Anthem Press

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.

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

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 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.

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.

"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."

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."

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.

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.

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.

Writing Memory, Resisting Injustice examines the life and journalism of Maria Teresa de Sá Nogueira, revealing how her fearless writing challenged colonial power and gave voice to the marginalized in Mozambique and Portugal. A vital contribution to Lusophone postcolonial studies.

This book examines the literary author Ulla Isaksson’s work as a writer for the screen, with particular focus on her collaboration with director Ingmar Bergman from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Excavating the Castle demonstrates that the serious and respectable historiography of the Gothic begins not in 1921, but in the early nineteenth century; and that the Gothic concept crystalized more than half a century earlier than historians of the Gothic had realized previously.

Against an African, African American and the 1960s Civil Rights Movement’s backdrop, this book examines six African American writers who use the cultural and historical past to imagine a different present and future.

Through the Russian Revolution by Albert Rhys-Williams, a Congregationalist pastor turned labor organiser and journalist, offers readers a first-hand account of the exciting and confusing events of the Russian revolution from June 1917 to August 1918. Williams, a lifelong defender of the Soviet system, documented his first adventure in Russia at its most chaotic moments. There he formed a lasting impression of what he thought the Soviet system could offer to the world and dedicated the rest of his life to this cause. His account, while sympathetic, reveals to a modern audience the inner working of the Bolshevik Party, life in Petrograd and the countryside, and an optimistic vision of the revolutionary future. 

Edward Alsworth Ross, one of the founders of the academic field of sociology, spent July–December 1917 traveling across the Russian Empire and talking to the people there. As he states in his brief introduction, “I have taken it as my business to describe impartially the major social changes going on in Russia … in the latter half of 1917, and leave it to others or to time itself to judge them.” Ross follows through on that promise remarkably well, describing Russian peasants, the urban educated class, industrial workers, women, religion, people who had been imprisoned under tsarism, religion, the people of the Caucasus and Central Asia, and the proposals for democracy, among other topics.

Though this unique account focuses more on the people and less on politics than other accounts of the time, Ross includes a fascinating account of a lengthy private interview with Trotsky in December 1917. He ends the book by looking ahead to Russia’s possible future, from a perspective after the Bolsheviks took power but before the Civil War changed everything. Delving into important themes rarely mentioned in other foreigners’ writings about the Russian Revolution, Russia in Upheaval gives a unique sense of the times.

This book examines the definitional differences between classical and modern political theory pertaining to the constituent parts of justice.

This book presents an exhaustive analytical history of the great Spanish publishing house Editorial Gustavo Gili, specifically the scientific and technological works in its catalogue that were published during the years of the Franco regime.

Examines episodes of philosophical embarrassment, highlighting how Hume, Wittgenstein, and others grappled with critiques that undermined philosophy’s foundations, leading to redefinitions of its aims and cautionary responses to scientism and self-deception

This book consists of diverse essays held together by the thread of embarrassment that runs through them. Sometimes, embarrassment is front and center as when we discuss its conceptual features; at other times, its presence is oblique, as when we take a closer look at Rousseau’s existential outrage at the very idea of a culture of embarrassment; or when we look at Darwin’s theory and George Eliot’s critique of it. We unearth deeply buried embarrassments in the history of philosophy treating them as useful entry points into the major figures from an unusual if not idiosyncratic angle. All this raises a somewhat different but important line of enquiry, one that is meta-philosophical. Hume and Wittgenstein are our prime examples of philosophers who are aware that they and their subject have undone themselves and thus have been thoroughly embarrassed. What are the upshots, they ask, for philosophers and their subject? Perhaps this issue is the answer to Rousseau’s tantrums: embarrassment is useful. Throughout the book, we have many things to say about its uses and its abuses. One question this raises for us is how to proceed in philosophy with equipment that tends to run off the rails with considerable regularity. Do we proceed with all modesty, alive to these facts about us and ready to be embarrassed the next time our reach exceeds our grasp? Or do we, as the early Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and Quine seem to have done, radically revise key elements of the philosophical project—the pursuit of truth and objectivity in all matters, for example—in an attempt to avoid future embarrassments? If you narrow your subject, and if you are competent in that narrowness, you can avoid embarrassment and achieve your modest goals. Such a course is in keeping with the approach of modern philosophy, since it has taken science as a model of sorts. However, when science exceeds its competence, claiming it can solve any and every problem, it loses its experimental modesty, and we no longer have science but scientism. It should come as no surprise, then, that one of our essays is a set of reflections on Wittgenstein’s cautionary remarks about the embarrassments of scientism and his warnings about the related inclination to self-deception. A definition, Kant remarked, should come toward the end rather than at the beginning of an investigation; hence, in the final essay, we provide a perspicuous overview of embarrassment.

Donald Thompson in Russia is a compilation of letters to his wife Dorothy in Topeka, Kansas, illustrated with photos. First published in 1918, it outlines Thompson’s conspiracy thesis that :German intrigue, working among the unthinking masses, has brought Russia to her present woeful condition.”

David R. Francis held the post of the United States ambassador to Russia from April 1916 to November 1918, and represented his country before four Russian governments: the Imperial, Provisional, Soviet, and Northern. He was an eyewitness of the greatest events in the history of Russia: World War I, the February Revolution, the downfall of the empire, the October Revolution, and the Civil War. During the two and half years of his residence in Russia, Francis met prominent figures such as Nicholas II, the last Russian emperor, and Vladimir I. Lenin, the first Soviet leader. Francis s diplomatic experience was unique and had no parallel in the history of Russian-American relations which is why his memoirs are of special interest for historians and the general public alike.

Louise Bryant and her husband John Reed were among a relatively small group of Americans who participated in one of the most important events of the twentieth century, the Russian Revolution of 1917. As first-hand observers, they attended meetings of the revolutionaries, were present at teh Winter Palace as it was under attack, and witnesssed  the surrender of the palace guards. Over the next weeks, they saw a new regime emerge and met manu of tis most important figures, including Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, and Kollontai. Bryant returned home in 1918 and immediately began working on the book that would becime Six Red Months in Russia. Unfortunately for Bryant, her sec and her relationship with Reed overshadowed her talent as a writer and the depth of her observations of this historic event. But Bryant deserves better; she had her oen voice and was a skilled observer and journalist in her own right. While Reed's book is certainly a significant work, it contains little personal commentary. Bryant's account, by comparison, is also a documentation of the revolution, but it goes farther than Reed's in many wants, adding interpretation to observation. Bryant communicates what life was like during the days of the revolution - the people, the food, the excitement, the fear. She is also keenly aware of her American audience and speaks directly to them, urging them to pay attention to this world-changing moment in history and not to be fooled by the misinformation about Bolshevism and the new regime. Six Red Months in Russia conveys Bryant's understanding of the revolution, and reminds us of the utter enthusiasm that many Russians, and Americans, felt for socialism and its yet-untainted, utopian ideals. This new edition of Bryant's book is annotated and set in its appropriate historical context to create a more accessible text for modern readers on the anniversary of this truly world-changing event. 

Explores innovative planning and design strategies to tackle housing affordability, offering case studies and solutions that enhance livability, community resilience, and opportunity, from urban scale to home design.

New socio-economic and environmental realities have brought about a “perfect storm” of circumstances that are forcing a search for innovative solutions in the built residential environment, including affordable housing design and construction. The need to rethink planning practices and align them with contemporary environmental constraints has taken center stage in recent years. The depletion of non-renewable resources, elevated levels of greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change are a few of the challenges that force designers to reconsider conceptual approaches in favor of ones that promote a better suitability between built and natural environments. Consideration of concepts that lower a place’s carbon footprint by minimizing driving, using renewable energy, and preserving the site’s natural assets is one of the contemporary strategies that architects, planners, and builders are integrating into their philosophy and practice.
Given these emerging challenges, the need to think innovatively about planning affordable communities while learning from notable case studies is at the heart of the proposed book. The intention is to explore principles and to present outstanding international case studies that offer valuable lessons.
The book is also about livability—where design touches life and the big and small things that make people appreciate homes and neighborhoods. Livability has become an increasingly important lens with which to analyze a city, considering population demands, built infrastructure, and ecosystems. Community requirements for goods and services, in relation to what is available to a population is an indication of a place’s livability. To foster livable, affordable communities throughout all the stages of life, the social, environmental, and structural needs of a place should be considered and planned for through innovative designs and policies.
The material assembled can be of help to planners, architects, and builders designing and planning a large community or individual homes. It can be used by for-profit firms or nonprofit organizations planning on initiating ownership or rental accommodations. Although some of the standards described in the book are relevant to the North American market, its basic principles can be used internationally. Similarly, even though many of the designs described here are for mid- to low-rise wood-frame structures, their concepts are applicable to tall, large buildings.

In our book, new voices from the African landscape join the conversation on making peace in spaces often ruined by violence. Academics, mediation professionals and community leaders have come together to share their experiences with mediation. It not only restores or creates relationships but also transforms people’s thoughts about making peace. Some lessons in this book are for sharing lived experiences for public benefit, others are aimed at conceptualising mediations, and some contribute to theory building, but all the contributions inspire peace action.
Overall, peace leaders in Africa manage violent conflict much better than observed from other vantage points outside Africa. Despite long-term poverty, terrorism and internal wars, international contests for Africa’s resources, governance dysfunctions, natural disasters, limited access to technology, and transnational crime, community leaders (some contributing to this book) are coming forward daily to apply their knowledge to mediate peace.
This book will appeal to peace-building students and professionals focusing on socio-economic development in safe and secure conditions. It is also unique in that it intersects and transcends many academic disciplines and is a valuable guidebook for curricula on peace and conflict studies, security studies, law studies, African development studies, public safety management, and public affairs. It demonstrates the interconnections between these dimensions of society. A new shift in the humanities to understand non-Western management approaches makes this book of exceptional value.

Of all the books by American witnesses of the Russian Revolution, John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World was and still is the best known. Even thoughtReed arrived in Russia in September 1917 and left in the spring of 1918, his enthusiastic account focuses on the ten key days of the revolution itself, brining to life the sights, sounds, and key people who were so instrumental in this critical event. Reed, officially a journalist, shed his objectivity and supplorted the Boshevik cause, and this book was the key forum in which he made his cause. In the end, the book has survived, and even thrived, as a primary source on the revolution, even thought Reed died in 1920.

Chicago native, political activist, and journalist Ernest Poole (1880-1950) provides a distinctive view of the  Bolshevik Revolution in his work, The Village: Russian Impressions. This work is unusual in the library of American accounts of Revolutionary Russia because it addresses the world of the Russian peasants, far away from the revolutionary centers of Petrograd and Moscow. He associated with a Russian priest, a doctor, a teacher, and a mill owner who offered a perspective not normally seen in the history of the Bolshevik Revolution. Poole's own views and those of the people he visited provide a fascinating account of the revolutionary era that helps readers a century later understand the complexity of this fascinating time. 

Traditional Bone Setting (TBS) has long held prominent sway in African healthcare, particularly in the more remote and pastoral expanses of Africa. This unique interdisciplinary religious, human rights, and sociological study of medicine manuscript is an examination of not only generationally inherited ethnobotanical, pharmacognosy TBS traditions – but also direct observations on how current surgical orthopedic medicine and modern-day social mechanisms clash with traditional healthcare approaches in contemporaneous and inexorable ways.

This book is a personal account of a medical education that began in 1966. Being a medical student and doctor was (and still is) a blend of absurdities, frustrations and joys. The curriculum was shot through with holes in the 1960s, and it still is. A hospital is no place to learn about how ill people live their lives.

This is a book about the adaptation of Indigenous groups in North America (Mexico, USA, Canada) and their interrelatedness to each other and outside influences over time.

Develops a new ethical framework for understanding nonviolence through Dostoevsky’s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” bridging literature, philosophy, and activism with insights from thinkers like Gandhi, Žižek, and Judith Butler

In recent years, several high-profile academic outputs related to theory and ethics of nonviolence have emerged. This book adds to theoretical literature on nonviolence through developing a new framework based on concepts drawn from Dostoevsky’s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” (LGI) which was originally articulated in the novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880). In doing so, this book accounts for a previously undetected ethical dimension of nonviolence. It repositions Dostoevsky as a vital contributor to theory on nonviolence and uncovers a philosophical stance that defines violence not through political revolution, but by spiritual resistance and self-reproach. This book accounts for principal findings that have been identified in empirical scholarship on nonviolence, and while doing so, it engages with classical political theorists and scholars on nonviolence, including Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Gene Sharp along with contemporary works including Žižek, Atack, Christoyannopoulos, and Butler.This book contributes a new framework to assess the ethical motivations behind nonviolence and its empirical efficacy based on concepts drawn from Dostoevsky’s parable. The analysis of LGI offers an innovative explanation of the historical role of nonviolence and presents new implications for interpreting the efficacy of nonviolence in the contemporary world. Scholars have described the Grand Inquisitor as being representative of an evolution toward a totalitarian state, and it has even been acknowledged that the Grand Inquisitor was an inspiration for several key dystopian works that came afterwards such as Zamiatin’s We (1921), Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Yet with great scholarly and literary emphasis having been placed on the authoritarian symbols of this parable, the LGI contains an under-studied component of nonviolence which, to date, is yet to be identified and theorized.

A unique, post-pandemic-era anthology that blends creative and critical works to redefine nostalgia studies through a culturally expansive and interdisciplinary lens

The edited collection titled Reverberating Past: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Art of Nostalgia is an interdisciplinary anthology that bridges the artistic and academic realms, exploring the concept of nostalgia through both personal and collective lenses. The volume is divided into two parts: the first part features poetry and short stories that capture the emotional resonance of past experiences, while the second one presents scholarly articles that delve into the multifaceted nature of nostalgia across disciplines such as literature, film, history, and psychology.
In the second part titled “Critical Essays,” there are seven essays. First chapter titled “Cuban and Puerto Rican Nostalgias: Where Another Place Is Home” examines how different forms of nostalgia are expressed and represented, focusing on Cuban and Puerto Rican experiences. The second chapter titled “Sculpting in History: Nostalgic Structures in Indian Popular Culture” explores how nostalgic structures, particularly historical monuments, are used in Indian cinema to evoke cultural memory and shape both regional and national identities. The third chapter titled “Fashioning the Memories: A Phenomenological Outlook on Identity, Fashion, and Nostalgia” explores how personal identity is shaped through nostalgic connections to fashion, revealing how clothing serves as a vessel for lived experiences and emotional recollection. The fourth chapter titled “Nostalgia and Digital Twins: Bridging Memories and Virtual Realities” explores how digital twins—virtual, data-driven replicas of people, places, or objects—interact with nostalgia to create immersive experiences that preserve, evoke, and reinterpret the past. The fifth chapter titled “Revisiting Indian Festivities: Tracing Cultural Identities Through Collective Memory” investigates how traditional festivals serve as a lens to understand evolving cultural identities in India, elucidating the functions of collective memory. The sixth chapter “Roots and Reverie: Italian Women’s Literature Through a Migrant’s Eyes” looks into the theme of nostalgia in the works of prominent Italian women writers, highlighting how their narratives encapsulate the emotional pull of memory, identity, and belonging. The seventh or final chapter titled “Recuperating the Desire for Desire: Nostalgia, Recognition, and an Ethics of Fiction” critically examines Moyez Vassanji’s Nostalgia through Lacanian and Levinasian lenses to argue that empathy can recuperate the other beyond compromised memory and Orientalist discourse.
The book emphasizes how contemporary artifacts—term used in a metaphorical way—serve as vessels for nostalgic experiences, shaping our understanding of the past and its influence on the present.

