Anthem Press

The long-awaited convergence of climate, economic, political, intellectual, faith and social failures gives many reasons for despair. The authors of this volume have spent their lives around the trauma of race and poverty in South Africa and the United States working with Nobel prize winners and those in townships and tenements. We have learned that hope is not delusional and accountability not naïve. But one must think clearly and deeply, untethered from the inadequate simplicities and false choices. We must be here now, with eyes wide open for when systems break down, as so many are today, knowing that they also break open new space for creative action.
The authors lead the global web of thinker-doers through the Leading Causes of Life Initiative and national networks in Africa, Europe and the United States. They find coherence among profound thinking from fields never brought into alignment before drawn from by economists, mycelial researchers, anthropologists and health sciences working in the Artic to South Africa, and the tough neighbourhoods in between. This includes a consideration of the human capacities that allow us to act in and transform the world we inhabit, of the radical nature of joy in the face of despair, of the judgement of Nemesis on hubris and privilege, of the ‘value of everything’ contra price as definitive, of the idea of involution as distinguished from evolution, of the concept of ‘meshworks’ in our entanglement with others, and, finally, of the ‘theatre of the soul’ as the unity of the physical, the psychological, the political and the spiritual.
Sharply sensitive to the urgency of careful thought and wise action, the authors help us see that life does find a way towards deep accountability for the life of complex human ecosystems. They ask us to take responsibility for this as a key to human flourishing and well-being.

Founded in 2005, Whitehot Magazine has become one of the leading channels for contemporary art criticism. Since its inception, Whitehot has published thousands of reviews covering art from the United States, East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America, with key pieces authored by critical luminaries, including Anthony Haden-Guest, Donald Kuspit, and Phoebe Hoban. The magazine is also uniquely independent in its editorial voice. Unlike other large art world publications, Whitehot is owned and managed by its founding editor rather than by a media holding company.
On the occasion of its upcoming 20th anniversary, founder Noah Becker and contributor Michael Maizels have compiled a critical anthology of the magazine’s writings. The selected articles not only encapsulate the storied history of Whitehot but also provide a significant window into the evolution of art practice and art criticism since the turn of the Millennium.

Specific objectives of the book include the discussion of the historical evolution of CBUM/Hip-Hop, and the development (and retention) of an informed perspective regarding legendary figures, bands, and genres in CBUM. The examination of the historical, social, and economic implications of CBUM that lead to the globalization of Hip-Hop, an understanding of how CBUM is perceived and measured in society, and the student’s ability to describe a range of effects fostered by the evolution of CBUM, all factor highly in this book.

Since the inception of cinema in the late nineteenth century, filmmakers have employed a wide array of precursory aesthetic strategies in the conception and creation of their disparate works. The existence of these traditional antecedents have afforded filmmakers a diverse range of technical and artistic applications towards the construction of their cinematic narratives. Furthermore, the socio-political and cultural contexts in which films are conceived often inform the manner in which particular aesthetic sensibilities are selected and deployed. Unfortunately, many creative artists – and audiences – remain unfamiliar with Aesthetics as a practical discipline and how it might apply to their own creative and/or interpretive pursuits.

‘Aesthetics and the Cinematic Narrative’ provides a concise historical survey of Aesthetics as a philosophical discipline and applies several of its underlying principles to the examination of filmic storytelling. The book’s four chapters codify working definitions of the relevant terms and concepts, employing specific case studies to illustrate how certain aesthetic stratagems govern a film’s structural design and execution. By drawing connections between the technical/creative decisions filmmakers must make and more time-honoured traditions regarding the nature of art, the structures of storytelling and the import of visual imagery, ‘Aesthetics and the Cinematic Narrative’ helps recontextualize film within a wider sphere of artistic/intellectual endeavour. The book is a useful and much-needed addition to the pre-existing canon for students of visual storytelling and for general readers.

This book explores the interdisciplinary pathways that leading environmental psychologists have taken to become educators, researchers, consultants, and professionals in this highly applied and growing field. Environmental psychology examines the transactions between people and the built and natural settings in which they inhabit. Despite this broad scope, few direct avenues to careers in environmental psychology exist, and students must forge varied and individualized routes to becoming scholars and practitioners in this important area of study.
The aim of the book is to serve as an inspiring supplemental resource for students who wish to know more about how leading thinkers established themselves as environmental psychologists. In each chapter, the author describes their inspirations, decisions about undergraduate and graduate courses, particular schools, and professional connections that have made a difference to their careers in environmental psychology. Many undergraduate students are disappointed with the lack of a clear path to becoming an environmental psychologist. A strong need exists for a resource like this book for students (and for others who may be looking to add to their careers) to understand how to gain experience and credentials in the field in different ways. Readers may also be bolstered in their attitude about choosing a niche field like environmental psychology and decide to stick with it if they read the success stories published in this book by leading thinkers who have taken varied and atypical approaches to becoming a professional environmental psychologist.
The book’s chapters are organized in a manner that shows readers how one may come from many different backgrounds and integrate environmental psychology into their education or professional realm. Part I contains chapters in which authors write about how they approached environmental psychology from architecture, urban planning, and geography, while Part II includes chapters from authors who found environmental psychology via cognitive psychology, clinical practice, and neuroscience. Part III has chapters from authors writing from the health sciences and social ecology, while Part IV contains chapters by authors inspired to become environmental psychologists through a general appreciation of nature and eco-conscious living in a variety of settings. Those who find a way to make environmental psychology part of their career are often very passionate individuals who are keen to describe their pathway to doing what they love with the hope that others will follow. This book is likely to advance that outcome

Hands, Wrists, Fingers invites musicians to explore a new way of thinking about good health. The physical dimensions of hands are certainly important and merit close study, encompassing coordination, relaxation, dexterity, speed, accuracy, and freedom from pain. While acknowledging these dimensions, Hands, Wrists, Fingers focuses on a broader perspective that includes cultural dimensions both conscious and unconscious, involving language, symbol, ritual, curiosity, playfulness, and mindfulness. Through a wealth of original insights, anecdotes, exercises, and games, musicians will be able to transform their hands into sensitive and intelligent agents of joyful creativity, in which the linguistic and symbolic dimensions of hands become inseparable from their physical and material existence.
Hands, Wrists, Fingers is organized in four parts: Culture, The Language of Hands, Sensitivity and Creativity, and Knowledge and Mystery. Behind the physical gestures and movements of your daily life and your music-making, there are the stories that you tell about your own hands—thoughts and feelings, memories, experiences, judgments, hopes, and fears. Hands, Wrists, Fingers argues that the way you use your hands is inseparable from these stories, in which you tell yourself “what you can and cannot do, what you should and should not do, what you’re allowed to do and what you’re prevented from doing.” If your inner stories aren’t healthy in themselves, it’s very difficult for your hands to behave in a healthy manner.
Hands, Wrists, Fingers is a practical book brimming with exercises and suggestions. Every chapter is supported by video clips illustrating and demonstrating its exercises. Among other things, you’ll explore the skills of rotation and of spiral movements, the mastery of textures and gradations, the playful manipulation of objects, and the use of your hands as agents of expressive language. Your hands will become creative, intelligent, and sensitive, and you’ll develop a new understanding of the true meaning of good health.

Appeals to a broad range of people across ages, values and political beliefs, and will change the way we live our lives

Integrating the fields of ecology and economics with practical business and conservation experience, this book delivers a clear path to restoring our economies to a sustainable state. The result is not a decline in our freedoms, values, and quality of life, but a means to sustaining them in a turbulent 21st century.
Students, business owners, and consumers have read this book and attended John’s seminars only to remark, “Why haven’t we learned this in our traditional coursework?” or “This book brings so much clarity to the fields of sustainability and environmental sciences.”
Intuitively, many of us sense some universal relationships exist between Earth’s ecological and economic systems. For Giordanengo, the most insightful relationships were not the ones he first imagined as a business and ecology student in the early 1990s. This book not only unveils critical new insights into ecology and economics, but integrates them with global case studies to make a bold case for redesigning our economies according to the immutable rules of nature. For example, viewing theories such as ecological succession through an economic lens, we discover the root causes of the wealth gap, while gaining clarity on the role of economic diversity in productivity growth and innovation gains.
Timely, Giordanengo melds centuries of research with decades of business and ecological experience to reveal three simple components common to ecosystems and economies: diversity, energy, and trade. The proper management of these foundational components is perhaps the greatest obstacle to resolving tensions between society, nature, and the global market economy. The scale at which diversity, energy, and trade must be managed is not global, nor is it hyper local. The scale of a sustainable economy lies somewhere between these two extremes, the subject of part II.
Part III of this book outlines a path for restoring our economies, guided by humanity’s shared experiences in ecological restoration. The essential process of ecosystem recovery (i.e., succession) is one such pathway. Unwittingly, the United States and other developed nations manage economic succession in ways that lower their productivity growth and resistance to future disturbances, while concentrating wealth into fewer hands. With such knowledge in hand, however, nations can also move the succession dial toward the productive and diverse center, where wealth and resources are recirculated quickly, new business opportunities are created, wealth is naturally distributed, and resilience and resistance are fortified—a stout shield in the face of global economic turmoil.
From regenerative agriculture to regional-scale manufacturing, and from endogenous energy systems to ecological conservation, practical business strategies and government policies are woven throughout this seminal book.
Consumers will find sound evidence to support a sustainable future.
Students will discover not just theoretical and systems knowledge, but applied economics, ecology, and conservation centered around actionable pathways.
Business and industry leaders will find novel solutions that balance financial responsibilities with social and environmental well-being.
One of nature’s most primeval rules is that times of great turbulence favor the evolved model, not the model of the past.

This is a relatively short work focusing on the metapolitics – the deeper structures – of the Second Cold War. It is designed to prompt discussion and debate, and thoughtful reflection on the current state of international affairs. The earlier Cold War conflict between communism and capitalism has given way to a more amorphous but, paradoxically, more intense struggle between representations of the political good. There is some analysis of diplomatic history and processes in international politics, but the focus is on the underlying attitudes and ideologies that have generated and sustained Cold War 2.

The work begins with some definitions of a Cold War and whether the term is applicable to the current condition of international affairs. There is also some discussion of the term ‘culture’ and how it is applied in this study. The fundamental question is why Cold War has returned, after all the hopes after 1989 and the end the First Cold War for a new peace order. The contesting explanations are examined, including perspectives from the ‘political West’ (the term used to describe the distinctive development of the Atlantic alliance system since 1945), from Russia and China, and later in the work, from the global South.

The work then looks at how this Cold War is being conducted, including renewed militarism, the suppression of dissent, the decline of diplomacy and the reduced opportunities for dialogue. This includes some discussion of ‘double standards’, applied not in a moralistic way but identified as a structural characteristic of international politics today. The instruments of Cold War 2 include sanctions and the reinterpretation of history and memory wars. Many of the familiar methods drawn from Cold War 1 are now applied, but in novel ways to reflect technological change as well as the different ideological contexts. Information management and communicative wars reach deep into public consciousness. However, Cold War 2 leaves much of the global South cold, refusing to be drawn into a conflict that is perceived to be largely a matter internal to the global North. The work ends with some reflections on possible ways this cold war could end.

The Spirit of the Laws not only systematizes the foundational ideas of “separation of powers” and “balances and checks,” it provides the decisive response to the question of whether power in the nation-state can be limited in the aftermath of the Westphalian settlement of 1648. It describes a civilizational change through which power becomes domesticated, with built-in resistance to attempts to absolutize (or make total) political power. As such, it is the Bible of modern politics, now made more accessible to English readers than it ever has been.

There have been in English only two prior translations of this work that first appeared in 1748. The deficiencies of those two efforts have been broadly identified in the scholarship. Although the text is still used with regularity in university instruction (having been recovered after a lull in the 1950s and 60s), it deserves – and now receives – a presentation that enhances its usefulness in the analysis both of politics and the philosophical foundations of human life.

Montesquieu’s singularity – the first secular argument against race-based slavery and only the second secular argument against the servitude of women – provides a special heritage for the modern word to preserve and a key to making operational those fundamental insights within the context of sustained political and cultural development. The replacement of blood and tribe with the universal attributes of humanity (while recognizing the highly variable ecologies of communities) constitutes the single-most important moral and political development of the modern world. And The Spirit of the Laws bears a primary responsibility for that accomplishment.

This book is the first biographical account of Sebastian Masuda written in English. Sebastian Masuda is a Japanese creator and artist who is globally known as the king of Japanese “Kawaii” (cute) subculture which originated in Harajuku. His continuous pursuit of the concept of kawaii is his lifetime passion and mission, and his work is always characterized by bright neon colors that led to the emergence of Decora fashion. He wears several hats in the field of fashion, art, and entertainment and uses colorful and kawaii elements as his creative foundation. He treats kawaii styles as explicit, non-violent forms of rebellion and resistance like many other youth subcultures in Japan that express themselves in unconventional fashion. One needs courage to walk down the street wearing bright, flashy clothes and accessories from head to toe.
As an artist, Masuda has created prominent art pieces, such as a giant Hello Kitty sculpture in New York and a giant Doraemon statue made out of fluffy yarn in Singapore. As a designer, he has designed the décor of Kawaii Monster Café in Harajuku and Sushidelic, a sushi restaurant, in New York. He also runs a store, 6%DokiDoki, which has its own clothing line. As an entertainment producer, he has collaborated with Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, a Japanese singer and pop culture icon, and produced her first music video.
This book traces a strong impact of Masudaʼs difficult and lonely childhood and upbringing and complex family background on his creative endeavors that attract millions of youngsters that are also going through personal hardships. Masuda went through his teenage years spending time alone in the library reading books which made him observant and perceptive. This book also delves into his deep understanding of kawaii with intricate layers of interpretations which are often misunderstood and misconstrued as simply being cute, girlie, and infantile. Kawaii is not just an adjective but a lifestyle, philosophy, and ideology.

Preface

The book’s Preface places the current AI explosion in the context of other technological cataclysms and recounts the author’s personal (and not always deadly serious) AI journey.

Chapter One: “Extracting the Essence: Toward Machine Translation of Literature” 

This 2019 essay rashly inquired whether artificial intelligence (AI) and machine translation (MT) might eventually be applied to literary translation. Such translation strives to somehow preserve the essence of a work while carrying it over to a different language and culture and giving it rebirth there. To recognize that essence, the translator must accurately capture the meaning of the original; appreciate its metaphors, connotations, register, references, and other abstract or associative factors; and choose among available target language expressions by exercising esthetic judgments. Computers, however, have until recently remained incapable of such accuracy, abstraction, and judgment. We revisited these shortfalls in light of developments in MT and AI. We teased apart several separable aspects of literary translation – literal meaning, meter, rhyme, and the abovementioned associative elements – with reference to arguments about Vladimir Nabokov’s hyper-literal translation of Pushkin’s poem Eugene Onegin. Prompted by this debate, we came to analyze translation as an optimization problem: because it will often prove impossible to perfectly convey all aspects or essences of a text in a single translation, the translator must search for some optimal compromise. Then we discussed several avenues for improvement in MT which could help to extract these aspects of a text’s essence – first, those which might enhance textually grounded MT (i.e., MT trained on text only), leading to delivery of high-quality literal translations; and second, those related to perceptually grounded MT (i.e., MT trained on simulated perception, e.g. of audiovisual input, as well as text), which might extract more abstract or associative elements of a text. We suggested that recognition of categories would prove central to the essence extraction sought by translators. As this categorization improves, MT should increasingly support literary, and thus cultural, preservation. However, the deepest artificial esthetic judgments will await artificial emotion. Chapter One concluded with two appendices, the first sampling numerous competing translations of Pushkin verses and the second displaying widely varying translations of a short French poem.

