxiliary notes, including annotations and appendices of poets’ prefaces, assessments of other contemporaries, and a collection of formerly lost archive material.

As becomes evident, the diversity of India’s imagining by her poets during this period corresponds to the diversity of her inhabitants and geography. In grouping its poetry according to region of publication, this anthology makes a structural innovation that negotiates the politics of locality, nation and empire by acknowledging the importance of all three terms in constructing an Indian national and cultural identity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Focusing specifically on the poetic construction of India, ‘Mapping the Nation’ offers a broad selection of poetry written by Indians in English during the period 1870–1920. Centering upon the “mapping” of India – both as a regional location and as a poetic ideal – this unique anthology presents poetry from various geographical nodal points of the subcontinent, as well as that written in the imperial metropole of England.

The anthology’s selection defines India in various ways: as being against Britain in loyalty and/or critique; in “exile” in or through memories of England; through a reconstructed past; through satirical or earnest depictions of her contemporary politics; through depictions of the subcontinent’s landscape and scenery; through her various regions and their inhabitants, customs, cultures and religions; or through odes to British and Indian literary figures and politicians. This rich bounty of content is complemented by an equally detailed array of auxiliary notes, including annotations and appendices of poets’ prefaces, assessments of other contemporaries, and a collection of formerly lost archive material.

As becomes evident, the diversity of India’s imagining by her poets during this period corresponds to the diversity of her inhabitants and geography. In grouping its poetry according to region of publication, this anthology makes a structural innovation that negotiates the politics of locality, nation and empire by acknowledging the importance of all three terms in constructing an Indian national and cultural identity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The book traces Luther’s career from his humble origins through his conflicts with pope and emperor, and his initiating the split between Protestants and Catholics. Based on the most recent scholarship, and drawing heavily upon Luther’s own writings, 'Martin Luther and the German Reformation' provides a picture of Luther that is historically faithful without being needlessly scholarly. Intended for use by students, it assumes no initial familiarity with Luther and is accessible to non-scholars. It would be ideal for any interested person who wants to get to know Martin Luther; one of the key figures in European history.

Marx in the Field is a unique edited collection illustrating the relevance of the Marxian method to study contemporary capitalism and the global development process. Essays in the collection bring Marx ‘to the field’ in three ways. They illustrate how Marxian categories can be concretely deployed for field research in the global economy, they analyse how these categories may be adapted during fieldwork and they discuss data collection methods supporting Marxian analysis. Crucially, many of the contributions expand the scope of Marxian analysis by combining its insights with those of other intellectual traditions, including radical feminisms, critical realism and postcolonial studies. The book defines the possibilities and challenges of fieldwork guided by Marxian analysis, including those emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The collection takes a global approach to the study of development and of contemporary capitalism. While some essays focus on themes and geographical areas of long-term concern for international development – like informal or rural poverty and work across South Asia, Southern and West Africa, or South America – others focus instead on actors benefitting from the development process - like regional exporters, larger farmers, and traders – or on unequal socio-economic outcomes across richer and emerging economies and regions – including Gulf countries, North America, Southern Europe, or Post-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe. Some essays explore global processes cutting across the world economy, connecting multiple regions, actors and inequalities.

While some of the contributions focus on classic Marxian tropes in the study of contemporary capitalism – like class, labour and working conditions, agrarian change, or global commodity chains and prices – others aim at demonstrating the relevance of the Marxian method beyond its traditional boundaries – for instance, for exploring the interplays between food, nutrition and poverty; the links between social reproduction, gender and homework; the features of migration and refugees regimes, tribal chieftaincy structures or prison labour; or the dynamics structuring global surrogacy. Overall, through the analysis of an extremely varied set of concrete settings and cases, this book illustrates the extraordinary insights we can gain by bringing Marx in the field.

Marx in the Field is a unique edited collection illustrating the relevance of the Marxian method to study contemporary capitalism and the global development process. Essays in the collection bring Marx ‘to the field’ in three ways. They illustrate how Marxian categories can be concretely deployed for field research in the global economy, they analyse how these categories may be adapted during fieldwork and they discuss data collection methods supporting Marxian analysis. Crucially, many of the contributions expand the scope of Marxian analysis by combining its insights with those of other intellectual traditions, including radical feminisms, critical realism and postcolonial studies. The book defines the possibilities and challenges of fieldwork guided by Marxian analysis, including those emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The collection takes a global approach to the study of development and of contemporary capitalism. While some essays focus on themes and geographical areas of long-term concern for international development – like informal or rural poverty and work across South Asia, Southern and West Africa, or South America – others focus instead on actors benefitting from the development process - like regional exporters, larger farmers, and traders – or on unequal socio-economic outcomes across richer and emerging economies and regions – including Gulf countries, North America, Southern Europe, or Post-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe. Some essays explore global processes cutting across the world economy, connecting multiple regions, actors and inequalities.

While some of the contributions focus on classic Marxian tropes in the study of contemporary capitalism – like class, labour and working conditions, agrarian change, or global commodity chains and prices – others aim at demonstrating the relevance of the Marxian method beyond its traditional boundaries – for instance, for exploring the interplays between food, nutrition and poverty; the links between social reproduction, gender and homework; the features of migration and refugees regimes, tribal chieftaincy structures or prison labour; or the dynamics structuring global surrogacy. Overall, through the analysis of an extremely varied set of concrete settings and cases, this book illustrates the extraordinary insights we can gain by bringing Marx in the field.

