Anthem Press

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.

An anthology that explores the poetry of iconoclastic New Women from the late Victorian era

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.

Aiming to contribute to the literature of what works to make peace, this volume examines the roles of land, water and mineral resources in conflict and peacemaking. The analysis focuses on six cases of prolonged, ethno-national, asymmetric conflict and six cases of special interest.

The data show that land, water and mineral resources have consistently been either a cause of war, a source of funding for war or a weapon of war. Yet, the goal of using natural resources in security, free from armed conflict or kidnappings, has been a reason for local or international communities to incentivise and/or facilitate peacemaking processes.

Nine of the cases ended in a negotiated, written peace accord which lasted more than 5 years. While some of the conflict areas saw a resurgence of armed conflict, other cases are exemplars of lasting peace agreements. The analysis shows what was successfully addressed in peace accords, as related to land and natural resources; what was addressed in aspirational terms that were never fully implemented; and what decisions were left to political processes that were agreed to, ending extensive armed conflict.

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.

Seeks to shed light on the workings of the mind of Toyin Falola, one of modern Africa’s most prolific public intellectuals, whose work spans the genres of prose, poetry, cultural criticism, sociology, archaeology, art history, orature, political commentary and of course, history

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.

Unfolds the relevance of non-violence that is not only limited to the peaceful co-existence of humankind but also signifies the role played by non-violence to build a fundamental interconnectedness between humans and nature

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.

An anthology that investigates the entrenchment of militarism in everyday lives and considers novel imaginaries of its dissolution.

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.

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

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

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.

Palaces, villas and churches. These were the highlights of my first visit to Italy. I took a lot of photos and looked forward to sharing them with friends and family. Back home, though, I found that I didn’t recall much about the places that impressed me. Although I had the benefit of a half-day guide in Rome, Florence and Venice, I sometimes had difficulty hearing what was said on crowded streets and busy interiors. The guides were capable but had only enough time to mention a few major features. As a rule, they skimped on actually describing buildings that intrigued me. And so they were not especially helpful in providing the insights I wanted. Upon my return, I found myself wondering: Where did the architects actually find their ideas? What did they want to accomplish? And what do their choices tell us about their time? My sojourn in Italy would have been more satisfying if I had come away with a fuller account of what I had seen. What I most needed was context. This book supplies that context.
Contemplation of antiquity and the exchange of views among architects released a surge of intellectual energy not seen for a millennium, a development that would never have happened so quickly were it not for Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing with movable type. This development, in turn, led to architects’ heightened self-awareness of their collective enterprise. They read what their fellow architects wrote and thereby gained in sophistication. They were no longer merely masons. They became architects in the modern sense. They took pride in their achievements and shared a conviction that the visual culture they created was far superior to that of the previous thousand years.
Their embrace of classical civilisation had a visceral urgency. Rome, after all, was a culture with a storied past, peopled by larger-than-life figures. To learn what the ancients had created in word or stone could supply a shortcut to wisdom. And emulating the Romans would provide new models of aesthetic excellence. This endeavour became known as the Renaissance, or rebirth. The Reformation, however, changed everything. Martin Luther brought to issue a quandary: How exactly was Christianity to be reconciled with the pagan past, if at all? Could one source of inspiration be sustained without compromising the other? Religious reform questioned the aesthetic achievements of the previous hundred years. The story of Renaissance architecture represents the effort to find an accommodation.

The collection Art’s Visionary Moment: Personal Encounters with Works That Last a Lifetime was inspired by T. S. Eliot’s observation in his Dante (1929): “The experience of a poem is the experience both of a moment and of a lifetime. … There is a first, or an early moment which is unique, … which can never be forgotten, but … is never repeated integrally; and yet which would become destitute of significance if it did not survive in a larger whole of experience.” In this collection, scholars, and artists from a variety of fields speak in personal terms, but with what one has called “intellectual passion,” of a work of art (poem, play, novel, film, visual art, among others) that, as Dante suggest, has had an immediate effect on them (the “Visionary Moment” from the title) yet survives “in a larger whole of experience” (that “Last a Lifetime” in the collection’s sub-title). Some of the titles of essays already submitted show the range of this inquiry: “Conversations with the Dead”; “Playing Richard III: The Experience of a Moment and a Lifetime”; “Picasso’s ‘Three Musicians’”; “Poetry Meets Power: Tamburlaine the Great”; “Pleasant Dreaming with ‘Thanatopsis’”; “From Madness to Miracle: An Encounter with Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale”; “Fight the Power” Spike Lee’s Visionary Moment”; and “Plastic Art Moment.”

The purpose of this proposed addition to the Anthem Companions series is to add another title to a growing list of well-received publications (including the author’s prior contribution on Robert E. Park).  In so doing, the goal is to reconnect some scholars to Riesman’s legacy and to introduce him to others. Specifically, the book consists of an editor’s introduction and seven contributed chapters. 

Contestatory and Creative Poetics for a Time of Climate Catastrophe: Volume 1: Per Se is an extended narrative meditation upon the meaning of per se, which generally denotes the thing-in-itself, for its own sake – but that, upon closer examination, transpires to be a high tensile composite of the ‘thing’ (se) and a relationship (per) that always links it to something else – and indeed, in relations of internal complexity, to itself. Per se, in the book’s multiple parsings of the term, is a moniker for the infinite relationality of the world and the relationality of each thing in itself. Per se also denotes the endless fractal embedding of bundles of relationality at the successive levels of thing-ness from the infinitesimally minute nano-scale to the unimaginably distant outer reaches of the sideral. Per se becomes an exploration of the way commodities, cut loose from their context of production and floating on sea of oscillating (exchange) values, never cease to morph back into artefacts defined by the socially intensive use-values their fellow actants discover in them.

The book thus focalises a politicised effort to revision the rampant multiscalar individualism, solipsism and apartheid-like segregation of our age. Instead, it searches for possibilities or community in every aspect of the world we have learnt to see through a relentlessly atomising and hypostatising filter. The volume claims that every act of perception is political, reestablishing obfuscated connections, thereby seeking to repair the shredded fabric of the ecosphere below the threshold of myopic common-sense. Yet it also celebrates the myriad acts of citizen defiance, visible and invisible, that constitute activist agendas around the world, sending signals – both practical and exemplary, symbolic and literary – that shore up communities of resistance everywhere. The book does not hesitate to interrogate the fractal responsiveness to its own nature, meditating repeatedly on the political character of writing, and more significantly, of the teaching of writing.

Central to its concerns are various avatars of trees, from the pirogue that hangs above a bar in Lille, and one that is crafted as part of an Italian artist’s global collaboration on the periphery of this volume’s emergence, via the jacarandas of post-apartheid South Africa, to a wood-chipped pine forest that has become a memorial library in Oslo – to name only a few of the topics taken up by the book’s many silvan micro-fictions. Looming over all these concerns are two contemporary silvan catastrophes: the megablazes that destroyed forests in Amazonia, Australia, California, Siberia and the Mediterranean during the period when the book was being written and the deforestation that has allowed zoogenic diseases to jump from once secluded animal species to the humans that would never have been their neighbours if naturally occurring forest-barriers had been left intact.

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

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

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

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

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

There is no good human life outside of a state, and the good state enables us to live well together – so says Constitutivism, the theory developed in this book. Reinvigorating Aristotelian ideas, the author asks in what sense citizens of modern, populous and pluralistic societies share a common good.

While we can easily find examples of cooperation that benefit each member, such as insurances, the idea that persons could share a common good became puzzling with modernity – a puzzlement epitomised in Margaret Thatcher’s ‘What is society? There is no such thing!’ Aristotle describes the state as the end of human development, both chronologically and normatively, but modern philosophers, from Thomas Hobbes to Carl Schmitt, conceive the relation between state and citizen as instrumental. Either the state is a means of advancing each member’s individual good or the individual is a means of advancing some collective good. From both perspectives, the Aristotelian idea that human individuals somehow realise their own good in realising some communal good appears metaphysically puzzling, even nonsensical.

This puzzlement, the author argues, results from our profoundly modern understanding of rational actions, which we generally see as means toward outcomes. If we allow that not only outcomes but also histories and identities can be good reasons for actions, then it makes sense to see a person’s good and the common good of their political community as constitutive of one another, as Aristotle thought. Building on this idea, the author argues that individual actions and lives exist only in conjunction with a political community. In designing our institutions, we hence also give ourselves an identity and, in that sense, constitute ourselves as persons. Her arguments shed new light on a range of traditional topics of political theory, such as the justification of state authority or the question of how to justify or challenge the design of social institutions.

Banned Books and Counterfeit Notes examines how convicts sent to France’s overseas penal colony in French Guiana used the colonial postal system together with other, unofficial means of communication, to document and challenge lived experiences of transportation and forced labour. Identifying a series of ‘counterfeit notes’, the forensic aim of the book is to refocus attention on different forms of writing, and reading (including the ‘banned books’ indicated in the title), which occur inside the penal colony (commonly referred to as the bagne) itself. In doing so, the book deconstructs many of the stories, anecdotes, myths and legends which have come to define and legitimise the bagne in French Guiana. The book’s theoretical framework is indebted to the work of philosopher Jacques Derrida and his extended commentary on writing, reading, paper, postal systems, archives, the death penalty, friendship and hospitality. The anticolonial critique found in the work of Ariella Azoulay (in relation to images and archives) and Ann Laura Stoler (in relation to colonial ruins) are also brought to bear on the visual material and material heritage of the penal colony. Patrick Chamoiseau’s writing on the penal colony as ‘trace-mémoire’ and Françoise Vergès’s concept of the postcolonial museum will offer further engagements with the present-day interpretation of what remains of the bagne today. Connecting histories of reading and writing within the penal colony to contemporary heritage practices and the repurposing of former sites, the book offers wider reflections on decarceration, abolition, education and community.
The book is the result of several years of research funded by both the British Academy and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. This funding enabled multiple visits to French Guiana and New Caledonia to explore present-day interpretation of penal heritage. Ethnographies of visits and tours to museums and other sites linked to the bagne are interwoven into the book’s narrative. Funding also allowed for archival work to be undertaken at the Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer in Aix-en-Provence and the Archives Territoriales in Cayenne as well as further research at the Musée de la Poste in Paris.
The material presented offers new readings of well-known figures such as the forger-artist Francis Lagrange, the anarchist Paul Roussenq and the convict-executioner Isidore Hespel as well as unknown convicts involved in campaigns for reading material and libraries. The book is part of the growing field of scholarship on France’s overseas penal colonies which began in the late 1990s. However, it moves beyond existing historiographical approaches which provide chronological overviews of life in the penal colony. Instead, the book focuses on specific writing and reading practices and the preservation of these within official archives. Such readings develop a closer analysis of forms of writing which include rhetorical strategies alongside the material conditions in which such writing occurs (e.g., access to paper and ink). Alongside this close analysis which draws on literary and cultural theoretical approaches to reading archival material, another key contribution is to show the cumulative and debilitating effect of life in the penal colony via the letters of figures like Roussenq and Hespel. The huge corpus of complaint letters produced and sent to the penal administration (as well as organisations such as the League of Human Rights) demonstrate the mental and physical impact of a decades-long struggle against the penal administration. While there have been a few studies on the history of prison libraries in France (e.g., Collectif, Lectures de prison (Paris: Le Lampadaire, 2018)), these have not included the sustained discussion of penal colonies that this book will provide. Where much scholarship focuses predominantly on archival material, the book will also create links with the built heritage of the penal colony and its contemporary interpretation.