Chapter Two: “Toward an Artificial Nabokov”

Chapter One inquired whether artificial translation of literature might be at all possible. The cautious conclusion was that while high-quality literal translation might be achievable through foreseeable development of current techniques, artistic translation would await artificial emotion, a more distant prospect. This 2021 sequel went on to ask whether an artificial intelligence might eventually gain the ability to actually create works of literary art. To throw literary consciousness into the sharpest relief, we took as exemplar an author known for a kind of hyper-consciousness: Vladimir Nabokov. To be sure, the suggestion that artworks combining Nabokov’s superhuman intricacy and wholly human depth could be authored by a collection of switches would horrify this transcendent author, and does seem to fly in the face of everything that is most human. But while we are concerned with what machines might do, our more fundamental concern is to understand the human thoughts and feelings to which machines might aspire; and this understanding, promising to bridge the gap between C.P. Snow’s two cultures, is finally coming within reach. In our literary context, Nabokov scholarship provides many specific examples – in Ada: or Ardor, Pale Fire, and other works – of the author’s hyper-conscious artistic techniques: glorying in memory; repetition to establish themes and motifs; allusion to wide-ranging works and facts; intricate puzzle posing; and relentlessly careful structuring at multiple levels of the text. Here we considered several such techniques, speculating about the extent to which current or coming AI capabilities could approach them. In Chapter Two, Section 2, to clarify assumptions, I set forth my own current conceptions of computation, consciousness, feeling, language, and thinking, providing in the process a somewhat prejudiced AI primer for the computer-shy humanist. In Chapter Two, Section 3, I applied to Nabokov’s prodigious work my understanding of these aspects of mind. Subsections focused on self-awareness, perception, memory, and puzzles.

Chapter Three: “Large Literary Models? Intelligence and Language in the LLM Era”

Spoiler: Chapter Three, Section 6, Experiments will present several striking demonstrations of the current (2025) state of the artificial literary art. This chapter’s initial sections aim to explain the breakthroughs that triggered the abrupt phase change from wannabe to indisputable intelligence and linguistic ability. We first give an account of intelligence, sufficiently general to apply to both biological and artificial entities, defining it as the ability to select actions or outcomes effectively according to the conditions and goals encountered – in computers, as conditional (if/then) expressions. We'll scan various ways of packaging conditionals in computer programs, culminating in deep neural network technology, in which each network node among billions can be seen as an if/then expression. Thus, conditionality realized through networks is seen as the common underpinning of artificial and biological intelligence. Next, to explain the breakthrough success of Large Language Models, we undertake an accompanying account of language, viewed as combining two separable capabilities: (1) to communicate using symbols, minimally one at a time and (2) to communicate with a sequence of symbols – that is, exploiting grammar. We explain the technological breakthrough enabling artificial symbol use as development of vector-based semantic techniques and we explain in depth our understanding of symbolic communication. In the grammatical area, the linguistic breakthrough has been enablement of improved predictors of sequences through consideration of much larger contexts. To manage the accompanying threat of computational overload, it’s necessary to focus on the most predictive contextual elements among thousands. These are taken to be those closest semantically to a given element in question – and the vector-based semantic approach proves to be perfect for identifying them via the attention mechanism and the sequence-prediction technology built upon it, the transformer architecture. However, despite spectacular progress in computational intelligence and language, some aspects undoubtedly remain lacking. We emphasize that the structure of neurally learned knowledge remains unclear, while speculating that class hierarchies and schemas play important parts in LLMs and describing new tools for analyzing the networks’ hidden patterns. We go on to consider issues of (1) search and revision (linguistic and otherwise); (2) experience grounded in the world beyond text, with explanation of Imitation Learning and Reinforcement Learning as ways of predicting what to do next; (3) memory and identity issues; and (4) emotions, stressing that current systems’ lack of built-in drives handicaps artificial artistry – for better or worse – and cautioning against mistaking faked feelings for felt ones. After presenting the abovementioned experiments, we'll conclude with an evaluation, attempting a working definition of “understanding” to support the contention that current LLMs do in fact evince artificial comprehension, while also noting original touches and linguistic creativity.

Sendoff

The volume’s Sendoff considers whether machines, while now arguably intelligent, can ever also gain sufficient sensation and emotion to create language art with other than borrowed depth – and, while viewing this development as likely all too soon, declines to despair on that account.

This book is about the Cannes Medical Conference of April 1919 and its long-lasting impacts in the humanitarian space. In the aftermath of the First World War, as the world order was being redesigned, this conference served to shift the Red Cross movement towards peacetime and public health work. The book examines the origins, course and consequences of the Cannes Medical Conference, and its wider legacy within the Red Cross movement: a legacy which is very significant yet almost completely undocumented.

The book demonstrates that this medical conference was a watershed moment that served to pivot the Red Cross movement across the world, from war and conflict-related activities to peacetime programs such as relief, disease and disaster management. The Red Cross movement is one of the largest humanitarian organisations in the world, and initially, its aim was to alleviate the suffering of people on the battlefield. In 1919, however, a new Red Cross organisation was created in Paris: the League of Red Cross Societies (LRCS) to considerably expand Red Cross work around the world.

The Cannes Medical Conference was the catalyst for the creation of the LRCS. Understanding this conference is therefore paramount to understanding why and how the LRCS was created, how it was imagined, and what its functions were. The LRCS still exists today, known as the International Federation of the Red Cross: it is the largest humanitarian organisation in the world, with 191 national Red Cross societies as its members, and it is based in Geneva. Much has been written on the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), but there has been very little research on the International Federation of the Red Cross, or its ancestor, the LRCS. Aside from a few pages in less than a handful of publications, the way in which the Cannes Medical Conference established the LRCS’s mission remains unknown. This book therefore proposes something that is innovative and that advances the historiography of the Red Cross movement, of humanitarianism and of public health.

Africa: Envisioning Tomorrow explores the major trends that will define the face of the sub-Saharan continent in the next three decades. The near doubling of Africa’s population by 2050 will lead to more than twenty million new job seekers entering the African labour market every year until then. Right now, Africa doesn’t seem armed to offer jobs to this many people, resulting in possible unrest and intra-African or intercontinental migration flows, including to Europe. Climate change creates additional migratory pressure as it threatens the future of agriculture and livestock.
The author explores the opportunities for increased job creation in Africa. Work provides income, and decent and meaningful jobs contribute to prospects and social stability. The evolution of the labour market is essential for the continent’s future. Fortunately, Africa has some major strengths. The continent has the youngest population in the world and represents a wealth of creativity and innovation. Moreover, Africans excel in ‘market-creating innovation’: the ability to see market opportunities and innovations that others do not. Africans create their own jobs through micro and small enterprises. A young well-trained middle class, familiar with digital technologies, is emerging. Africa’s abundant natural resources also attract global regional powers aspiring to secure access to critical raw materials, something the continent can use to its own advantage.
Special attention goes to the European Union’s Africa policy: the book takes a critical look at the European Union’s intentions and approach and formulates recommendations to the European Commission. The author combines economic analysis with stories from twenty-five years of experience with impact investments in Africa. He challenges the typical pessimistic stereotypes about the continent and provides an optimistic vision of Africa’s future.

‘Because at the heart of the apparent conflict between public health concerns and capitalistic interests, market access for pharmaceuticals is largely driven by political considerations, the difference with usual consumer goods being that pharmaceuticals are saving lives or years of life in good health’. Pharmaceuticals are mainly sourced by companies investing in costly R&D and production at their own risks to make them globally available. However, access for patients in need can be restricted due to insufficient medical resources and/or unaffordability. The dilemma between rewarding innovation with prices in line with value and risks for companies and ensuring affordability for patients or health insurances has become critical for all stakeholders, with political and economic implications. The development of universal health coverage puts pressure on governments to control directly or indirectly reimbursement and prices of pharmaceuticals, whereas the flow of innovations addressing infectious, chronic, and life-threatening diseases, thanks to accelerated scientific progress, is growing constantly.

Management of pharmaceutical health care expenditure approach varies according to the historical, cultural, and economic backgrounds that contribute to building each health care system, and companies are confronted with a very complex environment to launch their new drugs and manage their lifecycle until loss of patent. This book explores the different models of health care systems (e.g., Europe, United States, Japan, China) and the criteria and processes for decision making in coverage and pricing of pharmaceuticals. It also provides the analytic tools that are used to inform the decisions, and how market access strategy can be integrated in the product life cycle. Short case studies related to specific disease areas or methods are supporting exposed concepts and methods.

This book targets primarily students, but may prove useful to industry or insurance executives and eventually public decision makers with interest in the field: all will find relevant insights and sources to dig deeper into the topic. The content has been developed partially through a well received teaching program at CEIBS MBA since 2020.

Family law is a site of social conflict and the erasure of non-traditional families. This book explores how conservative religious and progressive queer groups can cooperatively work together to expand family law’s recognition beyond the traditional state-sponsored family. Various religious groups have shown an interest in promoting alternative family structures.

For example, certain Muslim and Mormon communities have advocated for polygamy, in the process aligning with queer groups’ interest in overcoming the engrafting of monogamy into state law. Advocacy by North American religious conservatives for reforms in favor of non-conjugal families and against same-sex marriage overlaps with certain queer efforts to legitimize friendships and non-traditional families more generally.

This book explores these potential areas of queer and religious political cooperation—including limitations and principled reservations to such cooperation. It then looks at additional future arenas of queer and religious political cooperation going beyond family law.

Ultimately, this book aims to locate and systematize seemingly isolated interest convergences between queer and religious groups into a coherent theoretical framework that can also be used on the ground in political work. In challenging dominant narratives of ‘culture wars,’ the book’s analysis is timely and in line with the need to prevent the escalation of social cleavages looming over our increasingly diverse societies. 

This volume deals critically with the insertion of university life in contemporary United States of America. The time frame covers the 1980s and today. These are five critical conversations with noted scholars hailing from different origins, holding different trajectories, agendas and interests who have excelled in the humanities in addressing the (Latin) American Scene in the United States of America. The volume is pursuing the interrogation of the sign “America” in between the crucial “Anglo/Latin” divide. This five-part interrogation is done in ways that do not necessarily agree with conventional understandings of the big sign (America) in mainstream or hegemonic English-language senses of the sign as it travels internally in the United States and internationally up and down and across the Atlantic. Hence, the suggested parenthesis of “Latin” that is intended to disrupt the sign of “America,” which is not and cannot possibly be the United States of America. The volume title also plays with “perfection” as in the verbal sense of finished business plus the idea of excellence. These five critical conversations illustrate some of the challenges, problems, troubles, dilemmas, and so on. We are in the “not yet” finished quality and the self-awareness of the scholarship that is “never perfect.” Hence, we are perpetually in motion and perhaps moving towards progress. Bright and dark sides frame the immediate and more distant past, the pressing present and the immediate future. The “here-and-now” summons an interregnum in which readers can see some of the challenges informing the academic profession, university life, history, Latin America and the U.S. associations, avatars of the (foreign) humanities, Spanish in pressurized Anglo settings, and so on.

The five interviewees (Walter D. Mignolo, John Beverley, Rolena Adorno, José Rabasa and Roberto González Echevarría) have all been affiliated with Departments of Spanish and Portuguese, also called Romance Studies, Hispanic Studies (and now, Iberian and Latin American Studies or vice versa, Latin American and Iberian Studies). The signs “Latin” and “Hispanic” surface significantly in fields of languages, literatures and cultures, but also history and a variety of studies (the humanities, historical, sociological, Latin American, post/de-colonial, cultural, subaltern, etc.). “Hispanic” is challenged, and it turns out to be a common misnomer within and sometimes against “Anglo” domains (i.e. the U.S. and the U.K. too). The category of “West” is debated in different ways. It is not necessarily assumed as an unquestionable summum bonum (conventionally, “Latin America” is not part of the “West” in conventional English-speaking domains and a rich tradition of criticism emerges in these conversations). Tensions within monolingual institutional settings in the United States are mentioned.

These conversations open up the notion of “history” which will go in different directions. There are different genealogies and there is no resolution. “Literature” is vigorously defended at least by one or two of these participants, but this is not the case in others who open up to the mounting challenges of literacy and the virtues and limitations of the alphabetic letter in historical and contemporary settings in the Americas (Latin America and the United States). Inter- or trans-disciplinarity is defended by all and 1,001 references fly around these exchanges. There is humor too, sometimes coming from me and sometimes at the expense of the interviewer. Three conversations took place in Spanish (Mignolo, Rabasa, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria ) and two in English (Beverley, Adorno). The final work includes my translations into English. There are personal predilections and collective trajectories, changes and continuities, celebrations and desires, accusations and stubborn challenges. The historical present allows for the referencing of Early Modern / colonial dimensions among these five (Latin) American scholars, and this is significant vis-à-vis the hegemonic European horizon inside U.S. academia. But things are ineluctably changing.

As with “Hispanic cultures,” speakers occupy both sides of virtually all binaries (majority and minority, white and non-white, “off-white,” “brown,” etc.), minority-academic culture and majority minority population, bilingual, English and Spanish, (Latin) American, American and European, humanities and social-science, a general struggle for a greater visibility in the universities in the Anglo Zone. Vast historical vistas are addressed starting with the “modern” in the Spanish-language tradition. There are additions of post/decolonial perspectives, continental philosophical traditions and criticism from the margins. These vistas are combined with their most pressing situations in the various academic environments. Tensions, challenges, xenophobia and even racism come up. The thrust of this work is to open up to something bigger and something different. “Hispanic” writ large inside the “foreign humanities” allows for numerous upsets of the conventional narratives.

Writing the notes for the exhibition catalogue, Becoming Tennessee Williams, a centenary exhibit at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas (1 February–31 July 2011), Professor and Exhibition Curator Charlotte Cannin noted of Williams’s work that he “reinvented the American theater,” and that “There is no more influential 20th-century American playwright than Tennessee Williams.” “He inspired future generations of writers,” she continues, “as diverse as Suzan-Lori Parks, Tony Kushner, David Mamet and John Waters, and his plays remain among the most produced in the world.” Of A Streetcar Named Desire in particular, critic Philip C. Kolin has said that it is, “One of the most influential plays in the twentieth century.” Kolin’s comment is not restricted to the United States or even to the English-speaking world. A Streetcar Named Desire made an immediate and profound impact on a Europe devastated by World War II, as much of it emerged from beneath the heavy boots of fascism. For Europe, A Streetcar Named Desire was of a piece with liberation, with political liberation, with literary liberation into new forms of expression, and with sexual emancipation. A Streetcar Named Desire suggested for many a new and more open way to live, and offered for writers a set of new possibilities for their art. And while the more sensational Williams may have helped attract large theater and finally film audiences, his endurance as arguably the greatest and most enduring of American dramatists will rest on his language, on his poetic theater, for, after all, as Williams himself has said of his work “Treatment is everything in a play of this type.”

Tennessee Williams, T-shirt Modernism and the Refashionings of Theater refocuses the work of Tennessee Williams against the larger fabric of cultural change in the post–World War II era in which he came to prominence, an era in which the rate of cultural change accelerated unprecedentedly as the late 40s became the 50s, the 50s the 60s, the 60s the 70s, etc. into periods of fragmentation and dislocation, a cultural unmooring we now generally (if too loosely) call postmodern, or, more accurately, perhaps, late modern. The study engages the Williams we thought we knew, as he grew, developed, reconfigured himself into a playwright we didn’t, in his attempts to refashion himself amid the vortices of changing sexual mores, including the performance of masculinities and the queering of theater, the struggle for a literate, literary theater, and the place of the theatrical experience in his contemporary culture.

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.

Statistics and the use of numbers, in general, are becoming increasingly important in journalism, this to the point that it cannot be overemphasised. In the age of the so-called big data, journalists’ engagement with numbers is seen as the Holy Grail to save the news media from declining streams of revenues, hyper-fragmentation of audiences and the de-politicisation of society in general. Indeed, for some the interaction between journalists and numbers is the future. These voices often refer to the ‘datafication’ of news – and society in general – and vehemently call for the incorporation of statistics and data into journalism practice as a way of improving the quality of news. They see in the ‘data revolution’ a real possibility to revolutionise the way journalism is done, making news stories more comprehensive, relevant, accessible and engaging. It is a quest that pretends to use numbers to enhance journalism and provide better public service journalism. To be sure, many journalists are now expected to deal and examine big and small numbers almost on a daily basis at least in ways that they were not asked to do in the past. This against the pressure of time, declining resources and growing masses of quantitative information related to economic, political and social phenomena (including scientific and academic research reports, public opinion data, political polls, and official and non-official datasets, among others). 