Offering an alternative exploration of the subject, ‘Marxism in Dark Times’ anchors its investigation of Marxism in the conceptual spheres of humanism, democracy and pluralism. Its essays question the stereotyped, positivist notion of the theory as practised by the exponents of official Marxism, highlight the legacy of the suppressed voices in the Marxist tradition, and provide new insights into reading Marxism in the twenty-first century—affording new perspectives on Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg, Nikolai Bukharin, David Ryazanov and the Frankfurt School. They seek to review the phenomenon of ‘Perestroika,’ explore the new historiography on Comintern, and examine the relation between Marxism and postmodernism. With its wide-ranging provision of materials—some translated here into English from German and Russian for the first time—this collection offers a pioneering English assessment of some of the most debatable issues in contemporary Marxism.

Offering an alternative exploration of the subject, ‘Marxism in Dark Times’ anchors its investigation of Marxism in the conceptual spheres of humanism, democracy and pluralism. Its essays question the stereotyped, positivist notion of the theory as practised by the exponents of official Marxism, highlight the legacy of the suppressed voices in the Marxist tradition, and provide new insights into reading Marxism in the twenty-first century—affording new perspectives on Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg, Nikolai Bukharin, David Ryazanov and the Frankfurt School. They seek to review the phenomenon of ‘Perestroika,’ explore the new historiography on Comintern, and examine the relation between Marxism and postmodernism. With its wide-ranging provision of materials—some translated here into English from German and Russian for the first time—this collection offers a pioneering English assessment of some of the most debatable issues in contemporary Marxism.

Max Nettlau’s Utopian Vision provides a historically grounded presentation of the entire literature of utopianism. Nettlau shows an encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject. He passionately believed that the value of utopian thinking and class struggle should not be underestimated as utopian desire exists in all of us. Utopian thinking, according to Nettlau, stimulates the imagination and awakens the desire to attain a better life for everyone. Nettlau argues that every idea begins as a utopia: some are realized; others are not. Utopian thinking also creates a desire for radical change in society without which no new reality could emerge. Every reality is first dreamed of and, then, the act of dreaming awakens the desire for realization. It is the same desire without which every piece of art would be unthinkable. When utopian ideas reach the masses, forces are released that build bridges into the future and make things possible that otherwise would only exist as dreamlike imaginings. Indeed, Nettlau claims that history is the record of utopian thought practically imagined.

May Alcott Nierike, Author and Advocate examines in-depth the writings on art and travel by the youngest sister of famed novelist Louisa May Alcott. Like other American women in the later nineteenth century, May was unable to receive the advanced training and exhibition opportunities in the USA that she needed to become a notable professional painter due to her gender. An additional obstacle for Alcott Nieriker was her family’s insecure financial status, making it difficult to travel or study abroad for training. Fortunately, following Louisa’s early publishing success, May was able to make three trips to London and Paris to immerse herself more fully in the art world, and eventually attained the prestigious honor of having two paintings accepted into the Paris Salon. However, the book argues that Alcott Nieriker’s main contributions to cultural history were not necessarily her artistic creations, but rather her publications on travel and art—specifically, four articles for the Boston Evening Transcript and an 1879 guidebook, Studying Art Abroad and How To Do It Cheaply. 

The book examines the art and travel writings of May Alcott Nieriker from three distinct but interrelated perspectives: (1) how Alcott Nieriker’s writings both relate to and yet stand apart from standard travel writing of the later nineteenth century; (2) how Alcott Nieriker’s travel writings smartly interweave art criticism and social as well as cultural advocacy, including her concerns about the lack of access to free museums in the USA; and (3) how Alcott Nieriker’s writings critique the social and cultural norms of the day in respect to equal opportunity for women artists, and in turn seek to empower women of modest means to navigate these obstacles and pursue careers as professional artists. In addition, the book provides more insight in general to the fields of nineteenth-century American art and art criticism, travel writing, gender studies, and American cultural studies. In sum, May Alcott Nieriker’s writings, a number of which are republished here for the first time since the 1870s, deserve further attention and interpretation because her texts give voice to critical social and cultural concerns of the nineteenth century, such as gender and class discrimination, that still resonate today.

May Alcott Nierike, Author and Advocate examines in-depth the writings on art and travel by the youngest sister of famed novelist Louisa May Alcott. Like other American women in the later nineteenth century, May was unable to receive the advanced training and exhibition opportunities in the USA that she needed to become a notable professional painter due to her gender. An additional obstacle for Alcott Nieriker was her family’s insecure financial status, making it difficult to travel or study abroad for training. Fortunately, following Louisa’s early publishing success, May was able to make three trips to London and Paris to immerse herself more fully in the art world, and eventually attained the prestigious honor of having two paintings accepted into the Paris Salon. However, the book argues that Alcott Nieriker’s main contributions to cultural history were not necessarily her artistic creations, but rather her publications on travel and art—specifically, four articles for the Boston Evening Transcript and an 1879 guidebook, Studying Art Abroad and How To Do It Cheaply. 

The book examines the art and travel writings of May Alcott Nieriker from three distinct but interrelated perspectives: (1) how Alcott Nieriker’s writings both relate to and yet stand apart from standard travel writing of the later nineteenth century; (2) how Alcott Nieriker’s travel writings smartly interweave art criticism and social as well as cultural advocacy, including her concerns about the lack of access to free museums in the USA; and (3) how Alcott Nieriker’s writings critique the social and cultural norms of the day in respect to equal opportunity for women artists, and in turn seek to empower women of modest means to navigate these obstacles and pursue careers as professional artists. In addition, the book provides more insight in general to the fields of nineteenth-century American art and art criticism, travel writing, gender studies, and American cultural studies. In sum, May Alcott Nieriker’s writings, a number of which are republished here for the first time since the 1870s, deserve further attention and interpretation because her texts give voice to critical social and cultural concerns of the nineteenth century, such as gender and class discrimination, that still resonate today.

Julia Tanney’s Meaning, Mind, and Action mounts an overarching challenge to widely held presuppositions within the practice of philosophy in its classical ‘analytic’ forms as well as in its ‘naturalist’ and ‘cognitivist’ turns, expanding upon those introduced in Rules, Reason and Self-Knowledge (2013).