The essays in this book attempt to follow Jan Kott’s counsel by combining historical investigation with cultural criticism to illuminate the present moment, particularly the present American moment. In this regard, the dates 1960 and 1923 in the book’s  subtitle are by no means accidental. The first three chapters concern the history of America’s relationship with Ireland during the administrations of the presidents whose terms spanned the immediate pre-history and history of the Troubles. After a glance backward at American and Irish relations in the nineteenth century, the first chapter focuses on the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president in America’s history and the first to visit Ireland during his term of office. It also juxtaposes Kennedy’s jubilant 1963 trip to Ireland with Ronald Reagan’s more complicated homecoming in 1984. The next two chapters examine relationships between Ireland, Northern Ireland and the United States from the time of the Kennedy assassination through the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, who in 1995 became the first American president to visit Northern Ireland during his presidency. The fourth chapter begins by juxtaposing the literacy and urbanity of presidents like Joe Biden and Michael D. Higgins of Ireland with the aversion to reading of President Biden’s predecessor, suggesting the advisability of electing readers as national leaders. This discussion includes the Democratic party primary before Biden’s 2020 election, the implications of his allusions to Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy during his campaign and his trip to Ireland in 2023 to commemorate the 25^th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.

Between these chapters,  shorter editorials or ‘provocations’  appear that consider analogies between a Northern Irish past and an uncertain American future, the latter of which is reprised in the book’s conclusion. This structural device, commonly called the ‘interchapter’, is hardly original as both creative and scholarly writers have employed it to offer supplements to matters relevant to their larger projects. In his short story collection Walking the Dog (1994), for example, Bernard MacLaverty combines nine stories with ten vignettes, one as short as four lines. In Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (1995), Declan Kiberd uses interchapters to introduce or add texture to more substantial discussions, as does Richard Rankin Russell for the second edition of Modernity, Place, and Community in Brian Friel’s Drama (2022).

Unlike the book’s chapters, these provocations are not so much scholarly exercises as ‘op-eds’ inflected by the insights not only of Irish writers but also, in the context of Trumpism’s endangerment of American democracy, those conveyed by  influential journalists, newspapers and news outlets. There is, admittedly, a certain irony in this undertaking, as Carlos Lozada observes in What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era (2021): ‘One of the ironies of our time is that a man who rarely reads, preferring the rage of cable news and Twitter for hours each day, has propelled an onslaught of book-length writing about his presidency’. As the title’s allusion to ‘Trumpism’, not Trump, is meant to indicate, the argument of this book is less concerned with prosecuting an argument ad hominem than with assessing the consequences of his cultivation of societal division as discussed by, among many others, Stephen Marche in The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future (2022) and  Jonathan Greenblatt in It Could Happen Here: Why America Is Tipping from Hate to the Unthinkable – And How We Can Stop It (2022). Yet,  when juxtaposing threats of violence in contemporary America with those that ravaged Northern Ireland and, however ameliorated, still do, at least one commonality is apparent: in addition to widening socio-economic inequality, to voter suppression, and to racism and misogyny, both civil wars and Troubles require belligerent public figures skilled at stoking hatred in their followers. Thus, From the ‘Troubles’ to Trumpism is a kind of historical retrofitting that reads an increasingly dangerous moment in contemporary America through the lens of recent Irish and Northern Irish history.

This book focuses on Pukhtun women’s educational struggle in the traditionalist Pukhtun society to succeed against the odds in Pukhtunkhwa, Pakistan. The study found higher education as a means of women's liberation – their struggle and experiences for higher education give them a unique position in their patriarchal culture. The province is dominated by the culture rather than the teaching of Islam. Therefore, people make decisions according to the Pukhtun culture and social values. Strong roots of patriarchy reinforced a religious misinterpretation that ‘culturalised’ Islam instead of Islamising their culture in the prevailing society. Both the stories of the book concluded patriarchy was the main cause of women's marginalisation, which further granted a fertile ground for the Taliban to sketch a strategic atrocity and ban women's education in the name of Islam in the Swat Valley.

Patriarchy and militarisation have been used as a tool for cultural governance of identity and maintenance of gender stratification by sharing common grounds of gender dynamics and women epistemology under liberal, radical Marxist/socialist, Islamic feminism and feminist peace and conflict theories of women security. Thus, the book discussed feminist approaches concerned about unequal opportunities in higher education that challenged the propagation of male-experience and knowledge.

The scope of the book is broad and focused on women empowerment and emancipation through education. It addresses issues related to young Pukhtun women from disadvantaged areas who aspire to get higher education. The main focus of the book is to hear Pukhtun women’s own voices while discussing the issues related to higher education.

The Pandemic, the wars, the crisis of political institutions, and the expansion of the intensive use of social networks have impacted the elaboration of phantoms and fantasies that emerge from the modifications of the politics of the bodies and politics of emotions: today—what more than never?—the sensibilities are changing on a global scale.

Emotions and politics of sensibilities registered in the current process of colonization of the inner planet imply the urgency of relieving the forms that its impacts acquire in the daily life of a global scale that becomes trans-globalization.

Trans-globalization is characterized by the modification of three basic features of the structuring processes on a planetary scale: (a) the unnoticed acceptance of the global extension of the banalization of the good, the politics of perversion, and the logic of waste; (b) the return of the question/tension/paradox of sovereignty as a physical device for international mediation of virtual transnational commodification; and (c) the acceleration of the so-called energy transition.

Embark on a new exploration of power dynamics through the book. The book challenges traditional notions of power, introducing a contemporary model that empowers ordinary individuals to wield power. Delving into the intricacies of human behavior, it presents a compelling contrast to the Machiavellian approach, providing readers with actionable insights and strategic principles to navigate and thrive in complex social landscapes.
As the narrative unfolds, engaging stories illustrate the transformative potential of the new power model. Ordinary individuals become protagonists in their journey to gain power, showcasing the applicability of these principles in real-life scenarios. The book skillfully weaves together theory and practicality, offering a roadmap for readers to enhance their personal and professional lives by embracing a more authentic and impactful approach to power.
The book is a refreshing perspective that challenges traditional norms, providing a compass to navigate the evolving terrain of power. Whether in business, relationships, or personal growth, this paradigm shift promises to empower individuals, fostering a new era where ideology and principles take center stage.

Eugene O’Neill wrote his most enduring and important plays after he won international acclaim as the first and only American playwright to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936. In the midst of the Great Depression, with his health failing and spirits sunk, he and his third wife, former actress Carlotta Monterey, moved to California to escape the materialism and commercialism of a declining “West,” and they built a new home called Tao House. A reasonably good translation of tao is “the way,” and in this house, which was largely the creation of Carlotta, he found the way to his most famous play, Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

As an unusually explicit autobiographical drama, this play returns to 1912, the outset of O’Neill’s writing career, when he confronted tragedy in his family story and found a way to dramatize his mother, father, brother, and himself in a way that has resonated with audiences since its publication and production in 1956. But this book argues that the play originates as much in the moment of its creation, 1939–1941—in the family relationships, the historical circumstances, and the fact that this work would represent a moment of closure of his great career.

Key to this heroic story of creation is the intervention of his wife, Carlotta, whose diaries enable a day-to-day observation of how the play was written. She was the driving force behind the design of Tao House, and she managed the rhythms and patterns of life within its architecture. It was her masterpiece, just as Long Day’s Journey was his. This book develops a close reading of their house and marriage and also uses many of O’Neill’s previous plays to illuminate the breakthrough of Long Day’s Journey.

This book is the most granular and at the same time the most far-reaching inquiry into how this quintessential play was written (and almost not written) and how it came into the world.

This book draws together an oral and visual art history of a country that is extremely rich in culture and history but that is often overlooked or underestimated. By observing the country’s history and visual culture and the artistic practices of select artists from the UAE, it considers the development of contemporary art from the UAE. This will increase accessibility to art by Emiratis and underline its wider relevance.
There is a dearth of literature on contemporary art by Emiratis, and this may be one of the reasons contemporary art from the UAE is under-represented globally. In order to help the reader better understand art from the UAE, this book traces the country’s historical make-up, its culture and contemporary art tradition through oral histories based on interviews with a wide variety of artists and people working in the art industries. It also explores this development using global art discourses that are relevant to art produced in the UAE today.
This book also considers how cultural and artistic identities are formed and explores the political and socio-economic interests in the country that have stimulated art practices and appreciation. For so long, an exclusively Western narrative has dominated Art, and popular media portrays the Gulf’s accomplishments in development and modernity with suspicion. Thanks to the UAE’s espousal of the Internet and online communities over the last decade, this book is particularly timely. Following the pandemic, a wider understanding of global art discourses, values and perceptions are increasingly welcomed. Art from the UAE bridges the local and the global, giving a voice and a visual presence to a country’s contemporary art tradition that has been widely overlooked.
The UAE has a distinct visual arts tradition that relates to a broader and inclusive understanding of art centered on development and change.