Therefore, it is impossible today to disassociate the discussion about quality in the news from the use of numbers. In this sense, there are important questions to ask: How do journalists use statistics to articulate news? What are the reasons and rationale behind incorporating numbers in the news? Are news stories really better because they present the audience particular numbers or data? Does the incorporation of statistics make news stories more comprehensive and accessible? The book is an attempt to answer this along other more fundamental questions such as: What do we understand by quality in the news? Is data really the future for journalism?

In this book, we aim at challenging some common assumptions about how journalists engage and use statistics in their quest for quality news. In doing so, it seeks to improve our understanding about the usage of data and statistics as a primary means for the construction of social reality. This is a task, in our view, that is urgent in times of ‘post-truth’ politics and the rise of ‘fake news’. In this sense, the quest to produce ‘quality’ news, which seems to require incorporating statistics and engaging with data, as laudable and straightforward as it sounds, is instead far more problematic and complex than what is often accounted for.

To start with, the notion of ‘quality’ in the news remains not only elusive but also contentious. On the one hand, as it is argued here, the notion of ‘quality news’ and ‘quality news providers’ has centred around the normative claims of journalism being a public service to society; something that, as we will argue, is questionable both factually and historically. On the other, there is ample evidence to suggest that contrary to the common assumptions statistics do not necessarily bring accessibility, reliability, validity nor credibility to the news stories. Indeed, based on extensive research and drawing from original data, the book explores the use of statistics within the practice of journalism through the lenses of five quality dimensions: relevance, accuracy, timeliness, interpretability and accessibility. According to the authors, by studying each dimension as a threshold that seeks to guarantee the quality of information in news it is possible to understand the whole journalistic workflow, from production to consumption, on how statistics are articulated throughout in order to substantiate quality news stories. The authors highlight the dichotomy between the normative and professional aspirations of journalism, whereby statistics help support the quality of news, and there is a desire to strengthen the ability of storytellers (journalists) through the use of numbers. The book tries to underpin the tensions and issues around journalism and statistics. The central point made is that while the concept of quality and its dimensions remains a theoretical aspiration among journalists, what they really aim to achieve is ultimately credibility and authority. Hence, drawing from this last dichotomy we argue that not only the use of statistics automatically translates into quality journalism but that in some occasions it even hinders the possibility of greater civic engagement with the news.

This book is unique in its dedicated tackling of the subject of death in the work of Jean Baudrillard. Through new readings of his work, juxtaposed with philosophical (Schopenhauer, Kant) and artistic (Jeremy Millar, Ron Mueck) examples along with films (Norte, the End of History; Ida), the book makes so patently clear the importance of Baudrillard’s tendency to poeticize, his core indebtedness to Georges Bataille, Alfred Jarry, and others, and his reliance on paradox. Ultimately, Stratagem of the Corpse is less a making sense of death and more a transcript of what occurred when death made sense of us, a reverse thanatology in which death delineates the variant forms of our encroachment, not so much death as seen by Baudrillard but Baudrillard as seen by death.

Examples of Baudrillardian simulacra, depersonalization, detachment, violence, obscenity, Baudrillard’s notion of the ‘perfect crime’, and nihilism are incisively discussed. The book makes a compelling case for why Baudrillard is relevant and necessary.

This book aims to increase our knowledge and deepen the understanding of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust by examining personal circumstances and characteristics of Jewish resistance members and the formation of small Jewish resistance groups during the Second World War. It is a carefully researched, fully annotated and referenced case study that examines primary and secondary sources, including evidence from oral history interviews with resistance members and documentary evidence, which have been conducted and was collected by the author during almost 40 years of research on the subject but were previously unavailable in English. It uses a qualitative analysis to investigate individual and small group manifestations of Jewish resistance during the German occupation of the Netherlands between 1940 and 1945. This study contributes to historiography, but its focus enables a different interpretation and displays a new view of history. It is a scholarly work, but it is also easily accessible for students and general readers interested in this subject.

Wittgenstein’s remarks on colour have been accorded little critical examination, the sole exception being the explanation in the Tractatus of the logical impossibility of a point in the visual field having two colours simultaneously, a gap the present work is primarily meant to fill. Remarks on Colour, a compilation of writings on the subject drafted in the last fifteen months of Wittgenstein’s life, is subjected to sustained critical scrutiny and is shown that it does not deserve to languish in the limbo to which it has been mostly consigned, but it indeed is deeper and more illuminating than other more studied writings, to say nothing of peripheral writings on ethics, aesthetics and religion.

The Remarks would warrant a careful look if only because it is, as it has been billed, ‘one of the few documents which shows [Wittgenstein] concentratedly at work on a single philosophical issue’. But it also deserves special consideration and is worth grappling with since it shows Wittgenstein thinking through a problem from scratch and, what is still less common, without knowing where he will end up. In particular no other extended stretch of writing so clearly shows him as engaged in an unconstrained investigation of a topic of huge general interest and setting the agenda for philosophers, indeed as pioneering a still insufficiently investigated subject. And following in his footsteps pays since it brings to light a great deal about how he approaches philosophy and proves to be a good way into the philosophy.

Wittgenstein’s once said: ‘Sometimes a sentence can be understood only if it is read at the right tempo’, and the present work takes him at his word and accords him the courtesy of treating his own sentences as ‘all to be read slowly’. His remarks are examined one by one in the order he wrote them rather than the order they appear in the published text with close attention to his toing-and-froing and changes of tack. The result is a picture of a serious philosopher at work, one grappling with rare scrupulousness to a series of problems. Just as importantly one sees that the thrust of his deliberations is routinely misidentified, that there are significant similarities as well as significant differences between his late and early thinking about colour, and that much folklore, both laudatory and disparaging, that has sprung up regarding the thinness of his reasoning and the thickness of his conclusions is substantially off-base.

The two volumes on Wittgenstein and AI aim to trace and suggest Wittgensteinian influences in some of the most cutting-edge areas of research in Artificial Intelligence (such as Computation, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and the use of automation in legal settings). The collection is driven by an essentially interdisciplinary approach, featuring articles from philosophers, computer scientists and legal scholars, writing on a broad range of topics in AI.

The chapters across these two volumes are grouped into two sets of themes: Mind and Language and Value and Governance. These themes correspond to two major areas of research in the philosophical study of AI: the computational mind and the ethics of artificial intelligence. These volumes make a significant and unprecedented contribution to the question of what Wittgenstein’s philosophy can offer to the ever-growing field of AI. It aims to provide insight for both philosophers and non-philosophers alike, offering reflection on the significance of Wittgenstein’s work for AI, and on the implications of advancements in AI technology for Wittgenstein’s philosophy and philosophy influenced by Wittgenstein.

VOLUME I: Wittgenstein and AI (Volume I): Mind and Language. This volume includes chapters on Wittgenstein and Turing’s views on AI, the question of whether machines can think, intentionality, AI language models, analogical reasoning and logic.

Today we face an incredibly complex array of interconnected water issues that cross multiple boundaries: Is water a property or a human right? How do we prioritize between economic utility and environmental sustainability? Do fish have more rights to water than irrigated grain? Can we reconcile competing cultural and religious values associated with water? How much water do people actually need? These questions share two key defining characteristics: (a) competing values, interests and information to frame the problem; and (b) differing views - of how to resolve a problem - are related more to uncertainty and ambiguity of perception than accuracy of scientific information.

These problems - known as complex problems - are ill-defined, ambiguous, and often associated with strong moral, political and professional values and issues. For complex water problems, certainty of solutions and degree of consensus varies widely. In fact, there is often little consensus about what the problem is, let alone how to resolve it. Furthermore, complex problems are constantly changing because of interactions among the natural, societal and political forces involved. The nature of complexity is contingent on a variety of contextual characteristics of the interactions among variables, processes, actors, and institutions. Understanding interactions and feedback loops between and within human and natural systems is critical for managing complex water problems. [NP] This edited volume synthesizes insights from theory and practice to address complex water problems through contingent and adaptive management using water diplomacy framework (WDF). This emerging framework diagnoses water problems, identifies intervention points, and proposes sustainable solutions that are sensitive to diverse viewpoints and uncertainty as well as changing and competing needs. The WDF actively seeks value-creation opportunities by blending science, policy, and politics through a contingent negotiated approach.

Gulf Gothic moves through deep time across languages and borders, presenting haunted, secret-laden narratives that emerge from the gulfs between people all along the Gulf of Mexico and on both sides of the Rio Grande. Collaborating in an interdisciplinary manner, literary and cultural critics Dolores Flores-Silva and Keith Cartwright chart the Gulf as a unified region and ground zero of North American (and global) transculturation.

The Gulf of Mexico has been inadequately appreciated as the dynamic transnational region that it is (taking in the Gulf states of Mexico and the U.S., as well as western Cuba), a cultural matrix that nourished the spread of maize agriculture and the rise of a two-thousand-year-old literary historical tradition that has responded to traumas of colonial conquest and plantation slavery. In this study, the Gulf signifies metaphorically and symbolically—as undead space of contacts and supposed impasses between peoples—as well as topographically. Its gothic modalities carry an urgent charge that demands to be addressed in holistic form

Gulf Gothic addresses modes of representing all that is blocked from free movement and aspiration. Here, the figure of La Llorona haunts boundary waters and shorelines, voicing much that has been occulted by colonial power and national narrative. La Llorona’s Indigenous prototypes, plantation/hacienda atmospherics, and heated storm patterns show up repeatedly in variations of an originary undeadness unconstrained by attempted quarantines and border walls. The authors turn to cinematic horror and the double gaze of ancient Maya texts, to folk-fable and legal documents and popular song, as well as to works by Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, LeAnne Howe, Kate Chopin, James Weldon Johnson, William Faulkner, Carlos Fuentes, Vicente Riva Palacio, Jesmyn Ward, and Fernanda Melchor, to attend to forces unbound by traditional gothic modalities and their foundational gulfs. 

Edited and with an introduction by Professor Habib, 'Confronting Colonialism' is a series of essays commemorating the second centenary of Tipu's final battle against the British at Sriranagapatnam in 1799. The essays, devoted to the history of Mysore under Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan, underscore the need to defend the memory of two rulers, who were indomitable opponents of the colonial regime; they also emphasize the centrality of Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan in Indian nationalist historiography. This collection is of particular importance, especially in light of the recent tendency to devalue the significance of the two rulers.

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.

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.

“Decolonizing the Diet” challenges the common claim that native American communities were decimated after 1492 because they lived in “virgin soils” that were distinct from those in the Old World. Comparing the European transition from Paleolithic hunting and gathering with native American subsistence strategies before and after 1492, this book offers a new way of understanding the link between biology, ecology and history. After examining the history and bioarchaeology of ancient Europe, the ancient Near East, ancient native America and Europe during the medieval Black Death, this book sets out to understand the subsequent collision between indigenous peoples and Europeans in North America from 1492 to the present day. Synthesizing the latest work in the science of nutrition, immunity, and evolutionary genetics with cutting edge scholarship on the history of indigenous North America, this book highlights a fundamental model of human demographic destruction—Human populations have been able to recover from mass epidemics within a century, whatever their genetic heritage. They fail to recover from epidemics when their ability to hunt, gather and farm nutritionally dense plants and animals is diminished by war, colonization and cultural destruction. The history of native America before and after 1492 clearly shows that biological immunity is contingent on historical context, not least in relation to the protection or destruction of long-evolved nutritional building blocks that underlie human immunity.

“Decolonizing the Diet” cautions against assuming that certain communities are more prone to metabolic syndromes and infectious diseases, whether due to genetic differences or a comparative lack of exposure to specific pathogens. This book refocuses our understanding on the ways in which human interventions—particularly in food production, nutritional accessibility and ecology—have exacerbated demographic decline in the face of disease; both in terms of reduced immunity prior to infection and reduced ability to fight pathogenic invasion.

“Decolonizing the Diet” provides a framework to approach contemporary health dilemmas, both inside and outside native America. Many developed nations now face a medical crisis: so-called “diseases of civilization” have been linked to an evolutionary mismatch between our ancient genetic heritage and our present social, nutritional and ecological environments. The disastrous European intervention in native American life after 1492 brought about a similar—though of course far more destructive— mismatch between biological needs and societal context. The curtailment of nutritional diversity is related to declining immunity in the face of infectious disease, to diminishing fertility and to the increasing prevalence of metabolic syndromes such as diabetes. “Decolonizing the Diet” thus intervenes in a series of historical and contemporary debates that now extend beyond native America—while noting the specific destruction wrought on indigenous nutritional systems after 1492.

• Americans perceive the many political dilemmas in our society and corruption in our government, but few understand the causes of these problems. After explaining the constitutional roots of declining governing capacity in our federal system, this book sets out a comprehensive agenda of 25 amendments that can attract wide support across the political spectrum. The “top 10” proposals include reforms to make elections more competitive, reliable, and fair, such as ranked choice voting (“instant runoffs”); semi-open primary races with fixed dates rotating among all states; an anti-gerrymandering formula to make congressional elections more competitive; improved access to the polls through a national voter registry and voter rights; limits to campaign donations and political advertising. 
• Instead of considering them piecemeal, we should understand how the needed amendments form a systemic overhaul that includes major improvements to the House and Senate. This requires a ban on filibusters, creative ways to fix unequal representation in the House of Representatives, and restoring popular access to legislators. Improving the judiciary requires an 18-year term on the Supreme Court and appellate courts, firm deadlines for confirmation votes to reduce partisan pressures on the judiciary, and clarification of judicial review. A national civics education curriculum and fair-and-balanced requirements for mass media would make it much harder to manipulate people through misinformation campaigns.
• The book also argues for direct election of the president, Puerto Rico statehood, and ways to fix our current radical inequalities of voter influence in the Senate. Several common-sense “good government” reforms will reduce corruption. These include mandated financial disclosures; a requirement for federal legislators and officers to hold their assets in blind trusts; penalties for campaigns using stolen information; limits to the president’s pardoning powers; and clearer grounds for impeachment. Beyond the filibuster, there are further steps to break gridlock in Congress and fix the budget process. 
• Finally, we need to improve the amendment process itself, and clarify how a national convention should work as an alternative to Congress for proposing amendments for ratification. When called by 38 states, a convention can reach national compromise on a whole package of amendments to restore responsive, efficient, and effective government.

Irish author (Eleanor) Norah Hoult (1898–1984) traveled in prominent literary circles and corresponded actively with some of the leading Irish authors of her time, including Brigid Brophy, Sean O’Casey, and Sean O’Faolain. Critics today compare her not only to O’Faolain and Frank O’Connor, but also to novelists Kate O’Brien and Edna O’Brien. Despite her reputation and a forty-four year publishing career, however, Hoult and her work remain surprisingly neglected.

This edition rectifies this critical oversight and introduces Hoult’s short story collection, 'Poor Women!', to a new generation of readers. 'Poor Women!' displays Hoult’s subtlety and humor as an author and her nature as a keen witness to human frailty. In these stories, Hoult unflaggingly highlights the restrictions imposed on her characters by society and its institutions: she thus provides a window into the social, literary and political milieu from which she hails.

Largely cited for its engagement with women’s and religious issues, 'Poor Women!' thus also displays a keen awareness of wider historical issues like the challenges of war and of cultural identity construction. Her incisive portraits capture the emotional paralysis of her characters and their self-delusions. Such thematic and stylistic emphases invite further comparison to better-known contemporary Irish literary giants like James Joyce and Mary Lavin.

Publishing is in crisis. Publishing has always been in crisis, but today’s version, fuelled by the digital boom, has some frightening symptoms. Trade publishers see their mid-lists hollowed, academic customers face budgetary pressures from higher education spending cuts, and educational publishers encounter increased competition across their markets. But over the centuries, forced change has been the norm for publishers. Somehow, they continue to adapt.

