The Animal Crossing virtual world is one of Japan’s most successful but unrecognised cultural exports, gaining a global audience during the COVID-19 pandemic among people who traditionally have not been attracted to networked computer games but are enchanted by the world’s emphasis of sociability and curation rather than violence. The book is the first major study of Animal Crossing, written in an incisive and engaging style for students, academics, non-specialist members of the public and businesspeople interested in the potential of an unconventional online global space that has diverse demographics.

The book has three strengths. It contextualises Animal Crossing within the history of computer games and global acceptance of Japanese aesthetics within popular culture alongside the Walkman, Hello Kitty, Anime, Manga and Godzilla. It brings together scholarly and popular literature without jargon, providing an accessible authoritative resource for people interested in different aspects of Animal Crossing in particular or consumer engagement with virtual worlds in general. It offers incisive comments about Animal Crossing as a legal, technological, social, cultural and commercial phenomenon. 

Those comments consider laws such as copyright, contract and marketing. They answer questions about who uses the virtual world, why and why not – drawing on research regarding online sociability and the pleasures of world-making. They discuss innovative aspects of Animal Crossing such as scope for users to incorporate art from a range of museums in personalised spaces curated by those users, visited by their friends and gamified by marketers, politicians and civil society advocates. Readers thus receive a rich interdisciplinary exploration covering things with which they are familiar and making links or providing an introduction to aspects that were previously unrecognised.

‘Émile Durkheim and the Collective Consciousness of Society: A Study in Criminology’ challenges conventional thinking on the use of Durkheim’s key concept of the ‘collective consciousness of society’, and represents the first ever book-length treatment of this underexplored topic. Operating from both a criminological and sociological perspective, Kenneth Smith argues that Durkheim’s original concept must be sensitively revised and updated for its real relevance to come to the fore.

This study puts forward three major adjustments to Durkheim’s concept of the collective consciousness. It complicates the idea that the common and collective consciousness are interchangeable terms for the same phenomenon; it refutes the ‘disciplinary’ function of society as part of the concept of the common or collective consciousness; and it reveals the illusiveness of the supposed universal set of equally held ideas in a society, underlining the importance of geographical and generational variation.

This book is not another warning about the end of the world. It is neither a penitential sermon on environmentalism, nor an appeal to frugality and self-restraint. Far from having exhausted the era of technological, social and democratic progress, we are on the brink of a new stage of industrial modernity: a shift from a fossil-based to a postfossil economy, from the ruthless exploitation of nature toward growth in tandem with it. Decoupling economic growth from environmental consumption is an ambitious goal, but also an achievable one.

Drawing on the German policy experience of tackling climate change, ‘Green Growth, Smart Growth’ outlines a positive way forward in this great transformation and it does so in the conviction that the danger industrial civilization poses to our future can be overcome using the means of modernity: science, technology and democracy. It is by no means certain that we will win the race against climate change and dwindling resources. That will require nothing less than a great leap forward—a green industrial revolution.

In Culture and Conflicts in Sierra Leone Mining: Strangers, Aliens, Spirits, the author uses Sierra Leone as a case study to contribute to the debates on the causes and nature of mineral resource conflicts in Africa. Many works focus on the political economy of more sensitive large-scale mining conflicts. This book integrates cultural conflict dimensions, primarily the clash between the centuries-old customary landlord-stranger land governance institution and state mining policies and laws governing extraction.

Extractive industries as outsiders or strangers with no land rights threaten centuries-old cultural norms of indigenous landlords in mining regions. The Sierra Leone colonial government facilitated a stranger hierarchy through crafting legislation that redefined autochthony, citizenship, and micro-cultural identities concerning the stranger. Such actions further exacerbated power imbalances in race, ethnicity, gender, age, and social class. This legacy persists in postcolonial Sierra Leone threatening sustainable development mainly based on mineral extraction. The book shows that these cultural conflicts challenge the effective development of the mining sector, including establishing artisanal mining as a viable complementary livelihood to agriculture for rural populations.

Rather than focus on the well-documented large-scale “blood diamond” war from 1991 to 2001 as other studies have done, the book examines the less-investigated, persistent culture-related conflicts that are historically integral to mineral extraction. Such conflicts impact the efficient flow of mineral commodity chains. The book uses a world-system notion of commodity chains characterized by unequal economic exchange and unequal ecological exchange. And it highlights, specifically, an unequal cultural exchange that impacts cultural heritage, including customary livelihoods, indigenous land rights, and sacred places, and favors a Western cultural universalism. Itexamines mining policies and laws of the government of Sierra Leone in a historical context to assess their efficacy by highlighting colonial relics that continue to thwart development efforts. Her work underscores the need for effective participation by vulnerable and marginalized communities in decision-making processes on matters important to their economic, environmental, and sociocultural sustainability.

The interdisciplinary work highlights how culture, history, environment, and society intertwine in the Sierra Leone mining industry and the effects of global, transnational, and local dynamics and interactions.

‘The Anthem Companion to Robert Bellah’ is the first major collection of writings on the life and work of one of the foremost twentieth-century sociologists of religion. Bellah’s work was central in many fields: the sociology of Japanese religion, the relationships between sociology and the humanities, the relationship between American religion and politics, the cultures of modern individualism, and evolution and society. During an intellectual career which spanned six decades, Bellah occupied a central position within at least three major intellectual movements: structural-functionalism and modernization theory in the 1950s and the 1960s; interpretive social science, which he helped create in the early 1970s along with Clifford Geertz and Peter Berger; and the so-called Axial age revival of the late 1990s and early 2000s. More often than not, Bellah’s work was on the edge of social scientific research; his seminal work on civil religion in the early 1970s created a huge debate across disciplines which continues to this day; his co-authored book ‘Habits of the Heart’ (1985) was a bestseller and the object of sustained debate in the general public sphere; his last magnum opus ‘Religion in Human Evolution’, published at 84, was a monument to an extraordinary scholarly and intellectual career. [NP] The richness of Bellah’s work is the object of this collection of essays by top American and European scholars from the social sciences and humanities. Each essay has a double character: it introduces a single topic in an accessible and complete manner, and then presents a reflection on the viability and import of Bellah’s ideas for interpreting contemporary phenomena. Among the authors are some of Bellah’s students who became top scholars in their fields, as well as younger scholars. From a disciplinary point of view, the list includes sociologists (Gorski, Torpey, Boy, Guhin, Libeck), historians (Borovoy, Barshay) and philosophers (Tipton, Lequire) to reflect the diversity of Bellah’s work.