This volume brings together, for the first time, several of Professor Habib's essays, representing three decades of scholarship and providing an insightful interpretation of the main currents in Indian history from the standpoint of Marxist historiography. The collection examines the role played by the peasantry and caste in Indian history; explores the forms of class struggle and the stage of Indian economic development in Mughal India; analyses the impact of colonialism on the Indian economy; and chronicles the changes in Marx's perception of India. These painstakingly researched and erudite essays form a volume that is indispensable for scholars and students of Indian history.

Over the last two decades, Eastern Europe has experienced extensive changes in geo-political relocations and relations. Attempts to establish liberal democracies, re-orientations from planned to market economics, and a desire to create ‘new states’ and internationally minded ‘new citizens’ has left some in poverty, unemployment and social insecurity, leading them to rely on normative coping and semi-autonomous strategies for security and social guarantees. Such processes testify to a paradoxical situation between the political attempts to create well-functioning, modern civil societies, and the reliance on normative laws on the margins of society.

This anthology explores aspects of everyday uncertainty, which are defined as ‘grey zones’. Within anthropology, grey zones have been conceived of in relation to political corruption and zones of ambiguity related to violence. Yet, the authors propose to expand the term to include situations where uncertainty and ambiguity have become part and parcel of everyday life and where the indefinable defines the situation. This book views these various grey zones not merely as legacies of socialism but as something in and of themselves; thus it deploys the notion of grey zones in order to find new ways of approaching and conceptualizing current situations in Eastern Europe, ways that are not preconfigured in terms of post-socialism or transition.

“The Mahatma Misunderstood” studies the relationship between the production of novels in late-colonial India and nationalist agitation promoted by the Indian National Congress. The volume examines the process by which novelists who were critically engaged with Gandhian nationalism, and who saw both the potentials and the pitfalls of Gandhian political strategies, came to be seen as the Mahatma’s standard-bearers rather than his loyal opposition.

In doing so, the volume challenges the orthodoxy in postcolonial and subaltern studies which contends that nationalists and nationalisms use independence to bring to power a bourgeois elite, who produce a story about the nation that erases the unevenness of minority experiences and demands in favor of simplified, majoritarian citizenship. Instead ‘The Mahatma Misunderstood’ demonstrates that nationalist fiction (and by extension the nationalist political movement) was marked from the beginning by a deep ambivalence about the relevance of nationalist agitation and mainstream nationalist politics for minorities in colonial India, and sought to recast anticolonial politics through novelistic debates with the spokesman for Indian nationalism, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

The volume thus articulates a recuperative theory of nationalism in the Indian case, in order to move thinking about nationalism beyond the current impasse produced by postcolonial theory in an era of transnational capitalism that too frequently forgets, underestimates or represses the national in the transnational.

'Travelling Home' provides a detailed analysis of the contribution that the mid twentieth-century 'Walkabout' magazine made to Australia’s cultural history.  Spanning five central decades of the twentieth century (1934-1974), 'Walkabout' was integral to Australia’s sense of itself as a nation. By advocating travel—both vicarious and actual—'Walkabout' encouraged settler Australians to broaden their image of the nation and its place in the Pacific region. In this way, 'Walkabout' explicitly aimed to make its readers feel at home in their country, as well as including a diverse picture of Aboriginal and Pacific cultures. Like National Geographic in the United States, Walkabout presented a cornucopia of images and information that was accessible to a broad readership.

Given its wide availability and distribution, together with its accessible and entertaining content, 'Walkabout' changed how Australia was perceived, and the magazine is recalled with nostalgic fondness by most if not all of its former readers. Many urban readers learnt about Indigenous peoples and cultures through the many articles on these topics, and although these representations now seem dated and at times discriminatory, they provide a lens through which to see how contemporary attitudes about race and difference were defined and negotiated.

Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, 'Travelling Home' engages with key questions in literary, cultural, and Australian studies about national identity and modernity. The book’s diverse topics demonstrate how 'Walkabout' canvassed subtle and shifting fields of representation. Grounded in the archival history of the magazine’s production, the book addresses questions key to Australian cultural history. These include an investigation of middle-brow print culture and the writers who contributed to Walkabout, and the role of 'Walkabout' in presenting diverse and often conflicting information about Indigenous and other non-white cultures. Other chapters examine how popular natural history enabled scientists and readers alike to define an unique Australian landscape, and to debate how a modernising nation could preserve its bush while advocating industrial and agricultural development. While the nation is central to 'Walkabout' magazine’s imagined world, Australia is always understood to be part of the Pacific region in complex ways that included neo-colonialism, and Pacific content was prominent in the magazine. Through complex and nuanced readings of Australian literary and cultural history, 'Travelling Home' reveals how vernacular understandings of key issues in Australia’s cultural history were developed and debated in this accessible and entertaining magazine.

Human life cannot be reduced to market transactions and human beings cannot only be treated as economic actors. When the power of the market increases, human beings will always try to protect themselves. Given the differences that exist in social and cultural traditions, these protective responses are likely to differ from one society to the other. This is why, even in a global market, diversity is always likely to persist. This book investigates the question of economic globalization - whether it is likely to lead to full convergence between political models and ways of life, or whether, even in a completely globalized world economy, there is likely to be scope for alternative solutions. But in a fully globalized world, how will we survive capitalism?

This book presents the most comprehensive study of the Waffen-SS until this date. It draws on archival studies done in more than 20 archives in 13 different countries over a period of 5 years. The gathered material comprises a wide-ranging selection of data such as records from the SS, contemporary Allied documents, letters from soldiers, as well as diaries and memoirs. Other major groups of material derive from the investigations into war crimes, from intelligence services and other organisations with a stake in the SS soldiers’ post-war networks and veteran societies. All this diverse data has made it possible to study the Waffen-SS not merely as a hierarchical organisation but as a living organisation made up by human beings. Based on this extensive material the book covers the entire history of the Waffen-SS and follows the post-war fate of the SS-veterans as well. The evolution of the Waffen-SS is analysed with special emphasis on the role of Nazi ideology, war crimes and atrocities, as well as the unique multi-ethnic and transnational character of the organization. The book describes the haphazard, opportunistic and sometimes chaotic growth of the Waffen-SS but also analyses how a constant focus on ideology and a continuous brutalization through commitment of war crimes had a considerable integrative power. The SS managed to form a strong ethos with lasting power both among many of the former SS-soldiers and a greater public audience, documented in the book’s study of the post-war veterans’ culture and the popular cultural memory of the Waffen-SS.

Patrick White (1912–1990) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973 and remains one of Australia’s most celebrated writers. This book represents new work by an outstanding list of White scholars from around the globe. White’s centenary revived mainstream interest in White in Australia and included a major exhibition on his life at the National Library of Australia. So too did the discovery of a highly significant hoard of hitherto unknown papers which were released by White’s literary executor Barbara Mobbs in 2006. The book aims to carry this momentum outwards to the rest of the world.

The contributors’ research is lodged in forwards-oriented methodologies and expressed in accessible language. On the whole, the collection is notable for its acknowledgement of White’s homosexuality in relation to the development of his literary style, in its consideration of the way his writing ‘works’ on/with readers, and for its contextualizing of his life and oeuvre in relation to London and to London life.

The title of the book reflects the effect on White scholarship of the newly discovered papers, the focus of numerous chapters on the farcical and ‘knockabout’ qualities of White’s work, and the contributors’ intention to inspire further work on White from a rising generation of scholars of twentieth-century literature beyond Australia.

'The Museum of Bioprospecting, Intellectual Property, and the Public Domain' addresses one of the most heated policy debates of our day: access to genetic resources and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits. Seven scholars – an anthropologist, an economist, a sociologist, and four lawyers – discuss how a museum can flesh out the relevant ethical issues that frustrate any purely technical solution. The visitors to the proposed museum become a source of considered judgments. Commercial movies are screened and discussion follows about some aspect of bioprospecting, intellectual property, and the public domain, suggested in the films. Both the screenings and discussions occur in small amphitheatres named according to the uneven chronology in the management of information: 100,00 BC to 16 September 1787 (public domain); 17 September  1787 to today’s date (intellectual property); and today’s date to (?) (legislation sui generis). The three amphitheatres surround a courtyard café which is a metaphor for the mission of the museum: conversation. The scholars vet the blueprint before an imaginary octogenarian who is not at all impressed and will "say the damnedest things." As this 21st century Don Quixote moseys across the chapters and pokes fun at the scholarly ruminations, the reader begins to understand how the proposed museum is indeed a forum for the nuanced ethics over bioprospecting, intellectual property, and the public domain. The dialogue-within-a-dialogue is highly original and entertaining.

John Keble had an immense influence on nineteenth-century literature and culture. A founding figure of the Oxford Movement, he was mythologized as the living embodiment of Christian ideals. His 1827 volume of verse The Christian Year was the best-selling book of poetry in the Victorian era while his lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry were highly influential. Those indebted to his ideas include figures as diverse as John Henry Newman, Christina Rossetti and Alfred Tennyson.

Despite his evident importance, Keble's social, political and cultural impacts on his times have, until recently, been significantly underestimated. This interdisciplinary volume is a major contribution to our understanding of the importance of Keble's life and work. It provides an entirely fresh perspective on Keble's writings, bringing critical work on Keble into the twenty-first century, in particular, demonstrating the importance of his contribution to nineteenth-century literature, politics and theology. Including works by a number of prominent scholars, 'John Keble in Context' provides a wide range of perspectives on Keble's place in politics and religion, his writings and his influence on his literary heirs and successors. This unique and timely volume offers the first major reassessment of Keble's work for several decades, and a comprehensive introduction to this key figure. John Keble in Context will appeal to students of Victorian literature, history, religion and culture.

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

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

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

Modern Persian, Elementary Level is a textbook of the Persian language spoken in Iran. It is intended for university-level learners and features material for two consecutive semesters of elementary Persian. The textbook aims to facilitate the implementation of the most recent trends in language instruction by emphasizing the basic tenets of flipped learning and practicing the communicative language teaching methodology with the student-centric approach to language instruction. With its real-world topics; high-frequency structures and vocabulary; thematic presentation of material; a plethora of engaging speaking activities in each chapter; dedicated listening, reading and writing sections; and integration of cultural material, this textbook is an integrated, straightforward and culture-conscious way to acquiring functional proficiency in spoken and written Persian. Complete with a companion website, over 300 audio and video presentations, answer key, a searchable audio dictionary and a special appendix for instructors that features classroom activity materials for the entire year, this textbook makes for an innovative and modern language-learning resource that is available in print and in an E-book format. Extra features and accompanying online resources make this textbook an effective option for those who wish to learn the language on their own.
The theoretical framework and underlying linguistic philosophy of the book, its methodology and practical approach to language instruction, format, and learning objectives are based on the latest trends in foreign language instruction defined by the Modern Language Association and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. The material of the textbook also reflects the 5 Cs of National Standards in Foreign Language Education.