Our world is a world of pain and suffering—at the individual level of private lives as well as the level of historical and political events. The familiar examples of suffering we need to engage with range from everyday unpleasantness, such as a prolonged illness, to massive horrors epitomized in world wars and genocides, such as, at the extreme, the Holocaust. We know, in most cases, how to explain these evils: medical science tells us how and why illnesses occur, geology explains earthquakes, and history and social psychology explain what happened at the darkest moments of our civilization, and why. However, even when everything has been explained, many of us feel that we still fail to properly understand why unspeakable events like brutal mass murders and war crimes happen. Those with religious convictions may wonder why God, if God exists, allows such things to exist. The theological and philosophical tradition of theodicy is an influential attempt to respond to such questions focusing not so much on explaining suffering but on the normative question of justifying suffering.
This book introduces antitheodicy as a critical ethical response to the problem of evil and suffering. While the mainstream debate on this problem in the philosophy of religion continues to focus on theodicies seeking to justify or excuse God’s allowing that there is apparently meaningless suffering, this introduction not only explains why an antitheodicist alternative is ethically superior to such attempts but also, more importantly, extends the antitheodicist approach from the philosophy of religion to broader ethical engagements with suffering. Sketching some of the historical milestones of antitheodicist thought as well as the most important contemporary versions of antitheodicy, the book argues that antitheodicy is the only decent account of suffering and that theodicies are incompatible with ethical seriousness. Theodicies tend to instrumentalize suffering in the service of some imagined overall good, or a metaphysical scheme failing to recognize the individual perspective of the victim. The significance of this essentially ethical argument against theodicies reaches far beyond the philosophy of religion, as the theodicy versus antitheodicy opposition also has interesting secular varieties. Any explicit or implicit instrumentalization of suffering in the service of real or imagined overall goodness may be claimed to be quasi-theodicist, even if it has nothing to do with religious or theological attempts to justify suffering. Antitheodicist critique is therefore needed across a range of ethical and political problems.

Indigenous entrepreneurship involves the use of Indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) to establish enterprises whose target is not only profit but also socio-economic development of communities, and that differentiates it from mainstream economic activities. Based on this, it is then possible to bring into the conversation the issue of IKS and entrepreneurship in Africa in terms of how the conceptualization and praxis of Indigenous entrepreneurship can be decolonized to unlock and unleash socio-economic development in Africa. For this reason, it matters that Indigenous entrepreneurship does not continue to be subjected to or governed by mainstream economic principles. It should be remembered that before colonial conquest, Indigenous entrepreneurship flourished and led to authentic and inclusive socio-economic development. It was colonialism and settler Eurocentric institutions that subjected Indigenous entrepreneurship to mainstream economic governance regimes leading to its marginalization and in some cases relative demise. Nonetheless, given on one hand the resilience of Indigenous entrepreneurship in terms of surviving the colonial encounter, onslaught, and institutions that should have suffocated and buried it and on the other its potential to spur inclusive socio-economic development, it is now time to revisit and recover it without subjecting it to or seeing it through mainstream economic lenses and the Eurocentric frame. Consequently, this raises three critical but related questions which the book tackles; first, how is entrepreneurship understood and practiced by Indigenous communities in Africa? Second, why is there a need to decolonize the conceptualization and praxis of entrepreneurship in Africa through the logic of IKS and how can this be done? Third, how and to what extent can IKS be leveraged and/or mobilized and unleashed to contribute to socio-economic development in Africa? Against this backdrop, the main goal of the book project therefore is to decolonize within the prism of IKS how Indigenous entrepreneurship is conceptualized, understood, and implemented in Africa. This task should show the poverty of the current understanding and implementation of entrepreneurship in Africa which is couched within a Eurocentric frame. It is now time to transcend the Eurocentric monologue of entrepreneurship to an understanding of how Indigenous communities in various parts of Africa conceptualize and practice entrepreneurship leading to socio-economic development. It is important to amplify the point that since it is the cornerstone of the contemporary Indigenous economy, Indigenous entrepreneurship is both the answer and the path forward for the development and cultural survival of African communities.

The Mind Economy is a bold and visionary exploration of the human psyche as a structured, dynamic economy. In this groundbreaking work, Professor Oliver Hoffmann proposes that memory is not simply a repository of past events but the foundational currency of our inner world—shaping identity, driving cognition, and fueling our emotional and mental processes.
Rooted in psychological theory, enriched by philosophical reflection, and sharpened through economic reasoning, this book introduces the concept of the “spirit system”—an integrated model that explains how narration, imagination, and memory will function as key exchange processes within the mental economy. Hoffmann reveals how memories are continuously reconstructed, assigned value, and traded in the form of thoughts, beliefs, and self-concepts. These processes define how individuals perceive themselves, relate to others, and make decisions in daily life.
The book also provides an in-depth introduction to “economic cognitive therapy,” a method that uses the principles of inner economization to increase mental efficiency, emotional resilience, and therapeutic effectiveness. Practical exercises and transformative techniques—such as imagination reconstruction and transcendental narration—offer powerful tools for personal development and healing. The inclusion of supportive practices like yoga, meditation, and aesthetic experience adds a deeply holistic dimension.
Rather than relying on mystical or esoteric language, The Mind Economy provides a clear, structured, and intellectually rich approach to understanding the self. It challenges conventional dualisms between inner and outer worlds and proposes that our economic systems may be reflections of internal mental structures, not the other way around.
This book is for readers who seek more than self-help—it is for thinkers, practitioners, and explorers of the human condition who want to understand how we constitute value, identity, and meaning from within. With depth, clarity, and vision, Hoffmann invites us to become better stewards of our inner resources—and to unlock the power of memory as the gateway to transformation.

Explores the complex intersections of AI, soft power, and public diplomacy, offering insights from leading experts and emerging voices on technology’s evolving role in global politics.

AI is progressively becoming important in practically all fields. Soft power and public diplomacy are not insulated from this influence. Public diplomacy scholars have famously noted that it is a theoretically underdeveloped field. However, it is of great interest in the foreign relations community particularly among policy makers and practitioners. Soft power and public diplomacy have been likened to inseparable conjoined twins . Soft power is said to be a theory for public diplomacy. This has not so far been demonstrated in an effective way. A satisfactory connection between soft power and public diplomacy will allow connections to be made with Artificial Intelligence (AI). These connections will be of interest not only to students and researchers but also to practitioners and policy formulators. The volume’s first section will deal with these issues.
The book’s remaining sections deal with conflict, culture, governance, and narrative. The culture section discusses narrative celebrity influence, GenAI and soft power projection, network society, and social media. The conflict section investigates soft power and conflict, and CyberPower. The governance section addresses digital diplomacy and security, cyber soft power, and views on AI and public diplomacy. The narrative section features disintegration and counter-disinformation in soft power, and demotic disruption of international discourse. Sixty percent of chapters have leading international soft power and public diplomacy authors. There is also a complement of younger authors introducing cutting edge ideas to discussion of soft power and public diplomacy in the age of AI.

Beckett and Broadcasting pioneered the study of Beckett and the media in 1976. Originally a doctoral dissertation defended at Åbo Akademi University (Finland), it has long been out of print. It is here republished with a sizable new introduction focusing on the role of radio in Beckett’s œuvre.

The Scottish Law Commission (SLC) has proposed that the law pertaining to the formation of voluntary obligations should be significantly reformed. If their recommendations are enacted, it is thought that the resultant legislative changes would be harmful to the coherence of Scots law as an ordered legal system. This is because the enquiry, consultation and report undertaken and produced by the SLC were each limited in their scope to a consideration of ‘contract law’. This fails to appreciate the fact that Scotland, properly speaking, does not have an isolated and sequestered ‘law of contract’ as many other jurisdictions do, but rather a rational, ordered and unitary ‘law of voluntary obligations’. This law of ‘voluntary obligations’ presently remains underpinned by the intellectual schema set out by Viscount Stair in his opus, the Institutions of the Law of Scotland. Stair’s schema suggests that obligations of this kind are created, or may putatively be created, by an ‘act of the will’ which he identifies as ‘engagement’. Bearing this in mind, the book seeks to make the case that piecemeal legislative reform of ‘formation of contract’, as proposed by the SLC, is fundamentally wrongheaded and that to retain intellectual and rational coherence, the law in this area should not be governed by statute, but rather allowed to develop in line within the flexible, unitary and ultimately rational framework which presently governs the law of ‘voluntary obligations’. In doing so, it considers a particular – ostensibly uncontroversial – aspect of the SLC’s law reform proposals: the abolition of the so-called ‘postal acceptance rule’. By reference to Stair’s taxonomy, this book demonstrates that there is in fact no ‘postal exception’ in Scots law; rather, the effect of this so-called exception is in fact nothing more than the quotidian consequence of the general rules relating to the formation of voluntary obligations. This, as is made plain, has significant consequences for the analysis of contracts formed by electronic means such as email and text – but the potential for development of the law in this direction would be irretrievably stymied if statute overrides the common law here. The book, then, is a work of ‘anti-law reform’ which seeks to make the case that juristic development need not always come from ‘on high’ in the form of legislation, but instead can be precipitated by expert commentary from jurists, to aid the development of the law as practised before the courts.

Following a short introduction, the book is arranged in seven chapters, each dealing with a specific genre and its main themes. The opening chapter considers how the village cricket story laid down the main tropes of cricket and fiction and established a defining relation between cricket, England’s green and pleasant land and national identity, especially in times of war and its aftermath. The second chapter develops the cricket, war and nation theme in the public school cricket novel, especially in the period of the South African (Boer) and First World Wars when cricket and war were frequently dramatised in similar terms. It also discusses the recurring treatment of homosexuality in the public school cricket novel and how the language of cricket was used to write about same-sex attraction. The next chapter breaks new ground in discussing how cricket has featured in murder mysteries. It demonstrates how well suited to each other the sport and the genre are – cricket providing a kind of open-air closed-room setting for a murder narrative – and explores the formal similarities between the shape and structure of a game of cricket and the procedures of the novel.
The following two chapters explore how amenable cricket fiction has proved as a medium for both comedy and tragedy. It discusses the inherent comic potential of cricket for fiction, the mishap and slapstick of a sport in which the box was introduced a century before the helmet. Cricket also has a long association with suicide as many observers of the game have noted. Fictional treatment of this tragic theme has focused on how a sport which is so time-consuming, both in the duration of a game and the extended career of those who play it, has made retirement difficult to manage and sometimes led to suicide.
As the English cricket story declined into insularity and nostalgia, and cricket ceased to be a subject for serious literary fiction, the post-colonial cricket novel emerged. The penultimate chapter considers how contemporary post-colonial novelists have revived and expanded the fictional possibilities of cricket by extending its global range and replenishing its traditional narratives to include previously unspoken issues of migration and race, thereby creating new kinds of stories. The concluding chapter looks at several apocalyptic end-of-the-world cricket stories and develops into a discussion of how cricket is both contributing to and threatened by global heating, raising the question of its sustainability as a sport and as a subject for fiction.

A philosophical and legal inquiry into the sort of creatures we are, and so how to live well and behave well, and an indictment of the failure of the Academy to address these foundational questions.

The prologue and chapter 1 situate the discussion in Climates of Migration in a broader context defined by a resurgence of attention on colonialism and postcolonial legacies, as evident in debates on restitution, reparation, historical accountability and responsibility. Colonial exploration and conquest are thereby connected with the environmental–migration nexus and accordingly chart the coordinates of the book as readers navigate the tentacular planetary reach of European colonial powers. This was of course an era when overseas travel was not even an option for the majority of people, yet one defined by sophisticated propagandist mechanisms that encouraged Europeans to travel through the imagination thanks to the immersive experiences offered at World’s Fairs and Colonial Exhibitions as well as in various board games and other ephemera that promoted the benefits of having colonies, glorified conquest and expansion, while molding young minds and bolstering patriotic fervor. The lessons to be learned were manifold, concerning as they did a recognition of the importance to the economy of—and dependency on—colonies, while implanting a deep familiarity with goods and products. These games capitalized upon the experiential realities of colonial assignments, and the design replicated the defining elements of the colonial enterprise, while also of course mobilizing support. Yet, as we know today, agricultural and extraction practices contributed to anthropogenic global warming, as communities were removed or driven off their lands, displaced and compelled to migrate elsewhere. As such, questions of mobility were therefore central to the production and visualization of Empire, and today, heated debates pertaining to border control and sovereignty can be traced back to this era.
The catalyst for chapter 2 is to be found in French philosopher Bruno Latour’s statement whereby “We can understand nothing about the politics of the last fifty years if we do not put the question of climate change and its denial front and center.” The focus thus shifts to the multiple ways in which climate change has bent the arc of politics in new directions, most notably in the conjunction between the eco-colonial dimension and migration itself given that “What makes the migratory crisis so difficult to conceptualize is that it is the symptom, to more or less excruciating degrees, of an ordeal common to all: the ordeal of finding oneself deprived of land.” Extensive recourse has been made to climate metaphors to amplify anti-immigration rhetoric, collectively delineating the parameters of an invasion narrative that alleges cultural, political and social saturation, submersion and replacement. Recourse to such terminology to describe migration exploits a simple tautology: climate change is a negative development, and therefore, conflating metaphors allows for a seamless twinning with the ills of immigration, grafting a pernicious meaning on the process (migration) and people concerned (migrants). In the associative context of climate change, this logic operates optimally since it coincides with a diagnosis of catastrophic global warming and the long-term projected impact, and has been present in European Union policy-making (“Green Deal” and “New Pact on Migration and Asylum of the EU”) and broader discussions pertaining to climate migrants and climate refugees.
Two strands intersect in chapter 3 and build on the conclusions of the previous chapters, simultaneously reappraising the coexistence of insular and open thinking and complex and simplistic reasoning and shifting the discussion toward an engagement with categories such as empathy and sympathy. This is achieved through a consideration of how cultural productions by artists and writers have enhanced modes of identification and relationality rather than detachment, and offered alternatives to racist and xenophobic media and political discourses. Chapter 4 subsequently provides an in-depth analysis of an emerging corpus of works by African writers for whom transhistorical violence motivates political commitment based on scrutiny and witnessing, documenting, recording and calls for accountability. The works considered have in common an adherence to an “environmental turn” that has culminated in a thematic “greening” of fiction (Cheryll Glotfelty) and a revitalization of writing. Writers have engaged with the longstanding consequences of environmental ecocide on the continent, while ultimately reflecting on the broader context of climate change and environmental derangement that accounts for shifting patterns of population mobility. The concluding chapter establishes a conjunction between new technologies of communication and extraction, more prominently in terms of the interplay between ecology and propaganda, and examines how the later has been used to further an anti-ecological agenda—denouncing warnings concerning global warming as fake news or promoting a lifestyle founded on the exponential use of industrial technologies—and pro-ecology positions centered on an unrelenting effort to prevent the systematic destruction of the environment and aimed at raising awareness and consciousness as well as encouraging behavior modification. The conclusion considers how new digital technologies have taken an age-old apparatus and amplified it, enabling information wars to run alongside physical ones, while discussing how disinformation and misinformation campaigns and algorithms now influence every facet of contemporary life, most prominently in terms of the climate change and migration nexus.