This book deals with a new set of triangular orthogonal functions, which evolved from the set of well-known block pulse functions (BPF), a major member of the piecewise constant orthogonal function (PCOF) family. Unlike PCOF, providing staircase solutions, this new set of triangular functions provides piecewise linear solution with less mean integral squared error (MISE).

After introducing the rich background of PCOF family, which includes Walsh, block pulse and other related functions, fundamentals of the newly proposed set – such as basic properties, function approximation, integral operational metrics, etc. – are presented. This set has been used for integration of functions, analysis and synthesis of dynamic systems and solution of integral equations. The study ends with microprocessor based simulation of SISO control systems using sample-and-hold functions and Dirac delta functions.

The best and most instructive way to learn about philosophy is by examining the history of the field. For it is here that we come to see how its particulars are identified and addressed by some of humankind’s sharpest intellects. Philosophy began hundreds of years BCE, and by now has grown to a scope and scale beyond acceptability by any single mind. But a sampling of episodes and issues can convey some idea of the nature of the field. And it is with this goal in view—clarifying the detail of some key philosophical issues—that these studies are being put into print. It is the aim of these forays into philosophical history to illustrate how contemporary perspectives, methods, and instruments of analysis can clarify some of the key philosophical teachings both by highlighting the difficulties they encounter and by providing instructive means for addressing them.

Ambitious measures to reduce carbon emissions are all too rare in reality, impeded by economic and political concerns rather than technological advances. In this collection of essays, Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth A. Stanton show that the impact of inaction on climate change will be far worse than the cost of ambitious climate policies.

After setting out the basic principles which must shape contemporary climate economics, Ackerman and Stanton consider common flaws in climate change policy – from mistaken assumptions that dismiss the welfare of future generations and anticipate little or no growth in low-income countries, to unrealistic projections of climate damages that dismiss catastrophic risks – and offer their own insightful remedies. They question the usefulness of conventional integrated assessment models (IAMs) that model the long-term interaction between economic growth and climate change, and propose an alternative in their Climate and Regional Economics and Development (CRED) model.

In this incisive work, Stanton and Ackerman offer a timely and original contribution to the fields of climate economics and global equity.

‘Émile Durkheim and the Collective Consciousness of Society: A Study in Criminology’ challenges conventional thinking on the use of Durkheim’s key concept of the ‘collective consciousness of society’, and represents the first ever book-length treatment of this underexplored topic. Operating from both a criminological and sociological perspective, Kenneth Smith argues that Durkheim’s original concept must be sensitively revised and updated for its real relevance to come to the fore.

This study puts forward three major adjustments to Durkheim’s concept of the collective consciousness. It complicates the idea that the common and collective consciousness are interchangeable terms for the same phenomenon; it refutes the ‘disciplinary’ function of society as part of the concept of the common or collective consciousness; and it reveals the illusiveness of the supposed universal set of equally held ideas in a society, underlining the importance of geographical and generational variation.

A revised edition of the classic monograph, 'The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh' investigates the social contradictions, class forces, and efforts at political organization and mobilization that lay behind the emergence of a powerful nationalist movement in Uttar Pradesh in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It also considers the concurrent emergence of Hindu–Muslim differences as a major factor affecting nationalist politics and the anti-colonial struggle in India.

With a revised introduction and conclusion incorporating material from new research, and corresponding revisions throughout the text, the new edition extends the scope of the original work to cover the entire inter-war period, 1920–40.

"Poetic Innovation in Wordsworth 1825–1833" uses extensive manuscript study of Wordsworth’s poems to present, for the first time, an account of his poetics during the supposedly "fallow" years, 1825-1833. Wordsworth wrote no manifestos during the later years and as a result the book turns to a manuscript page, unique among his dozens of notebooks, that when read spatially and in conjunction with other manuscripts and poems from the same period reveals a poetics in the making. ‘Poetic Innovation in Wordsworth 1825–1833’ develops a radical process of reading and interpreting, relying less on discursive prose and more on the conscious acknowledgement of the play of signifiers on the manuscript page that has led Robinson to capture a "world" of Wordsworth (1825–1833) beginning with the manuscript and spreading outwards to include the geography and topography relevant to his writing, the dwellings in which he worked, the well-known cottage industry of amanuenses who helped him produce his poems, the contemporary journals and poems of his sister Dorothy Wordsworth, and the social issues (Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform) that often occasioned them. Finally, the book presents a cluster of more-or-less unread poems but most worthy of inclusion in the Wordsworth canon.

In order to emulate for readers Wordsworth’s spatial vision of poetry and the poetic process, and the often-playful experience of reading these manuscripts, Robinson has, with the collaboration of book designer and award-winning scholar of the image in modern fiction Karen Jacobs, developed a book design that stresses a paratext (including footnotes) so that the reader is asked to read across as much as to read vertically. The poems presented and discussed in the text appear with an image background to enhance the idea that poems themselves are events in space. Images, both of geographical and architectural space and of highlightings of manuscript detail, saturate the text as a whole. Finally, the intensity and simultaneous playfulness of Wordsworth’s nearly obsessive revisionary process has dictated the production of twenty-two original ‘found’ poems based on materials from Wordsworth’s manuscripts; these also appear throughout the book against an image background.

The book’s design, by Karen Jacobs, echoes Robinson’s argument that Wordsmith’s late poetry both involves and evokes multi-layered responses.

The book discusses the representation of Amazonian indigenous cultures in temporary exhibitions taking place between the 1980s and 2010 through the analysis of selected case studies of these exhibitions held in major institutions in Europe, South America and the United States, including the British Museum, Musée du Quai Branly, Centre George Pompidou, Museum of Modern Art of New York, São Paulo Biennial and São Paulo Art Museum. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book is richly illustrated and presents a range of exhibition documentation never published before. 

The book takes as a starting point the theoretical discussions that emerged in the 1980s stimulating the development of notions of ‘decolonising’ or ‘indigenising’ the museum as well as of practices of collaboration between museums and indigenous communities. Forty years on from the outset of these debates, the book proposes a critical inquiry on how these discussions inflected on exhibition practices in the following decades, focusing in particular on how ‘major’ institutions (ethnographic museums, art museums and art biennials) have responded to these debates. 