Influenced by arguments of Wittgenstein, Ryle, and others, Tanney confronts the ‘platitudes’ or unalterable starting points that implicitly or explicitly ground mainstream, philosophical theorising, beginning with the ideas first, that the meaning of a complex, natural language expression such as a sentence is determined by its structure and second, that the meaning of its constituents and that such content—which must remain stable across contexts—is needed to accommodate logical transformations (embeddings in, say, negational, conditional, or propositional attitude contexts) and inferential reasoning. Opposing the ideas that this semantic or propositional content is the bearer of truth or falsehood and that to grasp a concept is to be equipped with rules which fix the relation between an expression and its reference or extension, Tanney argues, by contrast, that our practices are logically prior to their codifications. Explanations, justifications, or the appeal to principles, rules, norms are not on the same logical footing as the moves they endorse; in particular, our successful linguistic practices are not causally explained by a prior grasp of ‘meanings’. Further, to appreciate the indefinite elasticity of most, if not all, natural language expressions is to accept that there may be nothing in common by which we call a thing by the same name. Not only does this subvert the idea that the essence of our concepts can be revealed by contextually transcendent application conditions; it undermines the idea that they function to signify facts, properties, events, or relations whose nature is to be revealed by metaphysical or philosophical-scientific speculation. Construing them so would destroy the saying and explanatory power of the expressions subsumed by these concept-nouns in natural language discourses.

Provides a critical and comprehensive account of the mediation of rural darkness, analyzing a wide range of contemporary media, from astrophotography, tourist advertisements and social media to editing software, online databases and nature documentaries.

With the rapid and ubiquitous spread of urban light pollution, nocturnal darkness has become a rare and neglected experience. In response to the steady decline of gloom, researchers working across multiple disciplines have sought to understand the dynamic and innovative role nighttime plays in human cultures across time. From studies on the ritualistic function of darkened caves in Paleolithic times to contemporary policy concerns over the need for nighttime mayors and tourist economies, night research has emerged as a prolific line of inquiry capturing the night’s distinct qualities. However, while “night studies” brings much-needed attention to human experiences with darkness, little work exists outside the context of cities. The result is that explorations of rural darkness, such as the media genres and styles that culturally shape the meaning of the rural night, have been meager.

This book provides a critical and comprehensive account of the mediation of rural darkness. Analyzing a wide range of contemporary media, from astrophotography, tourist advertisements and social media to editing software, online databases and nature documentaries, the book focuses on two competing and irreconcilable cultures of rural darkness. On the one hand, many media genres contribute to a “preservation” ideology based on the Western myth of “wilderness.” Relying on the classic urban/rural binary, this culture of rural darkness imagines the night as a primal and ancient inheritance, a distant and remote frontier free from the ills of human technology. On the other hand, other media genres challenge this preservationist depiction of rural darkness, demonstrating that the rural night does not retreat from modern, urban life but is an extension of the urban-technological.

Promoting a hybrid, intermeshed view of the night, this culture of rural darkness dismantles the frontier myth by understanding “pristine” darkness as a cultural technology that seeks to erase the messy connections between the rural and the urban. The book contends that only the latter culture of rural darkness offers a responsible and accurate understanding of the rural night. Not only does the preservationist view of pristine darkness privilege “natural” darkness over other sustainable forms of gloom, but its endorsement of the frontier myth represents a flight from history, a rhetorical strategy that may actually prevent the night’s protection.

 “Media Sociology and Journalism: Studies in Truth and Democracy proposes an accurate reading on ‘fake populism’ regimes. Greg Nielson navigates on the fruitful and relevant tradition on media and power relationships to highlight the contributions of professional journalism to the fragility of democracy” — Fábio Pereira, Chair of Scientific Journalism, Université Laval.

 “Media Sociology and Journalism: Studies in Truth and Democracy proposes an accurate reading on ‘fake populism’ regimes. Greg Nielson navigates on the fruitful and relevant tradition on media and power relationships to highlight the contributions of professional journalism to the fragility of democracy” — Fábio Pereira, Chair of Scientific Journalism, Université Laval.

Multiculturalism has been a topic of scholarly exploration for almost fifty years. Most recently, these explorations have sought to respond to growing public sentiment that the multicultural ideal, borne out of Western liberalism, has failed. Indeed, ‘multiculturalism is dead’ has been a popular catch cry in Anglo- and Western-European countries for the past decade. Significantly, the continued discussion about the success or otherwise of multiculturalism registers the topic as alive as ever (albeit in a mode of crisis) and one that shows no signs of disappearing.

There are currently two main scholarly approaches to the so-called crisis of multiculturalism. The first approach retains the importance of multiculturalism by inflating and promoting its positive attributes. The second approach problematizes multiculturalism by retexturing its meaning and attempting to reconnect its political/theoretical domain with its ordinary manifestations. In some instances, the second approach renounces the concept of multiculturalism altogether, positioning it as a past phenomenon. Both approaches frequently mirror broader trends in cultural studies and artistic domains by turning to ‘the everyday’, using on-the-ground experiences as a tool to redefine the meaning of multiculturalism. But what work is done in the name of the everyday? Is ‘the everyday’ really a sanctioned, authentic space where cultural difference exists beyond the State? These are questions that neither approach takes seriously nor appropriately addresses. 

This modern book addresses this oversight by taking the everyday of everyday multiculturalism to task and doing so via the increasingly popular and everyday medium: digital storytelling. The ‘digital’ is an important node of analysis, not only because it has so far been overlooked in studies of everyday multiculturalism, but because its immateriality often affords it a distance from critical analyses pertaining to material effects. This book forefronts the materiality of digital storytelling by closely considering how the genre enables racialization to manifest at the level of the body. How does the genre compel the creators of digital stories to embody and/or reject racialized structures associated with concepts of multiculturalism? What do these stories tell us about the way multiculturalism is mediated and, importantly, how it might be re-mediated?