The Elite Quality Index (EQx) proposes an analytical framework to interpret—and possibly transform—the state of elite quality in the world’s political economies. It is based on a simple idea. The EQx posits that the business models chosen and run by elites determine economic and human development. That is, elites (the “who”) affect human and economic development outcomes (the “what”), sometimes directly but mostly indirectly through the influence that they exert on the institutions (the “how”) that set the rules of the game. These rules bestow on elites a “license to operate.” Both the “how” and the “what” have been theoretically discussed at great length and are amply measured. However, the EQx focuses on the “who” element, a research gap that urgently needs to be addressed. This is pursued at the national level by considering aggregate national elite systems in terms of the Value Creation and Value Extraction impacts of their primary business models. As a precursor of institutional quality, Elite Quality is deemed to be a significant pointer to long-term economic growth.

The EQx is a political economy index that uses aggregated datasets to measure the overall sustainable value creation of nations in terms of the ability of its elite business models to create value rather than extract it through rent seeking. The EQx is based on a four-level architecture. Below the top-level Index rankings, there are two Sub-Indices: Power and Value. Value Sub-Index I provides direct evidence of Value Creation and Extraction by elite business models, even though the latter might be easier to capture, as the results of rent seeking are more visible. Power Sub-Index II conceptualizes the potential for Value Extraction, as this cannot exist without power. Hence, while power is not Value Extraction per se, it is a necessary condition for rent seeking to take place. In many countries, elites that enjoy a high degree of power invest in operating inclusive Value Creation business models, while in others it is used to leverage value transfers from an array of stakeholders. Both of the EQx’s two Sub-Indices have a political and an economic dimension. This conceptual 2 × 2 framework results in four Index Areas. First, Political Power measures the capture of three kinds of rules: rules of the state, the rules of business regulation, and the rules of human labor. Second, Economic Power measures elite dominance at the firm and industry levels, such as measuring how much positive creative destruction there is in a political economy. Third, Political Value measures Value Extraction in the political dimension; the state’s unearned income, its taking of income, and its giving of income. Fourth, Economic Value measures Value Extraction from the economy’s three markets: products and services, the capital markets, and the labor markets. Each EQx Index Area is then assigned 3 conceptually related Pillars, yielding a total of 12. The purpose of the Pillars is to define and create conceptual lenses through which we can approach, understand, and measure specific phenomena. At the final and fourth level are the Indicators that use datasets to operationalize political economy phenomena associated with elite agency. All individual indicators and the respective weights that they are given then flow back up the framework to provide scores at the Pillar and aggregate EQx level. Descriptions of each of the 149 indicators used (what we measure) as well as the sustainable value creation (vs. rent-seeking) rationale that underpins their inclusion in the EQx (why we measure) are included in the report.

The EQx2025 provides novel insights that will allow policymakers, academics, journalists, business leaders, students, and concerned citizens understand how elites are impacting the political economy of their nations while also allowing them to benchmark countries that perform well (or poorly) in terms of economic growth and human development.

The debt we owe to the brilliant men who drafted their Constitution is incalculable. Recognizing that, with the passage of time, their document would likely require modifications, the Framers included provisions for amending the Constitution. The twenty-seven amendments that have been ratified to date have played a pivotal role in the continuing effort to perfect our Constitution. This book looks at U.S. history and the American experience through the lens of our Constitutional Amendments. It discusses why each Amendment was adopted, the importance of each Amendment, how the Amendments have been interpreted, and the impact they have had on American society. The Amendments are too important to be treated as afterthoughts, and this book seeks to rectify that by giving them the attention they deserve.
The Amendments have shaped and continue to shape the development of our nation. They guarantee the fundamental rights and liberties that Americans enjoy. They tell America’s story from the abolition of slavery to women’s suffrage, and to granting young men and women who are old enough to fight and even die for their country, the right to vote. The Amendments play a vital role in the quest for gender and racial equity, and the continuing struggle to achieve social justice. The story of the Amendments includes America’s dalliance with abstinence, the fourteen years of prohibition. They detail the changes in presidential elections, succession, and term limits; the direct election of senators; and the imposition of a federal income tax.
The Amendments are the result of the American people’s continuing efforts to perfect our Constitution, first through Acts of Congress, then through ratifications by State Legislatures, and finally by judicial review and interpretation.

The considerably large critical literature on Bollywood cinema is marked by an absence as it has not engaged fully with the ways in which songs lead to the memorial construction of films and how a spectator connects with films through their songs. The studies tended to deflect the emotional dimension of songs, their internal lyrical structure and their intertextual connections in favour of readings that treat songs as subsidiary to other formal elements. Consequently, there was little understanding of songs and their complex relationship with the narrative of the film. To address this absence, this book begins by taking a look at the prior history of Bollywood songs since the arrival of talkies with the film Alam Ara (1931). The chapter takes the reader through the journey of film songs from synchronous singing and music during production to non-diegetic music and the playback singer. In addition, the somewhat disparate filmic milieu of history, emotion and ethics, much of which are drawn from traditional texts, served to affirm the values of a secular India. Melodrama, mediated via Indian theories of sentimentality, became one of the key colonial discourses through which the politico-social order was critiqued and Indianness celebrated.
The book then raises the question, ‘Can one speak about periods?’ After defending periodisation in this instance because it does have heuristic value, the argument is given added support by positing melodrama as the dominant dramatic mode of Indian Hindi (Bollywood) cinema of the Golden Age. The term ‘melodrama’ is used to designate a film genre marked by sentimental songs that appeal to the heightened emotions of the spectator. Because emotionality is central to the concept of melodrama, a consideration of how emotions may be theorised is also given. The Indian classical concept of rasa is examined to provide a theoretical frame that is both historical and indigenous. Sentimental and melodramatic emotion ultimately enhanced cinema’s ethical role in building a post-colonial nation – a nation that was emerging from the trauma of partition as well as the excesses of colonisation. However, by focusing with holistic lens on the period in question – the ‘Golden Age’ – the book finesses the value of periodisation in this instance. Frame analyses of a sample of song sequences from a variety of films are used to demonstrate the roles of various song registers and the way these different registers (as identified in the appendices) work within the narrative. The argument for a connection between songs and narrative in the period is strengthened by an examination of the elements of song picturisation, most notably body movement, mise-en-scènes, lyrics, vocal expression, lighting, shots and music. A close examination of these elements reinforced the links between felt emotion and the melodramatic form in the Golden Age. Furthermore, it is argued that while Indian theories of emotional responses – notably rasa theory – recognised the place of cathartic outpouring in any dramatic presentation, the shape and structure of Bollywood cinema was indebted to the melodramatic imaginary that came to India with British colonisation. The archival material on English novels read in colonial times indicated that novels dealing with the ‘man of feeling’, novels such as Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) and Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), provided the melodramatic structures within which native structures of feeling (as in the varied rasas) may be given felt presence. That structure and its emotional pulling power dictated cinema and especially the cinema of the Golden Age. There are direct links between Devdas (1935), a seminal film based on a sentimental Bengali novel, and Pyaasa (1957), and these links speak to the presence of English discourses of sentimentality. Such was their pervasive power, indeed their affective intensities and strength, that no film of the ‘Golden Age of Bollywood’ escaped from their enervating and ineluctable presence.
The argument of the book – as indicated above – is followed through with references to many films. The instance of the ‘Islamicate’ film Mughal-e-Azam (1960) is taken up as an example of the power and pervasiveness of the melodramatic temper and the role of songs even when the cinematic genre is that of an epic. A close, paradigmatic reading of this film shows how the evocative power of sentimentality, emotional capital and the genre of melodrama invades an historical narrative and transforms history. To give greater depth to the place of songs, sentimentality and melodrama, the book turns to the two exceptional auteurs of the Golden Age, Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt. Between them, these two auteurs demonstrate a range of filmic articulations of songs in Hindi cinema, and their films illustrate, in an exemplary fashion, the role of songs in carrying the melodramatic and sentimental narrative of a film. The Hindi film auteur, as producer, director and actor, not only imposes his special style on his films but is visible on the screen itself.
This book is primarily concerned with songs from the Golden Age of Hindi cinema – 1951–1963 – a period in Hindi film history when emotion, sentiment and melodrama were regularly combined to create ‘affective intensities’. The registers, moods and, in some cases, ragas of songs have been examined over a broad corpus of examples to identify their effect on the spectator, their role in the narrative of the film and their thematisation associated with specific emotional states. In so doing, the book theorises sentimentality and melodrama in the context of Hindi film songs to more fully identify the nature of sentimentality and to more fully understand the way songs play a role in the melodramatic form.

This book explores the strategic role of Liberty University, church planting networks, and grassroots mobilization in shaping U.S. policy toward Israel. It examines how Dr. Jerry Falwell, through his leadership at Liberty University and the Moral Majority, built a powerful evangelical coalition that effectively influenced Congress and the White House. By analyzing the intersection of faith, politics, and diplomacy, the book uncovers how Christian Zionism became a central force in conservative American politics, fostering a deep alliance between evangelicals and the Israeli government. Falwell’s relationship with Israeli leaders, particularly Prime Minister Menachem Begin, marked a turning point in evangelical engagement with U.S.-Israel relations.
Drawing on archival research, policy analysis, and historical case studies, this study reveals how church planting initiatives were not just religious efforts but also political mobilization tools. Through Liberty University’s extensive alumni network, pastors and church leaders across the United States incorporated pro-Israel advocacy into their congregations, fostering a committed base that actively lobbied for policies such as the relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, foreign aid to Israel, and support for settlement expansion. The book highlights how evangelical activism extended beyond sermons and theological discourse, transforming into a well-organized political force with direct influence on U.S. foreign policy.
By tracing the historical evolution of evangelical political engagement, this book provides critical insights into the mechanisms by which grassroots activism, theological imperatives, and institutional influence shaped American diplomacy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It situates evangelical support for Israel within the broader conservative movement, illustrating how religious convictions translated into political action. As debates over faith-based politics and foreign policy continue to shape America’s global role, this book offers a timely and essential contribution to understanding the enduring impact of Christian Zionism on U.S.-Israel relations.

Leading a sustainable organization requires more than marketing slogans and good reporting. It requires identifying the value of sustainability for all stakeholders and the development of specific transition and change plans that deliver a different type of organization. Noble aspirations in treaties and policies are a necessary part of the picture, but leaders must create organizations that enable daily actions. Making sustainability happen is a series of leadership choices:
o Creating strategic differentiation to compete on sustainability business opportunities
o Crafting a purpose that inspires employees to give their best
o Building and sharing a knowledge model about why, what, and how to do sustainability
o Ensuring that sustainability efforts are woven into values and ethics
o Deploying a transition plan with clear action steps that move from compliance to alignment
o Making sustainability part of the culture and identity of an organization
o Weaving personal commitment to sustainability into team performance
o Telling the story of sustainable results in all business communication
o Maintaining commitment in the face of inevitable derailment factors
o Future proofing the organization to stay on the sustainability journey with a sense of long-term value creation
● The current generation of leaders has failed to make the progress needed to delay the worst effects of climate change and biodiversity loss, so the challenges become harder. The book offers a chapter-by-chapter blueprint of key actions that can be learned and shared. The goal is to enable business leaders to accelerate action, make better decisions, and ensure that sustainability becomes part of the DNA of any organization.
Key Selling Points:
● Timely: We are behind on all sustainable goals and need a new generation of leaders to embrace the task of business transformation.
● Accessible: The book is clearly organized around key practices and questions and prescriptive in nature. Each chapter has summary sections and an end of chapter quiz.
● Visual: The book includes more than 60 tables, charts, and graphs that visually illustrate how to turn ideas into actions.
● Global: The stories in the book are global in nature, providing greater engagement opportunities for the reader.
Why buy the book?
● Eleven chapters that offer a step-by-step learning path of key themes and capabilities necessary for sustainable business success.
● Sixty-seven tables and charts that visualize key topics.
● Chapter summaries that offer key points for reflection and group discussion.
● End of chapter reflection checklists to quickly assess your understanding of chapter themes.
● Eight longer reflection exercises framed around key questions. Each is based on real world examples including links for additional original source reading.
● An appendix listing eleven databases that can be used for independent research.
● A summary list of sixty-six terms with definitions that are key to understanding sustainability thinking.

Drawing on archival sources, this book provides an anthropological exploration of the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore, tracing its evolution from the Mayo School of Arts established in 1875. As a counterpart to London’s South Kensington School of Design (now the Royal College of Art), the Mayo School emerged as a crucial site for the dissemination of colonial art education in British India, alongside similar institutions in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. Named to honor Lord Earl of Mayo, the only Viceroy of India assassinated in office, it was founded by Lockwood Kipling and featured a distinguished roster of educators including Ram Singh, Percy Brown, Lionel Heath, S.N. Gupta, B.C. Sanyal, and A.R. Chughtai. The Mayo School also initiated the Journal of Indian Art and Industry, a seminal publication utilizing cutting-edge chromolithography techniques.

The book employs theoretical analysis to understand how the NCA, functioning as a bureaucratic entity, has shaped the landscape of design education, museums, and artistic practices in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. From its roots in British art education, derived from South Kensington, the institution's trajectory reflects its adaptation through American reforms in the early years of Pakistani independence. This analysis critically examines how frameworks of art history and anthropology have been mobilized to construct and objectify Pakistani art and artists.

Furthermore, the book explores the contributions of colonial anthropologists such as Richard Temple, Denzil Ibbetson, and Baden Powell, who were instrumental in the establishment and administration of the Mayo School. Their work in ethnographic reconstruction provided a cultural framework that influenced the education of artisan castes, situating them within a “primitive” Punjabi context. This colonial subtext profoundly impacted the pedagogical approaches of the Mayo School, which also nurtured the emergence of the Indo-Saracenic architectural style and supported traditional Punjabi painting.

Despite its industrial art orientation, the Mayo School was pivotal in the development of a modern Punjab painting tradition recognized at the British Indian Empire Exhibition of 1924. Under the guidance of Lionel Heath, the school began to embrace modern art, with printmaking, graphic design, and sculpture taking root in the 1930s through the efforts of B.C. Sanyal and M.M. Hussain. The Mayo School’s printing press produced a diverse array of materials, reflecting major Western art movements from Arts and Crafts to Art Deco and Bauhaus.