The results of the research suggest that practice has fallen behind theory and that most ‘major’ institutions or museums within Europe and the United States are still only marginally engaging with Amazonian indigenous peoples in the organisation of exhibitions. The book advances the concept of ‘minor curating’ as a strategy to potentiate access of indigenous peoples to historical collections held by major institutions and to facilitate the development of cultural projects with these collections and in ways that are culturally, historically and politically effective. The book has an interdisciplinary reach contributing to the fields of visual anthropology, curatorial studies, museum studies and exhibition history and covering a geographical area that has been overlooked within these fields. 

This annotated bibliography of nineteenth-century British periodicals, complete with a detailed subject index, reveals how Victorian commentaries on journalism shaped the discourse on the origins and contemporary character of the domestic, imperial and foreign press. Drawn from a wide range of publications that represent diverse political, economic, religious, social and literary views, this book contains over 4,500 entries, and features extracts from over 40 nineteenth-century periodicals.

The featured articles discuss both the prior and the contemporary press, from annuals to dailies, and examine topics such as circulation, content, audience and personnel. These nineteenth-century commentaries offer both a thorough and influential analysis of their journalistic milieu, presenting statistics on sales and descriptions of advertising, passing judgment on space allocations, pinpointing different readerships, and identifying individuals who engaged with the press either exclusively or occasionally.

The essays also examine the impact of outside forces – including technology, taxation, capitalism and compulsory education – whilst assessments of the press abroad add the further considerations of geography, ethnicity, resources and restraints to the collective analysis. Most importantly, the bibliography demonstrates that columnists routinely articulated ideas about the purpose of the press, yet rarely recognized the illogic of prioritizing public good and private profit simultaneously. The volume thus highlights implicitly a universal characteristic of journalism: its fractious, ambiguous, conflicting behavior – an endemic trait that appears to have survived well into the twenty-first century.

'Politics and the Theory of Language in the USSR 1917-1938' provides ground-breaking research into the complex interrelations of linguistic theory and politics during the first two decades of the USSR. The work examines how the new Revolutionary regime promoted linguistic research that scrutinised the relationship between language, social structure, national identity and ideological factors as part of an attempt to democratize the public sphere. It also looks at the demise of the sociological paradigm, as the isolation and bureaucratization of the state gradually shifted the focus of research.

Through this account, the collection formally acknowledges the achievements of the Soviet linguists of the time, whose innovative approaches to the relationship between language and society predates the emergence of western sociolinguistics by several decades. These articles are the first articles written in English about these linguists, and will introduce an Anglophone audience to a range of materials hitherto unavailable.

In addition to providing new articles, the volume also presents the first annotated translation of Ivan Meshchaninov's 1929 'Theses on Japhetidology', thereby providing insight into one of the most controversial strands within Soviet linguistic thought.

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

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

World trade and investment law is in crisis: new and progressive ideas are needed.

Rules that facilitated globalization and supported global economic growth are being challenged. A system of global governance that once seemed secure is now at risk as the US ignores the rules while developing countries struggle to escape restrictions. Some want to tear global institutions and agreements down while others try desperately to maintain the status quo. Rejecting both options, a group of trade and investment law experts from 10 countries, South and North, have joined hands to propose ideas for a new world trade and investment law that would maintain global growth while distributing costs and benefits more fairly. Paying special attention to those who have suffered from trade dislocation and to restrictions that have hampered innovative growth strategies in developing countries, they outline a progressive trade and investment law agenda in ‘World Trade and Investment Law Reimagined’ that includes new ways to link trade with protection for labour; measures to ensure that gains from trade are used to offset losses; new rules that can protect foreign investments without hamstringing developing governments or harming local communities; innovative procedures to allow developing countries the freedom to try innovative growth strategies; and methods to cope with new products.

Ever since human beings first travelled, cities have constituted important material and literary destinations. While the city has formed a key theme for scholars of literary fiction, travellers’ modes of writing the city have been somewhat neglected by travel studies. However, travel writing with its attention to difference provides a rich source for the study of representational ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’ in the modern city. Tracing spatial practices of French travel writers in London and New York from1851 to the 1980s, this book contributes to a body of work that analyses travel and travel writing beyond the Anglophone context, and engages a variety of travel writing in questions surrounding French modalities for negotiating and establishing a nexus of meanings for life in the modern city. One of the central tenets of the book is that, in the way its spaces are planned, encountered and represented, the city is operational in the formulation of identities and ideologies, and the book’s guiding question is how travel and travel writing allow for the exploration of urban modernity from a perspective of exchange. Bringing together the strands of theory, context and poetic analysis, this book examines travel writing as a spatial practice of the modern city, engaging urban space in questions of nationality, power and legibility and opening avenues for the exploration of urban modernity from a position of alterity, where alternative imaginative geographies of the city might emerge.

When the body of Saga Atsushi, Japan’s preeminent connoisseur of ukiyo-e (woodblock prints), is pulled from the ocean off the coast of Tohoku, having apparently committed suicide, the shocked Japanese art world turns out to mourn his death. Among them is Ryohei, an up-and-coming young ukiyo-e scholar and research assistant to Saga’s colleague-turned-rival, Professor Nishijima. But a chance encounter with an old friend makes Ryohei wonder if there might be more to Saga’s death than meets the eye…

A revised edition of the classic monograph, 'The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh' investigates the social contradictions, class forces, and efforts at political organization and mobilization that lay behind the emergence of a powerful nationalist movement in Uttar Pradesh in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It also considers the concurrent emergence of Hindu–Muslim differences as a major factor affecting nationalist politics and the anti-colonial struggle in India.

With a revised introduction and conclusion incorporating material from new research, and corresponding revisions throughout the text, the new edition extends the scope of the original work to cover the entire inter-war period, 1920–40.

“Death of a Prototype” is the first work by Victor Beilis to make it into English since the single-volume publication in 2002 of a duo of novellas—“The Rehabilitation of Freud & Bakhtin and Others”( translated by Richard Grose). Much like the novellas that preceded it, “Death of a Prototype” is a hyper-allusive and self-consciously ‘difficult’ work: Beilis delights in intertextual play, inviting the reader to unravel a complex web of quotations, references and paraphrases. The author engages closely with an entire spectrum of Russian and European cultural traditions, from classical antiquity to twentieth-century postmodernism. The visual arts unsurprisingly play a particularly important role in the novel. So, too, is visuality in general: seeing and being seen, acts of perception and observation, gazing, glancing and glimpsing. The reader is confronted with an intimidating array of literary styles, all jostling against one another. Alongside several dialogue-heavy chapters—not all that different stylistically from much contemporary fiction—readers encounter poetic, archaicized prose, self-referential literary analysis, Joycean stream of consciousness, among others. 