Modern Persian, Elementary Level features all the attributes necessary for the implementation of modern practices in foreign language instruction such as context-based teaching for real-world objectives, integrated approach toward all language skills (speaking, listening, reading, and writing), thematic presentation of material, differentiation between proficiency and competence, and student-centred classrooms. The curriculum, lessons plans, exercises and activities that inspired the material of the chapters have been tested at Cornell University for several years with groups of students from beginners with no background in Persian to Persian-heritage students, undergraduate and graduate students, and even faculty members from other fields. Feedback from students has been considered and incorporated in the development of the textbook. Modern Persian, Elementary Level is inspired by the author’s extensive years of experience in designing and teaching less-commonly-taught language programs and is informed by the experiences, research, and data across various modern languages. The textbook is intended to train literate Persian speakers and teaches familiarity with both colloquial pronunciation and written spelling as practised naturally by Persian native speakers.

“Taste, guts and money” are the founding pillars of an art dealer’s life. Regis Krampf has been following his passion from an early age and gradually built a collection following his taste and intuition. One of the artists most represented in his collection is Georges Braque. Although Krampf owns artworks outside the mentioned period and by other artists, this book is only about Georges Braque’s body of work made after cubism until his time of death in 1963.

Georges Braque was a genius of the 20th-century art scene. He pioneered the fauve movement and invented cubism with Picasso. The period this book focuses on is roughly situated between 1920 and 1960. After a near death experience on the battlefields of WWI, Braque focused on his techniques and inspirations away from affiliations or artist groups. Somehow, he was one of the first artists to kill the idea of an artistic movement following his scientific and artistic discoveries.

Georges Braque was an artisan, following the hands-on approach of his father and grandfather who were house painters. The texture – the surfaces he created – echoed the intricacies found in nature’s own handiwork. He would often take his paintings on his usual, interminable bicycle rides and place them directly in nature to observe how they would hold against it.

Braque is one of the innovators of Modern painting. The body of work in this important period has long been overlooked. Krampf aims to correct this mistake and give a broader understanding of his work.

This book is the only scientific biography of the Nobel Prize–winning Indian American chemist, Har Gobind Khorana. It begins with the story of Khorana’s origins in poverty in rural India and how he manages to emerge from that to be trained in chemistry in Britain and Switzerland before immigrating to Canada and the United States. Science was the dominant focus of Khorana’s life, and his biography is treated chronologically in conjunction with his scientific career.
The book explains in detail Khorana’s most important scientific achievements, his role in deciphering the genetic code (the reason for his Nobel Prize), the first synthesis of a functional gene in the laboratory, the elucidation of the idea behind the PCR technology that has since become ubiquitous in biotech, and his seminal studies of how structure determines the function of biological macromolecules in membranes. Finally, it focuses on his scientific legacy, and what his career means for future generations of scientists.

Ahmedi’s History of the Kings of the Ottoman Lineage and Their Holy Raid(s) against the Infidels is the foundation text for the study of the rise of the Ottoman State. Virtually every scholarly work dealing with the subject refers to his versified account of the early Ottomans. Even though it encompasses only a limited period of the Ottoman dynastic history, its importance derives from the fact that it is the oldest annalistic account of Ottoman history that has come down to us. Because the earliest Ottomans left no accounts of themselves, Ahmedi’s work became the key source—though almost always without a proper reading of the text—for subsequent theories regarding the social and political structure of the early Ottoman State.

The overwhelming religiosity found in Ahmedi’s poem on the Ottomans continues to stir debate among historians. However, his fourteenth-century representation of the ways Ottomans adapted Islam to conform with beliefs of their past reflected a specifically Turkish interpretation of Islam. We can follow that approach in the actions and writings of leaders and poets of succeeding generations of Ottomans all the way to the eighteenth century—that approach was framed by a medieval inheritance whose discursive characteristics continued for centuries. Ahmedi was a discourse-founder and his aim was to represent the Ottoman rulers as pious Muslims.

An understanding of Ahmedi’s representation of the role of Islam among the early Ottomans requires careful contemplation not only by putting the discursive characteristics of his predominantly religious text under a literary and philological microscope but also by making an attempt to place his representation within the much larger context of the making of Turkish Islam in Anatolia. Also, in the writing of histories during the Middle Ages, it was neither unusual nor abnormal to integrate religious concepts as “historical facts.” The medieval author always endeavored to find a creative way of amalgamating the two through the numerous literary devices that were available to him. Theories on the nature and identity of Ahmedi’s text, as well as on the launching of the Ottoman enterprise, surely will continue to evolve in the coming decades—especially when the ongoing Karacahisar excavations in Eskişehir provide us with the archeological record to reconstruct more thoroughly the Ottoman past. Regardless, what we find in the earliest history of the Ottoman State is a pious representation of its founders and a fictional glorification of the jihad as its ideology which continued in subsequent centuries.

The information contained in this text covers kindergarten, primary grades, middle school, and secondary school. It presents a balanced body of information for instruction between wholistic approaches and traditional approaches for the total literacy curriculum. This book includes the complete developmental aspects of skills necessary for competence in all literacy tasks from birth to adolescent literacy, the need for availability for teachers to assess the progress of all of these skills as they are presented in a wholistic fashion on a regular basis, the criteria of how decisions are made for remedial reading instruction, the interface of special education considerations for students experiencing literacy challenges, approaches for adolescent literacy programs, and abundant information on teaching English language learners.  Two chapters are devoted to the writing process. The first one explains the necessary information which is a prerequisite to writing, and the second examines all aspects of writing which includes many professional forms of writing, the assessment of writing, andspecialized methods of teaching writing.A unique feature of this text is its integration of multiple wholistic approaches, with an emphasis on research validation of approaches, descriptions of the different ways that literacy can be taught in today’s schools, explanations of the clinical techniques available for literacy instruction, information on the science that is illustrating to us as educators on how the brain and central nervous system are intricately involved with the literacy processes, and discussions of the implementation of materials that may enhance perceptual processing for some students. Now more than ever we know that skill in literacy is a foundational skill that impacts all learning a student undertakes throughout their formal education, into the workplace and on to graduate studies. Thus, it is imperative to equip teachers with perspective and a skill set to address needs in the classroom. Thus, this text may not only be considered a teaching tool but also a handbook of approaches and reference guide for conditions that are not included in current textbooks.

In looking back at our 20 years of research using LEA with different populations, we have concluded that this 50-year-old method for literacy instruction is as viable today as it was in 1971 when it was developed by Russell Stauffer.

In sixteen chapters devoted to avant-garde contemporary American poets, including Kenneth Goldsmith, Adeena Karasick, Tyrone Williams, Hannah Weiner, and Barrett Watten, prolific scholar and Purdue University professor Daniel Morris engages in a form of cultural repurposing by “learning twice” about how to attend to writers whose aesthetic contributions were not part of his education as a student in Boston and Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s when new formalism and post-confessional modes reigned supreme.
Morris’s study demonstrates his interest in moving beyond formalism to offer what Stephen Fredman calls “a wider cultural interpretation of literature that emphasizes the ‘new historicist’ concerns with hybridity, ethnicity, power relations, material culture, politics, and religion.” Essays address from multiple perspectives—prophetic, diasporic, ethical—the vexing problems and sublime potential of disseminating lyrics—the ancient form of transmission and preservation of the singular, private human voice across time and space—to an individual reader, in an environment in which e-poetry and digitalized poetics pose a crisis (understood as both opportunity and threat) to traditional page poetry.

In making love, one is elevated beyond the carnal desires it satisfies. For the religious, it is Divine; for those who are not religiously inclined, it is still a spiritual experience, one of seamless solidarity, a unity of two as one that defies mere orgasmic stimulation. You don’t have to make love to have sex. Even strangers can be sexually attracted and have an orgasmic escapade. But in the act of making love, there is symbolic meaning that is felt through-and-through the sex act. Two in love are joined, in life, and the sexual expression of this unison is deeply felt in the sex act itself. This is sexual intimacy, the making of love, the likes of which is rarely, if ever, seen outside a loving relationship. There is no escape from the philosophical dimensions of such a loving relationship. It is as abstract as it is concrete in the ideals that ground it. There is a mystery about it, a kind of transcendent experience that defies translation into words. Making and being in love are thus joined at the hip. Loving relationships make the bed in which true lovers sleep.
Unfortunately, many relationships flounder or never get off the ground. Just having sex may ease the tension, but it then becomes a means, not truly an end-in-itself. The moment the sex act ends, the couple may retreat and fall into discord. It is an oasis in a barren desert that provides temporary relief, a titillating, temporary escape from reality. This book can help you to overcome the obstacles, the unlovable habits that encumber your relationship, both inside and outside the bedroom. It can help to create the harmonic balance between your sex life and other aspects of your personal and interpersonal relationships, which are preludes to making and being in love.
To accomplish this, it applies a five-step method based on Logic-Based Therapy & Consultation (LBTC), a popular form of evidence-based, philosophical counseling modality. First, it introduces you to six types of unlovable ways of thinking and acting and helps you to identify the ones that may be sabotaging your own relationship. Second, it shows you how to counter these self-defeating habits with certain lovable goals (“virtues of love”). Third, it helps you to identify and embrace a personal “love philosophy” that empowers you to reach for your lovable goals. Fourth, it provides core philosophical ideas that are key to any successful quest for romantic love. Fifth, it helps you construct a behavioral plan that applies your philosophies to making constructive changes in your relationship. The latter may require making changes both inside and outside your relationship. Thus, this book also shows you how the problems you are having in one area of your life (at work, in your social life, etc.) can affect the quality of your relationship, inside and outside the bedroom, and it offers guidance, including self-improvement exercises, to overcome these impediments and attain enduring love and sexual intimacy.