In the formative years of Pakistan, the Mayo School transitioned into the National College of Arts in 1958, modeled after the Bauhaus with departments in Fine Art, Design, and Architecture. Influential figures such as poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, painter Shakir Ali, art patron Ghulam Mueenuddin, and American sculptor Mark Sponenburgh were pivotal in shaping the NCA as Pakistan’s premier institution for art and design. Through a critical examination of art history and anthropological frameworks, this book elucidates how imperial and nationalist discourses have intersected to shape and redefine artistic and cultural identities within Pakistan.

Disappearing Cities is a collection of over fifty short stories of invented cities, set in the not too distant future, destroyed by varied climate change impacts and linked natural disasters. The stories bring into question the relation between the natural and unnatural forces of change and expose responses to, and lessons learnt, from different disaster crises situations. Stories also focus on how means to adapt are sought. The projected fictions are created from projected current climate facts; trends; and the author’s experience of population displacement, relocation and design-based climate change responsive action. Central to the book is the recognition that to be able to respond and adapt to the scale of coming changes in the climate requires going beyond existing practical action and embracing a new way of imagining futures. Disappearing Cities aims to stimulate ways of meeting this need.
The book opens with a Prologue that establishes the contextual frame of empirical foundation out of which the fictions are created. It recognises that we all live in a world in which the conditions that will result in huge numbers of cities disappearing are underway. From the human perspective, the process appears to be very slow, whereas in historico-geological time, it is happening exceptionally quickly. The number of the loss of cities is going to be huge, yet the recognition that this will occur is not arriving, In part, this is because of a lack of knowledge, but equally, it reflects a lack of imagination. Transposing what is known about climate change by a significant percentage of the societies of many nations to actual environments in which they live is just not arriving. What appears so solid and established fails to be seen and imagined as a risk and vulnerable. From establishing this opening perspective, the first part of the book presents stories of cities already disappearing as a result of the forces of nature changed by anthropogenically created global warming. Part two discusses the impacts of natural disasters being made unnaturally. For example, by the way industrial societies are damaging and changing natural systems, including the climatic. The final part goes to cities destroyed by completely un-natural means, including war.
Disappearing Cities aims to contribute to meeting the need for a better understanding of, and ability to imagine, the risks to which vast numbers of cities are, and will be, exposed to forces of disappearance. To do this, the narratives are a hybrid of fact and fiction. The work was inspired by Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities and is intended to be a salient contemporary companion to this text. It mirrors its form but differs in style and content. Invisible Cities attained diverse readership, Disappearing Cities aspires to do likewise.

Before Alessandro Michele took the creative helm at Gucci in 2015, the brand was mostly known for its sleek sophistication and sexy hedonism. Despite having worked at the Italian fashion house for over twelve years as the accessories and jewellery designer, Michele was relatively unknown in the fashion industry and the public sphere. All of that was to change when he sent his models down the runway for the 2015 Fall ready-to-wear collection in an eclectic mix of pussy-bow blouses, chiffon dresses, wallpaper prints and a motley collection of accessories, including fur-lined loafers, berets and granny-style horn-rimmed glasses. Michele’s stylistic design approach created an aesthetic reminiscent of the fashion eccentric who wears flea market finds with high-end designer and heirloom pieces – imperfect, nostalgic and maximalist. The new Gucci woman (and man) were intellectual and sensual misfits who are perfectly at home in the glamourous rag-tag aesthetic of a Wes Anderson film.
With his inaugurate collection, Michele tapped into the zeitgeist that was yearning for a more colourful and playful design, and a disregard of traditional gender divisions: while Gucci has hitherto showcased its men’s and women’s collections separately, as well as favoured traditional masculine and feminine looks respectively, Michele broke with the idea of a gender binary, ushering in gender fluidity and a new fantastical vision of masculinity.
Although his collections were spectacular in their scope (the Fall/Winter 2017 consists of roughly 120 looks), the designs are also a testimony to his ability to scramble signifiers of gender, pop culture, history and time. Referencing and borrowing from philosophical concepts and ideas, such as the infamous Cyborg collection (Gucci Fall/Winter 2019) that envisioned subjectivities beyond the confines of the human body with replica heads or extra eyes on their hands; the Fall/Winter 2016 collection titled ‘Rhizomatic Scores’, referencing Deleuze and Guattari’s influential concept; or the Fall/Winter 2020 menswear collection titled ‘Masculine, Plural’ that referenced Butler’s notion of gender performativity, Michele exemplifies a fashion auteur who knows how to play not only with gender signifiers but also with signifiers of time, culture and species.

Examines Gothic realism in documentary and horror cinema, highlighting how films evoke archival anxiety and unsettling realities, from gothumentaries exploring ineffable subjects to mockumentaries and found-footage films addressing modernity’s overwhelming and mediated nature.

This study concerns Gothic realism in the dark, sensorial epistemologies emerging from intersections of documentary and horror cinema. From the ineffable subjects of horror documentaries and pseudo-documentaries, to the obsessive chroniclers of mockumentary, fake found-footage, and screenlife horror cinema, the films examined here express a generalized millennial and 21st-century archival anxiety around an unsettled and unsettling hypermediated reality. Part I focuses on gothumentaries, nonfiction works evoking the Gothic unreadable subjects and undetected realities. Case studies show key documentary films such as Capturing the Friedmans, Cropsey, and The Hellstrom Chronicle bring Gothic-horror tropes and conventions to bear upon documentary subject matter to produce skepticism of American environmental, social, and national stability from the 1970s onward. Part II explores mockumentary, fake found-footage, and screenlife horror cinema that turns to strategies of documentary and factual discourse to express an archival anxiety around human interaction with recording technologies. Case studies of pivotal films such as The Blair Witch Project, Diary of the Dead, Lake Mungo, Unfriended, Sickhouse, and We Are All Going to the World’s Fair turn to Gothic reflexivity as a way of expressing the subject’s relationship to, and experience of, a modernity that overwhelms in terms of its immensity, speed, and recordability.
These fiction and nonfiction moving-image manifestations of archival anxiety adopt the mood, themes, and rhetorical strategies of horror and documentary to form a critical discourse that troubles the real—focusing spectatorial attention on the limits of representation and teleological forms, shifting viewers to questions of embodiment and sensation. The primary focus is on Anglophone cinema from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, with reference to other works produced in Spain, Germany, and France.

Examines the daily struggles of migrantized divorced mothers in Germany in a framework of everyday violence and its (in)visibilities, focusing on their resistances and vulnerabilities within unequal relations of support

This book approaches the daily struggles of migrantized divorced motherhood through theories, discourses, and (in)visibilities of everyday violence. Building on ethnographically informed everyday violence theories, it offers a framework in which violence becomes everyday violence when it engages with the boundaries of ordinary lives by means of being disruptive, reproduced, absorbed, and expected. Taking neither the visibility nor the invisibility of violence for granted, it discusses how the same discourses of violence can visibly victimize certain daily struggles of migrantized divorced motherhood while obscuring certain others.
Analyzing the individual narratives of divorced mothers living in Germany with immigration biographies from Turkey, the book tackles their struggles with poverty, dequalification, maternal guilt, time constraints, care, everyday racism and sexism, as well as the conceptualizations of violence itself. If there is a certain form of “loneness” implied in the term lone parenting, these narratives reveal how such “loneness” is structurally and discursively constructed within a relationality of the self to resources. With attention to various forms of victimizations, vulnerabilities, and resistances, the book delves into what it means to “stand on one’s own two feet” in the face of paternalistic conditions of intimate and structural support.
Thus, the author makes various strong arguments around the work of tackling everyday violence and the immunities secured against the attribution of violence within power relations. Underlining the ambivalent consequences of our everyday and scholarly discourses on violence, she carefully situates the concept in a context of migrantization and culturalization of gendered experiences. Overall, the research participants offer narratives of not only everyday violence but also everyday protests, which refuse the forced (in)visibilities of their daily struggles and analyze the labor they invest into their relations to resources. And it is the acknowledgment of these protests that is at stake when they narrate their daily struggles, name violence, and reject a passive victimhood.

This book explores the transformative role of open-source technologies and digital commons in fostering a cooperative and sustainable economy. Built upon the research project “Techno-Social Innovation in the Collaborative Economy,” the study investigates innovative, grassroots economic models that leverage digital technologies for community-driven governance and decentralized value creation.
The book presents a multi-case study approach, featuring organizations such as Tzoumakers, Open Food Network, CoopCycle, and Circles UBI. These cases exemplify how platform cooperativism, cosmolocalism, and open cooperativism redefine traditional business structures, emphasizing sustainability, fairness, and democratic ownership. The discussion extends to blockchain-enabled DAOs and their impact on labor, governance, and wealth distribution.
Through theoretical and empirical insights, The Model of Open Cooperativism bridges political economy and digital innovation, providing practical strategies for policymakers, activists, and scholars. It highlights the success and challenges of grassroots-driven initiatives, offering a roadmap for transitioning toward a commons-based, post-capitalist economy.

For decades, museums have been recognized as spaces for public debate and civic education, where discourses produced through exhibitions and other activities contribute to the construction and legitimation of particular views of society and the world. The research presented in this book stems from a desire to engage in the ongoing debate aimed at rethinking ethnographic museums and their ways of producing representations of others. It seeks to explore new ways and possible solutions, alongside existing ones, to transform these spaces into inclusive environments for the production of knowledge that is as shared, plural, and decolonized as possible.
The focus is on some artifacts belonging to two Brazilian Indigenous populations, but kept and exhibited in two ethnographic museums in Lisbon and Vienna. Specifically, a Kambeba bamboo board for flattening the head of newborn babies, collected by Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira during the Philosophical Journey of 1783–1792 and kept at the Academy of Sciences in Lisbon, and a set of Munduruku feather works collected by the Austrian naturalist Johann Natterer between 1817 and 1835 and kept at the Völkerkundemuseum in Vienna.
By combining historical and ethnographic approaches, the aim is, on one hand, to show the role of objects in producing a specific stereotypical image of Brazilian natives, and, on the other hand, to discuss the presence of Indigenous objects in European museums to bring out different discourses, histories, and categories that have been silenced by colonial power and through which material culture is perceived and contextualized across time and space.

This book is a pioneering work that examines cultural diversity policies in Argentina, Brazil, and Peru over the past 15 years. The book offers a critical analysis of the rationalities and concepts underpinning these policies, exposing their inherent contradictions and the social forces that have both supported and resisted their implementation. By highlighting the struggles of marginalized groups in their pursuit of social, economic, and political equality, it reveals the deep intersections between culture, identity, and power.
The book situates these discussions within the broader context of Latin America’s colonial legacy and ongoing decolonization efforts. It demonstrates how the region’s nation-states, often founded on myths of cultural homogeneity, have grappled with the complex realities of diverse populations. Through detailed case studies, the book showcases how cultural diversity has become a powerful tool for social empowerment, particularly among racialized groups and other marginalized communities. It also offers insights into the evolution of these policies, tracing the ways in which they have responded to grassroots movements and the global discourse on cultural citizenship.
Furthermore, this work contributes to global debates by positioning Latin America as a key player in rethinking cultural policies that promote diversity, justice, and inclusion. It reflects on the lessons learned from observing these policies, urging readers to consider the broader implications for social cohesion and inclusive development. This work not only provides a thorough analysis of Latin America’s unique contributions to cultural policy but also underscores the urgent need for more dynamic, intercultural approaches to address the challenges of the 21st century.

Explores the rise of resurgent Philippine liberalism, its ties to neoliberalism and U.S. influence, and its role in exacerbating inequality and geopolitical tensions, rooted in both contemporary and historical contexts

A resurgent liberalism has become hegemonic in Philippine media and academic discourses, which were for many years characterized by progressive and nationalist perspectives. Resurgent Philippine liberalism (RPL) is defined by its relationships with neoliberalism’s instantiation in the Philippine economy and society and the neoliberal wing of the contemporary Philippine political elite. The transnational positionality of many of its exponents has allowed RPL to converge with and support the priorities of U.S. military, economic, and cultural power, especially since the projection of this power has been cloaked in the progressive rhetoric of “human rights,” “freedom of speech,” “anti-populism,” “anti-disinformation,” and so on. Moreover, RPL intersects with new technologies, forms of social capital, and iterations of dynastic politics, while playing a deleterious role in domestic and global crises that are intensifying inequality and geopolitical conflict. While RPL has arguably been precipitated by current affairs and concomitant anxieties (such as about U.S.–Philippine elite relations in a new multipolar geopolitics), it also has long-term historical roots in the post-Marcos era of elite democracy and further back to the origins of ilustrado liberalism and reformist nationalism in the nineteenth century.
This book makes certain novel theoretical interventions by interrogating the defining assumptions of the liberal critique of Philippine autocracy, which all too often exculpates U.S. imperial power (in both its “hard” and “soft” forms) in sustaining such regimes, rejects more holistic and materialist theories of socio-political change as precipitated by mass-movements of the working-class, and naively proposes Philippine elite liberal politics and/or the Western model of “liberal democracy” as viable alternatives to Philippine authoritarian populism.
In addition to this empirical, real-world analysis, the book is concerned with the ontological, epistemological, and more broadly theoretical dimensions of RPL, as manifested in Philippine academia, journalism, politics, activism, and culture. In its rejection – covert or overt – of formerly pre-eminent materialist theories of social change precipitated by mass movements of working-class people, RPL risks either resuscitating classical liberal methodologies such as the Great Man Theory of History or offering some new techniques for gaining knowledge about culture, politics, and economics. Concomitant problems include RPL’s historiography seeking to rehabilitate controversial historical subjects such as the Spanish and American colonial eras and how modern-day academic RPL has sought to obscure its more illiberal affiliations with U.S. imperialism and its tacit endorsement of the Philippine political status quo by drawing on the intellectual paradigms of “the global theory industry” (Brickhill, 2022) and a dematerialized conception of identity politics that reduces racism and other instruments of oppression to matters of interpersonal misunderstanding, rather than as the structural and material sine qua non of precisely the global liberal capitalism such scholars largely subscribe to. Finally, the authors seek to answer the question, how is RPL enabled and supported by non-Filipino foreign-based intellectuals and media commentators based largely in the United States and Western Europe? And how, further to Caroline Hau’s (2019) reflections, the RPL’s agenda has come to shape the academic study and comprehension of the Philippines in overseas university curricula?

This scholarly monograph looks at a little-researched diaspora, originating on the Greek Aegean Island of Ikaria. Ikaria itself is a small, isolated island, close to the Turkish coast. It has had a long and independent history, with periods of autonomy and self-rule, including the short-lived Free State of Ikaria in 1912, which was the outcome of the Ikarian Revolution against the Ottoman Empire. Ikarians themselves remained quite insular until the nineteenth century, when they began emigrating. Ottoman port-cities and urban centres, as well as nearby Aegean islands, received the first Ikarian emigrants.
Eventually, Ikarians found themselves in growing hubs of migration such as Egypt and the United States. By 1910, the first Ikarians had arrived in Port Pirie, South Australia, beginning a long tradition of Ikarian migration and settlement in the state. This book explores the Ikarians in South Australia between 1900 and 1945 – an under-researched period, and a contrast from most studies on Greeks in Australia, which have focused heavily on the mass migration post-World War II and post-Greek Civil War. This also leaves a gap for a later study on Ikarians in South Australia beyond 1945. The book positions itself around four key themes: emigration, settlement, community building and integration, with ideas such as localism and identity being explored as facets within those themes.