As we enter an era of unprecedented global mobility, discussions pertaining to cultural difference and the systems used to negotiate it become more frequent and more complex. This book makes a timely intervention into these discussions to both consolidate and reimagine the rocky terrain of multiculturalism, providing a valuable resource for scholars in cultural studies, media and internet studies, and ethnic and race studies. Additionally, the book provides a foundation for rethinking digital narrative production pertaining to cultural difference, giving it a practical purpose for educators and digital practitioners alike.

Multiculturalism has been a topic of scholarly exploration for almost fifty years. Most recently, these explorations have sought to respond to growing public sentiment that the multicultural ideal, borne out of Western liberalism, has failed. Indeed, ‘multiculturalism is dead’ has been a popular catch cry in Anglo- and Western-European countries for the past decade. Significantly, the continued discussion about the success or otherwise of multiculturalism registers the topic as alive as ever (albeit in a mode of crisis) and one that shows no signs of disappearing.

There are currently two main scholarly approaches to the so-called crisis of multiculturalism. The first approach retains the importance of multiculturalism by inflating and promoting its positive attributes. The second approach problematizes multiculturalism by retexturing its meaning and attempting to reconnect its political/theoretical domain with its ordinary manifestations. In some instances, the second approach renounces the concept of multiculturalism altogether, positioning it as a past phenomenon. Both approaches frequently mirror broader trends in cultural studies and artistic domains by turning to ‘the everyday’, using on-the-ground experiences as a tool to redefine the meaning of multiculturalism. But what work is done in the name of the everyday? Is ‘the everyday’ really a sanctioned, authentic space where cultural difference exists beyond the State? These are questions that neither approach takes seriously nor appropriately addresses. 

This modern book addresses this oversight by taking the everyday of everyday multiculturalism to task and doing so via the increasingly popular and everyday medium: digital storytelling. The ‘digital’ is an important node of analysis, not only because it has so far been overlooked in studies of everyday multiculturalism, but because its immateriality often affords it a distance from critical analyses pertaining to material effects. This book forefronts the materiality of digital storytelling by closely considering how the genre enables racialization to manifest at the level of the body. How does the genre compel the creators of digital stories to embody and/or reject racialized structures associated with concepts of multiculturalism? What do these stories tell us about the way multiculturalism is mediated and, importantly, how it might be re-mediated?

As we enter an era of unprecedented global mobility, discussions pertaining to cultural difference and the systems used to negotiate it become more frequent and more complex. This book makes a timely intervention into these discussions to both consolidate and reimagine the rocky terrain of multiculturalism, providing a valuable resource for scholars in cultural studies, media and internet studies, and ethnic and race studies. Additionally, the book provides a foundation for rethinking digital narrative production pertaining to cultural difference, giving it a practical purpose for educators and digital practitioners alike.

To date, masculinity has tended to be presented in cinema studies as a monolithic category that serves the interests of a hegemonic, normative patriarchy. This book demonstrates how the art-house film, in the form of personal cinema and its exploitation of the melodramatic mode, tells a different story, presenting a vision of masculinity that is sexually fluid, fragmented, unstable, and often incapacitated to the point of paralysis, being undermined not only from within, but also by external circumstance. Hollywood, in the form of “male weepies,” offered preliminary insights into this failing masculinity, but it is with the flowering of Post-World War II art film and its subsequent movement into the “indie” waves of the late 20th century and the early 21st century that cinema more profoundly realizes its potential to serve as a vehicle for the exploration of men’s interior lives, developing what might be termed the “male melodrama,” the correlative of the woman’s film. 

The present volume offers a series of essays that reassess the role of melodrama in a number of touchstone films in the art-cinema tradition that explore the subjective experience of a male protagonist, announcing the emergence of a genre that has progressively proliferated in contemporary cinema. While these films, made by such notable auteurs as Vittorio De Sica, Satyajit Ray, Vincente Minnelli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Jacques Demy, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Luca Guadagnino have been frequently discussed as outstanding examples of art films, to date, with a few exceptions, they have not been examined in terms of their representation of gender and subjectivity, which has left a lacuna in accounts of screened masculinities.

To date, masculinity has tended to be presented in cinema studies as a monolithic category that serves the interests of a hegemonic, normative patriarchy. This book demonstrates how the art-house film, in the form of personal cinema and its exploitation of the melodramatic mode, tells a different story, presenting a vision of masculinity that is sexually fluid, fragmented, unstable, and often incapacitated to the point of paralysis, being undermined not only from within, but also by external circumstance. Hollywood, in the form of “male weepies,” offered preliminary insights into this failing masculinity, but it is with the flowering of Post-World War II art film and its subsequent movement into the “indie” waves of the late 20th century and the early 21st century that cinema more profoundly realizes its potential to serve as a vehicle for the exploration of men’s interior lives, developing what might be termed the “male melodrama,” the correlative of the woman’s film. 

The present volume offers a series of essays that reassess the role of melodrama in a number of touchstone films in the art-cinema tradition that explore the subjective experience of a male protagonist, announcing the emergence of a genre that has progressively proliferated in contemporary cinema. While these films, made by such notable auteurs as Vittorio De Sica, Satyajit Ray, Vincente Minnelli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Jacques Demy, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Luca Guadagnino have been frequently discussed as outstanding examples of art films, to date, with a few exceptions, they have not been examined in terms of their representation of gender and subjectivity, which has left a lacuna in accounts of screened masculinities.