The book focuses on the novel and unexplored research area of intersection between science, technology, and innovation; and international affairs. The main objective of this book is to offer an original theoretical, analytical, and methodological framework that provides a wide comprehensive map of the current reality of science, tech, and innovation in the world system at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The book is based on 10 years of research work in the strategic intersection between science, technology, and innovation and international relations, and offers new explanations about three main issues: (1) the role of science, tech and innovation in the current international system, (2) the new configuration of international scientific relations, and (3) the impact and consequences of science, technology, and innovation in the world order of the twenty-first century.

Using an original methodology, the book adopts a systemic approach that uses systems models to offer a very detailed, holistic, and comprehensive analysis. It targets the social and academic interest in topics related to science, technology, and innovation and international affairs. The book addresses the lack of theoretical and methodological approaches that examine this rising phenomenon and provides clear findings and ideas about the main megatrends and impact of science, technology, and innovation in the international system for the next 20 years.

The central theme of Sexual Bargaining in the Digital Era is the ongoing (historic and present) struggle between the theocratically oriented Old Lights who insist on using the law to continue to impose the Old Normal (ON) on all other citizens—including the New Lights. The latter are progressives, feminists and others who advocate the notion that there is a social and economic “fit” between the New Normal (NN) and the emerging Digital Era. New Lights also argue that NN is exceedingly more beneficial for less advantaged persons (including those of color) than is ON. 

The Old Lights argue from a traditional religious standpoint. To help impose their theocratic view of the Family, they have recently joined forces with the extreme right-wing elements of the Republican party. That union of reactionary religion with reactionary politics is particularly detrimental to the well-being of less-advantaged persons.

The book also describes public policies and programs advocated by New Lights which are aimed at benefiting less-advantaged persons in particular (though not exclusively). Included are “Ideation Centers.” That is the contemporary label replacing the traditional label of “school.” Traditional schools were linked with the Industrial Age, but now tend to falter when it comes to preparing children/youth (especially less-advantaged) for the Digital Era.

Ideation centers are publicly funded sites whose central objective is to coach students in what some economists describe as ideation skills/capabilities—critical/creative thinking, negotiation and problem solving. Those are the very skills necessary to do well in the Digital Era and thus it is essential that less-advantaged children/youth have ready access to the centers. Those skills are also required to negotiate primary relationships (PR) effectively. Hence, ideation centers fulfil vital functions for both the public/economic/work world, and also for the personal world of PR.

Furthermore, in order to do well in the Digital Era women must be what the book calls “autonomous.” Indeed, the notion of growing numbers of women becoming autonomous is pivotal to the whole idea of NN. An autonomous woman is, first of all, in control of, or sovereign over what Marx/Engels called the “means of production.” Economic production refers to the kinds of educational and occupational experiences which enable her, among other things, to be economically independent (able to support herself and any dependants)—apart from a partner if need be.

Alongside production is reproduction. The autonomous woman controls not only the economic sphere of her life but also the sexual/reproductive sphere. The two spheres reinforce one another—control in one sphere enhances control over the other: Women who control their sexual/reproductive sphere are better able to control their economic sphere and vice versa. Needless to say, control over reproduction requires ready access to the most effective methods of contraception and access to safe abortion. For less-advantaged women, the costs of either or both would be borne by the state. 

The Craft of Professional Writing, 2nd edition is the most complete manual ever written for every form of professional (and professional quality) writing. Its chapters range from toasts and captions to every form of journalism to novel writing, book authorship and screenplays. The book offers techniques for the writing of each form, sample templates, and the advice on navigating a career in each writing field, including public relations and commercial writing, journalism in all media and self-employment as a freelancer. It also offers sections on the tools of writing, including pacing, editing, pitching, invoicing and managing the highs and lows of the different writing careers.

This book unveils the challenges of living beyond Covid-19 navigating trauma, solidarity, and transformative futures.

The novel coronavirus known as COVID-19 emerged in the city of Wuhan in December 2019 and has then spread across all over the world. Its spread has created trauma, death and destruction on its trail. It has also brought to fore many other related issues such as endemic poverty, racism, structural inequality, aggression and authoritarianism. Societies and nations have responded to these with lock downs which many a time have been done, as in the case of India, in a haste without taking into consideration the plight of the migrant labourers. In the case of the USA, lock down in places such as New York State began much later. In the USA, there have been varieties of responses to the virus as well as the lockdown and as well as ways to open up economies and societies.

Living with and beyond COVID-19 raises these issues of trauma – trauma of the virus and the accompanying illness and disease as well as traumas such as authoritarianism, racism and poverty. But trauma is not just natural. It is constructed, and constructed trauma has the potential to make us aware of our common suffering, fight against both the natural virus and the social virus, and create responsibility and solidarity. Living with COVID-19 and beyond also raises questions of appropriate ethics, politics and spirituality. It invites us to understand the multiple strands of our present condition and understand the critical ontology and genealogy of our viral present. It also challenges us to cultivate pathways of alternative planetary futures. It is not just enough to speak about post-COVID futures. Post-COVID futures without transformation of our contemporary economic, political and social conditions would not necessarily be better compared to our present situation.

The poems, novels and novellas that draw from paramythic forms and tropes draw from its symbolic power and its performative function, and often use it subversively to speak the unspeakable. They often merge incommensurate forms and include foreign words and registers or dialects, which lead to the need for translation, as well as the possibilities for what Apter calls the ‘untranslatable’. Foreign words and strange customs as well as oral story-telling forms may be untranslatable to outsiders – but their usefulness is tied to what Apter refers to as a ‘linguistic form of creative failure with homeopathic uses.’ So, when the paramythic voice, forms and tropes are located, translated, compared and interpreted in works by Australian writers having a Greek heritage, we have a new way to read Australian literature. We no longer read these texts in isolation given an affiliation with an ethnic minority group, but instead we see these as works that, as Gunew says, ‘share a world’, works that include and converse with other neo-cosmopolitan writers with double or multiple cultural perspectives.

The Kete royal dance, originating from the Ashanti people of Ghana, is a cultural treasure deeply rooted in the history and traditions of the Ashanti Kingdom. This dance form, once exclusive to royal courts, has undergone a transformative journey, transcending its palace origins to find a place within academic settings.
The history of the Kete royal dance dates back centuries to the Ashanti Kingdom, where it served as an integral part of royal ceremonies, festivals, and courtly events. Originally performed exclusively for Ashanti kings and queens, the dance symbolized royal prestige, spirituality, and cultural identity. Over time, the dance gained recognition beyond the palace walls, becoming a symbol of Ashanti cultural heritage. Kete dance is a language in itself, with each movement conveying a specific message or emotion. The dance communicates narratives of Ashanti history, spirituality, and societal values. Intricate footwork, hand gestures, and facial expressions are meticulously choreographed to tell stories, celebrate victories, or express reverence. The communicative power of Kete lies in its ability to transcend verbal language, conveying rich cultural narratives through the physical language of dance. In recent decades, Kete dance has transitioned from the exclusive domain of the palace to academic institutions. Dance scholars, educators, and students have recognized its cultural significance, leading to its inclusion in dance curricula. From an Afrocentric perspective, this volume discusses the transmission of the dance to the academy and in the diaspora. It highlights not only the teaching of the physical movements but also how heritage is imparted through specific cultural and generational contexts, historical narratives, and symbolic meanings embedded in Kete.

This book tackles, for the first time, the complex issues surrounding the phenomenon of orphanage tourism, which is a growing and highly lucrative tourism niche in Nepal and several other economically developing countries. The book explores the occurrence of orphanage tourism in Nepal – how it is experienced, understood, sustained, opposed and, crucially, how it shapes the lives of the children involved. Rather than exploring the motives of tourists who engage in volunteering in orphanages while on holiday as so much extant literature does, the book examines the factors that contribute to the emergence of commercial orphanages and the experiences of the children involved. A central concern is to illustrate the inadequate ways in which orphanage tourism is understood, framed and politicised, especially in terms of who is blamed for its prevalence and how various Western entities position themselves as agents of rescue. By examining Nepal’s socioeconomic and geopolitical landscape, as well as the role of Western international development and structural adjustment and the impacts of tourism, the book presents a deeper and more complete picture of the emergence of orphanage tourism and other forms of child labour.
Furthermore, by examining the everyday realities of life in Nepal, especially for children and young adults who grew up in contact with Western volunteers in commercial orphanages, the simplistic depiction of orphans as victims, who need saving from villains by heroes, is dismantled. The book is especially focused on showing how the historical and everyday realities of life for children compelled to work are all too often ignored, obscured and distorted in the interventionist discourse that is beginning to surround orphanage tourism. I will argue that common orphan tropes, imbued with desperation and vulnerability, are circulated, in no small way, towards predominantly fulfilling the agendas of various Western parties.

This book examines Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy and most populous country, and Asia in comparative development and sectoral perspectives. We traced the divergent growth in wealth between the two regions. It takes a novel approach of matching key growth sectors across five selected Asian countries and Nigeria in a cross-regional context. We found that state and institutional capabilities underlying the generation and diffusion of industrial and technological knowledge in Asia distinguished it from Africa. We employ quantitative and qualitative methods, including case studies and statistical/econometric methods, to analyze factors that separate the sample countries that made rapid economic progress in “catching up” and those that tend to be stagnating and “falling behind.”
Progress made by Asian countries over the last five decades was due in large part to their pursuit of industrialization, technological acquisition underpinned by leadership, good governance, and policies in the right institutional contexts. The four Asian countries compared with Nigeria are Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. There was not one grand development formula; however, the strategy broadly consisted of industrial (vertical) diversification as well as (horizontal) diversification in agriculture. Building industrial capabilities that enable export competitiveness was critical. Again, while leadership is not usually included in factors of growth, the book devotes a chapter to Leadership and Industrialization and another to State Capacity Industrialization and Economic Growth.
African countries on the contrary took the low road in exporting minerals and raw agricultural commodities with little value addition; in the process, Africa experienced a reversal of fortune. The African condition is manifestly a Reversal of Fortune because in the 1950s, they were ahead of, or equal to, Asia in per capita income as well as in other development metrics.
We carried out empirical measurement of Reversal of Fortune manifested in economic, social, technological, and industrial conditions by analyzing the disparities in development metrics, particularly the levels and rates of growth of national incomes, industrialization rates, and Human Development Index (HDI). The differences are stark.