This ground-breaking study, the first of its kind, outlines a theory of publishing that allows publishing houses to focus on their core competencies in difficult times while building a broader notion of what they are capable of. Tracing the history of publishing from the press works of fifteenth-century Germany to twenty-first-century Silicon Valley, via Venice, Beijing, Paris and London, ‘The Content Machine’ offers a new understanding of media and literature, analysing their many connections to technology and history. In answer to those who insist that publishing has no future in a digital age, this book gives a rejuvenated identity to this ever-changing industry and demonstrates how it can survive and thrive in a period of unprecedented challenges.

How did European colonization transform the organization of territory in South Asia? “Statemaking and Territory in South Asia: Lessons from the Anglo–Gorkha War (1814–1816)” seeks to connect two historical junctures at which the idea of the modern state as a geographically discernible and territorially circumscribed entity emerged in colonial South Asia.

The volume first examines the territorial disputes that emerged along the common frontiers of the Himalayan kingdom of Gorkha (present-day Nepal) and the English East India Company that eventually led to the Anglo–Gorkha War of 1814–1816. The volume argues that these disputes arose out of older tribute, taxation and property relationships that left their territories perpetually intermixed and with ill-defined boundaries. Following the war, the British sought to end this territorial illegibility by defining the joint boundary of the two states, rendering it linear and distinct.

Secondly, the volume also reveals the long-drawn-out process whereby the colonial state, through various cartographic projects and changes in administrative routines, attempted to rearrange its internal administrative divisions in an effort to create the geographical template of the modern state. This template would occupy a definite portion of the earth’s surface and with non-overlapping divisions and subdivisions.

Civilization is a Ponzi scheme... that we cannot stop, even as we face increasingly scarce resources, environmental degradation, market bubbles, and an Artificial Intelligence that grows energy-hungrier every day. The complex history of the Middle East shows how we got here, and how we can turn those challenges into opportunities. We are helped by those energy-hungry thinking machines, by combining their data crunching power our human intuition and ability to think outside the box. George J. Nasr shows how this team-up can help us turn challenges into opportunity, by can drawing on the turbulent past of the Middle East and its future hopes. We can transcend scarcity-driven ""Black Wars"" for resources like oil and water, and toward a technology-led ""Blue Peace"" of shared growth and continued expansion and even conquer the stars

Current debates in the environmental humanities, animal studies, and related fields increasingly revolve around this question: What to do with “the human”? Is the human a category worth preserving? Should it be replaced with the post-human? Should marginalized and minoritarian groups advocate for a universal humanism? What is the relationship between humanism and anthropocentrism? Is a genuinely non-anthropocentric mode of thinking and living possible for human beings?
This book argues that the writings of twentieth-century poet Robinson Jeffers offer twenty-first-century readers a number of crucial insights concerning such questions and timely advice about how not to be human. For Jeffers, our tendency to turn inward on ourselves and to indulge in human narcissism is at the heart of the social, economic, and existential ills that plague modern societies. As a remedy, Jeffers recommends turning ourselves outward—beyond the self and beyond the human—and learning to affirm and even love the inhuman cosmos in all of its terrible beauty. In articulating this vision of “inhumanism,” Jeffers develops a full-orbed and radical non-anthropocentrism that stretches across ethical, political, ontological, and aesthetic registers. In the process, Jeffers helps us find our way back to ourselves, but this time no longer as “human” in the traditional sense but as plain members of the inhuman world. With his inhumanist philosophy and poetics, Jeffers not only anticipates the most pressing questions and cutting-edge debates of our present moment but also challenges us to reconsider some of the key dogmas that underpin familiar discourses surrounding the Anthropocene and posthumanist philosophies and ecopoetics.

In a community hospital in suburban Chicago run by Catholic nuns, surgeons performed an operation never done in the world before. The team at the Little Company of Mary Hospital led by Richard Lawler transplanted a kidney in 1950 from a just-deceased woman into the abdominal cavity of a 44-year-old woman.

Critics in the medical community called the operation irresponsible because immunosuppressant drugs that prevent the rejection of a transplanted organ had yet to be developed. Some Catholic clergy considered the transplant sacrilegious because it “desecrated” the sacred body of a dead woman when her kidney was removed. Yet the nuns who ran the hospital blessed the procedure.

Lawler said time alone would judge its success. Seventy years later, that transplant is largely lost to history—overshadowed by remarkable transplant surgeries and medical breakthroughs that have made life-saving kidney and other organ transplants almost routine. The book throws light on a seminal moment in medical history, offering new insights into the early days of human organ transplantation while also looking at the current national kidney crisis.

The papers in this volume can be roughly divided between ‘the philosophy of mind’ and ‘the philosophy of language’. They are, however, united by the idea that this standard philosophical classification stands in the way of clear thinking about many of the core issues. With this, they are united by the idea that the notion of a human being must be central to any philosophical discussion of issues in this area, and by an insistence on an inescapably ethical dimension of any adequate discussion of these issues. None of the papers is well described as ‘exegetical’, but most of them are, in one way or another, papers about Wittgenstein, and all of them are discussions of themes central to his later work and strongly influenced by it. While the debt to Wittgenstein is enormous, many of the papers involve significant criticisms of ideas widely drawn from him, and some of these criticisms may have application to Wittgenstein himself.

The discussions of ‘the philosophy of mind’ are marked by an emphasis on the individual’s relations with others and, with that, by a detailed attention given to the human bodily form. Within the bodily form, the face is, both visually and through the voice, the locus of expression of our thoughts and feelings, and so central to our recognition of each other as beings who have thoughts and feelings. With this, it is central to the ‘attitude towards a soul’ of which Wittgenstein speaks: a phrase that highlights the centrality of an ethical dimension to any adequate philosophical treatment of our understanding of others. My relation to other creatures – both human and non-human – is distorted by the idea of an underpinning of the kind proposed in ‘the argument from analogy’; but it is distorted, too, by the idea (that we may take from Wittgenstein) that our seeing similarities between we human beings and dogs or giant squids is a condition of our ability to ascribe pain or fear to such creatures. A ‘phenomenological’ treatment of our perception of faces may be helpful in breaking down pervasive philosophical prejudices here. The irreducible sense in which the smile that we see is a smile on this face is intimately connected with Wittgenstein’s insistence on the importance of context for an ascription of thoughts and feelings: an insistence that brings out a fundamental incoherence in dominant, ‘reductive’, treatments of the notion of a persisting individual. This incoherence is intimately tied to a failure to leave a place for the notion of a particular individual, as opposed to kinds (transferable properties), in our thought about those whom we know and care for; and, with that, a failure to leave a place for anything recognisable as love. 

The notion of a human being links the discussions of mind and language through the relation between two themes in Wittgenstein: (i) the way in which the human enters into our thinking (‘The human body is the best picture of the human soul’); (ii) the way in which our thinking is a reflection of our humanity. These relations are distorted by the emphasis on ‘rule following’ and the appeal to the idea of continuing an arithmetical series that has had a central place in discussions of language originating from Wittgenstein. Approaches from this perspective fail to do justice to the idea of speech as a form of interaction between people. Rush Rhees suggests that conversation provides a better model for thinking about language. To share a language with someone is to be able to speak with her. One aspect of Wittgenstein’s ‘attitude towards a soul’ is the demand to seek forms of contact with others: including, centrally, interaction in speech with others. Such interaction is crucially dependent on trust, and on the effort to sustain conversation in the face of the unlimited possibilities of its collapse: possibilities that find expression in philosophy in various forms of scepticism. Wittgenstein’s appeal to the idea that ‘justification comes to an end’ is potentially misleading in that it may obscure the possibilities of sustaining discussion in the face of such potential collapse. While much of what we say may run into the sand if pursued in certain directions, we may take one of the tasks of philosophy to be that of bringing out possibilities of a sense of forms we would not have anticipated: and so enhancing the links between us that are involved in conversation. We do well here to shift from the familiar question ‘What conditions must something satisfy in order to be a language?’ to the question ‘What is it seriously to think of – to acknowledge in practice - an individual or group as speaking?’ A focus on this question may cast in a clearer light the character and importance of questions about the language capacities of non-human creatures. The issues here are only well understood if we recognize the primacy of the ethical in our relations to such creatures: a point well illustrated by a remarkable study of the language capacities of bonobo.

William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788-1795 takes seriously William Blake’s wish to be read as a natural philosopher, particularly in his early works, and illuminates the way that poetry and visual art were for Blake an imaginative way of philosophizing. Blake’s poetry and designs reveal a consistent preoccupation with eighteenth-century natural philosophical debates concerning the properties of the physical world, the nature of the soul, and God’s relationship to the material universe. This book traces the history of these debates, and examines images and ideas in Blake’s illuminated books that mark the development of the monist pantheism in his early works, which contend that every material thing is in its essence God, to the idealism of his later period, which casts the natural world as degenerate and illusory. The book argues that Blake’s philosophical thought was not as monolithic as has been previously characterized, and that his deepening engagement with late eighteenth-century vitalist life sciences, including studies of the asexual propagation of the marine polyp, marks his metaphysical turn. 

In contrast to the vast body of scholarship that emphasizes Blake’s early religious and political positions, William Blake as Natural Philosopher draws out the metaphysics underlying his commitments. In so doing, the book demonstrates that pantheism is important because it entails an ethics that respects the interconnected divinity of all material objects – not just humans – which in turn spurns hierarchical power structures. If everything is alive and essentially divine, Blake’s early work implies, then everything is worthy of respect and capable of giving and receiving infinite delight. Therefore, one should imaginatively and joyfully immerse oneself in the community of other beings in which one is already enmeshed. Often in the works discussed in this book, Blake offers negative examples to suggest his moral philosophy; he dramatizes the disastrous individual and social consequences of humans behaving as if God were a transcendent, immaterial, nonhuman demiurge, and as if they were separate from and ontologically superior to the degraded material universe that they see as composed of inert, lifeless atoms. 

William Blake as Natural Philosopher traces the evolution of eighteenth-century debates over the vitalist qualities of life and the nature of the soul both in the United Kingdom and on the continent, devoting significant attention to the natural philosophy of Newton, Locke, Berkeley, Leibniz, Buffon, La Mettrie, Hume, Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, and many others. 

Argues that the rapid rise of artificial intelligence and other pressing global challenges necessitate a fundamental reset in skills, career paths, and leadership approaches to prepare workers for the evolving workplace of the 21st century

Artificial intelligence is already causing a major shift in the nature of work. Countries, colleges, or employers are not prepared to continuously train billions of knowledge workers to compete in this new economic reality. But that’s not all. More change is coming due to the polycrisis of pressing challenges such as sustainability, social inequality, and geopolitical instability. Figuring out what career paths, skills, and talents we need to nurture has never been more urgent, especially for those who aspire to leadership.
In The Platinum Workforce, futurist and technologist Trond Arne Undheim reveals how to be a changemaker in the ongoing re-industrial transition. Industrial principles such as lean manufacturing, technological advancement, and production at scale meet significant sustainability challenges, increased risks, and intricate inequality concerns from the Global South as well as from workers in advanced societies who also feel left behind. Undheim has spent the last decade examining the technologies, risks, and trends shaping the future of work. Helping startups, shaping governance policies, teaching students, and building educational programs, he has found that there are two core skills and ten complementary skills that will define both individual and collective success in the future of work. The core skills are deft human–AI collaboration and an innate interoperability mindset, but teams together mastering the ten complementary skills—eco-awareness, maker skills, mediation skills, megascale operations, mobility, risk aptitude, R&D hacks, psycho-resilience, sociotechnical finesse, and systems thinking—is what will define future leadership.
Leading the 21st-century workplace will require unprecedented levels of human–AI collaboration. But evolving new forms of augmented intelligence will not be easy. We all have to train for it, constantly adapting to new interfaces and watching out for risks that could derail progress or create new problems. But the challenge does not stop there. Tackling the cascading effects of evolving hazards requires astute risk management. Transdisciplinary skills such as an entrepreneurial approach, megascale execution ability, and socio-technical skills will need to be constantly honed. Leaders and workers alike need to develop an interoperability mindset. Success requires adapting to, and helping others adapt to, the fundamental shifts in the materials, methods, tools, and technologies fueling the intricate cultural machine we call society. No matter our degrees, experiences, resources, or current skill sets, to compete in this new world, we need a reset.

This scholarly monograph is an original philosophical reflection on poetics, elucidating the metaphysical and mystical potential of poetic language as quasi-religious revelation. It develops a theory of the symbol based on French Symbolist Poetry as culminating in Stéphane Mallarmé.

The epic-like saga of Wu Song has been in living oral tradition in China for more than 700 years up to the present, where it has taken the form of drama, balladry, song and storytelling.

International efforts to ensure that armed forces meet the requirements of IHL so that the protection of civilians and detainees in armed conflict is increased continue to face implementation challenges that compromise their effectiveness. This includes, for example, the operations of the International Criminal Court, or the nascent norm of Responsibility to Protect. Relying on initiatives such as these also means that before pressure can be brought to bear on those who violate IHL, irreparable damage is done to victims’ lives and dignity. 

At the same time, the ICRC has grown to recognize that its traditional approach of informing militaries about IHL and emphasizing the incorporation of IHL principles into military policies, doctrines, and educational and training curricula, while healthy measures, are not by themselves sufficient to keep soldiers from not complying with IHL and injuring or killing civilians and detainees. Importantly, this recognition has been driven by empirical data on IHL training effectiveness, and it has been coupled with an understanding that soldiers need to internalize IHL principles to ensure they comply with them. The ICRC has realized that the role played by military leaders, both officers and NCOs, in establishing a sense of positive military identity and professionalism can lead to the development of a values-oriented culture that includes IHL compliance.

Using case studies of empirical assessment in IHL and IHL-related training, as they have occurred over the last 20 years, this book illustrates for military leaders and both civilian and military IHL instructors the many different ways empirical assessment can be used to measure training effectiveness long before troops take to the field. The results of these assessments can also be used to support the deliberate creation of better IHL training curricula and programs, especially ones that emphasize the importance of relying on multidisciplinary teams supporting military leaders as they directly engage with their troops on the ethical and moral issues as well as the legal issues raised by armed conflict. This book also looks to the future and considers the potential of war video games to serve as an effective training platform for young soldiers.

Why do we obey? How have poets and writers responded to this question? This book investigates the relationship between Euro-American literature and the history of the anarchist movement and culture, from the late 18th century to the first half of the 20th. Adopting a comparative perspective, it examines how the political question of obedience—and its refusal—became integrated into literary discourse.

This book explores Raf Simons’ revolutionary impact on fashion and modern masculinity, analyzing his collections and campaigns to uncover how his work challenges traditional masculine norms and creates new visual narratives in menswear.

Reveals how individuals of African descent have engaged with and reshaped the classical tradition, highlighting a rich, often overlooked cross-cultural legacy

Human Tapestries delves into the lives of individuals of African descent who have found inspiration in the classical tradition. The book offers a collection of engaging stories that highlight the ways these individuals have interacted with, adapted, and contributed to classical thought, literature, and culture. It reveals how the classical world has shaped and been shaped by African-descended people over time. Through these narratives, Human Tapestries emphasizes the often-overlooked connection between African heritage and classical traditions. By examining historical and contemporary figures, the book showcases the diverse and lasting influence of classical ideas on people of African descent. It presents a more inclusive understanding of the classical world.
The book ultimately celebrates the enduring impact of classical traditions on African-descended individuals throughout history. By weaving together past and present stories, Human Tapestries offers a nuanced perspective that challenges traditional views of the classical canon. It serves as a reminder of the profound and continuous intersection of African and Black culture and classical scholarship.

This book explores Raf Simons’ revolutionary impact on fashion and modern masculinity, analyzing his collections and campaigns to uncover how his work challenges traditional masculine norms and creates new visual narratives in menswear.