The title of this book may seem to confuse two separate disciplines – finance and macroeconomics. However, it is based on the fact that finance and macroeconomics were integrated, at least in their formative years. It is a natural extension of a line of research that dominated monetary theory in the early part of the 20th century. Economists such as Keynes, Robertson, Hawtrey, Fisher, Hayek and Schumpeter sought to blend the analysis of business cycles with their (often first-hand) experience of money and financial markets. The result was a monetary theory that provided the fertile background to what came to be called macroeconomics. However, in the post-war period, the monetary aspects of this theory dropped out of sight in the neo-classical synthesis and hydraulic Keynesianism. Post-Keynesians such as Davidson and Minsky have done much to try to restore the monetary aspects of the theory, but the other – more technical– aspects of financial analysis have been ignored. Paradoxically, these aspects now form an integral part of the curriculum of finance and business departments and are the tools of the trade in financial analysis. This book aims to show how these tools of financial analysis were initially part of the early investigations of macroeconomics and how they maybe used to provide a realistic analysis of the behavior of modern financial economies.

‘Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction’ explores representations of exotic animals in Victorian adventure fiction, mainly in works by R. M. Ballantyne, G. A. Henty, G. M. Fenn, Paul du Chaillu, H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan. These primary texts are concerned with Southern and West Africa, India and what is now Indonesia in the period 1860–1910, an era which comprises imperial expansion, consolidation and the beginnings of imperial decline. Representations of exotic animals in such literary works generally revolve around portrayals of violence, either in big-game hunting or in the collection of scientific specimens, and draw on a range of literary sources, most notably romance, natural history writing and ‘penny dreadful’ fiction.

This study investigates how these texts’ depictions of forms of violence complicate the seemingly fundamental distinction of humans from animals, and undermines the ideological structures of imperial rule. Rather than an innate and hierarchical opposition, the relationship of humans with their animal others emerges in this context as a complex interplay of kinship and difference. This argument both continues the postcolonial dismantling of empire’s logic of domination and develops the recentering of the nonhuman in environmentally focused criticism. Most vitally, it also signals the relation between these fields: the necessary interdependence of human and nonhuman interests, environmental activism and global social justice.

For millennia the proto-Chinese Sinitic cultures of the Yellow River basin, centered on the Central (or “North China”) Plain, evolved in a very different direction from those of the Yangtze basin and lands to the farther south. Because scholars of the former monopolized the written record, East Asian history has long adopted their viewpoint, which has discounted the importance of those southern cultures, which were dismissed as “barbaric.”

This book uses the drainage and reclamation of a coastal marsh on the central Fujian coast organized by a Sinitic magnate in the later eighth century to explore both the nature of local culture and its interaction with and impact upon the evolving Sinitic culture. Bearers of the latter had already been migrating toward the south for centuries, but before the Tang few had ventured south of the Min River basin in northern Fujian into the central and southern basins of the province. The project was undertaken in response to their growing demand for land, which grew as the pace of migration accelerated in the aftermath of the mid-eighth century rebellions that almost ended the Tang.

Later records claim that the project was undermined by a jiao, a mythological dragon-like beast. The author argues that this in fact was a crocodile that was wallowing in the dikes. Cultural memory had transformed the crocodile into a jiao as a representation of the indigenous culture that had transformed Sinitic culture. He concludes that this local event illustrates the accommodation that evolved between the classical culture of the Yellow River and the local cultures of the south.

‘Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema’ explores aspects of gender, race and region in films and television produced in the northern Australian state of Queensland. Drawing on a range of scholarly sources and an extensive filmography, the essays in the book investigate poetics and production histories from the 'period' films of the Australian cinema revival of the 1970s to contemporary 'Queensland-genre' films, highlighting the resonances of regional locations amid the energetic growth of the film industry, and promotion of Queensland as a production destination.

‘Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema’ comprises eight essays, an introduction and conclusion, and the analysis of poetics and cultural geographies is focused on landmark films and television. The first section of the book, ‘Backtracks: Landscape and Identity’, refers to films from and before the revival, beginning with the 1978 film 'The Irishman' as an example of heritage cinema in which performances of gender and race, like the setting, suggest a romanticised and uncritical image of colonial Australia. It is compared to Baz Luhrmann’s 'Australia' (2008) and several other films. In the second chapter, ‘Heritage Enigmatic’, 'The Irishman' is also drawn into comparison with Charles Chauvel’s ‘Jedda’ (1955), as films that incorporate Indigenous performances in this heritage discourse through the role of voice and sound. In Part 2, ‘Silences in Paradise’, the first essay, ‘Tropical Gothic’, focuses on Rachel Perkins’s 'Radiance' (1998) as a landmark post-colonial film that questions the connotations of icons of paradise in Queensland. The discussion leads to films, in the next chapter, ‘Island Girls Friday’, that figure women on Queensland islands, spanning the pre-revival and contemporary era: ‘Age of Consent’ (1969), ‘Nim’s Island’ (2008) and ‘Uninhabited’ (2010). Part 3, ‘Masculine Dramas of the Coast’ moves to the Gold Coast, in films dating from before and since the current spike in transnational production at the Warner Roadshow film studios there, namely, 'The Coolangatta Gold' (1984), 'Peter Pan' (2003), and 'Sanctum' (2011). The final section, ‘Regional Backtracks’, turns, first, to two television series, ‘Remote Area Nurse’ (2006), and ‘The Straits’ (2012), that share unique provenance of production in the Torres Strait and far north regions of Queensland, while, in the final chapter, the iconic outback districts of western Queensland figure the convergence of land, landscape and location in films with potent perspectives on Indigenous histories in ‘The Proposition’ (2005) and ‘Mystery Road’ (2013). ‘Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema’ presents the various regions as syncretic spaces subject to transitions of social and industry practices over time.

The book discusses the representation of Amazonian indigenous cultures in temporary exhibitions taking place between the 1980s and 2010 through the analysis of selected case studies of these exhibitions held in major institutions in Europe, South America and the United States, including the British Museum, Musée du Quai Branly, Centre George Pompidou, Museum of Modern Art of New York, São Paulo Biennial and São Paulo Art Museum. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book is richly illustrated and presents a range of exhibition documentation never published before. 