This book explores the history of hypertext, an influential concept that forms the underlying structure of the World Wide Web and innumerable software applications. Barnet combines an analysis of contemporary literature with her exclusive interviews with those at the forefront of the hypertext innovation. She tells both the human and the technological story, tracing its path back to an analogue device imagined by Vannevar Bush in 1945, before modern computing had happened.

‘Memory Machines’ offers an expansive record of hypertext over the last 60 years, pinpointing the major breakthroughs and fundamental flaws in its evolution. Barnet argues that some of the earliest hypertext systems were more richly connected and in some respects more flexible than the Web; this is also a fascinating account of the paths not taken.

Barnet ends the journey through computing history at the birth of mass domesticated hypertext, at the point that it grew out of the university labs and into the Web. And yet she suggests that hypertext may not have completed its evolutionary story, and may still have the capacity to become something different, something much better than it is today.

This book explores the history of hypertext, an influential concept that forms the underlying structure of the World Wide Web and innumerable software applications. Barnet combines an analysis of contemporary literature with her exclusive interviews with those at the forefront of the hypertext innovation. She tells both the human and the technological story, tracing its path back to an analogue device imagined by Vannevar Bush in 1945, before modern computing had happened.

‘Memory Machines’ offers an expansive record of hypertext over the last 60 years, pinpointing the major breakthroughs and fundamental flaws in its evolution. Barnet argues that some of the earliest hypertext systems were more richly connected and in some respects more flexible than the Web; this is also a fascinating account of the paths not taken.

Barnet ends the journey through computing history at the birth of mass domesticated hypertext, at the point that it grew out of the university labs and into the Web. And yet she suggests that hypertext may not have completed its evolutionary story, and may still have the capacity to become something different, something much better than it is today.

As an ancient Indian poet-dramatist, Kālidāsa cannot be absorbed into the homogenizing tendencies of Hindu hagiography, as has often been attempted, especially in the period after independence. From being projected as a Brahmin by birth in legends, a Vedāntist and Vaishnavite in darsana (theology), and more recently, owing to Western theoretical perspectives being applied to texts separated in time and contexts, Kalidasa is critiqued for a patriarchal and casteist outlook. These various readings have privileged personal theories and validated them by reading literary texts in certain ways. ‘Memory, Metaphor and Mysticism in Kalidasa’s ‘AbhijñānaŚākuntalam’’ brings together scholars from both sides of the globe who offer possibilities for reviewing this text, not as an Oriental discovery or a cultural property, but as an ancient literary text that can be read in multiple philosophical contexts. Further, the translations of ‘AbhijñānaŚākuntalam’ into South Asian languages like Urdu and Nepali and a classical language like Persian are also included for detailed study for understanding the impact of this text in the respective literary traditions of these languages, and to assess the actual cross-literary dialogue that this text made, without hyperboles and generalizations, given the fact that many of these translation happened just before and after independence when literary historiography and nation writing project went hand in hand in India.

The written histories, built memorials and spoken narratives of settler descendants often reveal an absence of Aboriginal people in Australian settlers’ historical consciousness and a lack of empathy for those whose lands were taken over. This absence reflects an intellectual and emotional disconnect from Aboriginal people’s experiences and from recent national debates about reconciling contested pasts. The aim of ‘Memory, Place and Settler‒Aboriginal History’ is to understand the evolution and endurance of this disconnect. Drawing on archival research, interviews and fieldwork, Skye Krichauff fuses the methodologies and theories of historical enquiry, anthropology and memory studies to investigate the multifaceted processes through which current generations of rural settler descendants come to know the colonial era. Primarily focussing on analysing and comparing the historical consciousness of a specific group of settler descendants – namely those who have grown up on land in the mid-north of South Australia that was occupied by their forebears in the nineteenth century – this book is additionally informed by interviews and fieldwork conducted with Aboriginal descendants. In addition, as a fifth-generation settler descendant herself, Krichauff utilises her insider status to provide personal insights and reflections with her analysis.

Within spoken narratives and during site visits, settler descendants demonstrate that their consciousness of the colonial past has been formed by growing up in places surrounded by people and objects that provide continuous reminders and physical evidence of the lives of previous generations. This book argues that the primary and most powerful way through which this group knows the colonial past is through lived experience. A recognition that (and how) previous generations’ experiences transfer through the generations is crucial to any investigation into the past known and understood through lived experience. As such, this monograph investigates and contextualises the timing, speed and intensity with which rural districts were occupied, Aboriginal people were dispossessed, and the extent and nature of previous generations’ relations with Aboriginal people.

Included in this monograph is an analysis of public histories (local written histories and plaques, monuments and information boards) which demonstrates a settler-colonial historical epistemology that frames the way mid-northern settler descendants make sense of the past. Memories of personal lived experiences are remembered, understood and articulated – are composed and constructed – using the public language and the meanings available in the wider culture in which individuals live. Krichauff provides concrete examples which demonstrate how, amongst many settler descendants, the memories, family stories and lived experiences of Aboriginal presence and positive settler‒Aboriginal interaction (stories which fall outside the dominant epistemology) are ignored or neglected. While knowledge about the past learned through external sources (books, films, documentaries) can, to varying degrees, shape and inform settler descendants’ consiousness of the colonial era, Krichauff argues that it is the degree of connection with experience that is crucial to understanding the extent to which external knowledge is absorbed and remembered. By connecting Aboriginal people (past and present) with people and places known through everyday life, settler descendants are more likely to intellectually and emotionally connect their own histories with those of the victims of colonialism. This book concludes by demonstrating how it is possible to unsettle settler descendants’ consciousness of the colonial past in ways that enable a tentative connection with Aboriginal people and their experiences.