Over a century ago, in his examination The Sensational in Modern English Fiction (1919), Walter Clarke Phillips declared, “Whatever sources of appeal may come or go, there is one which from the very structure of modern democratic society seldom bids for applause unheeded—that is, the appeal to fear” (p. 2). It is to this appeal that we owe the abundance of crime writing at our disposal—a trove of mystery that undoubtedly fascinates in its ability to entertain while safely reflecting the ugliest truths about ourselves and the societies in which we live. Thus, crime writing is the perfect vehicle for examining the origins and endurance of those societal fears which are firmly grounded in such conceptions and the perceived boundaries that perpetuate them, and it simultaneously gives us the opportunity to evaluate the full range of those characteristics that differentiate the genre, particularly in its ability to allow us to begin to pick apart social constructions in relation to its own composition.
This volume argues that we must examine the boundaries in fiction and non-fiction crime writing with an awareness of and turn toward the unseen structures and spatial uncertainties that so often lead to collective anxieties. The chapters within utilize theories of cultural memory and/or deep mapping in order to explore the interplay of the literary, historical, social, and cultural in various modes of crime writing through the examination of unseen structures and uncertain spaces and provide new insights into the works of iconic authors, such as Agatha Christie, and iconic fictional figures, such as Sherlock Holmes, as well as into underexplored subjects, such as Ukrainian detective fiction of the Soviet period and crime writing by a Bengali police detective at the turn of the twentieth century.
This volume features authors and subjects that are global in scope with original, innovative work on crime writing from the 1890s to as recent as 2017. The breadth of coverage—of both time and place—is an indicator of a text in which seasoned readers, advanced students, and academics will find specialized explorations of individual works and authors, while the critical and theoretical approaches and the topical coherence of the collection offer to a wide audience a scholarly overview of crime writing, as a still-growing area of popular interest and a still-evolving field of intellectual exploration.

This book contends that the struggle and perseverance of transnational communities occur within and through at least three interrelated dynamic socio-political processes. The first is the pattern in which transnational communities mobilize to access public opportunities. This occurs when communities deal with cross-border and cross-national trajectories. The second relates to transnational community civic mobilization in relation to the prevailing, as well as emerging, socio-political conditions and situations within host and homeland societies, including community encounters and connections with like-minded civic communities. The third concerns immediate local community mobilizations in response, as well as an extension, to existing and emerging local socio-political encounters and connections. Therefore, this work proposes that transnational local, national, and transnational mobilization takes place within the dynamic horizontal processes of mobilizing communities in simultaneously expanding community horizons while preserving community well-being in multiple interrelated contexts.

More significantly, current studies drawing on transnational political sociological frames, as well as public sociopolitical scholarly debates, often consider the relationship between the state and society as inherently hierarchical and oppositional. Such relational and hierarchical conceptions of state–society interactions insist on the idea that formal state structures dominate and often subordinate informal community-oriented socio-political platforms. These top-down institutional priorities and actions limit the horizontal dynamics of transnational communities, including community attempts to balance local, national, and transnational encounters and connections, while avoiding state–society as well as local, national, and transnational extremes. Modern scholarship, thereby, departs from an overemphasis on class distinctions of society, as well as potential class-based interest group mobilizations, as the basis for diverse struggles and perseverance within the dynamics of state–society relations.

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

This collected volume makes an incisive contribution to the field of philosophy of culture, filling a gap between the relevant scholarship in cultural studies and philosophy. It focuses on Wittgenstein as a philosopher deeply concerned with culture, and aims to establish his work as an alternative to existing (Marxist, post-structuralist, etc.) approaches to the study and criticism of popular culture. In a series of essays, this volume showcases the great – and largely overlooked – potential of Wittgenstein’s philosophical method for cultural studies: Here, we find a particularist methodology for studying popular culture that ‘clarifies’ standards of measurement in discussing such issues as the ‘quality’ of art. Through conceptual clarification, we can gain a properly pluralistic understanding of normative dimensions in culture without collapsing into either relativism or generalised constructivism. In avoiding what Wittgenstein characterises as ‘void and unfair’ generalisations, his philosophy seems very well suited to the study of popular mass art, mass media and popular subcultures.
The essays outline the methodological framework of Wittgensteinian approaches to philosophy and conceptual analysis. Each essay demonstrates their merits by looking at particular examples such as analyses of popular films and TV series, detective fiction, comics, or shared practices of fandom, and by engaging with and analysing approaches to criticism of pop in a Wittgensteinian way (e.g., following up on work by the Frankfurt school, Roger Scruton).
Section 1 (‘Wittgenstein on culture and the popular’) lays the conceptual groundwork in highlighting the pluralistic ways in which Wittgenstein conceives ‘culture’. Section 2 (‘Wittgenstein and popular culture’) focusses on how Wittgensteinian methods of analysis and criticism enhance our understanding of popular culture either by offering an application of Wittgensteinian thinking to concrete examples out of a wide range of possible materials or by confronting Wittgenstein with another theoretical approach to the field of popular culture. The essays in section 3 (‘Wittgenstein in popular culture’) will showcase, then, the different ways in which Wittgenstein and his work have themselves become points of reference in popular culture, including (but not limited to) the iconicity of the philosophical genius writing his masterpiece in the trenches of the First World War, the appropriation of isolated concepts outside their philosophical context (‘family resemblance’) or the uses of Wittgenstein’s gnomic sentences in the form of quotes wavering between brilliance and banality (‘What one cannot speak of, thereof one must be silent’).

This book discusses several EU intuitions based upon how they vote. Two of the seven official EU institutions represent only the member states: they are the European Council (27 heads of state or government) and the Council of the European Union (government ministers from the member states, e.g., 27 agricultural ministers). First, the so-called European Council exclusively decides by unanimity. The extant literature holds that this slows down the decisionmaking process considerably, as the number of member states increases. This is the case because any given member country could take all others “hostage” by refusing to consent without extracting concessions.
On the other end of the spectrum, the so-called Council of the European Union takes the vast majority of its decisions by what is termed qualified majority—55% of the members (i.e., with the current 27 countries, this means 15) representing at least 65% of the total EU population. In this case, the former hostage holders can now simply be outvoted. Hence, the latter European Union institution could be a likely candidate for a practical solution to the unanimity-voting quagmire.

‘Human Resource Policy’ provides practitioners and students with a conceptual framework and practical guidelines to establish and maintain an effective HR policy function. It highlights the importance of, but often neglected, policy function as the vital link between strategy and practice.

Taking a uniquely holistic approach to HR policy, ‘Human Resource Policy’ demonstrates how HR policies can contribute to the achievement of organisational goals and the development of organisational culture. It focuses on practical aspects such as the processes of policy development and policy implementation so that they are understood and have maximum impact on policy function. Common policy management challenges are also discussed.

The book also examines in detail 16 common HR policy areas and discusses policy options in each area. This part of the book includes learning activities based on realistic business scenarios that require readers to deal with policy issues and solve policy-related problems.

The book is an addition to the scarce literature dealing specifically with HR policy.

When the author’s aging body and the post-polio symptoms it was manifesting made it impossible for her to undertake the physically strenuous ethnographic research in the array of American, European, African and Asian settings that underlay her book Doctors Without Borders and characterized her research throughout her career, she began writing ethnographic essays, drawing from a range of things she was seeing, experiencing, thinking and feeling at this juncture in her life.

Among the leitmotifs that pervade and interconnect these topically varied essays are lived experiences of physicians and patients, including patients who are physically handicapped, elderly, mortally ill or beyond the reach of medical care; the origins and consequences of epidemic outbreaks of old and new plague-like infectious diseases that occur and recur, despite the impressive advances of medicine; the concomitants and challenges of aging; the wellsprings, dynamics and significance of medical humanitarian action; engagement with a “beyond borders” world view; the occurrence of national and international events of major moral as well as political and legal import and repercussions, such as the travel ban on persons from certain countries with a predominantly Muslim population initiated by Donald Trump and the terrorist bombing in Brussels’s Zaventem airport; and the meaning and meaningfulness of teaching, exploring, questing and writing. Latently associated with these themes are the author’s social values and social conscience.

Composing these essays from a participant observer outlook heightens and enriches the author’s observations over the course of her daily life, enabling her to engage in “mind travel” to places and people she has intimately known in the past and to places she has yearningly hoped to visit but never has.

The conventional wisdom on coral reef management tells us that decentralized management, where the government shares power with local people, has both economic and ecological benefits. Three decades of research show that grassroots, stakeholder-focused management allows communities to collaboratively and sustainably manage reefs. “The people” began demanding a seat at the table in the 1990s, with decentralized management even becoming a requirement for international donor-funded development projects. Nowadays, the inclusion of stakeholders, with governments even asking for their help, is the norm. Much of the literature on coral reef management has documented the social and ecological impacts of an increasingly participatory style of management all over the world. But it is yet to be seen how this participatory management will deal with emerging threats such as climate change. 

Climate change is increasingly recognized as the greatest threat to coral reefs, outweighing local stressors such as overfishing. Similarly, global private multinational companies now hold concentrated power that rivals that of many national governments. Companies’ decisions made without any input from local communities are increasingly impacting global ecosystems, especially coral reefs. A puzzle has emerged for decision-makers and stakeholders alike: How can participatory management institutions respond to global environmental change? How does conservation policy enable (or diminish) “the people” to have their voices heard despite power differentials? This book poses some initial answers to this puzzle, drawing on the academic discipline of public policy.

We focus on democratic, participatory, stakeholder-driven forms of coral reef management and how they are meeting new challenges in recent years. It begins with the story of grassroots activists in the Cayman Islands who organized the first-ever people’s referendum against the incredibly powerful interests of the international cruise industry to prevent destruction of local reefs. How did this social movement contest power so effectively? Then, our focus moves to another case where grassroots activists, specifically the “Reef Guardians” of South Florida, organized to fight reef destruction in American courts. This case is unique and interesting as the American Federal Government was damaging reefs, working at cross purposes with other branches of the federal government tasked with protecting reefs. Why was the federal government violating its own species protection laws? How did people’s movements ensure accountability? Thus, the book examines how subnational jurisdictions, primarily states, manage immense coral reef resources through an in-depth look at the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. This sanctuary was the first stakeholder-driven marine-protected area in the United States, one that is rapidly adapting to global change. Finally, we examine how one of the most important democratic institutions in the world, the United States Congress, is responding to global change in American reefs. Congress’s response to climate-driven coral bleaching is interesting because lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are coming together to make legislation on coral conservation despite the partisan rancor and gridlock that characterized the Trump regime.