Reveals how individuals of African descent have engaged with and reshaped the classical tradition, highlighting a rich, often overlooked cross-cultural legacy

Human Tapestries delves into the lives of individuals of African descent who have found inspiration in the classical tradition. The book offers a collection of engaging stories that highlight the ways these individuals have interacted with, adapted, and contributed to classical thought, literature, and culture. It reveals how the classical world has shaped and been shaped by African-descended people over time. Through these narratives, Human Tapestries emphasizes the often-overlooked connection between African heritage and classical traditions. By examining historical and contemporary figures, the book showcases the diverse and lasting influence of classical ideas on people of African descent. It presents a more inclusive understanding of the classical world.
The book ultimately celebrates the enduring impact of classical traditions on African-descended individuals throughout history. By weaving together past and present stories, Human Tapestries offers a nuanced perspective that challenges traditional views of the classical canon. It serves as a reminder of the profound and continuous intersection of African and Black culture and classical scholarship.

Explores Nicola Caputi’s scientific writings to reveal how his studies of tarantism, local flora, and environmental health exemplify the integration of local observation and experimental practice within early eighteenth-century scientific culture in the Kingdom of Naples.

The Situated Science of Nicola Caputi provides the first systematic study of the intellectual trajectory of Nicola Caputi (1696–1761), a physician from Salento whose work illustrates the role of local observers in the making of eighteenth-century science. A member of the Neapolitan Academy of Sciences, Caputi combined the empirical study of natural phenomena with explicit reflections on the credibility of testimony and the authority of the witness. His writings reveal how scientific knowledge could be constructed at the intersection of local practice, early eighteenth-century experimental philosophy, and European scholarly networks.
The core of Caputi’s production is the De tarantulae anatome et morsu (1741), a detailed treatise on the anatomy of the tarantula and on tarantism as a culturally and medically significant condition. Here Caputi employed the microscope to dissect hundreds of specimens, recorded case histories of the afflicted, and reflected on the epistemic role of the conterraneus author, the local witness uniquely authorized to interpret endemic diseases. Tarantism, with its strange symptoms, cyclical recurrence, and musical therapy, is presented as a wondrous phenomenon, situated between natural philosophy and medical practice, and explained through an experimental approach.
Caputi’s engagement with local natural knowledge extended further. In his Dissertatio de delfinio, composed at the time of his admission to the Neapolitan Academy in 1733, he investigated both the morphological characteristics and the pharmacological virtues of a Salentine plant against intermittent fevers, combining Tournefortian botanical categories with experimental analysis.. In the Guadina difesa (1751), he acted as expert consultant in a dispute over the edibility of fish from a coastal lake, defending its salubrity through direct measurement and hydrometric instruments of his own design. These works show Caputi’s ability to address pressing medical, environmental, and social issues through experimental practices anchored in his territory.
By presenting these three writings together, the book situates Caputi within the broader intellectual landscape of early eighteenth-century Neapolitan scientific culture and the European Republic of Letters. His work exemplifies a mode of situated science: knowledge rooted in a specific region but articulated with the tools and categories of early modern philosophy and medicine. Wonders and singular natural phenomena emerge here not as marginal curiosities but as central objects of experimental inquiry. Caputi’s case thus offers a fresh perspective on the creative role of peripheral regions in the history of science and medicine.

A mid-level exploration of the Argument from Reason, this book challenges naturalism by defending rational agency, freedom, and theism, while engaging contemporary issues such as AI, consciousness, and transhumanism. Suitable for students, scholars, and general readers seeking clarity on mind, meaning, and personhood.

Explores how decision making, grounded in modal logic, shapes a person’s relationship to the world by transforming their possibilities, values and perspectives – forming the basis of a philosophy of life

Philosophy of life is an overarching value and conceptual framework that gives context and meaning to practical philosophy, including the practical interventions aimed at enhancing the quality of life. This includes philosophical counselling and all kinds of psychotherapy. However, the tendency of disciplinary specialisation has led to a general neglect of the firm rootedness of psychotherapy in logic and philosophy generally. This book shows how conventional psychotherapy today uncritically rests on propositional logic and elucidates the consequences of that logical blind spot for the nature and content of the interventions and psychotherapeutic view of one’s lifeworld.

A particular quality of modal logic in practical philosophy, and in psychotherapy as a form of practical philosophy, is experientially very different from the common perception of theoretical logic, which is formal and mathematical. However, when modal logic is applied to philosophy of life, and especially to psychotherapy, it shows opulent colours and a capacity to transform seemingly hopeless situations, frozen in determining, non-permissive circumstances. Modal Integrative Psychotherapy as a modal logic–driven psychotherapy method illustrates how philosophy of life plays a role as an intervention strategy to improve quality of life.

The book shows how psychotherapy grows from philosophy and articulates a particular practical philosophy that, rather than cancelling psychology as a discipline and psychotherapy as a profession, leads them to a stage of philosophical deliberation that has liberating, emancipating and empowering effects through the application of logical modality of otherwise irresolvable life issues. Such a perspective depicts life plans, life goals and life strategy as elements that determine the philosophical foundations of a quest for good life that project philosophy of life as living practice, including helping oneself and helping others through psychotherapeutic and at once philosophical interventions.

A study in the literature of selfhood across time, Self-Haunting analyses how the Gnostics, the Romantics, Kierkegaard, Beckett and Ashbery dramatize the self’s struggle to fulfill an ideal of integrity and autonomy that will not let it go.

This monograph examines how far-right political parties in Europe instrumentalize gender to shape voter mobilization and reinforce exclusionary national identities, with comparative case studies of Italy and the Netherlands highlighting strategies targeting women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and migrants.

The book interprets Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, focusing on language, logic, and the sense of propositions, then examines its ethical and value-oriented themes. It analyzes the work’s concluding remarks on ethics, situating them within its scientific worldview and highlighting parallels with authors Wittgenstein read and admired, presenting an enduring conception of the ethical.

Collection of my most recent accessible papers on Wittgenstein. Some are previously unpublished. Others have been revised since their original publication.

Discusses the decline of U.S. education and proposes reforms to address inconsistent standards, weakened teaching, and ineffective federal policies

In recent years, the United States has experienced a decline in education, a trend that contradicts the incline of advancements seen in other countries around the world. This decline presents substantial threats to the future of the United States that affect academic performance along with economic growth and social structure. This book examines the various and intricate reasons behind this trend of rapid decline while providing knowledge for educators (teachers and administrators), policymakers, and other stakeholder groups committed to improving the American education system and explaining the impact of the Department of Education and why it is no longer needed in its current state.
One of the main reasons for the educational decline is the inconsistency in educational standards across states and school districts created by the Department of Education that began in 1980. Different countries that maintain consistent national standards, the United States operates under an uneven system that often prioritizes local governance over uniformed results. This inconsistency leads to large differences in the quality of educational quality as some students receive a below-average education based on geographic location rather than what their potential allows. This book explains how this lack of standardization has contributed to significant gaps in knowledge and performance, especially related to the disadvantaged student populations.
The quality of teaching has been another crucial factor that plays a role in the disintegrating educational standards created by the Department of Education and their initiatives. In many circumstances, teachers and administrators face tremendous challenges that include high student-to-teacher ratios, limited resources, and inadequate professional development opportunities. These factors restrict their ability to effectively engage and educate students. This book investigates the systemic issues affecting teacher recruitment and retention, discusses how low pay, a lack of support, and high burnout rates contribute to a teaching workforce that often fails to meet the needs of its students. By addressing these critical gaps, we can begin to understand how to attract and retain quality educators who can drive student success within the United States.
Administrative practices and policies within school systems also have an undeniable impact on educational outcomes. Bureaucratic barriers often dampen innovation and limit the autonomy that schools need to adapt to their unique challenges. This book analyzes the complicated relationship between local administrations and broader educational policies set forth by the U.S. Department of Education. Next, it discusses how strict compliance-focused environments can prevent creativity and responsiveness in classrooms that ultimately undermine the very goal of education that is to prepare students for success in an ever-changing world.
The role of the U.S. Department of Education cannot be overlooked. While focused on improving education nationwide, federal policies have at times implemented unrealistic expectations and mandates without adequately considering the diverse environment of American education. This book analyzes these policies and offers a plan for reform, emphasizing the need for flexibility and local context in educational standards and assessments. As a result, this perspective is necessary for creating an environment that encourages schools to thrive rather than just survive.

Collection of my most recent accessible papers on Wittgenstein. Some are previously unpublished. Others have been revised since their original publication.

In this selection of essays written for a variety of publications and platforms throughout the 1990s (essays, program notes, conferences), Nicole Brenez sets out and applies the tenets of what she dubs the “figurative analysis” of cinema. As the title suggests, her two main interests could broadly be summarized as the “figure” (in general) and the “body” (in particular). An actor performing on screen is, of course, a body, but Brenez goes beyond psychological or purely dramatic considerations, studying how formal elements such as framing, lighting, and editing determine what a body is and an audience’s perception of it as well as how cinematic devices can be used to create new bodies – as in the science fiction films of the 1990s that posit hybrid, post-human forms. At the same time, a body can also be a collective of individuals or even themes and motifs brought together via cinematic means.
The term “figure” also has a broad and rich meaning in Brenez’s work, informing concepts such as “figural analysis,” “figural economy,” “figurative invention,” or pure “figuration.” While glimpses of these concepts have appeared in scattered translations over the years, this collection represents the first comprehensive and expansive selection of her writings on cinema in English.
Brenez is interested in the myriad of shapes that figures take in film: shadows, silhouettes, and contours, but also themes and motifs, and how these are visually and aurally manifested. She is especially interested in the ways in which an individual film produces these figures or figurative constellations. Laying out a methodology in the book’s introduction (a letter to John Ford biographer Tag Gallagher), Brenez goes on to analyze and interpret the myriad of figures found in movies by filmmakers ranging from John Woo to Paul Sharits as well as classics by Orson Welles and Sergei Eisenstein. At once rigorous and open, the originality of the films Brenez studies and her very stimulating intuitions and connections, has produced one of the major studies of cinema of the late 20th century.

The proposed volume covers Christopher Winch’s work over a period of 37 years and illustrates four interconnected themes that have informed his thinking over that period. Writing from a Wittgensteinian perspective, Winch is primarily interested in applying Wittgenstein’s general approach to philosophising to educational problems and puzzles of a variety of different kinds. Throughout the collection there is an emphasis on the complexity and subtlety of many of the philosophical problems associated with education, the importance of appreciating differences and the contestability of many educational judgements. Thus the volume starts with a section on rationality and argument and a discussion of some of the perplexities about the nature of literacy and whether it represents a cognitive ‘leap forward’ for the human race or whether it is more of an enabling technology. It is followed, in a reply to David Cooper, by an article that emphasises the importance of charitable interpretation in understanding reasoning and looks at some of the difficulties involved in understanding reasoning in informal contexts.

Winch’s interest in rule-following and concept formation is the theme of the next few articles. Winch has long been interested in philosophical aspects of professional action and judgement. The third section of this book focuses on that preoccupation. Gilbert Ryle’s ideas as well as Wittgenstein’s have been a significant influence on this. This section closes with a discussion of the sense we can make of the claim that theoretical knowledge can inform agency in professional contexts. The fourth section gathers together seven papers on learning and training that Winch has published over the last 25 years. The overarching theme of this section is the highly variegated nature of the phenomena of learning and the difficulty of constructing a ‘grand theory’ of learning. 

This book explores fourteen international case studies of ‘crimes of the powerful’, both contemporary and historical. As such, it explores a hidden and often unknown area of criminal and immoral activity beyond the more commonly studied field of conventional or ‘street’ crimes. It offers a unique insight into different examples of criminality and immorality enacted by the powerful, including corporations, states and criminal networks. The case studies include little-known and more widely known events, offering a critical sociological or forensic analysis of each case. By doing so, the book explores what kinds of criminality or immorality the case exemplifies and identifies key contextual and legislative factors facilitating their occurrence and limiting the perpetrators’ accountability. The critical analytical approach situates the case studies within the wider context and considers the role of social, political and other factors, such as neoliberalism, colonialist histories, inequalities of race and gender and globalisation in their facilitation of particular kinds of immoral or criminal acts. Fundamentally, it explores the legacies of social harm produced by the case study events and how these have played out over time.

Drawing upon themes like disasters, medico-crimes, genocide, corporate crime, organised crime, colonial crimes and internment, the book explores key concepts like critical criminology, sociology and legislation combined with critical social policy. It will also include corporate crime, white collar crime, professional crime and social harm. These concepts will be outlined and then applied in the case studies as a way of understanding and analytically engaging with the individual cases.

Being highly topical, the book reflects a growing popular and academic interest in the social harms produced by the actions of the powerful relating to the legacies and consequences of colonialism, and the impacts of global inequalities, particularly in terms of race and gender. Offering a critical sociological perspective on these issues, the book presents a novel insight into criminality which has interdisciplinary relevance in diverse disciplines including criminology, sociology, social policy and law, geography, environmental studies, international politics and development, peace studies and critical gender studies.

The highest art of operational leadership is that of making timely and sound decisions. The act of exercising command consists of making decisions and ordering their execution.

This book offers an updated view of interconnected issues such as sustainable development, well-being and environmental dynamics in advanced economies, delineating a broad interpretation of complex (local) development paths reviewing theoretical approaches and providing paradigmatic examples.

This book examines documenta fifteen (2022) as a turning point in global art politics, from ruangrupa’s Indonesian lumbung model to Palestinian cultural infrastructures. It traces how debates over collectivity, decolonization, and memory politics reveal the contradictions of globalization, financialization, and contemporary art’s search for rootedness.

Argues that we are still firmly within postmodernity, not beyond it, and that contemporary culture is defined less by creation than by reproduction—an age where originality has vanished, history is dissolving, and hyperreality feels more real than reality itself

The Ecstasy of Reproduction strives to address the crucial questions of our era—inevitable questions that require perspective and objectivity, but questions that seem invisible. The author explains contemporaneity, a contemporaneity that he still terms postmodernity. This is because, regardless of what a few scholars assert, no other working definition has proved to be a more accurate replacement. We are at least a century away from its ending. And when the end will come, it will not be a transition but an implosion. If we keep silent, we can hear the explosion already. Now we must wait for the shockwave. The book opens with postmodernity (Chapter 1) and closes with postmodernity (Chapter 8). It ends, however, with a Post Scriptum: it was meant to be a speech for a conference, it became the screenshot of the century. In between is a description of its aesthetic and behavioral expressions in the past decades (Chapter 4). The author reasons about the end of beauty (Chapter 5), terms contemporaneity Kitsch (Chapter 3), and concludes that Kitsch is the end of art (Chapter 2). He questions the possibility of creation, culture, the author, and the artist (Chapters 6 and 7). Ca va sans dire originality is a thing of the past. The one of the present age is not an exercise of plagiarism, it is simply that to create is to reproduce. Castelli writes this text with immense intellectual responsibility and feels that history is a vanishing process. If the artificiality of hyperreality is more real than reality, then it is difficult to believe that science is progress. Even more when a mass of anonymous consumers dances in unison before a hologram.

The author is well aware that some of his readers may accuse him of catastrophism. Showing only the dark side of human nature and a world dominated by self-gratification is to show only one aspect of reality. His picture surely omits human potential for creation. Yet, he is content to suggest that postmodernity is itself a villain. And, of course, as someone else said, life begins on the other side of despair.