'Men and Masculinities in South India' aims to increase understanding of gender within South Asia and especially South Asian masculinities, a topic whose analysis and ethnographising in the region has had a very sketchy beginning and is ripe for more thorough examination. This is, in short, an almost empty field dominated so far by short articles and collections and the time is right for the first full-length ethnographic study of masculinities. This ground-breaking monograph covers a range of areas including work, cross-sex relationships, sexuality, men's friendships, religious practices and leisure. This book is especially concerned with issues arising from debates which broadly argue over the differences and merits of approaches to gender and identity - rooted in essentialism versus performativity. Questions about the tensions between essentialist and performative theories of self and gender are therefore highlighted throughout the book and explored in relation to various bodies of theory and to South Asian understandings of personhood.

‘Mesoscale Modelling for Meteorological and Air Pollution Applications’ combines the fundamental and practical aspects of mesoscale air pollution and meteorological modelling. Providing an overview of the fundamental concepts of air pollution and meteorological modelling, including parameterization of key atmospheric processes, the book also considers equally important aspects such as model integration, evaluation concepts, performance evaluation, policy relevance and user training. Based on research topics that are the most relevant to the development, with models for high resolution meteorology and air quality simulations, and also based on the experience of a large number of meteorological services and air pollution modelling research and user groups, mainly from Europe and North America, ‘Mesoscale Modelling for Meteorological and Air Pollution Applications’ encapsulates the basic concepts of numerical modelling of air quality, model structures, operational characteristics and applications of air pollution mesoscale models for research as well as operational tasks.

An interdisciplinary, accessible study of Mexico–US and Serbia-EU border practices and policies that brings insights of critical border and forced displacement studies to examine histories, policies, violence, models of care, activism, and creativity within these border regimes.

Mexico–US, Serbia–EU Border Lives and Works pushes the boundaries of traditional border studies by incorporating perspectives beyond the humanities and social sciences, engaging engineers, public health scholars, humanitarian practitioners, human rights activists, and artists. Through accessible and interdisciplinary exploration, the book examines the Mexico–US and Serbia–EU border regimes, providing a nuanced understanding of these spaces as sources of inspiration, sites of research and ethical dilemmas, locations of service, and for many contributors, a place to call home. Across four sections, the edited volume fosters conversations that traverse disciplines while addressing conflicting perspectives on border-making, life at the border, and migration across borders.

A central theme of the book emerges as writers engage with ethical concerns raised by conventional research methods, such as interviews and surveys, and the challenges posed by incorporating insights from diverse fields. Contributors critically reflect on these dilemmas, offering perspectives that traditional border studies often overlook. The result is a multifaceted engagement with border regimes, presented through qualitative research, cultural and textual analysis, art installations, personal essays, and interviews.

Mexico–US, Serbia–EU Border Lives and Works aims to reframe existing conceptions of US and EU border regimes, highlighting how governments, NGOs, media, researchers, and citizens respond to migration, often in conflicting ways. It situates Serbia and Mexico’s border politics within the global context of “migration management,” emphasizing that border regimes developed by the United States and the European Union affect more than just the movement of people. They reshape the social, cultural, and political fabric of communities, influencing protests, hospitality, and artistic expression.

By critiquing policies and practices that harm migrants, asylum seekers, and host communities, this book seeks to inform activism and policymaking in the United States, European Union, Mexico, and Serbia. It advocates for intersectional and collaborative research that bridges disciplines and speaks effectively to policymakers, activists, and broader communities. By addressing the complexities of migration and displacement alongside the systems that support people on the move, Mexico–US, Serbia–EU Border Lives, and Works highlights the need for border research and policy informed by the lived experiences of displaced populations and their hosts, as well as the work of humanitarian actors, artists, and activists.

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic imposed immobility on large sectors of the world’s population, with confinement becoming for several years an everyday reality. The lives of those who previously enjoyed the privileges of being ‘fast castes’ ground to a halt, while at the same time the displacement of more vulnerable populations along well-established migration corridors has been radically reduced. The result has been a recalibration of the scale of journeying, with travellers slowing down and readjusting their relationship to the proximate and nearby. This situation has provided an opportunity for those who study travel and travel writing to rethink their object of study. This volume explores and historicizes the phenomenon of ‘microtravel’, designating slower journeys within a limited radius which allow, and sometimes necessitate, new forms of experiencing the world.
The contributors reveal how these practices are far from new and are indeed evident across numerous examples of journey narratives from earlier periods. The volume considers a diverse range of forms, including fictional texts. It also includes ficto-critical writing, allowing a fuller exploration of new approaches to microtravel in the twenty-first century. Sometimes deceleration is reduced to immobility, with the traditional horizontal axis of travel replaced by a burrowing down into time, place and space. Contributions engage with the following four intersecting themes:
Confinement and immobility: travel writing is traditionally associated with tropes of expansiveness and openness. The volume disrupts this understanding by claiming that the travelogue is often more accurately understood as a form dependent on tensions between mobility and immobility, between confinement and liberty. Confined travellers may experience a breakdown of the journey as their progress stalls and they are reduced to a state of sessility. This physical restriction can lead, however, to different modes of travelling, an understanding of microtravel associated with slowing down and perceiving the place differently. For some, this sessility is a choice, a restricted frame of reference or scope imposed on their travels. Deceleration and pedestrianism: confinement leads to an inevitable slowing down of the journey, but microtravel encompasses other forms of spatial limitation. Eschewing mechanized transport, for instance, the pedestrian becomes reliant on self-propulsion, reducing the dimensions of the world to those of the travelling self. Walking exemplifies the impact of deceleration on the journey, activating multisensory forms of engagement and ensuring direct, close contact with the field of travel. The return of walking in contemporary travelogues may demonstrate, however, a nostalgia for earlier modes of journeying, and there is a need to recognize the pitfalls of such romanticization. Palimpsestic travel: Kris Lackey coined the term ‘vertical travel’ to describe journeys that disrupt the traditional horizontal axes of travel. Robert Macfarlane has written, in Underground, about itineraries that burrow beneath our feet and explore the hidden and the unseen. This volume focuses also on the notion of palimpsestic journeying as a form of microtravel, an engagement with place that reveals historical layers and allows the travellers to create connections between the past and present. Microspection and microsound: just as deceleration can trigger heightened sensory awareness of the multiple textures of place, on occasion moving beyond the human emphases of the Anthropocene, so our understanding of microtravel is associated with an attention to detail otherwise missed from mechanized journeys or those reliant on acceleration of the body through space.