Local communities are now, more than ever before, experiencing environmental change. These changes draw attention to the discrepancy and conflict between their own views and the views of the initiators of development, such as governments and multilateral organizations. The main thesis of the book unfolds around the idea that under changing environmental conditions, sustainable development can only be achieved when communities can overcome the view conflict and are free to set their own goals.

Using a case study of the Trio indigenous peoples in Suriname, the book presents an “inside” view of a community on the path towards sustainable development when facing climate change. It introduces a new framework, called VIEW, to comprehensively analyze the views of the Trio community when progressing through the different stages of development. The community apparently goes through a process of judging climate change against their own values, followed by creating a meaning about it and ultimately making a decision on how to act.

This book will take the reader beyond examining a few examples from the field. It discusses the position of a researcher in community development and presents several tools and indicators to effectively work with communities. The book lays out a set of principles for researchers to engage in ethical, effective and valid research. Only with the right mindset, a researcher can look through the eyes of the community in a respectable manner and implement a truly bottom-up approach in sustainable development.

A Player’s Guide to the Post-Truth Condition: The Name of the Game presents sixteen short, readable chapters designed to leverage our post-truth condition’s deep historical and philosophical roots into opportunities for unprecedented innovation and change. Fuller offers a bracing, proactive and hopeful vision against the tendency to demonize post-truth as the realm of ‘fake news’ and ‘bullshit’. Where others see threats to the established order, Fuller sees opportunities to overturn it. This theme is pursued across many domains, including politics, religion, the economy, the law, public relations, journalism, the performing arts and academia, not least academic science. The red thread running through Fuller’s treatment is that these domains are games that cannot be easily won unless one can determine the terms of engagement, which is to say, the ‘name of the game’. This involves the exercise of ‘modal power’, which is the capacity to manipulate what people think is possible. Once the ‘necessarily’ true appears to be only ‘contingently’ so, then the future suddenly becomes a more open space for action. This was what frightened Plato about the alternative realities persuasively portrayed by playwrights in ancient Athens. Nevertheless, Fuller believes that it should be embraced by denizens of today’s post-truth condition. 

This book is designed to do what its title says, namely, to provide a guide to the post-truth condition for those who wish to feel at home and thrive in it – rather than simply avoid or attack it. It consists of a series of short chapters that are best read in the order presented but may also be read in a different order or simply in parts – as most books are normally read. The book ranges widely across philosophy, theology, science, politics, economics, psychology and the arts – but hopefully in a way that allows readers to find their bearings, given the opportunities presented by the Internet to follow up whatever might interest them in the text. Underlying this breadth of scope is a fundamental scepticism with ‘business as usual’ in the production and evaluation of knowledge claims. To be sure, the reader will see that post-truth extends many of the themes already found in what passes for ‘postmodernism’. However, at a deeper level, and in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the post-truth condition invites us to discover in a new key what it has always meant to be ‘modern’.

Climate change and the intertwined extinction crisis lend themselves to political economy. Joseph Henry Vogel has constructed an argument for bringing the carbon-rich but economically poor countries through the bottleneck of a cowboy economy and into the 'cap and trade' Annex I countries of the Kyoto Protocol. Ecuador serves as the example. ‘The Economics of the Yasuní Initiative’ is a counterpoint to ‘The Economics of Climate Change’ by Sir Nicholas Stern on many levels. At the most basic level, Vogel argues that Stern is wrong for his failure to recognize the nature of climate change as thermodynamic, thereby missing the point of Northern appropriation of the atmospheric sink. The switch to thermodynamics brings into focus the legitimacy of a 'carbon debt’ that starts to tick with the first report of the IPCC in 1990. Through the lens of economic theory, the understandable intransigence of poor countries to assume the 'cap' in 'cap and trade' is a distortion to the economic system. But by that same economics, one distortion can justify another. That other distortion is the payment Ecuador seeks for not drilling in the Yasuní Biosphere. Heeding the call of Deirdre (formerly Donald) McCloskey that economics needs more humor, Vogel has written a scathing critique of economics-as-usual which also entertains.

This comprehensive text offers a rare and insightful investigation into the energy sector of the developing world. ‘Energy for Development’ provides comparative case studies of countries going through the reform process, evaluates reform experience, discusses the lessons that can be learned and identifies challenges faced by these countries at the national and global level. A topical and timely book which seeks to explore the anxieties and insecurities of the global energy sector since 2001.

Knowledge is more than information but instead the organizing of information into theories and practices that allow us to do things and accomplish goals. The first stage of knowledge creation depended upon creative scientists and entrepreneurs, but the second stage required research laboratories and teams. Now cooperation between organizations is necessary to solve individual, organizational, institutional, and global problems that face us today.

Individuals presently are raised in four kinds of social contexts: traditional, modern, post-modern, and anomic. These contexts explain partisan divides as well as the inability of some to succeed in society. Post-modern contexts produce individuals who are cognitively complex, creative, critical but have empathy towards others. The acceleration in knowledge creation is caused by not only the growth of more post-modern individuals who are creative but organizational innovation and innovative regions. Organizational structures that discourage radical innovations are contrasted with those that facilitate it. Similarly, the histories of three innovative regions--Silicon Valley, Kistra in Sweden, and Hsinchu in Taiwan—are contrasted with the failure of Rt. 128 near Boston.

During the second wave of knowledge creation, social structures were differentiated vertically. Now in the third wave, the differentiation process is horizontal. In the stratification system this means different capitalist classes and work logics rather than social classes with super salaries, thus increasing social inequality. In the study of organizations, this translates into missionary and self-management forms where post-modern individuals obtain meaningful work and ask for customized service. In the study of networks it means the rise of systemic coordinated networks replacing supply chains.

Given the growing inefficiencies of labor markets, product/service markets, and public markets (elections), systemic coordinated networks are proposed as a solution. Furthermore, we need a national corps of individuals with special skills in sectors with shortages who can then be assigned to work in disadvantaged areas. Pre-school, primary school, and secondary school need to be reinvented to facilitate more upward social mobility. Agriculture and industry also require radical new innovations. To build a new civil society, governments have to encourage participation in programs that help others.

The essays in this volume demonstrate how the Rossettis – from the celebrated Dante Gabriel and Christina to the comparatively neglected Maria and William – drew upon a shared cultural experience, and describe how each contributed to the intellectual debates of the age and played a substantial role in their various fields. Bringing together significant contributions from some of the most renowned experts on the Rossettis, 'Outsiders Looking In' provides important new perspectives on this talented family and their brilliant legacy.

The BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – are currently at the crossroads of major structural economic and political changes. This book provides a comparative analysis of the national innovation systems of the five BRICS countries and the trends in each of their science, technology and innovation policies. The BRICS Project was a workshop launched as part of the Globelics Scientific Committee, a global research network on the economics of learning, innovation and competence. The BRICS Project identifies and analyses development opportunities; highlights common characteristics and challenges of the BRICS countries; and helps to uncover possible paths to fulfil the BRICS countries’ socio-political and economic development potential. The BRICS Project also reveals development alternatives that contain the potential to help both developed and underdeveloped countries to overcome the problems brought by ‘an exhausted production and consumption system and a malignant regulatory and financial regime’. The collected research and workshop papers are now available in BRICS and Development Alternatives, an invaluable contribution to the understanding of the rise of these new emerging science and technology (S&T) powers and to improving evidence-based S&T policymaking with regard to these countries.

The individual has never been more important in society – in almost every sphere of public and private life, the individual is sovereign. Yet the importance and apparent power assigned to the individual is not all that it seems. As ‘Responsible Citizens’ investigates via its UK-based case studies, this emphasis on the individual has gone hand in hand with a rise in subtle authoritarianism, which has insinuated itself into the government of the population. Whilst present throughout the public services, this authoritarianism is most conspicuous in the health and social welfare sectors, such that a kind of ‘governance through responsibility’ is today enforced upon the population.

In the twenty-first century, individualism has come to pervade the body politic, especially where health and social care are concerned. Clients who may be at their most abject and vulnerable are urged to take responsibility for themselves rather than further burden the health and social care services. In some British healthcare trusts, prosecutions are mounted against clients who have lost their temper or who act inappropriately as a result of their disorientation, under the guise of ‘making them take responsibility for their actions’. Citizens on the street in Britain are likely to have responsibility thrust upon them through mechanisms such as electronic surveillance and the burgeoning new cohorts of community enforcement officers, as well as the police themselves. Thus taking responsibility is never quite as simple as it seems – being responsible demarcates the borderland between autonomy and authority, and often equates to simply ‘doing what you’re told’.

Information and communication technologies have expanded dramatically in Latin America. During the last two decades, mobile phones have penetrated more quickly in this region than in developed regions at a remarkable rate. Similarly, the per capita growth rates of Internet users have been higher in developing countries than in developed countries. The really fast diffusion of newer technologies such as mobile telephony, broadband and Internet has opened up big opportunities for using these technologies in the delivery of information in businesses and social service providers in Latin America and the Caribbean.

‘Information Technologies in Latin America’ provides a collection of rigorous empirical studies that contributes to a better understanding of the role and impact of old and new information technologies on Latin American economic development. It provides evidence using randomized and quasi-experimental designed studies for different ICT interventions. In evaluating their development impact a critical concern has been to contribute to the little existing evidence. In fact, whereas many ICT projects in the developing world have been promoted by multilateral organizations, bilateral aid agencies and nongovernmental organizations in recent years, the extent to which these interventions and policies actually contribute to the development of the region is unclear. The book provides evidence on what works and what does not. An important objective is to test one of the frustrating benefits of randomized controlled trials, namely, their ability to show that a program works when it does not and in fact, important policy lessons can be gained from failed field experiments.

This collection of essays aims to provide valuable insight on both the promise and the pitfalls of trying to replace conventional, high-cost outreach with technological alternatives. Thus, it may be relevant both to researchers working in the area of information technologies and development, as well as to practitioners pondering how to leverage technology to improve outreach and reach clients in innovative ways.