An anthology that presents 25 years of Lou Marinoff’s work addressing foundational paradoxes and dilemmas in rational choice, probability, and utility theory, offering original analyses of and/or resolutions to classic problems like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Newcomb’s Problem, and the Two Envelopes Problem

This unique anthology reflects the author’s resolutions of some of the most perplexing, interesting, and widely discussed problems arising in rational choice theory, probability theory, and utility theory. It spans 25 years of his research and publications in these related fields. Part One treats the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD). It disproves Axelrod’s and Hamilton’s landmark but mistaken claim (Science, 1981) that Rapoport’s legendary Tit-for-Tat is an evolutionarily stable strategy and introduces a family of optimal strategies for iterated computer tournaments. Their members maximize expected utilities, embodying the properties of provocability, forgiveness, and exploitiveness. The leading member outperforms Tit-for-Tat. However, members of this family surprisingly fail to perform well against their own twins and siblings, thus reinforcing Axelrod’s lemma that there is no “best” strategy for iterated PDs independent of the competing population.
Part Two decouples Newcomb’s problem from Braess’s paradox, the Cohen–Kelly queuing paradox, and the PD, thus illustrating (contra Irvine, 1993) that Braess’s paradox does not resolve Newcomb’s problem. It then describes an innovative experiment with rationality in cyberspace, analogous to Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons. The experiment shows that ostensibly “rational” actors consistently make irrational choices, even (and sometimes especially) when their irrationality is revealed to them. Part Two concludes with a computer model that reveals why some players always defect in non-cooperative games, holding implications for social and political stability. The model shows that even an initial majority of 67% cooperators can degenerate into a 100% non-cooperative population, while higher initial percentages of cooperators can maintain majority cooperation yet must still endure “resistant” nuclei of permanently defecting players.
Part Three presents a (1994) resolution of Bertrand’s random chord paradox, which still stands among the most convincing treatments since the problem was originally posed in 1889. A recent noteworthy challenge (Shackel, 2024) is summarized with a response. Part Three then dissects divergent solutions by Elga and Lewis to the perplexing Sleeping Beauty problem, presenting new arguments against Elga’s solution that decide the issue in favor of Lewis. Part Three ends by decisively resolving the notorious Two Envelopes paradox—still hotly debated after more than 30 years—by exposing a fundamental and fatal mis-application of the Principle of Indifference.
Part Four takes up a moral question debated by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Kant—“Should one lie to a highway robber to gain one’s release?”—and in so doing exposes a fissure in Gauthier’s otherwise well-received ethics of constrained maximization. It then develops a holistic interpretation of meaning, using a reverse Turing test to rebut if not disprove the Strong AI thesis. The central question is not how well Turing machines can simulate human intelligence; rather, how badly humans can fail to simulate machine intelligence. Finally, Part Four explores amusingly counter-intuitive ontological implications of an old Cambridge challenge puzzle—The Coconut Problem—including an ingenious but “impossible” negative solution by quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli.

Provides a comprehensive analysis of the regulatory framework for securitisation in the European Union and United Kingdom

Reform of the securitisation regulatory framework is key for relaunching the securitisation markets in the European Union and the United Kingdom to free up banks’ balance sheets for additional lending to households and businesses. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the regulatory framework for securitisation in the United Kingdom and Europe. It covers all of the key aspects of the regulatory aspects of securitisation and the European Union, including risk retention, due diligence and transparency requirements, and the regulatory capital treatment of securitisations for banks and insurers. The book includes in-depth analysis of recent and proposed EU and U.K. regulatory changes to the securitisation framework and their application to different asset classes and types of securitisation. It also considers practical issues faced by practitioners working in-house or in private practice in interpreting and applying the regulatory framework.

This is a collection of fresh perspectives and opinions on the creative interventions on the Nigerian literary and entertainment space. Tackling issues from different authorial perspectives, bring a freshness that come with unsullied critical in their analysis of the different aspects of Nigeria’s literary, filmic and entertainment engagements.

What role did Polish philosophers play in shaping human destiny?
First of all, one must keep in mind that the philosopher’s role is to eradicate stupidity, especially when it is dressed in fashionable togs, wrapped in clever phrases, and passed off as truth or, at least, as good common sense. He opposes those who believe they know everything when, in fact, they know nothing at all. He is confident in his wisdom for he does not claim to know what he does not. One simply cannot know everything, he repeats; the person who has an answer to every question is a fool. Or an ideologue. In other words, the philosopher is wise because he does not talk for the sake of talking. His knowledge is inevitably partial. The question arises: is there a reliable method to discern wisdom from folly? How can we unmask thoughtlessness that dresses itself in the peacock feathers of applause and masquerades as wisdom? Who sets the criteria that separate is the wise from the hollow and the vain? The philosopher does, precisely the very one who knows that he knows nothing. That is how Socrates would put it. But the Socratic tradition never really took root among Polish philosophers.
I have often wondered why Leszek Kołakowski—in his early life a Marxist, later a Christian—did not become the Polish “Socrates.” Of all Polish philosophers, he was probably the only one who qualified for the role. Yet although charismatic and excellently educated, he could not be such a figure while a member of the Communist Party and a follower of other people’s ideas. He could only have become one in exile, in the 1970s, when he assumed an informal leadership in the democratic opposition. This, however, is a fiction. One cannot be a “Socrates” at a distance, in absentia.
The prewar analytic philosophers, like the postwar “Marxians,” were confident in determining the conditions of cognition. They never spoke on things they did not understand, but also knew exactly what they were talking about. Their knowledge was not unrelated to the environment from which they arose and which they went on to develop/shape. For that reason, their philosophical choices were also political ones. Philosophy, after all, challenges the monopoly of politics (and, if religion influences politics, of religion as well) in the development of one’s world-view. Independent thinkers cannot be told what to think or how to think. Philosophy weans one off humility, undermines authority, and insists on independent judgment which is not welcomed by politicians or by the average person. The general distrust toward philosophy necessarily feeds its proverbial “elitism,” that attitude of “anything you can know, I can know better.” The philosopher is not at ease in a crowd, and the Polish philosopher is no exception. It is not his element. He prefers the company of a few carefully chosen companions, meeting privately. That is enough for him. He can prove that virtues such as courage, friendship, justice, and wisdom—usually practiced in public life—may also be cultivated privately. In seminars, in homes, he finds his voice and regains balance.
Practicing philosophy on the periphery has often been presented in court—in the days of Socrates, under Hitler, under communists, and even in democracy—as something semi-criminal or utterly frivolous. At the same time, philosophers seem to make light of something essentially fundamental: that they know too much to be entirely safe and that their fate is already sealed. Those who recognized this early adapted to the prevailing historical conditions. They kept their heads, it is true, but at the cost of betraying their vocation. They invoked ideology as the path of collective progress, only to spend the rest of their lives, in a Münchausen-like manner, struggling to haul themselves out of the swamp into which they had sunk—partly by the dictates of history, partly by their own free will. I suggest dismissing the rumor spread by Czesław Miłosz about the “Hegelian bite” as nothing more than fairy tales. A quarter-century earlier, one of those who might have been susceptible to such a temptation had already preemptively discredited it. As Leszek Kołakowskie wrote, “No one is relieved of the moral obligation to oppose a system of government, a doctrine, or a social order that he regards as base and inhuman by pleading that he considers it historically necessary. We are against that form of moral relativism which assumes that the criteria for a moral assessment of human behaviour can be derived from knowledge of the secrets of the Weltgeist.”

Presents the first in-depth study of contemporary English-language Pakistani women’s fiction, exploring how female authors use narrative to critique patriarchal norms and Western stereotypes through spatial and emotional portrayals of women's everyday lives

The title discusses the literary production of contemporary Pakistani women through the analysis of a corpus of novels that provide representations of the ways in which women navigate the complexities of Pakistani society in relation to three different but related domains, the nation, the city and the household. This critical interrogation serves to underscore the inherent value of literary articulations that portray contemporary Pakistani society from an Indigenously situated female perspective. Fictional narratives written by Pakistani women constitute a form of discursive agency that challenges both local patriarchal structures and Western representations of Muslim women as voiceless and powerless. The discussion locates the selected fictional narratives within the broader historical contexts of Pakistani Anglophone and Urdu literary traditions. This perspective shows that women’s contribution to the South Asian literary scene is neither new nor limited in terms of genre or language.

In Pakistan, women have always found themselves at the receiving end of oppressive dynamics of power, something against which they have articulated forms of personal and collective resistance. Seeing fiction as a means of expression that cannot exist outside of a human society, within which it is generated and from which it elaborates its imagery, allows attending to the ways in which the interaction between literature and society contributes to the construction of shared narratives. The study highlights that while the authors reveal the intersectionality of power dynamics, they also show that patriarchal mechanisms of force affect women across the entire social spectrum, even if with different degrees of coercion, and provide their readers with resolute female models pointing out that a positive social transformation is possible through personal acts of resistance.

Employing spatial and affective frameworks, this monograph moves from the macro-level of the nation to the micro-level of the household to analyse three spatial dimensions as crucial contexts for understanding how women’s social bonds are formed and reformed in response to normative pressures exerted by familial and extra-familial agents. In line with the idea expressed by Sara Ahmed (2004) that social interaction cannot be separated from the emotions and feelings that it stimulates in individuals, the discourse pays attention to the nexus between character’s emotions and their behaviour, highlighting how feelings stimulate the questioning of normativity.

As the world faces escalating species extinction, increasing urbanization, and widespread pollution, this book advocates for a new paradigm of coexistence, "Becoming into Others" (B.I.O.). It calls for rethinking connections to enhance cohabitation among all life forms, expanding our ontological framework to embrace the emergence of 'others coming into being.

"When an astonishing revolution toppled the Russian autocracy early in 1917, James L. Houghteling Jr., a special attaché to the US embassy in Russia, was one of the very few Americans present who daily recorded the striking events he witnessed and the comments he heard from both Russian and foreign observers. The diary of the thirty-three-year-old Chicago native therefore provides a rare and valuable record of dramatic developments in the streets of the wartime capital, Petrograd. It also offers unusual insights into how Russian elites and foreign diplomats, journalists, and business owners viewed the actions of soldiers, workers, and political leaders who shaped the revolution.

Like US Ambassador David R. Francis and others, Houghteling enthusiastically hailed the fall of the Romanov monarchy as a triumph for American-style liberty and for a patriotic spirit that seemed to promise more vigorous prosecution of the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Although Houghteling witnessed soldiers’ refusals to obey officers’ orders, heard stories about desertions, and learned about the popularity of socialists, he refused to allow that to dim his optimism in the weeks when the United States moved toward declaring war against Germany in April. A Diary of the Russian Revolution thus reflects the wishful thinking that affected so many Americans’ views of the overthrow of the autocracy and distorted their responses to anti-war socialists’ seizure of power in the fall of 1917.

This book presents Houghteling’s original account along with explanatory notes and an introduction that sets the diary in the wider context of American interpretations and misinterpretations of the revolutions of 1917 that did so much to shape the twentieth century."

This book explores the ‘culture of caution’ within Islamic television talk show production, with a primary focus on the Islam Channel in the United Kingdom. Drawing on ethnographic research and personal reflections, it unpacks the socio-political, emotional and creative challenges Muslim media producers face in crafting religious and cultural content for diverse audiences. The book highlights how faith-based media operates under constraints shaped by Islamophobia, public scrutiny and regulatory boundaries, while striving for authentic representation.
By analysing content creation, labour dynamics and gendered experiences, this monograph fills a gap in the literature by offering a behind-the-scenes perspective into religious broadcasting rarely documented in academic work. It investigates the pressures of self-censorship, emotional regulation, and the balancing act between tradition and modernity.
Written for academics, media professionals and cultural policy stakeholders, this book sheds light on how Islamic media navigates production in the West, while affirming the value of resilience, faith and critical media practice in shaping public narratives about Muslims.

Charles Edward Russell was a major intellectual and political figure of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. As a very well-known American radical, he published many books on the US economy, the condition of workers, social issues, and other subjects. He was an active member of the American socialist movement before 1917, but when the US entered the war in 1917 he moved to support the US war effort, something many radicals had still opposed. When President Woodrow Wilson was preparing a special delegation to Russia in the summer of 1917, he added Russell to the delegation in an effort to include a radical at a time when the Russian Provisional Government was increasingly socialist.

Russell was the only delegation member to write an account of his trip, and he hurried to get it published by early 1918. He managed to communicate the complexity of the situation in 1917 Russia and inform readers about some of the leaders who were not well recognized abroad. He provided an optimistic view of the revolution, Russia’s future, and how it might have a significant positive effect on change in the United States."

Charles Edward Russell was a major intellectual and political figure of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. As a very well-known American radical, he published many books on the US economy, the condition of workers, social issues, and other subjects. He was an active member of the American socialist movement before 1917, but when the US entered the war in 1917 he moved to support the US war effort, something many radicals had still opposed. When President Woodrow Wilson was preparing a special delegation to Russia in the summer of 1917, he added Russell to the delegation in an effort to include a radical at a time when the Russian Provisional Government was increasingly socialist.

Russell was the only delegation member to write an account of his trip, and he hurried to get it published by early 1918. He managed to communicate the complexity of the situation in 1917 Russia and inform readers about some of the leaders who were not well recognized abroad. He provided an optimistic view of the revolution, Russia’s future, and how it might have a significant positive effect on change in the United States."

"When an astonishing revolution toppled the Russian autocracy early in 1917, James L. Houghteling Jr., a special attaché to the US embassy in Russia, was one of the very few Americans present who daily recorded the striking events he witnessed and the comments he heard from both Russian and foreign observers. The diary of the thirty-three-year-old Chicago native therefore provides a rare and valuable record of dramatic developments in the streets of the wartime capital, Petrograd. It also offers unusual insights into how Russian elites and foreign diplomats, journalists, and business owners viewed the actions of soldiers, workers, and political leaders who shaped the revolution.

Like US Ambassador David R. Francis and others, Houghteling enthusiastically hailed the fall of the Romanov monarchy as a triumph for American-style liberty and for a patriotic spirit that seemed to promise more vigorous prosecution of the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Although Houghteling witnessed soldiers’ refusals to obey officers’ orders, heard stories about desertions, and learned about the popularity of socialists, he refused to allow that to dim his optimism in the weeks when the United States moved toward declaring war against Germany in April. A Diary of the Russian Revolution thus reflects the wishful thinking that affected so many Americans’ views of the overthrow of the autocracy and distorted their responses to anti-war socialists’ seizure of power in the fall of 1917.

This book presents Houghteling’s original account along with explanatory notes and an introduction that sets the diary in the wider context of American interpretations and misinterpretations of the revolutions of 1917 that did so much to shape the twentieth century."

In 1917—that is, in the midst of the First World War—Madeleine Z. Doty, a feminist, lawyer, prison reformer, peace activist, and journalist, was commissioned by the magazine Good Housekeeping to travel "around the world" to get a view “behind the battle line” of how people on the home front, especially women, were responding to the war. Traveling on the Trans-Siberian Railway from China, Doty crossed the border into Russia just days after the Bolshevik Revolution had begun. She meant it literally when she declared in her account of these travels, Behind the Battle Line: Around the World in 1918: “The Bolshevik Revolution had descended on me.”

Having found herself serendipitously arriving in St. Petersburg (then called Petrograd) as history was being made, Doty made plans to extend her visit, staying in Russia for four months, and documenting the revolution as it unfolded, as well as particular elements of it in revolutionary Russia that interested her, such as the justice and penal system and women’s leadership. She also offered a strikingly textured portrait of Russian-German peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. When Behind the Battle Line was published, critics noted that the Russian chapters are richest, but combined as they are with discussion of Japan, Korea, Norway, France, Sweden, China, and England, Doty’s account of the Bolshevik Revolution has not gotten the attention it deserves. This book offers Doty’s writings on Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution as a stand-alone volume (supplemented with explanatory footnotes) along with an introduction providing background on Doty herself and the milieu of suffragists, reformers, professionals, and journalists in New York City, of which she was an important part.

Malcolm Grow’s commentary presents us with a fascinating personal account of wartime experience, one that highlights a number of pertinent issues of Russia’s experience of total war. While military historiography is replete with studies of battle plans and strategies, troop movements, numbers of casualties, territorial gains, and decisions of state actors, war is so much more than these, as a fundamentally human experience. Unlike most other foreigners’ accounts of Russia’s war, written by journalists, diplomats, or civilian observers who spent little, if any, time at the “front,” Grow’s narrative provides a firsthand perspective of someone embedded with the Russian troops. Although his primary duty as a regimental doctor was medical care of wounded and ill soldiers, Grow’s narrative focuses much attention on combat, particularly his experiences observing operations from the trenches—even occasionally being drawn into the fighting. His narrative clearly reveals how lines of separation between combatants and non-combatants were blurred on the Eastern Front, where the war was highly mobile and divisions between “front” and “rear” were difficult to maintain. As a result, medical personnel were exposed to dangers, deprivations, and physical and psychological traumas that paralleled the experiences of combatants. Grow also offers his observations of the Russian revolutions of 1917 and their effects on the army. Although he does so through a distinctly American lens and thus reflects some (mis)conceptions held by Americans and other Westerners, his narrative also defies some of these conventions, and provides us with a unique and intimate look at life on the Russian front.