Opportunities to write our memoirs are many and varied. To meet emerging demands, the memoir genre continually is evolving, and it is possible for the memoirist to shape the memoirs, with varying themes, time and settings, to be brought to bear on school education at a senior level and for a range of teacher-development programs. Thus, the developing importance of an accompanying exegesis.
For better or for worse, childhoods shape adult relationships and attachment styles, profoundly shaping who we are as teachers, teaching styles and generally the things we consider important and not so important. The shape of our childhood and adolescence has a profound impact on how relationships are formed in adulthood. It can affect our ability to trust, be vulnerable and create productive bonds, both at school and college and professionally, and also our general levels of motivation.
Through the aforementioned theme and subthemes, my memoirs here reveal how childhood struggle has shaped my approach to teaching and my academic career – from an unskilled labourer from the country working class in the timber industry, deprived of a high school education and recruited into the workforce at 15 years of age, to a senior academic in one of Australia’s G8 universities, holding five PhDs.
With strong historical backgrounding, a special appeal of this book is its drive to place childhood and adolescent events contained in the memoirs in a wider historical context, looking to transnational movements such as discussions on anachronisms and eugenics. In so doing, the exegesis – a fresh and exciting innovation – is in harmony with the memoirs. The memoir is so refashioned as a pedagogical tool.

To show the non-linear nature of social evolution, it is crucially important to discuss cases from different cultural areas and different historical periods, including our time, as well as different levels of overall sociocultural complexity. This anthology includes chapters that explore case studies covering a wide range of societies of the Old and the New World ranging from ancient to modern contexts. Respectively, the chapters are based on different kinds of sources – archaeological, historical, anthropological (ethnographic), and sociological. This analysis of pre-modern and modern societies sheds valuable light on the variety of ways in which social institutions were developing through time and space and of how these institutions may have fostered social evolution. Therefore, this publication may enhance our understanding of social evolution at the world-system, regional, and local-culture levels via the integration of various kinds of evidence within a unified conceptual framework.
Societies are systems composed of a great number of various social institutions. Societies change as a result of emergence, transformation, and interaction of institutions. As systems of social institutions, societies have a fundamental characteristic that can be called a “basic principle of societal organization.” The principle of organization a society embodies depends on the way its institutions are arranged with respect to one another. Two basic principles can be distinguished: heterarchical, at which institutions interact being unranked with respect to one another or can be ranked in different ways, and the opposite principle, homoarchical, at which institutions interact being rigidly ranked in the only way and have no or very limited potential for being unranked or ranked in other ways. Societies of the same level of overall cultural complexity and with the same basic principle of organization can take different specific forms, as alternativeness exists not only between but also within the heterarchical and homoarchical macrogroups of societies. The division of societies into predominantly heterarchical and homoarchical is a constant fact of human sociocultural history. The dichotomy of heterarchy and homoarchy has considerably determined the non-linear and alternative nature of the global sociocultural process.
Transformations in the ways social institutions and their sets, societal subsystems, are ranked (homoarchically or heterarchically) on one hand and changes in the overall sociocultural complexity on the other are two different, largely unrelated processes. Homoarchy and heterarchy are not evolutionary lines: a society can pass from a predominantly heterarchical way of ranking institutions to predominantly homoarchical or vice versa, and can do it both with and without a change in level of complexity. At any level of overall cultural complexity, one can observe both heterarchical and homoarchical societies, because an equal level of complexity (which makes it possible to solve equally difficult problems societies face) can be achieved in various forms on essentially different (though intersecting in the history of many societies and regions) principles of societal organization.

This volume consists of four parts, comprising 15 chapters. It highlights the roles of culture and institutions on economic and social changes. The West is illustrated by the United States, Britain or Canada and the East, by chopstick economies such as China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Part I is the theoretical framework. It contains five chapters. Chapter 1 (Searching for the New Paradigm: Uncertainty and Learning in the Evolutionary Approach) employs the evolutionary perspective to interpret economic and social transformations. Chapter 2 (Culture and Institutions on Economic Transformation) explains the relationship between traditional belief/ideology/religion and culture. The West adopts rule of law while the East, rule by law. In chapter 3 (Quilt and Shame Cultures: Anglosphere versus Chopstick Economies), a Christian nation in Western economies, such as the United States, is identified as a society of guilt while chopstick economies in the East, such as China, are embedded with Confucianism, a society of shame. Cultural difference has implications on social control and educational reform. In chapter 4 (Chinese Legalism and European Mercantilism), contemporary China utilises Confucianism supplemented by Legalism to strengthen the state power. Legalism is akin to European Mercantilism. Chapter 5 (An Imagined Social World in the West and East) highlights the imagined world in the West and East.
Part II presents different cases in entrepreneurship and everyday life creativity. Chapter 6 (Entrepreneurship: Transformative and Adaptive) argues that the United States, due to individualism and self-assertion, brings technological breakthroughs in the world while Asian economies such as China receive training in Confucianism, and provide the world with mainly adaptive entrepreneurs and imitative products. Culture makes a difference in entrepreneurship and hence economic transformation. Chapter 7 (Intellectual Property Protection: The Case of Smartphone) explains the origin of the disputes in U.S.–China intellectual property protection. It is illustrated by Huawei, a learner in technological transfer. Chapter 8 (The ‘New Opium War’: On Supplying Fentanyl) argues that China’s ways of handling the production and consumption of fentanyl contrast sharply with the Western powers. Fentanyl crisis is the New Opium War! Chapter 9 (Electoral versus Authoritarian States: Combating Coronavirus Disease Pandemic) compares pandemic-associated measures in the United States and China. It reveals that culture counts in tackling global responses to infectious diseases. Chapter 10 (If Shakespeare Is the West, then Jin Yong is the East) compares the works of Shakespeare and Jin Yong. Shakespeare works focus on individualism and self-reliance while Yin Yong works stress on familism and patriotism.
Part III highlights the impacts of culture on Chinese economies. Chapter 11 (A Winning Tactic? Social Construction of Peasanty in Socialist China) explains how Mao Zedong turned Chinese peasanty, if not serfs, into a winning game for his party. Peasanty were ‘oppressed’ by their landlords. After painbearers cried out their suffering and killed the landlords, they could stand up again. They supported the Chinese Communist Party instead of the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang). Chapter 12 (Culture, Nationalism and Wolf Warrior Diplomacy) argues that foreign policy reflects culture and history. China’s wolf warrior diplomacy traces its roots back to culture. Chapter 13 (Impacts on Taiwan: Sharing the Same Culture versus Different Social Identity) examines whether the same culture will entail different impacts on Taiwan’s politics. It also explores whether different social identities affect Taiwan’s political affairs and economic transformation. To further reveal the impacts of cultural differences on policy change, the authors use Hong Kong as a case study (Chapter 14: British Hong Kong versus post-1997 Hong Kong). They examine if British ruling (representing Western culture) entails any impact on the economy and society in Hong Kong (now a Chinese city). Chapter 15 (Western Culture in Hong Kong: Hong Rengan and Ho Tung) explains and illustrates how Hong Rengan (Taiping Heavenly Kingdom) and Ho Tung (a member of Hong Kong Legislative Council) absorb Western knowledge in Hong Kong. Deeply embedded with Chinese culture, Hong could not help the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to establish a real republic in China. Ho’s flexibility and dual identities helped him work comfortably in Hong Kong, thus setting up a pre-condition for Hong Kong to move into a global financial centre.

The enduring influence of Saint Laurent’s designs in modern fashion is undeniable. Concepts introduced by Saint Laurent, like the tuxedo jacket for women and the sheer blouse and dress, have become staples in contemporary fashion, transcending their origins to become symbols of power, elegance and sexuality. His ability to anticipate and articulate the needs and desires of the modern woman has left a lasting blueprint for how fashion interacts with social change and individual identity. Moreover, even after his death at 71 in 2008, Saint Laurent’s integration of art and fashion continues to inspire current designers, seen in the ongoing collaborations between high fashion and contemporary artists.
Saint Laurent was above all an artist of synthesis, of agglomeration and reshaping, of conglomeration and adaptation. His work is a fusion of the tactile and aesthetic with fancy and supposition – for his interiors are not what were but could have been, a projection of imagination and personality. It is a straddling of two separate worlds, which is crucial to fashion. His significance is in making this explicit.

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.

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.

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.

Gabrielle Appleby is a professor of constitutional law at the UNSW Faculty of Law & Justice and is currently a Professorial Research Fellow at the Pro Vice Chancellor Society at UNSW (Sydney). She researches and teaches in public law, with her areas of expertise including the role, powers and accountability of the Executive; parliamentary law and practice; the role of government lawyers; the integrity of the judicial branch; and First Nations constitutional recognition. She is the Director of The Judiciary Project at the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law, the constitutional consultant to the Clerk of the Australian House of Representatives and a member of the Indigenous Law Centre. Gabrielle was the founding editor of Australia’s national public law blog, AUSPUBLAW (www.auspublaw.org). In 2015–2018, Gabrielle was a Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project, Law, Order and Federalism, looking at the effects of the High Court’s chapter III jurisprudence on State government law and order policy development. In 2016–2017, she worked as a pro bono constitutional adviser to the Regional Dialogues and the First Nations Constitutional Convention that led to the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Her books include Australian Public Law (4th ed., 2024); The Judge, The Judiciary and the Court: Individual, Collegial and Institutional Judicial Dynamics in Australia (2021); Judicial Federalism in Australia (2021); The Role of the Solicitor-General: Negotiating Law, Politics and the Public Interest (2016); The Critical Judgments Project: Re-reading Monis v The Queen (2016); and The Tim Carmody Affair (2016). Gabrielle has also spent time working for the Queensland Crown Solicitor and the Victorian Government Solicitor’s Office.
Megan Davis is the Pro Vice-Chancellor Society (PVCS) at UNSW Sydney and a UNSW Scientia Professor. She holds the Balnaves Chair in Constitutional Law and the Whitlam Fraser Harvard Chair in Australian Studies at Harvard University and is a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. She has also been appointed a Penn Carey Law Bok Visiting International Professor, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School (Penn Carey Law). Professor Davis is a renowned constitutional lawyer and public law expert, specialising on Indigenous peoples and the law, the constitutional recognition of First Nations and democracy. Professor Davis is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is an Acting Commissioner of the NSW Land and Environment Court. She has been the leading Australian lawyer on constitutional recognition of First Nations peoples for two decades and designed the Referendum Council’s deliberative process that led to the Uluru Statement from the Heart. From 2022 to 2023, she served on the Referendum Working Group, the Referendum Engagement Group and the Attorney General’s Constitutional Expert Group. She was a member of the Prime Minister’s Referendum Council (2015–2017) and the Prime Minister’s Expert Panel on the Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in the Constitution (2011–2012). She is the Co-Chair of the Uluru Dialogue – the group of First Nations leaders who led the Uluru Statement from the Heart work. Professor Davis was a Commissioner on the QLD Commission of Inquiry into Youth Detention Centres in 2016, and was the Chair and author of ‘Family is Culture’, an inquiry into NSW Aboriginal Children in Out of Home care (2017–2019). She is a globally recognised expert in Indigenous peoples legal rights and was elected by the UN Economic and Social Council as an expert member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (2011–2016). Professor Davis was also appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council to the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous peoples twice (2017–2022). Professor Davis is a Sydney Peace Prize Laureate for the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart and was awarded a 2024 PeaceWomen Award by the Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom (WILPF). In 2023, Professor Davis was named on TIME Magazine’s TIME NEXT100 list of the Next Generation of Global leaders. She was also named Marie Claire ‘Powerhouse of the Year’ in 2023. She is a previous Overall Winner of the AFR Women of Influence (now AFR Women of Leadership) awards in 2018 and was previously named on the AFR Annual Cultural Power list and AFR’s Australia’s top 5 Legal Powerbrokers list.

This is the first republication of Rheta Childe Dorr’s book Inside the Russian Revolution (1917), accompanied by the editor’s research introduction and comments. Dorr (1866–1948) was a leading suffragette from Nebraska, studied at the University of Nebraska, before moving to New York as a journalist and first editor of The Suffragette. Living on the lower East Side, she became a socialist. She visited Russia during the first Russian revolution (1905–1907) and later covered the February Revolution of 1917 for the New York Evening Mail.
Her book Inside the Russian Revolution (1917) depicts the overthrow of the tsar as a positive, democratic move with hope of a Russia following the American path to constitutional democracy. The evolution of revolutionary Russia from February to October changed not only Dorr’s perception of the Russian revolution as a phenomenon but her vision of socialism as well. In this sense, she was among the American radicals who contributed to American phenomenology of the 1917 Russian revolution but were not satisfied with its results. Being a prominent figure in the U.S. political and social life of her time, Rheta Dorr expanded the horizons of the Americans’ identity.
Dorr is also known for other publications. In 1922, she assisted Anna Vyrubova, a lady-in-waiting, the best friend and the confidante of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, with the writing of Vyrubova’s memoir, My Memories of the Russian Court. Thereafter, Dorr wrote her own memoir, A Woman of Fifty, published in 1924. Dorr moved from her autobiography to a biography of Susan B. Anthony, published in 1928, and completed her publishing activity in 1929 with a tome on the question of prohibition.

Explores the rise of the “gig public” in the age of performative publicness, highlighting challenges in sustaining meaningful discourse, the impact of new technologies and AI on public engagement, and the emergence of the will to visibility within the context of capitalism and algorithmic governmentality.

This monograph explores the evolving nature of publicness in the era of digital communication and social media saturation, arguing that the rise of the “gig public” represents a new paradigm that challenges the traditional conceptualization of the public in shaping social and political change. The gig public departs from traditional notions of publicness and the public, characterized by individuals’ spontaneous and less-structured engagement in public discourse. This engagement is often hampered by challenges in fostering sustained interaction and depth of discussion, due to the ephemeral nature of online interactions.
In particular, this monograph highlights the importance of customs, negotiations, and contracts that complement the normatively privileged public reasoning in public domains. It examines the transformations in the multifaceted nature of the public and its interrelationship with other social structures amid the shifting boundaries between public and private domains. In addition, it explores the evolution of conceptualizations of publicness and related concepts within critical theory, illustrating how contemporary shifts are redefining civic engagement and the essence of public life in a rapidly changing world. From these perspectives, the study is structured around three primary focal points: First, it analyzes how new information technologies and AI have altered human interactions within the public sphere. Second, it examines the impact of capitalist economic dynamics and governmentality strategies on reshaping the public realm, fundamentally altering the essence of the public and its democratic potential. Third, it explores how habitual and routine practices traditionally associated with the private sphere are now influencing the ongoing evolution of publicness.
The monograph aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the challenges posed by the fragmentation of contemporary public discourse and the emergence of gig publics. It also considers strategies to invigorate publicness through AI technology that enables users to transform plain language into automated actions on their computers, potentially reshaping civic engagement in the digital age.