The essays in ‘Migrant Nation: Australian Culture, Society and Identity’ work within the gap between Australian image and experience, focusing on particular historical blind spots by telling stories of individuals and groups that did not fit the favoured identity mould and can therefore offer fresh insights into the other side of identity construction. In this way this collection casts light onto the hidden face Australian identity and pays respect to the experiences of a wide variety of people who have generally been excluded, neglected or simply forgotten in the long-running quest to tell a unified story of Australian culture and identity, a story that is rapidly unravelling. [NP] Whether in terms of language, history, culture or personal circumstances, many of the subjects of these essays were foreign to the settler dream. The stories reveal their efforts to establish a sense of legitimacy and belonging outside of the dominant Australian story. Drawing upon memories, letters, interviews, documentary fragments and archives, the authors have in common a commitment to give life to neglected histories and thus to include, in an expanding and open-ended national narrative, people who were cast as strangers in the place that was their home.

Following the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the rapid political, social and economic change that ensued, widespread population movements took place across the former territory of the Soviet Union. 'Migrant Resettlement in the Russian Federation' offers a new perspective on one of the most significant movements - the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking population moving from Soviet successor states to the Russian Federation. While the substantial domestic and foreign policy implications of this migration movement have been recognized, there has to date been little exploration of another crucial aspect of this phenomenon: the micro-level sociocultural experiences and implications of movement and resettlement, and the nature of migrant response.

Based on original empirical data collected by the author, this timely book offers a unique insight into the individual and collective experiences of movement and resettlement among Russian migrants 'returning' to the Russian Federation over the period 1991–2002. Moya Flynn uses different levels of analysis (local, regional, national and global) to open up fresh perspectives on the nature of the Russian migration regime and government migration policy. The book offers the first in-depth examination of non-governmental development in the area of migration in post-Soviet Russia and provides new understandings of the experience of migration and resettlement at the individual level, specifically through an exploration of understandings of 'home' and 'homeland' and a focus on the role of migrant networks.

'Migrant Resettlement in the Russian Federation' is a major new contribution to current debates in migration studies. Its unique synthesis of original theoretical and empirical material will appeal to students of contemporary Russian politics, geography, culture and society, academics and policymakers alike.

Following the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the rapid political, social and economic change that ensued, widespread population movements took place across the former territory of the Soviet Union. 'Migrant Resettlement in the Russian Federation' offers a new perspective on one of the most significant movements - the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking population moving from Soviet successor states to the Russian Federation. While the substantial domestic and foreign policy implications of this migration movement have been recognized, there has to date been little exploration of another crucial aspect of this phenomenon: the micro-level sociocultural experiences and implications of movement and resettlement, and the nature of migrant response.

Based on original empirical data collected by the author, this timely book offers a unique insight into the individual and collective experiences of movement and resettlement among Russian migrants 'returning' to the Russian Federation over the period 1991–2002. Moya Flynn uses different levels of analysis (local, regional, national and global) to open up fresh perspectives on the nature of the Russian migration regime and government migration policy. The book offers the first in-depth examination of non-governmental development in the area of migration in post-Soviet Russia and provides new understandings of the experience of migration and resettlement at the individual level, specifically through an exploration of understandings of 'home' and 'homeland' and a focus on the role of migrant networks.

'Migrant Resettlement in the Russian Federation' is a major new contribution to current debates in migration studies. Its unique synthesis of original theoretical and empirical material will appeal to students of contemporary Russian politics, geography, culture and society, academics and policymakers alike.

Eight American military veterans of the Vietnam/Cold War era describe their service and its influence on their lives since leaving active service in this book. Their stories are preceded by a concise history of America's methods of raising its military forces from colonial days to today. Particular focus is given to the 34 years in which the nation relied on the possibility of mandatory service (the draft, Selective Service) from young men. Drafted service was essential to America's role in World War I, World War II, the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Special emphasis is given to Congressional acceptance of drafted service in World War I which shaped the remaining uses of the draft until 1973.

The largest part of the book provides the author's recollections of their service in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard in the United States and overseas. Their service was compelled or stimulated by the presence of the draft. Their military service then shaped the next half-century of their working lives.

The final section of the book provides the author’s collective recollections of their military service as seen from the third decade of the 21st century and half a century after the end of the military draft. They reflect on the challenges faced by the current American military and the possibilities of a return to some form of drafted military service.

Eight American military veterans of the Vietnam/Cold War era describe their service and its influence on their lives since leaving active service in this book. Their stories are preceded by a concise history of America's methods of raising its military forces from colonial days to today. Particular focus is given to the 34 years in which the nation relied on the possibility of mandatory service (the draft, Selective Service) from young men. Drafted service was essential to America's role in World War I, World War II, the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Special emphasis is given to Congressional acceptance of drafted service in World War I which shaped the remaining uses of the draft until 1973.

The largest part of the book provides the author's recollections of their service in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard in the United States and overseas. Their service was compelled or stimulated by the presence of the draft. Their military service then shaped the next half-century of their working lives.

The final section of the book provides the author’s collective recollections of their military service as seen from the third decade of the 21st century and half a century after the end of the military draft. They reflect on the challenges faced by the current American military and the possibilities of a return to some form of drafted military service.