This scholarly monograph synthesises critical understandings of collective social trauma and the Gothic’s discursive manifestation within the trauma paradigm in testimonial and literary expressions of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Gothic writing, more than just a historically specific manifestation of English eighteenth-century concerns about national identity and the French Revolution, functions as a textuality haunting that which it is not and an articulation of a society’s collective fears. Chernobyl Gothic, then, is a testimony, literature and aesthetics that haunts the empty space of the Soviet authority’s non-disclosure of the disaster, namely in the displaced survivor, the Exclusion Zone, and the exploded nuclear reactor housing. Chapters in this book examine the ways in which trauma and the Gothic coalesce around the writing of the Chernobyl disaster in various literary genres. Images of terror, fear and panic deployed satirically in Soviet Science Fiction published before the disaster portray a body politic in chaos and excess of Marxist homogeneity. Psychological hermeticism of individuals and social groups in Chernobyl testimony and fiction indicates the haunting of intergenerational trauma. Literature of international mourning, identifying in the Chernobyl eyewitness a lost subject who nevertheless survives and seemingly resists memorialisation, negotiates an ethics of exchange between self and other, visitor and native, living and dead. Cryptomimesis and mourning generate Gothic, uncanny effects within these texts through their ‘inside-outness’. This constitutes a pertinent Gothic structural aesthetics in analysing the traumas of a displaced network of survivors from a collapsed regime that nonetheless remains relevant in current geopolitics.

In the continued aftermath of disaster, technological representations of Chernobyl and the Exclusion Zone in the contemporary Gothic, namely in Virtual Reality and computer games, explore a discursivity of ghosts and monstrosity respectively.

Grand-Gugignol Cinema and the Horror Genre traces important contributions of the Parisian Grand-Guignol theatre’s Golden Age as theoretical considerations of embodiment and affect in the development of horror cinema in the twentieth century. This study traces key components of the Grand-Guignol stage as a means to explore the immersive and corporeal aspects of horror cinema from the sound period to today. The book is a means to explore the Grand-Guignol not only as a historical place and genre, but theoretically, as a conceptual framework that opens up an affective mapping of Grand-Guignol attractions in cinema. 

In a broader theoretical sense, Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare positions Grand-Guignol cinema in corporeal and affective terms as a way to discuss central themes from the Golden Age of the Grand-Guignol theatre as they figure within the framework of post-representational analysis in cinema studies. Post-representational analysis draws meaning out of matter, or the material intensities of films; here, making sense (representation and meaning) and also sensing (in a more corporeal, sensorial way) have political relevance that cut across gender, class, race and sexuality. The author deploys the Grand-Guignol as a conceptual tool to reveal its important influence on the horror genre by focusing on the dominant themes of the Grand-Guignol theatre that cinematic horror has taken up in its own immersive theatrics of the corporeal and sensorial.

This study’s restoration of a long Grand-Guignol tradition in cinema makes it a significant contribution to new theorizations of horror. It brings seemingly disparate traditions into conversation, as American, Canadian, French, and Italian cinema are all important sites for thinking through cinematic embodiment. These four countries have developed their own important genres and movements of Grand-Guignol cinema: the slasher, the “French Films of Sensation,” Canadian “body horror,” and the giallo. The Grand-Guignol famously operated in a dead-end of Chaptal Street, in the Pigalle district of Paris; this study offers affective and corporeal readings that open up new byways beyond the dead-end of psychoanalytic readings that continue to be dominant in horror genre scholarship.

'South of the Crisis' examines why and how global capitalism has entered a phase of unsustainable crises of accumulation and legitimacy, and looks at various solutions to such crises, from mild reform to radical overhaul.

The book then examines the various scenarios from a Latin American perspective, arguing that the continent is a 'garden of forking paths' rather than a homogeneous area, and that different countries are likely to try diverse experiments in adapting to the crisis - with significantly different outcomes.

One common challenge faced by all Latin American countries, albeit with different modalities, is how to achieve economic growth with social inclusion. Corradi investigates the pros and cons of different policy solutions to the challenge of inclusion.

It is well known that resource-rich countries may suffer from a 'resource curse'. Their economic performance in the medium and long-run may be adversely affected by the resource riches. This problem is particularly important for Russia, since it is the world's second largest producer and exporter of oil, largest producer and exporter of natural gas, and also exports other natural resources such as diamonds, platinum, nickel, coal, iron ore, timber, and grain. This book is an edited collection, bringing together well-known specialists from Russia, Japan, Western Europe and the USA, providing data about the Russian hydrocarbons sector, its size, economic significance, and taxation. It also offers data about the growth of the Stabilization Fund. In addition, it analyses the role of the hydrocarbons sector in Russia's post-1998 economic boom, drawing attention to the contribution of remittances to Russia of the proceeds of raw material exports. With respect to international political economy, 'Russia’s Oil and Natural Gas' points out that Russia today, with its large energy exports, helps solve the problem of domestic energy shortages which plague many countries. In this way, Russia is currently a major contributor to world stability and the welfare of the energy importers.

Prometheus and Gaia examines the ideological currents known as Futurism and Eco-Pessimism. While these tendencies are rarely spoken about explicitly, especially in mainstream discourse, they do have strong (if subterranean) influences on today’s popular politics. In light of the existential threats posed by climate change, nuclear proliferation, disruptive technologies (especially bioengineering and AI) and looming economic crises, many have grown weary of the “small fixes” offered by conventional politicians. Worsening climate change, to take one example, appears to be a problem that “reducing, reusing, and recycling,” or non-binding treaties, are inadequate to remedy. Likewise, perennial economic crises seem too large and too systemic a threat compared to the moderate “fixes” of quantitative easing and government bailouts. If the system, itself, is the problem, then some radical change appears necessary. 

Here, two styles of thought emerge to challenge the status quo: The Futurist sees in existential threats just so many symptoms of a disconnect. This is the widening chasm between a dynamic and ever-accelerating technology, on the one hand, and an all-too static conception of human nature and human society, on the other. Their solution is to fully embrace the disruptive and anarchic powers of technology, and to leave the human as we know it behind, as nothing more than a parochial relic. The Eco-Pessimist instead sees technological development as the problem. The need to dominate nature, and our spoiling the planet, is the proximate cause of our contemporary crises. Their solution is to chastise human consumption, egoism and instrumental reason as destructive of a holistic, planetary balance.

What these two ideologies have in common is a strident anti-humanism. Each, in their own way, subordinates human welfare and reason to some alien “other.” This common anti-humanism is, in some respects, more important than the specific “other” that they designate—whether this be an anarchic nature or a dynamic technology. In both cases, what stands above humanity is valorized as an object of adoration rather than true understanding or comprehension. This need for radical transcendence beyond the human masquerades as a new form of politics; in fact it is a pre-modern and counter-Enlightenment tendency. Prometheus and Gaia seeks to uncover and demystify this strange coincidence of opposites, and goes on to make the positive case for a humanistic rationalism.

Recent years have seen the strong development of Neo-Victorian studies, including its theorisation by such scholars as Cora Kaplan, Sally Shuttleworth, Ann Heilmann, Christian Gutleben, Marie-Louise Kohlke, Mark Llewellyn and others. It is a focus that has engaged literary critics from around the globe like Carmen Veronica Borbély (Romania), Susanne Gruß (Germany), Tiffany Gagliardi Trotman (Spain), Hitomi Nakatani (Japan), Agnieszka Matysiak (Poland), Max Duperray (France), Jeanne Ellis (South Africa) and Van Leavenworth (Sweden) to name just a few. [NP] ‘Neo-Gothic Narratives’ defines and theorizes what, exactly, qualifies as such a text, what mobilises the employment of the Gothic to speak to our own times, whether nostalgia plays a role and whether there is room for humour besides the sobriety and horror in these narratives across various media. What attracts us to the Gothic that makes us want to resurrect, reinvent, echo it? Why do we let the Gothic redefine us? Why do we let it haunt us? Does it speak to us through intertexuality, self-reflectivity, metafiction, immersion, affect? Are we reclaiming the history of women and other subalterns in the Gothic that had been denied in other forms of history? Are we revisiting the trauma of English colonisation and seeking national identity? Or are we simply tourists who enjoy cruising through the otherworld? The essays in this volume investigate both the readerly experience of Neo-Gothic narratives as well as their writerly pastiche.

In human binocular vision, the lenses of our eyes project two slightly different images onto the retinas and our brain calculates the difference between them as actual depth. Stereoscopy replicates this process by providing left-eye views and right-eye views (stereo pairs) of the same picture at slightly different angles which, when viewed simultaneously, create the illusion of depth (stereopsis). In 1844 Sir David Brewster invented a handheld apparatus for viewing stereoscopic photographs through a system of prismatic lenses, with the stereo pairs mounted on a single card. During the 1870s, a popular theatrical entertainment involved the projection of duo-color coded slides onto a large screen to be viewed through glasses with corresponding left and right colored cells to produce a stereoscopic illusion, known as “anaglyphic” 3-D. 

With the development of motion pictures, it was natural that pioneers like William Friese-Green and the Lumiere brothers would experiment with anaglyphic systems, since the photographic principle was the same. But commercial exploitation of the process awaited 1952, when independent producer Arch Oboler released Bwana Devil, a low-budget Anscocolor feature whose phenomenal box-office success catalyzed a short, industry-wide conversion to 3-D. Between 1953 and 1954, Hollywood produced 69 features in 3-D, mostly action films that could exploit the depth illusion, such as Westerns, science fiction, and horror films—all of them shot in some version of Oboler’s Natural Vision. With some modification, such as the introduction of twin-lens cameras and projectors, this was the process used for nearly all the 3-D films made between 1953 and 2009, when James Cameron’s Avatar became the highest-grossing feature of all time and the studios once again stampeded into 3-D production, this time in the more perceptually satisfying (and, ultimately, cost-effective) digital form. 

While all 3-D systems fool our brains into believing that something is either closer or farther away than it actually is, older systems tended to represent depth as a series of dimensionally flat planes like an eighteenth-century peep show, whereas digital systems add the effect of volumetric figures occupying real space, creating a kind of “aesthetics of immersion.” Yet the ultimate technology for seeing things in three dimensions is Virtual Reality (VR), which uses a hybrid of advanced modern technology—Lidar scanners, hyper-accelerated graphic cards, etc.—and the stereoscopic illusion first quantified in the nineteenth century to create a state of sensory immersion that borders on otherness. Finding a way to mass-market the VR experience as a form of popular cinema, rather than as an enhanced form of video game, has become the new grail of the film industry.