In a little over twenty years, New York–-based fashion designer Thome Browne has decisively and permanently changed the fashion industry. Through his clothes that are rooted in America’s distinctive preppie style, he has challenged age-old conventions of tailoring by altering proportions and blurring gender boundaries. The cropped trouser, which has become a staple of people’s wardrobes around the world, owes much to Browne’s pioneering reinterpretation of the suit. Through highly choreographed catwalk shows, he has enlivened the presentation of fashion, creating soulful spectacles that variously critique and cherish common themes in human lives.
Browne’s influence within the fashion industry has been recognised through various awards. The Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) has named him ‘Menswear Designer of the Year’ on three occasions, in 2006, 2013, and 2016. Since 2023, Browne has served as the CFDA’s Chair. In May 2023, Browne dressed nine celebrities to honour Karl Lagerfeld at the annual gala hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
This book considers Browne’s position as a fashion auteur by focusing on four collections that enable detailed consideration of his innovative clothing designs and catwalk presentations, situating them within their historical and social context and drawing out what makes them distinctive and influential.

What did Australians read? This book answers this question in terms of books rather than newspapers and considers the long nineteenth century, interpreted as running from 1788 to 1901. In the wake of this primary question, several others arise: how did Australians acquire the books they read, and how did readers in the outback overcome the handicaps of distance and remoteness? Did they read for pleasure, instruction, self-edification, or spiritual sustenance? More importantly, how did Australian readers respond to the books they read? The evidence is drawn from autobiographical sources, in which individual readers related their personal reading experiences and responses.
At the same time, the book pursues a second and related question: What did Australians write? Reference is made here not to the kind of writing we know as ‘literature’, but to the non-literary writing which cultural historians call ‘ordinary writings’. These are the writings of everyday life, represented in this book by diaries, journals, hand-written newspapers and correspondence. The focus is wide enough to include the everyday cultural practices of people of low social status and little education. The writing practices of the partially literate, including writing delegated to a third party, have their place here.
In this double investigation, the book draws on evidence from a cohort of 101 nineteenth-century readers and writers. They are a heterogeneous group of autobiographers, coming from Melbourne and Sydney to rural Queensland and Western Australia. They come from the city and the bush, from coastal towns and the interior, from sheep stations, gold diggings and city offices. They show us the perennial importance of Shakespeare and the Bible, the popularity of the English canon, the prestige of poetry and the importance of religious reading. Books held the Empire together but, as they travelled, their meanings changed according to the local cultural environment. This book registers such nuances in the Australian context. The writing of this group is represented by some prolific diarists and correspondents. In the late-nineteenth century, the eastern colonies became world leaders in sending letters. The postal environment which made this possible is also examined.

This book looks at Australian newspapers over the half century following the introduction of television in 1956. Through a quantitative study, it illuminates how the nature of news has changed and how central journalistic practices have developed. It examines newspapers’ changing size and structure, their story priorities, their use of visual aids and interpretive frames, their changing range and treatment of sources, and how these changes affected their political and international coverage.
The content analysis shows a dominant theme of growth and improvement. Newspapers offered their readers much more at the end of the half century than at the beginning. The much larger volume of news was presented in more visually attractive and reader-friendly ways than before. News agendas expanded in response both to changing reader interests and a changing political environment. Newspapers had a more active orientation towards using a wider range of sources. All papers shared in the major trends but to varying degrees so that by the end of the period there were sharper differences between the papers than at the beginning.
Mapping the multi-dimensional nature of change in this pivotal period lays a groundwork for analysing the changing nature of journalism during the existential crisis that news organisations are now facing during the digital age.

This book illustrates how different forces shape ideas, knowledge traditions, policies, processes, institutions and everyday lives to domesticate both people and the planet in pursuit of profit. It examines the myriad ways in which contemporary ruling and non-ruling elites influence politics, culture, economy and religion and shape our daily interactions, emphasising their impact on individuals, families, communities, democratic praxis, societal structures and nature. The book portrays power structures that are skewed in a manner that marginalises many while upholding the interests of a few. It depicts numerous contradictions inherent in capitalism and the state, while also presenting alternative ideas drawn from the everyday experiences of working people.
State and capitalism territorialise and deterritorialise lives and livelihoods. It destabilises social, cultural and economic relationships. Everyday crises are manufactured, and conflicts are designed to divert the masses from exploring alternatives to capitalism. This strategy aims to maintain the status quo by ensuring that attention and resources are consistently focused on the accumulation of wealth and prosperity for a few, thereby preventing widespread consideration of alternative and egalitarian systems and processes for mass welfare.

Practicing journalism is dangerous. Until the wars in Ukraine and Gaza broke out, Mexico continued to rank as the deadliest locale for reporters, with too many other countries close behind, including Afghanistan, Syria, India, and the Philippines. More journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 2023 than during the entirety of World War II and the numbers of journalists killed, injured, or exiled from both Russia and Ukraine since the Russian invasion in 2021 continues to grow.
The University of Oregon staged the “Extra! Extra! Refugee Journalists become the Story—Migrating to Stay Alive” conference in April 2024 with expert guest speakers: refugee journalists, academic experts, and others who specialize in exiled journalist issues and threats to journalists and free expression.
The symposium brought Mexican refugee journalists in exile to the University of Oregon campus for keynote speeches followed by workshops with other experts in the fields of freedom of expression and threats to journalists. These workshops led to student field work during the conference dates, work regarding how the crises examined during the conference impact tools used by immigrants to obtain news from their countries of origin.
The material generated during the symposium plus ancillary reportage fuels the critical stories and conclusions told in the book Don’t Shoot the Journalists.

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.

This collection of essays delves into the central human problem of interpersonal violence, proposing nonviolence as a powerful antidote. Drawing from the author’s personal experiences, philosophical reflections, and scholarly work over the past two decades, the book offers a multifaceted exploration of nonviolence through ethical, spiritual, and practical lenses. Beginning with the author’s early pacifism shaped by the violence of the 1980s and the post-9/11 world, the essays provide insights into the complexities of practicing nonviolence in a violent society.

The book examines various aspects of nonviolence, including the ethical foundations rooted in love and morality, the influence of spirituality and disciplined practice on peacemaking, and the practical challenges of nonviolent parenting. It engages with critical theories of violence, critiques deterministic views of human aggression, and explores the role of somaesthetics and body consciousness in cultivating a nonviolent ethos. The essays also tackle the philosophical underpinnings of political nonviolence, from pacifism and nonresistance to pragmatic approaches that challenge traditional definitions of success in conflict.

Through an interdisciplinary approach, the book weaves together historical analysis, philosophical discourse, and personal narrative to present nonviolence as more than an ideal but as a practical guide for living. It highlights the importance of virtues such as kindness, empathy, and respect, drawing on the works of influential figures such as Gandhi, King, and Nhat Hanh. Ultimately, this collection seeks to inspire readers to consider nonviolence not merely as an ethical stance but as a transformative way of being in the world, offering hope for a less violent future.

The book seeks to provide the general reader, student, and academic specialist a detailed examination of the Fascist and broader extreme right-wing community in Great Britain during the interwar years. Fascist groups began to form and grow during the 1920s, but became a more visible component of Britain’s political turmoil during the 1930s. The largest and most visible group was the British Union of Fascists (BUF; 1932–1940) led by Sir Oswald Mosley, called by some the “British Hitler.” The extreme right wing in Britain was, however, a larger political tendency than merely Mosley’s BUF. It included several explicitly Fascist groups, racial purity groups, a group of large press outlets, numerous high-profile individuals, and several sitting Conservative politicians. The BUF did not seriously run candidates in the 1935 elections and hence did not see any of its members elected to Parliament. But it was far from irrelevant. Members of the British far right led vocal campaigns in support of the continental dictatorships, for the extermination of Marxism, for the massive rearmament of the country, and for the modernizing and re-building of Britain as a Great Power. As such, the extreme right was a vocal and visible part of Britain’s political discourse of the time.

The book will operate on two levels, making it meaningful to multiple audiences. First, the book will provide a basic narrative description of the British Fascist movement and its various offshoots. This will include the principal organizations, key individuals, the essential components of its political ideology, and the events which saw the movement grow, decline, and then virtually disappear under government suppression and public outrage. Any interested general reader of modern history will be able to gain a basic understanding of the movement, its ideology, and its trajectory. It should thus be able to stand alone as a useful basic survey.

Second, the book puts forward an academic thesis and is based upon original, archival research. The chapters dissect the various components of the extreme right political program, and in each case identifies problematic contradictions. The far right routinely insisted that it alone had the modern, rational, and realistic answers for the new problems of the modern world. However, as will be explained in each case, the far-right program was riven with cross-purposes and ideological contradictions. Zander’s approach is to examine the extreme right by organizing its program into their three most urgent policy pre-occupations: Modernization, Empire, and War. By dissecting the extreme right agenda this way, each area of their political agenda reveals itself to have been seriously flawed with contradictory policies, means that did not match objectives, simple irrationality, and blatant immorality. In the final analysis, the principal academic thesis of the book concern the far right’s dream to return Britain to its earlier position of global economic, political, and cultural leadership, while employing a set of policies and means that would accomplish much the opposite – to, in fact, disengage it from the world and make Britain an insulated national fortress.

The last few years have seen a renewal of the extreme right wing as a political force, particularly in Europe and the United States. Several of the ideological components and policy priorities of Britain’s far right in the interwar years are quite similar to the extreme right movements of today. By examining the historical development of the far right of the time, perhaps some light may be shed on the resurgence of the far right today.

Chapter One, “Extracting the Essence: Toward Machine Translation of Literature,” rashly inquires whether artificial intelligence (AI) and machine translation (MT) may 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 aesthetic judgments. Computers, however, presently remain incapable of such accuracy, abstraction, and judgment. We revisit these shortfalls in light of developments in MT and AI. We tease apart several separable aspects of literary translation – literal meaning, meter, rhyme, and the abovementioned associative elements – with reference to arguments about Vladimir Nabokov’s hyperliteral translation of Pushkin’s poem Eugene Onegin. We accordingly propose analysis of 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 discuss several avenues for improvement in MT which may help to extract these aspects of a text’s essence – first, those which may enhance textually grounded MT (i.e., MT trained on text only), leading to delivery of high-quality literal translations; and second, those related to future 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 suggest that recognition of perceptually grounded categories will prove central to the essence extraction sought by translators. As this categorization improves, MT should increasingly support literary, and thus cultural, preservation. However, artificial aesthetic judgments will await artificial emotion.
• Chapter Two, going beyond Chapter One’s lookahead toward artificial translation of literature, asks whether an AI might eventually gain the ability to actually create works of literary art. We again take as exemplar the hyperconscious art of 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 hyperconscious 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 consider several such techniques, speculating about the extent to which current or coming AI capabilities could approach them. In Section One, 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 Section Two, I apply to Nabokov’s prodigious work my understanding of these aspects of mind. Subsections focus on self-awareness, perception, memory, and puzzles.
• In Chapter Three, focus is upon the recent successes of generative AI – of large language models (LLMs) for text and diffusion models for images and videos. These are yielding an explosion in AI capabilities, many of them “emergent,” meaning “largely unexplained.” I speculate about the underlying knowledge and procedures acquired through the current methods and their likely successors, with focus on linguistic skills and the implications for artificial translation and literary composition. The chapter proposes original definitions of intelligence, language, and other crucial elements of cognition and culminates in an assortment of striking demos.

Good Trouble will show the strong connection between the Black Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the Catholic Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland – specifically the influence of the Montgomery to Selma march on the 1969 Belfast to Derry march through oral history, based on numerous interviews of events leading up to both marches and afterwards. This is close to the author’s heart as both of his parents marched to integrate lunch counters and movie theatres in Salisbury, North Carolina, in 1963 as college students. His mother was at the 1963 March to Washington where Martin Luther King gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.
Award winning author Julieann Campbell (On Bloody Sunday) wrote the introduction for Good Trouble, looking back at her times growing up in Derry, in the heart of the Catholic Civil Rights Movement. Jones travelled to Dublin, Belfast and Derry to conduct interviews for the book. In all, he did fifteen interviews with people who were involved in the movement in Northern Ireland (including Billy McVeigh – featured in the BAFTA winning documentary, Once Upon A Time In Northern Ireland) and in the United States (including Richard Smiley and Dr. Sheyann Webb-Christburg – both were at Bloody Sunday in Alabama and on the Selma to Montgomery march among others). Jones was also able to talk with Eamonn McCann (he took part in the Belfast to Derry march in 1969; he was the John Lewis of Northern Ireland).
Unlike most books on Northern Ireland, this goes into detail about the connection and the influence between the two movements. Also, most focus on Bloody Sunday and not the pivotal incidents at Burntollet Bridge and the Battle of the Bogside. Building off of unprecedented access and interviews with participants in both movements, Jones crafts a gripping and moving account of these pivotal years for both countries.

Hidden Heroes offers a rare and intimate glimpse into the lives of ordinary North Koreans through a collection of short stories by renowned DPRK authors. Spanning from the 1980s to the present, these works explore the theme of the “hidden hero,” a popular moniker in the DPRK to describe the average citizen who navigates the complexities of daily life with quiet dedication for their work and country.
The anthology is divided into three thematic sections—Identities, Communities, and Power—showcasing a diverse array of characters and settings. Readers will encounter factory managers juggling work and family responsibilities, neighbors bonding during friendly outings, university deans resisting corruption, and diasporic Koreans in Japan grappling with questions of belonging. Through these relatable human experiences, the stories challenge simplistic notions of North Korean society and reveal a more nuanced reality.
While elements of propaganda and state ideology are present, as is typical in all officially sanctioned DPRK literature, the focus in the text is rather on the personal struggles, relationships, and aspirations of the characters. By highlighting these universal themes, Hidden Heroes invites readers to look beyond geopolitical tensions and connect with the shared humanity of North Koreans. For anyone seeking to expand their understanding of this often-misunderstood country, this anthology provides an engaging and thought-provoking literary journey into the everyday lives of North Korean citizens.