The book takes as a starting point the theoretical discussions that emerged in the 1980s stimulating the development of notions of ‘decolonising’ or ‘indigenising’ the museum as well as of practices of collaboration between museums and indigenous communities. Forty years on from the outset of these debates, the book proposes a critical inquiry on how these discussions inflected on exhibition practices in the following decades, focusing in particular on how ‘major’ institutions (ethnographic museums, art museums and art biennials) have responded to these debates. 

The results of the research suggest that practice has fallen behind theory and that most ‘major’ institutions or museums within Europe and the United States are still only marginally engaging with Amazonian indigenous peoples in the organisation of exhibitions. The book advances the concept of ‘minor curating’ as a strategy to potentiate access of indigenous peoples to historical collections held by major institutions and to facilitate the development of cultural projects with these collections and in ways that are culturally, historically and politically effective. The book has an interdisciplinary reach contributing to the fields of visual anthropology, curatorial studies, museum studies and exhibition history and covering a geographical area that has been overlooked within these fields. 

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

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

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

At the end of the 1970s, China was a poor country with a huge population, ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. The domestic economy was organized through direct administrative instructions and was isolated from the international economy. After a quarter of a century, China has been transformed beyond imagination. In the course of this transformation, China's policymakers have faced enormous challenges.

The essays in this book address different aspects of those challenges. The 'development' challenge involved devising policies that would raise the mass of the Chinese people out of poverty and avoid the disasters that had, in the worst cases, caused millions of deaths through famine. The 'transition' challenge involved, firstly, resolving the relationship between changes in the economic and political systems; and secondly, finding the correct sequence and nature of reforms necessary to improve economic performance. The 'globalization' challenge involved identifying the best way in which to integrate China’s economic system with the international economy at a time of revolutionary change in the global business system. These essays seek both to enhance understanding of China's immense success in meeting these challenges in the past and to provide an indication of the challenges that still lie ahead. China's system reforms have been described as 'groping for stones to cross the river'. The journey across the river is far from over, and the other bank is only dimly visible.

The central characters in this book are the myths born of the European collective imagination about the lands beyond Europe and the beings who inhabited them. The New World was an irresistible attraction to Renaissance Europe and the great geographical discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries represent a unique moment in history, not only on account of the technical and human feat involved but also because the discoverers came to believe that they had reached the land of legends.

This is an enthralling account of the conflicting experiences of discovering the New World, drawing upon the intriguing tales of early discovery and amazing illustrations of the day. The authors invoke the unique exhilaration of exploration, investigating the conflict between the ambitious idealism and harsh realities that have always characterized and torn the country. After all, did people not go to America in search of both the Garden of Eden and the tribes of the damned?

Over the past two decades, many welfare states have experienced a combination of low economic growth and rising unemployment, concurrent with increasing pension and health care obligations, which has exacerbated government budget deficits. Some analysts forecast that for a number of welfare states these problems will worsen in the future. Their fiscal problems, in particular, present welfare state policy makers with the dilemma of attempting to fund redistribution schemes consistent with the ideal of a secure egalitarian society while at the same time remaining competitive in a ‘new economy’ that places a premium on competition, innovation, and flexible labour and product markets.

Thus, an important issue has emerged: what types of reforms are required to enable welfare states to preserve sustainability? For the purpose of this study, a sustainable welfare state is one that can remain the guarantor against social risks and adverse economic trends for all segments of their respective societies and satisfy sound fiscal criteria (such as the Maastricht requirement for all members of the EMU that their fiscal budget deficit does not exceed 3% of the GDP), without imposing considerable financial burdens on future generations.

How can we best understand Russia's relationship with Europe today? Is Russia a European country? What binds us together and divides us? And is there a viable basis for cooperation? Is Russia a friend, a partner, a neighbour or a foe to Europe? This book brings together an impressive group of academic specialists and practitioners to provide a timely and important study of these complex questions. The recognition of mutual dependency, it is argued, needs to be qualified by a range of political, economic and normative tensions which make this a problematic and frequently turbulent relationship. There has never been a more important time to understand Russia's relationship with Europe and it is the subsequent sense of unease both in Russia and Europe which provides the focus for this investigation and which will make it of use to specialist and general readers alike.

Techno-economic paradigm shifts are at the core of general, innovation-based theory of economic and societal development as conceived by Carlota Perez. Her book on the subject, ‘Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital’, is a seminal enunciation of the theory, and has had immense influence on business strategy, state development programs and policy, and academic thinking on the subject.

‘Techno-Economic Paradigms’ presents a series of essays by the leading academics in the field discussing the theory of techno-economic paradigm shifts, and its role in explaining processes of innovation and development. This festschrift honours Carlota Perez, the founder of the theory 'techno-economic paradigm shifts'.

Based on an extensive ethnographic study of television and audiences in class-divided Philippines, this is the first book to take a bottom-up approach in considering how people respond to images and narratives of suffering and poverty on television. Arguing for an anthropological ethics of media, this book challenges existing work in media studies and sociology that focuses solely on textual analysis and philosophical approaches to the question of representing vulnerable others. Current questions in media ethics, such as whether to portray sufferers as humane and empowered individuals or show them ‘at their worst’ have so far used textual and visual analyses to convey the researcher’s own moral position on the matter. In contrast, this book, inspired by the anthropology of moralities, accounts for the different interpretations and moral positions of audiences, who are positioned in various degrees of social and moral proximity to those they see and hear on television. Winner of the 2016 Philippine Social Science Council Excellence in Research Award.

‘The Learning Economy and the Economics of Hope’ brings together contributions by an expert on policies, management and economics of innovation and knowledge. It offers original insights in processes of innovation and learning and it draws implications for economic theory and public policy. It introduces the reader to important concepts such as innovation systems and the learning economy. It throws a new light on economic development and opens up for a new kind of economics – the economics of hope. It offers a fresh perspective on many of the most important global challenges of today showing how full attention to the characteristics of the learning economy needs to be combined with innovation in global governance if we want to be able to handle these challenges.