"In April 1917, Walter Crosley assumed the position of naval attaché to Petrograd and brought his wife, Pauline, with him. Over the next eleven months, the Crosleys witnessed the last gasps of the Russian Empire and the emergence of the new Bolshevik-led communist regime. Throughout this period, Pauline wrote letters describing the changing political landscape and the challenges of daily life in a city in the midst (and in the wake) of revolution. Though her letters were written primarily to family members, she recognized their potential value and the interest they might hold for a larger audience, and decided to publish them in 1920. As Crosley wrote in the foreword to her book, “May these letters now serve to interest and enlighten those others who would know what has not before been published!”

Crosley’s book of published letters is a unique and interesting addition to the body of first-hand literature on the Russian Revolution. It is particularly important as the product of a female author. Pauline Crosley’s role and experience in Russia in 1917 was much the same as the diplomatic wives of the US Foreign Service: she was largely responsible for their social calendar and the day-to-day operations of their home. Her letters tend to focus on the details of everyday life, particularly the assessment of their fuel and food supplies, as well as the changing cultural scene and growing violence in the city. Crosley’s letters give us a sense of what life was like during these tumultuous months, and serve as a fascinating companion to some of the more politically detailed accounts of the revolutionary period."

Malcolm Grow’s commentary presents us with a fascinating personal account of wartime experience, one that highlights a number of pertinent issues of Russia’s experience of total war. While military historiography is replete with studies of battle plans and strategies, troop movements, numbers of casualties, territorial gains, and decisions of state actors, war is so much more than these, as a fundamentally human experience. Unlike most other foreigners’ accounts of Russia’s war, written by journalists, diplomats, or civilian observers who spent little, if any, time at the “front,” Grow’s narrative provides a firsthand perspective of someone embedded with the Russian troops. Although his primary duty as a regimental doctor was medical care of wounded and ill soldiers, Grow’s narrative focuses much attention on combat, particularly his experiences observing operations from the trenches—even occasionally being drawn into the fighting. His narrative clearly reveals how lines of separation between combatants and non-combatants were blurred on the Eastern Front, where the war was highly mobile and divisions between “front” and “rear” were difficult to maintain. As a result, medical personnel were exposed to dangers, deprivations, and physical and psychological traumas that paralleled the experiences of combatants. Grow also offers his observations of the Russian revolutions of 1917 and their effects on the army. Although he does so through a distinctly American lens and thus reflects some (mis)conceptions held by Americans and other Westerners, his narrative also defies some of these conventions, and provides us with a unique and intimate look at life on the Russian front.

"In April 1917, Walter Crosley assumed the position of naval attaché to Petrograd and brought his wife, Pauline, with him. Over the next eleven months, the Crosleys witnessed the last gasps of the Russian Empire and the emergence of the new Bolshevik-led communist regime. Throughout this period, Pauline wrote letters describing the changing political landscape and the challenges of daily life in a city in the midst (and in the wake) of revolution. Though her letters were written primarily to family members, she recognized their potential value and the interest they might hold for a larger audience, and decided to publish them in 1920. As Crosley wrote in the foreword to her book, “May these letters now serve to interest and enlighten those others who would know what has not before been published!”

Crosley’s book of published letters is a unique and interesting addition to the body of first-hand literature on the Russian Revolution. It is particularly important as the product of a female author. Pauline Crosley’s role and experience in Russia in 1917 was much the same as the diplomatic wives of the US Foreign Service: she was largely responsible for their social calendar and the day-to-day operations of their home. Her letters tend to focus on the details of everyday life, particularly the assessment of their fuel and food supplies, as well as the changing cultural scene and growing violence in the city. Crosley’s letters give us a sense of what life was like during these tumultuous months, and serve as a fascinating companion to some of the more politically detailed accounts of the revolutionary period."

In 1917—that is, in the midst of the First World War—Madeleine Z. Doty, a feminist, lawyer, prison reformer, peace activist, and journalist, was commissioned by the magazine Good Housekeeping to travel "around the world" to get a view “behind the battle line” of how people on the home front, especially women, were responding to the war. Traveling on the Trans-Siberian Railway from China, Doty crossed the border into Russia just days after the Bolshevik Revolution had begun. She meant it literally when she declared in her account of these travels, Behind the Battle Line: Around the World in 1918: “The Bolshevik Revolution had descended on me.”

Having found herself serendipitously arriving in St. Petersburg (then called Petrograd) as history was being made, Doty made plans to extend her visit, staying in Russia for four months, and documenting the revolution as it unfolded, as well as particular elements of it in revolutionary Russia that interested her, such as the justice and penal system and women’s leadership. She also offered a strikingly textured portrait of Russian-German peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. When Behind the Battle Line was published, critics noted that the Russian chapters are richest, but combined as they are with discussion of Japan, Korea, Norway, France, Sweden, China, and England, Doty’s account of the Bolshevik Revolution has not gotten the attention it deserves. This book offers Doty’s writings on Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution as a stand-alone volume (supplemented with explanatory footnotes) along with an introduction providing background on Doty herself and the milieu of suffragists, reformers, professionals, and journalists in New York City, of which she was an important part.

Arthur Bullard’s The Russian Pendulum (1919) is a personal and political analysis of the Russian Revolution, from the Revolution of 1905 through the beginning of the Civil War in 1918. It reflects Bullard’s own perspective, as an advocate for change in Russia with American help. Bullard’s experience as an advisor to Colonel House and Woodrow Wilson as a key staffer for the Committee for Public Information in Russia strongly colors his analysis. In this provocative study, Bullard analyzes the February Revolution, Lenin’s success with “land and peace” proposals, and then ends with Bullard’s own proposals, entitled “What IS To Be Done?” Here he argues that those concerned with Russia should seek information on all sides of the problem and should accept that an “agrarian revolution” has occurred and that any regeneration of Russia must involve public education and commerce. If the United States is to help, it must provide education cooperation, and avoid military intervention.

This book is a first-hand account of the Russian Revolution and its impact on the Russian people. Cantacuzene, an American journalist who lived in Russia during the revolution, provides a detailed and personal narrative of the events leading up to the revolution, the revolution itself, and its aftermath. The book is divided into three parts, each focusing on a different period of the revolution. The first part covers the years leading up to the revolution, including the political climate in Russia, the rise of the Bolsheviks, and the growing unrest among the Russian people. The second part covers the actual revolution, including the fall of the Tsarist regime and the rise of the Bolsheviks to power. The final part covers the aftermath of the revolution, including the civil war, the establishment of the Soviet Union, and the impact of the revolution on the Russian people.Throughout the book, Cantacuzene provides a unique perspective on the revolution, offering insights into the lives of ordinary Russians and their experiences during this tumultuous period in history. She also provides a critical analysis of the Bolsheviks and their policies, highlighting the challenges and contradictions of their revolutionary project.Russian People: Revolutionary Recollections is a valuable historical document that provides a vivid and engaging account of one of the most significant events of the 20th century. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the Russian Revolution, Soviet history, or the history of revolutionary movements. This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

This book is a first-hand account of the Russian Revolution and its impact on the Russian people. Cantacuzene, an American journalist who lived in Russia during the revolution, provides a detailed and personal narrative of the events leading up to the revolution, the revolution itself, and its aftermath. The book is divided into three parts, each focusing on a different period of the revolution. The first part covers the years leading up to the revolution, including the political climate in Russia, the rise of the Bolsheviks, and the growing unrest among the Russian people. The second part covers the actual revolution, including the fall of the Tsarist regime and the rise of the Bolsheviks to power. The final part covers the aftermath of the revolution, including the civil war, the establishment of the Soviet Union, and the impact of the revolution on the Russian people.Throughout the book, Cantacuzene provides a unique perspective on the revolution, offering insights into the lives of ordinary Russians and their experiences during this tumultuous period in history. She also provides a critical analysis of the Bolsheviks and their policies, highlighting the challenges and contradictions of their revolutionary project.Russian People: Revolutionary Recollections is a valuable historical document that provides a vivid and engaging account of one of the most significant events of the 20th century. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the Russian Revolution, Soviet history, or the history of revolutionary movements. This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

Arthur Bullard’s The Russian Pendulum (1919) is a personal and political analysis of the Russian Revolution, from the Revolution of 1905 through the beginning of the Civil War in 1918. It reflects Bullard’s own perspective, as an advocate for change in Russia with American help. Bullard’s experience as an advisor to Colonel House and Woodrow Wilson as a key staffer for the Committee for Public Information in Russia strongly colors his analysis. In this provocative study, Bullard analyzes the February Revolution, Lenin’s success with “land and peace” proposals, and then ends with Bullard’s own proposals, entitled “What IS To Be Done?” Here he argues that those concerned with Russia should seek information on all sides of the problem and should accept that an “agrarian revolution” has occurred and that any regeneration of Russia must involve public education and commerce. If the United States is to help, it must provide education cooperation, and avoid military intervention.

Universality and Utopia explores the intersection between philosophical universalism and revolutionary politics in twentieth-century Peruvian indigenista literature. It traces a tradition of thought whose basic tenets originate in the philosophical works of José Carlos Mariátegui and are subsequently elaborated in the literary works of César Vallejo and José MaríaArguedas. My central thesis is that, more than a “regionalist” or “provincialist” literature that describes the social reality and historic oppression of the rural Indian since colonial times, the socialist indigenismo is continuous with the invention of a utopian imaginary for a project of alternative modernity, through which urban intellectuals, artists and activists conceived of a national future beyond that of capitalist modernization. Above all, such a future would traverse the prescient division between the urban mestizo and the Indian, and finally the lingering disparity between the nation’s Western and native heritage. In doing so, indigenista writers did not only adapt the tenets of socialist philosophy and avant-garde aesthetics to describe their unique social realities and thinking of the possibility of an emancipatory political practice; they also interrogated the foundations of European Marxism, expressing various figurations of the emancipatory process to come, and different models for the new revolutionary subjectivity that would aid this transition. 

Rejecting assimilation into Western modernization within the urban milieu (“acculturation”) under liberal capitalism imagined by liberal writers—such as Manuel González Prada and ClorindaMatto de Turner, in the late nineteenth century—I argue that the twentieth-century socialist indigenista tradition anticipated a bilateral process of appropriation and mediation between the rural Indian and mestizo, integrating indigenous as well as Western cultural and economic forms. In the first chapter, I assess Mariátegui’s heterodox “Peruvian socialism,” tracing the articulation of a nascentindigenista aesthetics to an emancipatory politics as part of an “active philosophy” driven by what the author names “creative antagonism.” In the second chapter, I explore how César Vallejo’s “materialist poetics” progressively extend the nationalist destiny and social realist aesthetic avowed by Mariátegui onto an internationalist and geopolitical horizon, as part of an “aesthetics of transmutation” that coincides with a plea for humanity as a whole. In the third chapter, I trace how José MaríaArguedas’ novels attempt to reconcile what he named “the magical and rational conceptions of the world,” extending the ideal of a transcultural mediation between the rural Indian and urban mestizo to conceive of a new collectivist and cooperativist ethics of “labor for-itself,” informed by his anthropological and ethnographic research. In the fourth chapter, I propose a general retrospective of the aims and limitations of the ideals guiding this tradition, considering the development of Peruvian indigenista literature after Arguedas, interrogating the legacy and prospects of emancipatory politics in response to the limits of neoliberal capitalism and the crisis of democracy in Latin America today.

‘Regimes of Happiness’ is a comparative and historical analysis of how human societies have articulated and enacted distinctive notions of human fulfillment, determining divergent moral, ethical and religious traditions and incommensurate and conflicting understanding of the meaning of the ‘good life’.

Presented in two parts, ‘Regimes of Happiness’ provides a historical view of the way in which Western societies, the descendants of the Latin Roman Empire, created languages and institutions that established specific and occasionally antithetical conceptions of a fulfilled human life or 'happiness' in the first part. The second part explores how non-Western societies and non-Christian religions have conceived and established their own ideals of human perfection. ‘Regimes of Happiness’ is a critical reflection on modern notions of happiness which are typically focused on individual feelings of pleasure.

The book explores the era of space collaboration (from 1970 to the present). This period has been largely ignored by historians in favor of a focus on the earlier space race. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, a key program and catalyst for Détente, marked the transition to the new age of space collaboration, which continued through the Soviet Interkosmos missions, the Mir-Shuttle dockings of the early 1990s, and on through the International Space Station. Europeans, Americans, and Russians envisioned space collaboration as a way to reconfigure political and international relations. 

The shift toward collaboration was a result of a new focus on safety, which displaced the earlier emphasis on risk-taking in the first phase of the space race, when military imperatives often overshadowed peaceful goals. Apollo-Soyuz (ignored by Cold War historians) was thus imagined as a test project for a docking mechanism that would allow a manned-capsule stranded in orbit to dock with another capsule and provide an escape hatch back to earth (it was actually inspired, in part, by the 1969 Hollywood film “Marooned” with Gene Hackman). The focus on engineering for safety grew out of the broader concerns about environmental degradation and nuclear war that in turn reflected a growing sense in the 1970s and 1980s of the dangers associated with excessive risk-taking in politics and engineering. Few historians or social scientists have examined the social construction of safety and its use in engineering and politics. 

The book draws on the Russian Academy of Sciences Archives, Nixon and Reagan libraries and National Archives Collections, NASA headquarters library documents, and various memoirs and other published sources in English and Russian.

An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Wildlife Corridors charts some best practices and makes some new theoretical contributions related to the design and creation of wildlife corridors in Anthropocene times. The book not only provides much of the knowledge necessary for a general and credible understanding of connectivity projects, but also makes a unique theoretical contribution to current knowledge about wildlife corridors by arguing that theories about compassion, empathy, and traditional ecological knowledge should inform wildlife corridor projects.

Wildlife corridors, or connectivity projects, are necessary, because when land is set aside or used for human activities, habitats that were once contiguous become fragmented. If species are unable to move between these fragmented areas, they become at risk for inbreeding or extinction. Wildlife corridors attempt to remediate such fragmentation by restoring connectivity and creating expanses of habitat that can provide species with important bridges and points of connection between other habitats. Providing such linkages between habitats reduces these risks and helps maintain genetic diversity and a population’s health.

The book argues for a holistic approach to wildlife corridors that attempts to account for a broad and varied range of stakeholder voices, including those of the vulnerable nonhuman species that underpin the need for corridor projects in the first place. This book should appeal to general audiences and practitioners alike.

The purpose of this volume is not simply to compile yet another wearying chronicle of the horrors that have been committed by our fellow human beings. Most students who register for a course on Genocide assume that it will focus, perhaps exclusively, on the Holocaust—the only case with which they are familiar. Many of them have read Elie Wiesel’s eloquent masterpiece Night in secondary school, and some may have read The Diary of Anne Frank. A few students might even know that a genocide occurred in Rwanda or Darfur. Like most people, however, they equate genocide simply with mass killing, and assume that genocide must by definition entail millions of deaths. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide”—meaning “to kill a people”— originally defined it “a colonial crime of destroying the national patterns of the oppressed and imposing the national patterns of the oppressors.” This was a process, Lemkin said, that was intended to destroy a people’s culture thatcould sometimes but not necessarily always result in mass murder. Students need to know that after World War II the great powers undermined and co-opted the process of writing the1948 Genocide Convention at the UN. It was written very carefully to remove from the definition of genocide the treatment of Indigenous peoples in the US and Canada; racial lynching and Jim Crowism in the US; the “elimination of backwards people to protect human progress” in pre-apartheid South Africa, New Zealand and Australia; the mass murder of colonial subjects and repression of racial minorities at the hands of European security forces the world over; the mass murder of political opponents in Latin America; the mass murder of “economic” or social groups in the Soviet Union; and the blanket removal of any mention of famine and sexual violence as acts that could constitute genocide. Instead, they simply used the Holocaust as a template and succeeded in distorting what Lemkin originally meant by “genocide”—the murder of a people by destroying their social and cultural connections.