If neo-Victorianism is, as Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn remark, ‘more than historical fiction set in the nineteenth century’, then it is because it ‘must in some respect be self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians’ while keeping in mind the ethical, metafictional and metacritical parameters in ‘acts of (readerly/writerly) appropriation’ in the metafictional mode. They acknowledge the initial definition had to be aware of ‘metafictional and metahistorical concern with the process of narrating/re-imagining/re-visioning histories, and had to be self-conscious about its own position as literary or filmic reconstruction’ but now they are alert to the global, ongoing ‘discourse around nostalgia, heritage and cultural memory’ in other parts of the long-nineteenth century world as portrayed in neo-Victorian narratives. Neo-Victorian Lesbians on Screen argues the portrayal on screen of lesbians situated in the long nineteenth century across various countries is at the very least a dual task; the imperative project of revoicing lesbian silence and female companionship is complicated by the lack of and/or complex representation of such women in the past. The adaptations, with varying degrees of success, carefully manipulate the gaze of the viewer to illustrate both how crucial the act of looking proves to be for lesbian attachment in these films and how the viewer’s own gaze changes the way the lesbian is represented. Texts, subtexts and intertextualities help elucidate the memories and sexualities of the various women. Men – in their silence, abuse, misunderstanding or love – relate to the women with a lack of social roadmap to govern their responses. Maier and Friars consider the adaptations’ awareness of the audience and the ways in which the films implicitly acknowledge the stakes behind bringing the lesbian to life, as it were, in visual media. Because screen adaptations disrupt historical distance by literally picturing Victorian subjects via a medium they did not have, films of novels as well as biofictions, and new narratives are challenged by the lesbian subject’s vivid presence on screen. The lesbian is no longer a contained (neo)Victorian presence in the ‘othered’ nineteenth century, but her very existence on screen signals her effervescent modernity, which filmmakers alternately embrace or reject.

• This book reviews changes in attitudes towards immigrants in Britain and the language that was used to put these feelings into words between 1921 and 2021. It analyses in what context attitudes were articulated and where they came from. To determine what was specifically British, it makes international comparisons.
• It applies a historical and linguistic method for an analysis of so far relatively unused primary sources. It also explores secondary resources and, to provisde context, engages with the existing literature that deals with immigration but is not focused on attitudes or not always covers the entire period after 1921, and links post-1921 developments to what was set in motion before 1921 to sketch a long history that runs into the present.
• The linguistic historical approach applied in this book brings it all together for the first time. It discovers when and how attitudes to immigrants in Britain changed after 1921, where they originated and what language was used to voice these attitudes, in particular specific words, their meanings, the under- or overtones they bore, and what people meant or felt when they used them.

Series are everywhere, unfolding before our eyes like unseen, self-writing lines in all external and internal directions. Or as Clarice Lispector says, “What I’m writing to you is a ‘this’. It won’t stop: it goes on . . .” (Agua Viva). From the vast manifest universe to the invisible center of oneself and beyond, there is nothing that is not, in a whole series of senses, the series of itself. As every number is expressible as a series of numbers, so one sees that seriality, once defined by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as “simultaneous unity and multiplicity,” belongs at every scale to the essence of everything.

Following this idea of the series as a fundamental feature of reality, The Seriality of the One investigates its metaphysical, ontological, and existential significance in dialogue with an open constellation of modern and premodern authors, giving special attention to the way seriality mediates and measures the relation between the individual and the universal, bridging by ellipsis the unbounded interpenetrating unities of the one and the One. Seen through the ongoing perspective of the series, beings, events, and facts are never discrete and definable identities that can ever be counted or discounted as having greater or lesser importance or status than others. Nothing is merely itself or a part of something else. In the infinity mirror of seriality, all are simultaneously equivalent to all or the totality itself.

The implications and parameters of this insight are here explored in five chapters focused on the categories of quality and quantity. First, through a counter-reading of a passage from Aristotle’s Metaphysics in which the primacy of substance is established in relation to the specter of a universe of mere succession, seriality is identified as the overflowing unity of one and many. Second, in light of the serial basis of counting and Nietzsche’s critique of enumeration, the nature of quantification is examined as a pervasive limitation of our times, the instrument of a “transparency” that works to obfuscate actuality. Third, paralleling Hegel’s prioritization of quality over quantity, the nature of quality is interrogated as the spiritual core of life’s spontaneous and infinitely evolving question of itself. Fourth, elaborating upon Meher Baba’s figuration of seriality as the interface of reality and illusion, the concept of seriality is examined in its simplicity as the way of moving beyond the opposition or dialectical oscillation between quality and quantity. Last, drawing on the geometric metaphor of divine vision in Dante’s Paradiso, the principle of measure is explicated in order to articulate the poetic and creative nature of seriality as process or activity, this immeasurable reality’s never-ending reckoning of its own indivisibility.

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

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

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

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

Women poets of the late Victorian period created much fascinating verse from the standpoint of the independent and advanced New Woman, a profoundly important figure with her iconoclastic perceptions of public and private matters. The New Woman sought to improve women’s lives on a variety of fronts, bringing this individual both approbation and disdain. This anthology features a broad range of crucial subjects addressed by these poets, including marriage, motherhood, female desire, and social problems.
Although the iconoclastic New Women have garnered much interest in recent decades, relatively little attention has been devoted to the valuable poetry these authors produced. Many of the New Woman poets are barely known today, if at all, but their writings offer an exceptional lens onto contemporary conditions that provide inestimable value for Victorian studies. Although much of the work has languished in obscurity, this expansive anthology brings the fascinating poetry to the fore.
This volume provides an invaluable aid by uncovering poetry that has been long neglected or infrequently explored. Several of the poets developed extensive oeuvres investigating matters of special interest at the fin de siècle. It is not an easy task in the twenty-first century to identify, obtain, and review the nineteenth-century books containing these poems. This anthology provides a ready resource to access the poetry, which has had limited exposure in other modern collections.

This book has approached the question of natural resources in Africa from a different perspective. It makes the argument that natural resources in Africa can be utilised to reclaim its economic sovereignty which is central to the economic development and industrialisation of the continent. In making this argument, the book acknowledges that African countries have political control (de jure sovereignty) over natural resources in their respective territories, but most of them have little control over what happens to these resources (de facto sovereignty) once an extractive licence is issued. This is evident in the fact that the bulk of primary commodities in Africa are shipped out of the continent in raw or semi-processed form, with most African states having no say over what happens to these natural resources once they are extracted. This is mainly because most countries have low productive capabilities to transform the abundant natural resources into final consumer and capital goods. As a consequence of low productive capabilities, most African countries have no option (no margin of discretion or autonomy) but to sell their primary commodities in raw or semi-processed form, leading to the now famous situation of ‘commodity trap’.

The lack of freedom (autonomy) to choose what happens to natural resources extracted from the continent is an indication of the weak economic sovereignty. Although the primary commodity companies that operate across the continent obtain licences and pay royalties and other taxes levied for extracting natural resources, African states have no say after primary commodities are extracted partly because the bulk of primary resources extracted leave the continent and get processed into final and intermediate goods elsewhere. As long as the processes of adding value to primary commodities take place outside of the continent, African countries have no control and role to play in the process of adding value. This is the main cause of weak economic sovereignty because the most powerful process (transforming natural resources into final and intermediate goods and services) occurs outside, beyond the continent’s reach. As the book illustrates, it is the capacity to transform primary resources into goods and services needed in society that strengthens a country’s economic sovereignty and ultimately strengthens its political sovereignty and influence.

Drawing from a natural resource-based industrialisation perspective, the book offers suggestions on how African countries can use their rich natural resources to strengthen their economic sovereignty, arguing that natural resources constitute the foundation for building sustainable and inclusive economies on the continent. The book argues that the key to strengthening economic sovereignty (which includes financial and monetary sovereignty) is building strong and diversified productive capabilities, because this enables a country to enlarge its economic options and alternatives, which in turn increases its economic sovereignty. Building of regional value chains (RVCs) capitalising on the African Continental Free Trade Agreement offers a new opportunity for the continent to strengthen its economic sovereignty by building diverse productive capabilities.

The Australian democratic system has long been regarded as one of the most stable and predictable in the world, with an entrenched two-party duopoly, compulsory voting ensuring high levels of electoral participation and relatively high levels of satisfaction with the democratic process. Yet the ways Australians engage with, and participate in, their democracy have shifted substantially in recent times. While a record proportion of Australians are now on the electoral roll, less than 1% belong to a political party, and the share of Australians that have always voted for the same party in Federal elections has declined from 72% in 1967 to 37% in 2022. Turnout in the 2022 Federal Election fell below 90% for the first time since the introduction of compulsory voting in 1924. Over 50% of voters cast their ballots early in 2022, up from around 10% in 2004. The advent of social media has afforded Australians a range of opportunities for political engagement but has also given rise to serious concerns surrounding the dissemination of misinformation. And Australians have also recently been afforded several historically rare opportunities for direct participation in the lawmaking process – particularly, the 2017 same-sex marriage plebiscite and the 2023 referendum on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament.
These developments give rise to a wide range of deep, difficult questions for Australian democracy, many of which have been under-explored. What, for instance, does the failure of the referendum on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament mean for Australian democracy? What sorts of opportunities ought to be afforded to Australians for direct participation in government? How might climate change impact Australian democracy in the coming decades? How might the rise in early voting impact the character of Australian democracy? What opportunities do Australians have for engagement in civic life, and what obstacles do they face in exercising them?
This edited collection brings together specialists in the democratic process to consider such questions, alongside many others. Moreover, the collection is uniquely interdisciplinary, insofar as the contributors are drawn from a diverse range of fields – law, philosophy, political science and sociology. The chapters each help bring us a broader understanding of civic participation in Australian democracy, in order that we might evaluate the status quo, and gauge where it might be headed, in the future.

This book addresses the role of investment arbitrators within the framework of international investment law, a system that tends by design to prioritise the interests of foreign investors, often at the expense of the economic and social policies of the host states. The theoretical foundations of this volume are doctrinal, and the argument presented is aimed at contributing to the scholarly debate on the reform of the system of investment law. Because of this, the book is particularly focussed on the scholarship and is aimed at an audience already familiar with the system of investment arbitration and its case-law. The author explores both the explicit and implicit duties of arbitrators and critically questions certain critiques of investment law that call for arbitrators to interpret bilateral investment treaties and free trade agreements in ways that also protect the host states’ interests. While the author argues that challenges to the legitimacy and credibility of the current investment law regime are well-founded, he also argues that arbitrators find themselves constrained by the prevailing legal framework, unable to fully balance the competing interests of foreign investors and host states. The book concludes that achieving greater equality in the investment legal regime necessitates a departure from the existing bilateral investment treaties paradigm and calls for a more just and balanced system of investment treaties. The author argues that, until such a transformation occurs, arbitrators remain compelled to apply the current applicable law, highlighting the insurmountable limitations and tensions within the present system.

The approach of examining law through comics and other forms of popular culture has gained significant traction recently. The portrayal of phenomena in comics, TV series and movies reflects and shapes public perception, embedding these views in collective imagination. Popular culture, which mirrors and influences mainstream trends, plays a crucial role in how legal phenomena and figures – such as professors, students, lawyers, judges and police – are perceived by the public.
Comics are particularly effective in this context due to their popularity and imaginative nature. Legal reasoning itself often involves imaginative thinking, as illustrated by Justice Felix Frankfurter's advice to a young aspiring lawyer in 1954. He emphasised the importance of cultivating imagination through various forms of art, suggesting that engaging with pop culture can enrich legal understanding.
This collection seeks to utilise pop culture, specifically comics, to explain and teach complex legal concepts. This approach has been explored in fields such as law and film, and law and literature, but this book aims to be innovative by adopting a comparative and international approach.
By including scholars from diverse backgrounds and extending beyond Anglo-American perspectives, this book aims to provide a richer, more varied analysis of how law is depicted in graphic novels, manga and animated series, thereby filling an important gap in the literature.

This collection of articles by an international group of leading experts has its special focus on the relevance of Karl Jaspers’s philosophy for the social sciences. It also includes classical evaluations of Jaspers’s thinking by renowned authors Talcott Parsons and Jürgen Habermas. Several chapters are devoted to the relationship between Jaspers and his teacher (Max Weber), his famous student (Hannah Arendt) and crucial figures in his intellectual world (Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel). Others deal with his relevance for disciplines from psychiatry to the study of religion and the historico-sociological research about the Axial Age, a term coined by Jaspers. In his introduction, editor Hans Joas tries to systematise Jaspers’s relevance for the contemporary social sciences and to explain why Parsons had called him a ‘social scientist’s philosopher’.

The contributions to this volume deal, on one hand, with thematic areas for which Jaspers’s work has been crucial: the Axial Age debate, a non-theological and non-reductive theory of religion; the understanding of psychoanalysis and psychiatry; and the possibilities of a diagnosis of one’s own age. On the other hand, they put Jaspers in contrast with Max Weber, Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel and Hannah Arendt. The volume also contains important chapters by Talcott Parsons, who called Jaspers ‘a social scientist’s philosopher’, and by Jürgen Habermas, who contrasts his own views on the role of communicative ethics in an age of religious pluralism with those of Jaspers.

The book promises to become an indispensable source in the re-evaluation of Jaspers’s thinking in the years to come.

Does this sound familiar? You go to work like any other day. This time when you arrive at work, you are told to go to a meeting. During the meeting, you are given new guidelines sent down from the organization. You are told that while you are doing your job like every other routine day, you are now asked to do some new task or business process/function. The request does not make sense to you. You decide to ask the all-important question “why?” The response you receive is the common one: “It has come down from the top that this is the new course of action and must get done.” There is no more explanation. There is no justification. There is no discussion. There is no responsibility of reason.

Too often, decisions are made within all levels of an organization and are then blindly communicated out to the masses. While the organization allows people to have a voice and share what will be done, there is a lack of responsibility of reason for what is being asked that will directly impact the person and the entire organization. While having communication and shared voice is a critical component within organizational behavior, it is equally important to understand the importance of what is being said, how it is being said, and the impact the words you say will have on the individual and the company.

To be successful, there must be a value of voice and a responsibility of reason to create and sustain shared leadership and an effective organizational behavior model for all companies. Leaders rely on past philosophies based on their leadership styles to guide them to success. However, all leadership types will face the same universal issue of being responsible for their actions and decisions while ensuring that others are also responsible for their reasons in sharing their voice or performing a function in the organization. History has demonstrated that most businesses, specifically small businesses that make up most of the market, fail within the first five years. In most cases, this situation is due to a lack of resources, understanding, and a value of voice and no responsibility of reason. Through the course of this book, the reader will learn how to successfully structure their business to combine management skills that will affect their business and a shared voice to effectively answer the “why” and to develop a responsibility of reason.