‘The Learning Economy and the Economics of Hope’ presents work published between 1985 and 1992 and introduces the core concepts innovation as an interactive process. The analysis demonstrates that new technology is developed in an interaction between individuals and organisations and that innovation would not thrive in an economy similar to textbook models of pure markets and perfect competition. It also presents articles that were published between 2004 and 2010. These may be seen as further developments and evidence-based consolidation of ideas that were presented more than ten years earlier. It presents the learning economy through the perspective of the economics of knowledge. The concluding part of the book includes three papers that make use of the conceptual frameworks developed in an analysis of China’s innovation system and policy, Europe’s crisis and Africa’s underdevelopment.

Central to any interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is an understanding of his philosophical method and the nature of the turn which characterises the evolution from his early to his later work. In the essays in Wittgenstein, Scepticism and Naturalism, Marie McGinn argues that the methodological shift has at its heart a highly distinctive form of naturalism. 

This form of naturalism has nothing to do with the kind of scientific naturalism that is associated with accounting for all phenomena in terms of the conceptual resources of the natural sciences. It is closer to the Aristotelian naturalism defended by John McDowell, although, in Wittgenstein’s case, the principal influence is Goethe, whose conception of how to understand the phenomena of nature is self-consciously opposed to the reductive approach of scientific naturalism. Goethe places the emphasis on achieving a clarified view of complex, natural phenomena in their natural setting, with a view to describing patterns and connections that are in plain view. The novelty of Wittgenstein’s later work is that it applies these methods to the task of conceptual clarification, which aims at dissolving philosophical problems and paradoxes.

The essays in Wittgenstein, Scepticism and Naturalism cover the following topics: scepticism about the external world; scepticism about other minds; knowledge and belief; meaning and rule-following; psychological states and the distinctive first-person use of psychological concepts; the relation between the early and the later philosophy; and the nature of Wittgenstein’s naturalism.

This volume introduces two unique and hitherto largely unknown contributions published in the 1500s to the making of modern economic knowledge, making them available internationally for the first time in full English translation.
- Written in 1597, Barthélemy de Laffemas’ General regulation for the establishment of manufactures (written originally in French: Reiglement général pour dresser les manufactures) represents one of the earliest voices in the history of political economy – together with Italian economists Giovanni Botero (1589) and Antonio Serra (1613) – arguing that manufacturing and industry are the true sources of the wealth of nations and that states
should pursue an active industrial policy. Located at the crossroads between medieval Scholasticism and early mercantilism, it presents a political program that would lead to French economic development, providing the foundations for the French industrialization program during the 1660s-1680s. Laffemas presents a simplified version of an infant industry argument and European standard model of economic development known from thoughts of Enlightenment thinkers such as Colbert, Sir James Steuart, Friedrich List’s National System of Political Economy (1841), nineteenth and twentieth-century theories for catching up with England and later the US, and the ‘industrial policy’ or recently ‘mission-driven’ policies (Mariana Mazzucato).
- Leonhard Fronsperger’s On the praise of self-interest (German original: Von dem Lob deß Eigen Nutzen, 1564) is the first documented instance of the ‘Mandeville paradox’, one of the key axioms of neoliberalism. Commonly associated with much later writings, including Bernard de Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1705/14), and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), German military surgeon and polymath Fronsperger argued in 1564 that self-interest is an important driver in economic development. In his text, however, Fronsperger is much more pragmatic and less ideological than Mandeville or post-Mandevillean modern neoliberals. Vested in Renaissance Humanism and directly associated with the master of his time – Erasmus of Rotterdam – Fronsperger develops Renaissance theory about homo faber (creative, driven humans) as the center of the world to perfection, deriving from it the logical conclusion that possessive individualism and self-interest are important forces moving the human economy forward. Without letting go of the state, this work argues for self-interest facilitating virtuous cycles of enrichment and positive economic development.

Over the past two decades, many welfare states have experienced a combination of low economic growth and rising unemployment, concurrent with increasing pension and health care obligations, which has exacerbated government budget deficits. Some analysts forecast that for a number of welfare states these problems will worsen in the future. Their fiscal problems, in particular, present welfare state policy makers with the dilemma of attempting to fund redistribution schemes consistent with the ideal of a secure egalitarian society while at the same time remaining competitive in a ‘new economy’ that places a premium on competition, innovation, and flexible labour and product markets.

Thus, an important issue has emerged: what types of reforms are required to enable welfare states to preserve sustainability? For the purpose of this study, a sustainable welfare state is one that can remain the guarantor against social risks and adverse economic trends for all segments of their respective societies and satisfy sound fiscal criteria (such as the Maastricht requirement for all members of the EMU that their fiscal budget deficit does not exceed 3% of the GDP), without imposing considerable financial burdens on future generations.

This book challenges the notion of a ‘new’ India, not by dismissing it as an imagined India, but by engaging in the debate as to what constitutes the new. It acknowledges that India is changing remarkably, while also acknowledging that in the overzealous enthusiasm about the new India there is collective amnesia about the other, older India. The essays argue that the increasing consolidation of capitalist markets of commodity production and consumption has unleashed not only economic growth and social change, but also introduced new contradictions associated with market dynamics in the economic and social spheres such as agrarian crisis, slow growth of employment, and the persistence of low-caste exploitation.

The volume also investigates the emergent tensions in art, architecture, and citizenship. In transforming India into an IT valley with corporate campuses, appealing to a westernized audience of technology entrepreneurs, including non-resident Indians abroad, architecture arguably is not addressing India’s economic and social plight. Art too has taken a commercial turn by catering to the new middle classes spawned by the global and Indian technology revolution. The extraordinary economic values they command seem to jar with the grim economic and social polarization underway. The book unravels contemporary India in its complexities and uncovers some of the hidden tensions plaguing the country, and points to the significance of a widely shared development outcome as an alternative for social transformation.

This edited collection deals with dream as a literary trope and the origin of or a source of creativity in women’s writings. It gathers essays spanning a time period from the end of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, with a strong focus on the Romantic period and particularly on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which dreams are at the heart of the writing process but also constitute the diegetic substance of the narrative. The contributions re-examine the oneiric facets of the novel and develop fresh perspectives on dreams and dreaming in Mary Shelley’s fiction and on other female authors (Anne Finch, Ann Radcliffe, Emily and Charlotte Brontë and a few others), re-appraising the textuality of dreams and their link to women’s creativity and creation as a whole.