The archipelago of the Philippines is well endowed in nonferrous mineral resources such as copper, gold, lead, silver, nickel, and zinc. In recent years, the government of the Philippines, acting under the influence of the dominant and seemingly ubiquitous neoliberal development paradigm, has liberalized its mining laws to encourage the extraction of minerals by foreign corporations in order to accelerate the development of the economy. The Philippines is also a nation highly prone to a variety of natural hazards such as earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, typhoons, and El Niño–induced droughts.

Nonferrous metals mining is an activity with a substantial potential for environmental degradation, and these various natural hazards have a high potential to adversely interact with mining’s potential for environmental degradation. Earthquakes can destabilize tailings storage facilities, typhoons can flood tailings ponds, and mine-pit dewatering can enhance the competition for groundwater resources during droughts. This study show how natural hazards can amplify the environmental harm prevalent in mining and pose a substantial threat to the livelihoods of archipelago’s poor, who are dependent upon subsistence agriculture and subsistence aquaculture.

The archipelago of the Philippines is well endowed in nonferrous mineral resources such as copper, gold, lead, silver, nickel, and zinc. In recent years, the government of the Philippines, acting under the influence of the dominant and seemingly ubiquitous neoliberal development paradigm, has liberalized its mining laws to encourage the extraction of minerals by foreign corporations in order to accelerate the development of the economy. The Philippines is also a nation highly prone to a variety of natural hazards such as earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, typhoons, and El Niño–induced droughts.

Nonferrous metals mining is an activity with a substantial potential for environmental degradation, and these various natural hazards have a high potential to adversely interact with mining’s potential for environmental degradation. Earthquakes can destabilize tailings storage facilities, typhoons can flood tailings ponds, and mine-pit dewatering can enhance the competition for groundwater resources during droughts. This study show how natural hazards can amplify the environmental harm prevalent in mining and pose a substantial threat to the livelihoods of archipelago’s poor, who are dependent upon subsistence agriculture and subsistence aquaculture.

The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947 by a group of atomic scientists to symbolise the perils facing humanity from nuclear weapons. In 2007 it was set at five minutes before the final bell, including for the first time the threat of climate change as well as new developments in the life sciences and nanotechnology. This book aims at an analysis of the evolution of our present predicament throughout the Anthropocene Era beginning in 1763, making special reference to the history of the period, the study of the subject and major advances in the natural sciences.

Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson set out the basis for a scientific approach to the pre-industrial stages of historical development in the Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, when the American and French Revolutions created a vocabulary of modernity. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the industrial revolution unfolded in several stages, nationalism, imperialism and totalitarianism were among the phenomena impeding the update of the Enlightenment programme as well as the fulfilment of the aspirations of 1776 and 1789. Our present predicament demands a rigorous examination of its origins and an assertion of a scientific pandisciplinary approach involving history and other academic specialisations.

The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947 by a group of atomic scientists to symbolise the perils facing humanity from nuclear weapons. In 2007 it was set at five minutes before the final bell, including for the first time the threat of climate change as well as new developments in the life sciences and nanotechnology. This book aims at an analysis of the evolution of our present predicament throughout the Anthropocene Era beginning in 1763, making special reference to the history of the period, the study of the subject and major advances in the natural sciences.

Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson set out the basis for a scientific approach to the pre-industrial stages of historical development in the Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, when the American and French Revolutions created a vocabulary of modernity. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the industrial revolution unfolded in several stages, nationalism, imperialism and totalitarianism were among the phenomena impeding the update of the Enlightenment programme as well as the fulfilment of the aspirations of 1776 and 1789. Our present predicament demands a rigorous examination of its origins and an assertion of a scientific pandisciplinary approach involving history and other academic specialisations.

In 1947, the Doomsday Clock was created by a group of atomic scientists to symbolise the perils facing humanity from nuclear weapons. In 2007, it was set five minutes before the final bell, including for the first time the threat of climate change as well as new developments in the life sciences and nanotechnology. This book aims at an analysis of the evolution of our present predicament throughout the Anthropocene Era beginning in 1763, making special reference to the history of the period, the study of the subject and major advances in the natural sciences.

Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson set out the basis for a scientific approach to the pre-industrial stages of historical development in the Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, when the American and French revolutions created a vocabulary of modernity. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the industrial revolution unfolded in several stages, nationalism, imperialism and totalitarianism were among the phenomena impeding the update of the Enlightenment programme as well as the fulfilment of the aspirations of 1776 and 1789. Our present predicament demands a rigorous examination of its origins and an assertion of a scientific pandisciplinary approach involving history and other academic specialisations.

The idea of the tragic has permeated Western culture for millennia, being closely bound with the concept of the limit of inescapable necessity that has been embodied in and expressed through theatre since the time of the ancient Greeks. This book addresses the question of how the twentieth century – one of the most violent periods of human history – dealt with the fundamental structure that is the tragic. Examining the consciousness of the era through an in-depth analysis of some of the twentieth century’s most outstanding texts – including works by Ibsen, Claudel, O’Neill, Brecht, Camus, Beckett, Pasolini, Grotowski, Delcuvellerie and Josse De Pauw – ‘Modern European Tragedy’ draws a vivid picture of the development that tragedy experienced during this time. Along the way, the book engages with some of the prominent currents of twentieth-century thought and philosophy that can still be found in the varied map of contemporary thought today: the ideas of modern Christianity, psychoanalysis, the theory of the Absurd, nihilism, Marxism and the acceptance of the limit. Together, analyses of these currents serve to support the book’s key avenues of investigation: its explorations of what inspired these key authors to engage with the idea of the tragic; and its explanation of why the contemporary tragic no longer bears the form of classic tragedy.