Students should also know that Lemkin’s ideas were most strongly supported at the UN by member states that were former colonies—namely Egypt, India, Pakistan, China and the Philippines—and by women within many of the delegations that were working to prevent the UN from succeeding in outlawing genocide, such as those from the US and the UK. When students learn this history can begin to think critically about what international law is and which systems of power international law serves. However, they also need a textbook that guides them to think critically and imaginatively about genocide and the 1948 UN Convention without reducing genocide and the UN Genocide Convention to a crude and cynical analysis of global power struggles. In other words, they need a book that is honest and that resists the temptation to spin ahistorical morality tales.

Reassesses Henri Lefebvre’s enduring relevance to sociology, examining themes from Marxism to urban life and proposing new directions for Lefebvrian research on rhythm, embodiment and utopian thought

Henri Lefebvre’s work, particularly his theory of the production of space, has been remarkably influential historically within geographical research. While this extensive research has shown the continuing relevance of Lefebvre’s oeuvre for urban geographical research, Lefebvre’s contributions to sociology have been less explored. This is surprising and a missed opportunity, not least because Lefebvre’s writings on the urban, space and everyday life were fundamentally informed by and connected to his sociology. This volume responds to this lacuna in sociological engagements with Lefebvre’s work, bringing together leading scholars on Lefebvre’s sociological work who discuss elements from across his sociological oeuvre. This includes topics for which Lefebvre is well known such as space, rhythm-analysis and Marxism, through to lesser-known topics such as the rural, autogestion, the state and violence and finally to studies which push Lefebvre into new areas such as time, phenomenology and the environment. Therefore, this volume not only achieves a breadth of coverage but also provides fresh insights for those familiar with Lefebvre and new points of interest for those encountering his sociology for the first time. Our volume makes a critical addition to the long list of established and influential Anthem Companions to Sociology by adding a new volume on one of the most influential Marxist sociologists and philosophers of the twentieth century. An engagement with the work of Henri Lefebvre remains indispensable for sociology as this volume shows.

Academic writing is built on choices, and even a single word can change the strength and direction of an argument. This book helps students move beyond formulas, showing how to draft with purpose, revise for clarity, and build credible, well-supported claims. Through real examples, practical exercises, and clear explanations, it guides writers from research planning to sentence-level refinement. Suitable for both classroom use and independent study, it turns the process of writing academic essays into an engaging practice that develops critical thinking and precision, giving students the tools to succeed across disciplines and in real-world communication.

Academic writing is built on choices, and even a single word can change the strength and direction of an argument. This book helps students move beyond formulas, showing how to draft with purpose, revise for clarity, and build credible, well-supported claims. Through real examples, practical exercises, and clear explanations, it guides writers from research planning to sentence-level refinement. Suitable for both classroom use and independent study, it turns the process of writing academic essays into an engaging practice that develops critical thinking and precision, giving students the tools to succeed across disciplines and in real-world communication.

Academic writing is built on choices, and even a single word can change the strength and direction of an argument. This book helps students move beyond formulas, showing how to draft with purpose, revise for clarity, and build credible, well-supported claims. Through real examples, practical exercises, and clear explanations, it guides writers from research planning to sentence-level refinement. Suitable for both classroom use and independent study, it turns the process of writing academic essays into an engaging practice that develops critical thinking and precision, giving students the tools to succeed across disciplines and in real-world communication.

Offers a comprehensive guide to building resilience in the post-pandemic tourism and hospitality industry, combining theory, practical strategies and case studies to support sustainable recovery and future readiness

The book Resilience and Recovery of Hospitality and Tourism: Challenges, Synthesis and Agendas comprehensively explores the strategies necessary for the tourism and hospitality industry to recover and thrive post-pandemic. It begins with an introduction to the concept of resilience within the industry, followed by an overview of the various practices adopted to navigate recent challenges. The book covers the threats and obstacles to resilience, highlighting the need for effective workforce development planning and the mobilisation of resources through data-driven sustainable models. Leadership issues are examined, emphasising the critical role of strong leadership in fostering resilience. Predictors of resilience are identified, helping the industry to adapt to changing conditions. The development of resilience-based frameworks is discussed, aiming to revive global tourism conditions. The book also underscores the significance of data-driven technologies in building collaborative capacities for resilience. Sustainable practices and their management are crucial for maintaining resilience, as is the role of organisational culture in overcoming challenges. The book concludes with case studies that provide practical insights into managing resilience issues, developing effective strategies and understanding the broader implications for the tourism and hospitality industry.
This book is an essential resource for professionals and academics in the tourism and hospitality industry, including managers, policymakers, researchers and students. It is designed for those who seek to understand and implement resilience strategies in the face of unprecedented challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic. By providing a detailed analysis of the industry’s threats, obstacles and innovative practices, the book offers valuable insights into workforce development, leadership, and the role of data-driven technologies and sustainable practices. With its comprehensive coverage of resilience-based frameworks and real-world case studies, this book is an indispensable guide for anyone committed to fostering a resilient, adaptive, and sustainable tourism and hospitality sector.

Academic writing is built on choices, and even a single word can change the strength and direction of an argument. This book helps students move beyond formulas, showing how to draft with purpose, revise for clarity, and build credible, well-supported claims. Through real examples, practical exercises, and clear explanations, it guides writers from research planning to sentence-level refinement. Suitable for both classroom use and independent study, it turns the process of writing academic essays into an engaging practice that develops critical thinking and precision, giving students the tools to succeed across disciplines and in real-world communication.

Explores the life and journalism of Maria Teresa de Sá Nogueira, highlighting her powerful role as a voice of resistance and testimony across colonial and postcolonial Lusophone Africa and Portugal

The Life and Writings of Maria Teresa de Sá Nogueira offers a compelling historical and literary portrait of one of Mozambique’s most important yet overlooked journalistic voices. Through textual analysis and exclusive interviews with her son, this book traces Maria Teresa de Sá Nogueira’s life and work across the shifting landscapes of colonial and postcolonial Mozambique and Portugal. It situates her journalism not only as a record of lived experience but also as a courageous act of resistance against injustice, inequality, and silence in the Lusophone world. Her voice emerges as both witness and critic, offering readers an intimate yet far-reaching account of an era marked by upheaval and transformation.
More than a biographical study, this book is a nuanced theorization of Lusophone postcolonial identity through the lens of gender, migration, political struggle, and literary activism. The chapters are thematically organized to mirror the trajectory of Maria Teresa’s life, interrogating the societal pressures she faced as a woman journalist, her engagement with colonial power structures, and her unrelenting advocacy for underrepresented voices. Her reportage, translated and carefully curated here, captures the contradictions of empire, the burden of memory, and the precariousness of freedom in times of sociopolitical transition. Through her work, readers encounter the personal as political and the journalistic as deeply literary.
The Life and Writings of Maria Teresa de Sá Nogueira fills a long-standing gap in Lusophone literary and cultural studies. It will resonate with students and scholars of postcolonial studies, journalism, African and Portuguese history, and gender studies, particularly within the context of Mozambique and Lusophone Africa. But it also speaks to a wider audience eager to understand how a single voice—bold, persistent, and principled—can illuminate the entangled legacies of colonialism and the enduring fight for justice. This is a book that invites readers not only to remember but also to reckon with history through the fearless writing of Maria Teresa de Sá Nogueira.

As the first study of its kind, this book offers a new understanding of progressive women’s poetry in Urdu and the legacy of postcolonial politics. It underlines Urdu’s linguistic hybridities, the context of the zenana, reform, and rekhti to illustrate how the modernising impulse under colonial rule impacted women as subjects in textual form. It argues that canonical texts for sharif women from Mirat-ul Arus to Umrao Jan Ada need to be looked at alongside women’s diaries and autobiographies so that we have an overall picture of gendered lives from imaginative fiction, memoirs and biographies.

In the late nineteenth century, ideas of the cosmopolitan and local were in conversation with the secular and sacred across different Indian literatures. Emerging poets from the zenana can be traced back to Zahida Khatun Sherwania from Aligarh and Haya Lakhnavi from Lucknow who had very unique trajectories as sharif women. With the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, the Indian women’s movement gathered force and those who had previously been confined to the private sphere took their place in public as speaking subjects. The influence of the Left, Marxist thought and resistance against colonial rule fired the Progressive Writers Movement in the 1930s. The pioneering writer and activist Rashid Jahan was at the helm of the movement mediating women’s voices through a scientific and rational lens. She was succeeded by Ismat Chughtai, who like her contemporary Saadat Hasan Manto courted controversy by writing openly about sexualities and class. With the onset of partition, as the progressive writers were split across two nations, they carried with them the vision of a secular borderless world. In Pakistan, Urdu became an ideological ground for state formation, and Urdu writers came under state surveillance in the Cold War era. The study picks up the story of progressive women poets in Pakistan to try and understand their response to emerging dominant narratives of nation, community and gender. How did national politics and an ideological Islamisation that was at odds with a secular separation of church and state affect their writing? 

Despite the disintegration of the Progressive Writers Movement and the official closure of the Left in Pakistan, the author argues that an exceptional legacy can be found in the voices of distinctive women poets including Ada Jafri, Zehra Nigah, Sara Shagufta, Parvin Shakir, Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed. Their poems offer new metaphors and symbols borrowing from feminist thought and a hybrid Islamicate culture. Riaz and Naheed joined forces with the women’s movement in Pakistan in the 1980s and caused some discomfort amongst Urdu literary circles with their writing. Celebrated across both sides of the border, their poetry and politics is less well known than the verse of the progressive poet par excellence Faiz Ahmed Faiz or the hard hitting lyrics of Habib Jalib. The book demonstrates how they manipulate and appropriate a national language as mother tongue speakers to enunciate a middle ground between the sacred and secular. In doing so they offer a new aesthetic that is inspired by activism and influenced by feminist philosophy. 

Williams fought a good fight for a better democracy and the collective equal rights of African Americans. He was not just a revolutionary voice and internationalist leader and voice in the Black Power movement, and should not be forgotten or dismissed because he maintained other reasons for raging his grievance towards the policies and practices of democracy in the United States. Robert F. Williams neither should be reduced to the status of a tool of Cold War politics or to a study about armed self-defense. Rather, in his contesting the government’s refusal to defend the human rights of 22 million African Americans, Williams’ actions and uncompromising stance directly and affirmatively addressed the promise and rights guaranteed US citizenship and the constitutional rights of the members of that society. Williams critically questioned numerous unjust acts and human rights violations, and waged (often a one-family man) war against America’s inability to practice principles of freedom and democracy, when these mistreatments were ignored. Robert F. Williams was an independent thinker, a compassionate and intelligent man. He was a common man, and despite his lofty intelligence, he was an American, claiming his right to his American citizenship. He was acutely aware of the broken promises of the United States. Yet, he nonetheless remained fully invested in assuming all of the rights, privileges, and responsibilities the Constitution guaranteed American citizens of African descent. He was always focused on making sure Americans took full advantage of the tools available in society and/or in government to bring them to bear in their situation. He believed in the redress of government, and the citizen’s right to do that. He believed that the US Constitution should be abided by, and that that was the right of every citizen.  Robert F. Williams collaborated with leaders of two foreign countries in order to communicate his grievances against the United States government and its citizens who remained complicit in practices of racial injustice. His exile in China from 1966 to 1969 led to his being expunged from the memory of Monroe, North Carolina’s trumped up charges of kidnapping. In the South and the Black Diaspora of the Midwest, he was a local civil rights leader, pragmatist, and internationalist in twentieth-century world history.

Investigates Gothic’s place in English literary history from 1814 to 1921, revealing its earlier and deeper integration into the selective tradition than previously recognized, and challenging long-held assumptions in Gothic studies and literary historiography

This book seeks to excavate the changing status of the Gothic within what, after Raymond Williams, we might call the selective tradition, from approximately 1814 to 1921. The beginning of this period marks the publication of John Dunlop’s The History of Fiction, which was the first general history of literature written in Britain for which the Gothic novel would have been within scope, and therefore offers the first litmus test of the Gothic’s status in the selective tradition as it is transmitted in durable, authoritative form. The year 1921, of course, marks the publication of Edith Birkhead’s The Tale of Terror, which figuratively marks the beginning of modern Gothic studies as a field. While scholarship of the Gothic has always attended to contemporary reception within periodicals and review culture, the question of the afterlife of that contemporary reception as it manifested in respectable and authoritative narratives about the literary past has never been explored in this period. The reason for this is what I call the founding myth of Gothic studies, which holds that the Gothic novel was never a critically respected genre and that the critical category of the Gothic novel itself was an artificial concept originating with Birkhead et al. This myth, I argue, turns out to be almost entirely false, and such an exploration, therefore, represents an entirely new avenue of inquiry for Gothic studies. As such, this study touches on many methodological domains in an attempt to survey the field with glasses rather than a microscope, and thus sketch enough of the ground for more detailed and specific investigations to follow.
This is above all a work of literary history, but it is a work of literary history designed to serve the needs of the field of Gothic studies. That said, it is also about more than the Gothic. At heart, this project asks two sets of questions. The first set has directly to do with the Gothic: when did the contemporary critical concept of the Gothic first emerge, how were those developments first reflected in the historical record in both durable and authoritative form, and how was that concept transmitted through the Knowledge System once the concept crystalized? The second set of questions pertains to the historiography of the Gothic, which, as of this writing, has long been considered a settled story, though the findings of this book call that story into significant question. In essence, the second set boils down to “how did we miss so much of the story?” These questions implicate much larger issues related to the history of ideas; book history; information and library sciences; the materials, methods, and practice of literary history; the digital humanities; and even questions of individual positionality and human contingency. Although this project does not engage in computational analysis, the orientation toward knowledge and its dissemination and transmission taken in this study follows to some extent what Ruth Ahnert, Sebastian E. Ahnert, Catherine Nicole Coleman, and Scott B. Weingart have recently called “the network turn,” especially in how I conceive of what I call the Knowledge System, and I would consider myself an analog practitioner of the digital humanities.

This book circumscribes both news media and popular cultural discourse dealing with the U.S. military, including its attendant industries, personnel, and leadership, over the course of a century and a half of American war. This book encompasses an analysis of American introspection, or lack thereof, describing the tone, content, lexicon, and spirit of media coverage of the American military in its engagements from the Spanish American War through to U.S. wars of choice in Iraq and the War on Terror. This work establishes conclusions about the overall way in which American media producers see the U.S. military and, in turn, describes the powerful and dynamic parameters of a discourse on the U.S. military in the public consciousness of the United States as well as international observers during the course of the last 125 years.

This new monograph is, therefore, positioned to provide an innovative and carefully researched view into the linkages between discourse and politics and between culture and policies within the United States looking at various critical moments in the history of the development of the American Empire. Ultimately, this research provides insight into the complex interrelationships between policy, the military, discourse, and culture focusing upon the power centres of discourse creation while connecting previously disjointed lines of historical and media research considering the United States and its imperial and military reach throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century.

Potential benefits of the proposed research project are manifest within its innovative approach to the study of discourse construction, its broad historical vision and its multifaceted methodological approach applying the precepts of history, critical discourse analysis, political science, and media and communication studies. Further benefit from the proposed project includes the pioneering analysis it offers about the U.S. military itself, an institution which is routinely spared time under the critical lense of academic researchers given its primacy of place within the popular, contemporary American imagination. Through this unflinching analysis, this work is both viable and timely given the current geopolitical position of the United States at the apex of global political developments, and possibly, according to some researchers, at the beginning of the end of its military imperium.