This book, therefore, focuses on an aspect frequently mentioned but rarely subjected to in-depth analyses, especially within the context of an edited collection bringing together several authors. Replacing Shelley’s fiction in a female line thanks to its chronological span, it allows readers to recognize common points between the various authors tackled in the book, interrogating the paradox of the invasion of Self by a radically Other force from a feminine perspective and raising the central issue of authorial intention. One of the strengths of this collection is its coherence: almost all the essays included deal with Romantic and early Victorian prose written by women. They shed light on one another by looking at the same or similar texts from different points of view, using a variety of critical approaches (feminist, psychoanalytic, intertextual, scientific, aesthetic, among others). The other articles (on late-eighteenth–early-nineteenth century scientists and on Anne Finch) provide readers either with necessary contextual information or with welcome chronological perspective.

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

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

This book challenges the notion of a ‘new’ India, not by dismissing it as an imagined India, but by engaging in the debate as to what constitutes the new. It acknowledges that India is changing remarkably, while also acknowledging that in the overzealous enthusiasm about the new India there is collective amnesia about the other, older India. The essays argue that the increasing consolidation of capitalist markets of commodity production and consumption has unleashed not only economic growth and social change, but also introduced new contradictions associated with market dynamics in the economic and social spheres such as agrarian crisis, slow growth of employment, and the persistence of low-caste exploitation.

The volume also investigates the emergent tensions in art, architecture, and citizenship. In transforming India into an IT valley with corporate campuses, appealing to a westernized audience of technology entrepreneurs, including non-resident Indians abroad, architecture arguably is not addressing India’s economic and social plight. Art too has taken a commercial turn by catering to the new middle classes spawned by the global and Indian technology revolution. The extraordinary economic values they command seem to jar with the grim economic and social polarization underway. The book unravels contemporary India in its complexities and uncovers some of the hidden tensions plaguing the country, and points to the significance of a widely shared development outcome as an alternative for social transformation.

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

Digital technologies are an indispensable facet of every aspect of our society. Even in the developing world, mobile phones have transformed the lives and livelihoods of average citizens. Yet, two decades ago, when there were more phone lines in Manhattan than in most of Sub-Saharan Africa, only a few visionary institutions could have imagined that computers, the Internet and mobile phones would be so prominent in poverty-stricken environments. One of these visionary institutions was the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), which recognized the important but complex role that information and communication technologies (ICTs) would have in fostering human development and reducing poverty. IDRC-supported projects critically examined the ways in which ICTs could be used to improve learning, empower the disenfranchised, generate income opportunities for the poor, and facilitate access to healthcare in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Their research focused on development priorities that were defined in collaboration with researchers from the Global South, civil society organizations, government officials and policymakers. By supporting research in this field since 1996, IDRC has become one of the leading institutions and key contributors to the growth of the “ICTs for development” (ICT4D) field, specifically because of its strategic decision to focus on building the capacity of Southern researchers and policymakers to explore how ICTs can continue to change people’s lives in the developing world.

Considering that most development institutions and governments are currently attempting to integrate ICTs into their practices, this is an opportune time to reflect on the research findings that have emerged from working alongside researchers in this area. In particular, this book examines how research has helped IDRC contribute to building the ICT4D field based on a nuanced understanding of the relationship between ICTs and development goals. It also discusses programmatic investments made by IDRC since the late 1990s in a wide variety of areas related to ICTs, including infrastructure, access, regulations, health, governance, education, livelihoods, social inclusion, technical innovation, intellectual property rights and evaluation.

Each chapter in this book analyzes how the research findings from IDRC-supported projects have contributed to an evolution of thinking, and the successes and challenges in using ICTs as a tool to address development issues. Each chapter also presents key lessons learned from ICT4D programming and makes recommendations for future work. The book illustrates how IDRC’s focus shifted over time from looking specifically at issues of access to understanding the implications of ICTs in the lives of citizens in the developing world. 

The volume is a comprehensive collection of essays on various aspects of Ferdinand Tönnies’s thought. Each of the essays has been written by a distinguished expert on Tönnies. The contributors include Niall Bond, Kenneth C. Bessant, David Inglis, Stefan Bertschi, Efraim Podoksik, William Stafford, Slavko Splichal and Mathieu Deflem. [NP] This companion is a major contribution to our understanding of one of Germany’s greatest social theorists and who was a major founder of sociology, a significant cultural critic, and an important political thinker. The essays contained in this volume are written in a clear style in order to be easily understood by non-specialists yet they are comprehensive enough to appeal to the specialist. The international collection of authors represents a range of disciplines, thus providing a fuller appreciation for the writings of Ferdinand Tönnies.

Major theories of securitization have been indispensable in shedding light on how governmental security politics have been articulated through discourses or through institutionalized practices. While theorists in the field have acknowledged their state-centred focus, they have yet to remedy this. This book provides a rare opportunity to consider such theories in a non-state centred way, focusing instead on ‘virtuous’ or supra-national organizations such as judicial human rights institutions in Europe. This book aims to explore the ways such organizations, illustrated with particular but not exclusive, reference to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), have been complicit in governmental security agendas to the extent of losing their role as neutral arbiter of state actions to colluding with state-led security politics. Thus, it will link the socio-legal study of human rights with the politics of securitization and with European Studies, re-appraising the aspect of the ‘European Project’ that anticipated closer harmonization and integration of nation-states through the operation of supranational courts like the ECtHR. The situation in the United States will be used for comparative purposes. 

The first theme of the book will be to consider the relationship between human rights, embodiment and the violation of bodily integrity. It will demonstrate and explain the subordination of international rights to national security through the issue of ‘embodiment’, the most fundamental of human rights being to protect bodily integrity. 

The book seeks to tease out the contextual background to the way women’s bodies have been treated by judicial human rights. Building on a decade of research by the author, it shows that the steady expansion – in democratic countries – of laws restricting women’s dress and conduct, and [Muslim] women’s lack of success in contesting this via the national or supranational judiciary, are in part due to the liberal individualism that has characterized human rights from their inception.

Digital technologies are an indispensable facet of every aspect of our society. Even in the developing world, mobile phones have transformed the lives and livelihoods of average citizens. Yet, two decades ago, when there were more phone lines in Manhattan than in most of Sub-Saharan Africa, only a few visionary institutions could have imagined that computers, the Internet and mobile phones would be so prominent in poverty-stricken environments. One of these visionary institutions was the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), which recognized the important but complex role that information and communication technologies (ICTs) would have in fostering human development and reducing poverty. IDRC-supported projects critically examined the ways in which ICTs could be used to improve learning, empower the disenfranchised, generate income opportunities for the poor, and facilitate access to healthcare in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Their research focused on development priorities that were defined in collaboration with researchers from the Global South, civil society organizations, government officials and policymakers. By supporting research in this field since 1996, IDRC has become one of the leading institutions and key contributors to the growth of the “ICTs for development” (ICT4D) field, specifically because of its strategic decision to focus on building the capacity of Southern researchers and policymakers to explore how ICTs can continue to change people’s lives in the developing world.