This book examines the question of aesthetic experience in the novels of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Marcel Proust, Tom McCarthy and Rachel Cusk in order to propose a reconsideration of aesthetic experience informed by literature and philosophy in equal measure. The introduction suggests an alternative four moments (of aesthetic experience) to Kant’s four moments of aesthetic judgement, derived in part from my four literary authors respectively: curation, quietness, violence and disconnection. Taken collectively, the four moments show the danger of becoming too invested or interested in aesthetic experience, as well as patience and openness toward the creative act of writing. While these four moments are not meant as determinations, taken together, they offer a picture of aesthetic experience as involuntary, subject to chance and resistant to calculation on the part of the aesthetic subject. Besides contributing to the scholarship on each of the four novelists, this book advances a theory of the aesthetic that shifts away from the framework of judging objects to focus instead on experience and how it is articulated both within and beyond literature. It is here that the theory of aesthetic experience benefits from literature’s singularity: no one text or passage can serve as an example that would adequately circumscribe the field of aesthetic experience, just as no one philosophical example could, and yet the reflective nature of the literary text demands a rigorous look at aesthetic experience without the restrictions of a totalising philosophical system.
The two ‘negative’ moments – represented by Huysmans’s À rebours and McCarthy’s Remainder – besides ending poorly for the protagonists, wind up with a foreclosure of aesthetic experience. For Huysmans’s Des Esseintes, who attempts to sustain aesthetic experience at will via curation, the fantasy falls apart, leaving him ill and necessitating his dreaded return to society. For McCarthy’s unnamed narrator who is engaged throughout the novel with various projects of re-enactments, the story ends violently, with bloodshed and a plane hijacking. Theoretically, these novels provide a cautionary tale about the impulse to seek out and even domesticate the aesthetic object.
On the contrary, the two ‘positive’ moments – represented by Proust’s Recherche and Cusk’s Outline trilogy – each involve narrators and characters who are invested in the creative act of writing. Two particular critically underrepresented passages from Proust can help articulate the ‘quiet’ moment of aesthetic experience: without relying on works of art, they are theoretically compelling in their refusal to theorise themselves, unlike the more popular passages from the novel. Cusk’s novels present the moment of disconnection – that is, the sense of an experience being dislodged from any particular narrative or plot. And yet, each of the characters in question are creative writers, meaning that this everyday feeling of alienation tends to factor into a productive, artistic impulse.
In conclusion, these four moments are tied together as they pertain to the nature (and boundaries) of aesthetic experience in general. Just as Kant’s four moments of aesthetic judgement seem to be grouped in pairs – disinterest and purposiveness without purpose on one hand, and universality and necessity on the other hand – these four moments can be grouped and set apart to help reconsider what we mean when we talk about aesthetic experience.

What do conspiracy theories, algorithms and meritocracy have in common? All three avoid contingency and frantically look for necessities. The COVID-19 crisis has brought about a proliferation of conspiracy theories that reject, among other things, official accounts of the virus’s origins and remedies, and sometimes even the existence of the virus itself. Conspiratorial thinking usually links events to secret plots concocted by powerful conspirators, whether it be Bill Gates or Big Pharma. In this book, I point to another dominant driving force: the desire to find simple and apparently reasonable explanations for phenomena that are actually purely random and contingent. Often, unfounded conspiracy theories emerge because contingency is not accepted, and necessities are looked for at all costs. Nothing happens by chance, and there must be a plan or an intelligent design behind everything.
This book deals with ‘contingency phobia’. This special phobia is not only manifest in most unwarranted conspiracy theories, but it also appears, in Western culture, as a recurrent psychological, cognitive and scientific pattern. It is the cause of a variety of other phenomena that have become emblematic for liberal democracies, such as the contemporary algorithm culture or the obsession with merit and ranking. Not only the conspiratorial mindset rejects a world of contingency and strives to create a universe structured by a necessary order; life coaches, algorithm engineers and neoliberal meritocrats all do the same. This book analyses these phenomena by using the same criteria: how do humans deal with contingency and how do they try to establish necessities?
Some philosophies, such as Daoism and Zen Buddhism, make unwarranted conspiracy theories quasi-impossible because they find original ways of combining contingency with ontological, theological or cosmological premises. I identify sources that other disciplines examining conspiracy theories, for example, political science, anthropology, psychology or sociology, have rarely seen as primary. Political scientists focus on the macro level and construe conspiracy theories mostly as national or regional phenomena whereas anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists tend to focus on the micro level. The present study is an example of practical philosophy depicting conspiratorial thinking as an organic or a dynamic phenomenon by crystallising cognitive and cultural ‘necessity-contingency patterns’ that can be found in politics, culture, religion and science.

Richard Washburn Child was an American author and diplomat who served as the U.S. ambassador to Italy between 1921 and 1924 during the rise of fascism in that country. Earlier, however, Child visited Russia on the eve of the revolution and was greatly impressed with what he saw. He praised the Russians for their spirit and independence. He optimistically believed that Russia was a dormant force ready to liberate itself from its feudal past and spring forward into modernity. He describes Russia’s resources, both natural and human, and attempts to explain the Russian mindset.
Child acknowledged rumours of a stirring revolutionary mood, but he did not believe they were accurate. Reading his observations, given what we know would soon happen, is both fascinating and poignant. Child would later go on to be a huge supporter of Mussolini and editor of the dictator’s autobiography.
Child urged the United States to establish partnerships with Russia and create opportunities with this powerful nation before other countries beat them to it. He believed that Great Britain was already taking steps to invest in Russia. Child also emphasised the importance of sending representatives to Russia who actually understood the customs and spoke the language.

This book contains fifteen chapters organized thematically around key themes but in a non-cumulative way. This means readers can randomly sample topics and sections of the book or dive into a single essay covering one specific issue in more detail (such as biases, mistakes, strategy, foresight, talent or teams). Either way, readers can assess if they agree with the approaches offered or perhaps favor different perspectives. If the latter, they may wish to discuss the issues with some colleagues informally during a break or examine the case more formally  in team building exercises to raise the organization’s strategic IQ.

Sampling the collected sub-sections and chapters (whether in small bites or as one read-through) will help managers refine their own approaches to strategic thinking and leadership. Also, it will help align them better with colleagues or partners who come from different backgrounds, functional responsibilities or cultural orientations. It will soon become apparent to readers that the overall approach to business problems presented is very much behavioral. This means that each essay or case starts by identifying important management problems in some realistic business settings. Before offering any conceptual perspectives or prescriptive advice, each essay seeks to better understand the behavioral context of the problems addressed.

This varied case approach seeks to provide practical insights, tips or even full solutions, but not until the essence of the problem and its broader organizational and cultural settings are sufficiently understood. Offering prescriptions without first getting well-grounded behavioual descriptions tend to result in failed interventions. Normative advice that is drawn from text books rather than real slices of life often amount to  boxing with shadows on the wall rather than solving the real issues. As such, this book aims to illustrate for managers and leaders how to frame thorny management issues by (i) clearly defining a distinct business problem, (ii) viewing it through multiple lenses and (iii) creatively exploring pragmatic solutions for the short and long runs.

Toyin Falola’s astounding intellectual production must be one of the mysteries in the intellectual world. It has transcended the confined world of historical research into broader horizons that include the role of the public intellectual. The present study would undertake a rigorous analysis of the origins, continuities and discontinuities of this transformation. This means we have to recast the debates regarding who is a public intellectual from a multiplicity of discursive situations and historical and cultural contexts. We have to employ methodological parallels from North Atlantic intellectual traditions. How did the role of the public intellectual emerge in the first place in world intellectual history? Addressing this question would enrich this research endeavour immensely.
In interrogating comparative discursive formations, we shall re-evaluate the roles, functions and achievements of continental intellectuals such as Betrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Malraux, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Wole Soyinka and Pierre Bourdieu. Again, this discursive element will give this study a global appeal and range.

Violence impregnates human life in many ways. We do violence to individuals or groups. We do violence to plants and animals. We do violence to the planet Earth. However, Nature will not survive our arrogance and patterns of exploiting and destroying the biosphere if we do not break the cycle of violence. As such, any moral effort to stop barbaric consumerism and chaotic nihilism is simultaneously the possibility of making life and biodiversity flourish on Earth. The moral imperative is thus also an ecological imperative. Therefore, the question is: how can we talk about non-violence in the current ecological crisis? Put differently, we can also ask: how can non-violence be brought to our ecological concerns? Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’. The notion of injustice becomes all the more crucial when applied to excluding animals and plants from the history of our planet. This eco-moral crisis must become more public as the ecological trajectory of the Earth foreshadows a very troublesome future.
Non-violence and Ecological Imperative is a contribution to the relevance and potential of the philosophy of non-violence in showing clearly that our viable ecological future depends on attitudes and strategies that are rooted in the Gandhian moment of civilising humanity as an antidote to the violent modern techno-industrial way of life. The interdependence and cooperation between humans and nature are inevitable. Non-exploitative and non-violent prerequisites of Gandhian ideology entail that interdependence and cooperation must be based on altruistic values and not on self-interest and materialistic values. This signifies immeasurable love not only among humans but also with nature. Thus, absolute love substitutes greed. Non-possession from an absolute love revolutionises the socio-ecological paradigm of human civilisation. Various ecological scientists and economists have asserted the need for revisiting the harmony between human activities and nature.
Stern et.al (1998) concluded that economic growth would never result in improvement in environmental quality. Arrow et.al (1995) concluded that economic growth is not a panacea for environmental quality. Meadows et al. (1972) in his book The Limits to Growth claimed that environmental limits would cause the collapse of the world economic system. Against this backdrop, Gandhi advocated the process of recycling and minimising waste so that humans adopt a lifestyle that integrates with the ecosystem. Humans must dwell in a life that converges with the law of nature and maintains ecological harmony. This notion of continuity of life is inspired by the Gandhian philosophy of non-violence and absolute love. The moment there is a break in continuity, it results in violence leading to unrest or conflict, dismantling the process of continuity.

Demilitarizing the Future draws from art, anthropology, and activism to investigate the entrenchment of militarism in everyday lives and consider novel imaginaries of its dissolution—of peacemaking, community, and shared equitable futures. The pieces collected in this anthology track across the Korean DMZ, fortified homes of high-crime Jamaica, the tenements of Palestine, police drones in the skies over U.S. cities, and other sites in the global networks of warfare and military preparedness. The authors represent various fields from anthropology, poetry, literary studies, and community organizing to together present a multidisciplinary collection of creative scholarship. In addition to typical chapters with empirically backed arguments, we include one anthropologist-poet contributor, Nomi Stone, and one photographer, Boone Nguyen, who both showcase the interdisciplinary experiments of our humanistic social science about militarized landscapes. Rather than presuming that the aftermath of war requires the reimposition of new military infrastructures, we have collected a variety of pieces that speak to the socially and artistically generative potentialities of military waste infrastructures as well as their enduring toxicities. Militarism and preparedness for war undergirds the infrastructure and design of everyday lives across the globe and its satellites, but the processes of demilitarization offer their own forms and affordances. Within this collection, we do not insist on a dichotomy between militarism and demilitarization, but rather invite our authors and artists to depict these forces as a categorical range with interdependent imaginaries.

China has been stereotypically perceived as a place of backwardness. However, the 21st century has been a transitional period for China to express its cultural power. This book explores how digital technology, in particular virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), is playing a role in China’s rejuvenation, especially in relation to cultural displays, performances and art exhibitions.
It examines how audiences, both in China and globally, respond to Digital China through digital immersive art. Drawing on the author's anthropological research and empirical studies on stakeholders and audience reception, this book provides a comprehensive understanding of transformative power of digital technology and its impact on cultural experience in contemporary China.
The ‘reform of the cultural system’ over the past two decades in China has fostered a techno-cultural imaginary mixed with the celebration of Chinese civilisation and advanced by digital technology and entrepreneurs. Such a hybrid imaginary influences how people view and consume digital immersive art. Much digital immersive art within China is thus viewed within the framework of modernisation, as the case studies in this book will show. Outside China, however, the dominant narrative of techno-orientalism prevails, constructing a different image of Digital China, a technocratic state.

Emerging from the fields of ecological restoration and economics, this interdisciplinary book delivers a clear path to restoring our economies in a way that speaks well to industry groups and business owners, students and the general public, and to policy makers. There are proven relationships between ecology and economics. Giordanengo employs those relationships in an intriguing way and integrates them with global case studies to argue that redesigning economic systems according to ecological principles is necessary to balancing critical social, environmental, and economic goals. For example, he reveals how more obscure ecological principles and theories—succession, evolution, diversity-productivity curves, and so on—can inform the restructuring of economic systems that are resilient, productive, and regenerative.

A variety of students and practitioners have read the first edition, or 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.”

Traditional approaches to sustainability focus on the social, environmental, and economic pillars of an economy, while paying little attention to the foundation those pillars rest upon. A comprehensive focus on our economy’s foundational components has been ignored for good reason; we have lacked an understanding of what they are or how they interact with one another. Cross-cutting research between ecological and economic systems reveals three foundational components (i.e., drivers) common to both systems. The effective management of these components is perhaps the most important obstacle to resolving current tensions between society, nature and the global market economy.

The scale at which diversity, energy and trade must be managed is also justified by self-regulating ecosystems such as jungles, prairies, and pine forests. That scale is not global, nor is it hyper local. The economic and ecological rationale agree that the scale of a sustainable economy—the natural geography of humans— is regional. To the contrary, the attempt to manage our economy at a global scale has given rise to chronic social, environmental, and economic symptoms across earth. In highly developed countries such as the United States, these symptoms include flat real wages and productivity growth, a growing wealth gap, degraded environmental conditions, rising social unrest, and more.

The closing chapters outline a natural path for restoring our economies, illuminated by humanities shared experience in ecological restoration. The process of ecosystem recovery following disturbance (i.e., succession) is one such pathway. Unwittingly, developed nations such as the United States mange succession to concentrate wealth into fewer hands, while lowering the economy’s productive capacity, net productivity, and resistance to future disturbances. Economic policies can also move the succession dial toward the productive and diverse center, where wealth and resources are recirculated quickly, new business opportunities are created, and resilience and resistance are fortified—a stout shield in the face of global economic turmoil.

For policymakers, consumers, and industry groups, this book explores root causes of the challenges you face, so that you may take deep correct actions to yield lasting change.

Giordanengo provides critique, but goes further, with clear steps that individuals, businesses, communities, and policymakers can take to start restoring our economies now. From agricultural restoration to regional manufacturing and energy systems, he outlines practical strategies and policy mechanisms for building regenerative economies. Students will find not just theoretical and systems knowledge, but applied economics, ecology, and conservation centered around actionable pathways.

Economic restoration is not only possible—it is our humanitarian duty.

Assessments of the history of literary criticism suffer from two errors. On one hand, they often ignore the relationship between critical history and literary history. On the other hand, they tend to assume a progressive vision of history where literary movements or critical schools of thought build upon each other. As a result, such assessments either privilege the present and praise its progress or express nostalgia for the past.

The Humanist Critic: Lionel Trilling and Edward Said demonstrates the poverty of these tendencies. By examining the careers of two of the most significant figures in literary-critical history, it demonstrates how Said inherits and revises an older style of criticism that Trilling practices, and conversely, we see how Trilling anticipates future directions in criticism that Said will scrutinize. At the same time, The Humanist Critic argues that developments in critical history and developments in literary modernism represent a parallel story. Recognizing these intertwined narratives is key to lessening the perceived antagonism between modernism, continental critical theory, and what each presumably displaced.

The Humanist Critic thus studies the influence of Matthew Arnold and Thomas Mann on Trilling and the influence of Joseph Conrad and Gerard Manley Hopkins on Said while also putting the careers of Trilling and Said in dialogue with structuralist and deconstructive thought. The Humanist Critic is ultimately a focused genealogy of literary studies; a study of influence; a critique of current trends in critical culture; and a renewed justification for the humanist vocation.