Considering that most development institutions and governments are currently attempting to integrate ICTs into their practices, this is an opportune time to reflect on the research findings that have emerged from working alongside researchers in this area. In particular, this book examines how research has helped IDRC contribute to building the ICT4D field based on a nuanced understanding of the relationship between ICTs and development goals. It also discusses programmatic investments made by IDRC since the late 1990s in a wide variety of areas related to ICTs, including infrastructure, access, regulations, health, governance, education, livelihoods, social inclusion, technical innovation, intellectual property rights and evaluation.

Each chapter in this book analyzes how the research findings from IDRC-supported projects have contributed to an evolution of thinking, and the successes and challenges in using ICTs as a tool to address development issues. Each chapter also presents key lessons learned from ICT4D programming and makes recommendations for future work. The book illustrates how IDRC’s focus shifted over time from looking specifically at issues of access to understanding the implications of ICTs in the lives of citizens in the developing world. 

‘Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema’ explores aspects of gender, race and region in films and television produced in the northern Australian state of Queensland. Drawing on a range of scholarly sources and an extensive filmography, the essays in the book investigate poetics and production histories from the 'period' films of the Australian cinema revival of the 1970s to contemporary 'Queensland-genre' films, highlighting the resonances of regional locations amid the energetic growth of the film industry, and promotion of Queensland as a production destination.

‘Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema’ comprises eight essays, an introduction and conclusion, and the analysis of poetics and cultural geographies is focused on landmark films and television. The first section of the book, ‘Backtracks: Landscape and Identity’, refers to films from and before the revival, beginning with the 1978 film 'The Irishman' as an example of heritage cinema in which performances of gender and race, like the setting, suggest a romanticised and uncritical image of colonial Australia. It is compared to Baz Luhrmann’s 'Australia' (2008) and several other films. In the second chapter, ‘Heritage Enigmatic’, 'The Irishman' is also drawn into comparison with Charles Chauvel’s ‘Jedda’ (1955), as films that incorporate Indigenous performances in this heritage discourse through the role of voice and sound. In Part 2, ‘Silences in Paradise’, the first essay, ‘Tropical Gothic’, focuses on Rachel Perkins’s 'Radiance' (1998) as a landmark post-colonial film that questions the connotations of icons of paradise in Queensland. The discussion leads to films, in the next chapter, ‘Island Girls Friday’, that figure women on Queensland islands, spanning the pre-revival and contemporary era: ‘Age of Consent’ (1969), ‘Nim’s Island’ (2008) and ‘Uninhabited’ (2010). Part 3, ‘Masculine Dramas of the Coast’ moves to the Gold Coast, in films dating from before and since the current spike in transnational production at the Warner Roadshow film studios there, namely, 'The Coolangatta Gold' (1984), 'Peter Pan' (2003), and 'Sanctum' (2011). The final section, ‘Regional Backtracks’, turns, first, to two television series, ‘Remote Area Nurse’ (2006), and ‘The Straits’ (2012), that share unique provenance of production in the Torres Strait and far north regions of Queensland, while, in the final chapter, the iconic outback districts of western Queensland figure the convergence of land, landscape and location in films with potent perspectives on Indigenous histories in ‘The Proposition’ (2005) and ‘Mystery Road’ (2013). ‘Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema’ presents the various regions as syncretic spaces subject to transitions of social and industry practices over time.

While the dynamic relationship between common sense and science has gone largely unrecognized in the history of ideas, Common Sense and Science from Aristotle to Reid reveals that thinkers have pondered the nature of common sense and its relationship to science and scientific thinking for a very long time. It demonstrates how a diverse array of neglected early modern thinkers turn out to have been on the right track for understanding how the mind makes sense of the world and how basic features of the human mind and cognition are related to scientific theory and practice. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources and scholarship from the history of ideas, cognitive science, and the history and philosophy of science, this book helps readers understand the fundamental historical and philosophical relationship between common sense and science.

The story begins in the ancient world, where “scientific” knowledge (epistêmê in Greek, scientia in Latin) arose in counterpoint to everyday understanding and common opinion, until Aristotle produced a reconciliation of the two that set the course for scientific thought for the next two millennia. It then moves into the early modern period, when the New Science of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton emerged triumphant, and common sense and its relationship to science once again became problematic, remaining so to this day. The book goes on to examine this fraught relationship, and the early modern thinkers who sought to repair it, culminating in the thought of the philosopher Thomas Reid (1711–1796), the preeminent figure in the Scottish school of common sense philosophy. A comprehensive epilogue brings the story into the present. It is a story full of fascinating twists and turns, but ultimately a tale about the perennial quest to understand how the human mind is able to gain credible and reliable knowledge about the self, nature, other human beings, and God.

The collected essays in this book are the result of a series of workshops held at the University of Cagliari in Italy. In this work, the authors aim at reconstructing the evolution of a key concept of traditional Indian grammar: Pāṇini’s zero. The book investigates how certain patterns of description account for exceptions in the currently presupposed one-to-one symmetry between the semantic and the phono-morphological level of language. This work also deals with some powerful mechanisms of rule extension, which are valuable for different contexts of rule arrangement, such as the ritual model. The interpretative model laid down in the introduction proves strong and suggestive enough to allow subsequent articles in the book to make incursions into other traditions and cultures. The potentialities of aniconic expression in the artistic field are explored, together with the outcomes of this theory.

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

How can we best understand Russia's relationship with Europe today? Is Russia a European country? What binds us together and divides us? And is there a viable basis for cooperation? Is Russia a friend, a partner, a neighbour or a foe to Europe? This book brings together an impressive group of academic specialists and practitioners to provide a timely and important study of these complex questions. The recognition of mutual dependency, it is argued, needs to be qualified by a range of political, economic and normative tensions which make this a problematic and frequently turbulent relationship. There has never been a more important time to understand Russia's relationship with Europe and it is the subsequent sense of unease both in Russia and Europe which provides the focus for this investigation and which will make it of use to specialist and general readers alike.