Anthem Press

• 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asia’s creative guru Stan Lai has written one of the unique works of our time, explaining that the mysterious act of creativity is actually a traceable function of mind, and there is a path to learn creativity through un-learning many of our habits picked up in life. Through his extensive experience, the greatest living Asian playwright shows us how to cultivate a ‘creative app’ that works within us.

This book is a rewrite by the author of his best-selling work in Chinese that has become the most prominent work on creativity in China, used by artists as well as schools and corporations. Stan Lai is uniquely qualified to write on creativity, because he not only has four decades of creative experience, widely acclaimed as the greatest playwright in the Chinese language, but also over two decades of teaching experience in the performing arts.

Can creativity be taught? Most of the books and training in this area deal with skills for jumpstarting alternative thinking, brainstorming and other exercises, but do not deal with creativity itself. They don’t tackle the obvious question: What is creativity and how can I get it? Lai explains that the reason we don’t think creativity can be taught is that we don’t really understand what happens in the mysterious process. By slowing down the moment of inspiration, Lai lets us see exactly the elements involved in this complex process that lasts only an instant. Then he shows you how to prepare for this moment, through his unique Map of Creativity. This is a whole path of training in creativity, which he explains clearly and humour and compassion, and tailor-made exercises.

Creativitry is a milestone in understanding and learning the creative act. Born in America, raised in Taiwan, with a career spanning the Chinese diaspora, Lai believes that we are all born creative, but the source to creativity has been blocked, by life. How to take down the barriers that are blocking the source from us is a task of un-learning many things that have become habits and put us into a so-called non-creative mode. Taking his cue from his Buddhist training that wisdom and method are both needed for success in any endeavour, he explains how ‘wisdom’ has mysteriously vanished from education systems all over. Most teaching in creativity focuses on method, which one learns in one’s art. But we need another type of training, more urgently, the training for wisdom, which can only happen in the domain of life. To do, you must first be. To discover your creativity, you must first discover yourself.

William Hazlitt had concluded in 1815 that a Quaker poet would be ‘a literary phenomenon’ – how could a marginal sect renowned for their plain dress, sober ways and proscription of pleasures produce imaginative literature? To conceive such a writer would be a paradox. Yet the career of Bernard Barton, a prolific poet of the 1820s and 1830s, presented the Romantic era with just such a phenomenon. Instantly recognisable to his contemporaries as the Quaker poet, Barton drew on the styles of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century – Cowper, Wordsworth, Crabbe – to fashion verse under a Quaker muse. His diverse poetic output is unified by a tender emotional warmth, a picturesque love for the Suffolk countryside and a self-consciously modest but nevertheless sophisticated authorship. 

This is the first ever modern edition of Barton’s poetry, providing freshly edited texts from the original print sources and a comprehensive scholarly treatment encompassing critical commentary, detailed notes and textual variations. Capturing the full range of his career from the 1810s to 1840s, it includes generous selections of nature poetry, religious verse, texts of sociability and friendship, ekphrastic compositions, political writings and a long extract from his radically pacifist elegy to Napoleon. The book also includes a selection of invaluable contextual material, such as periodical reviews and Barton’s own prefaces, as well as a substantial essay introducing Barton and his times.

In a time when the nineteenth-century literary canon is in a continual process of expansion and revision, this unusual and striking poet, working from the position of a religious minority and yet fully engaging the mainstream poetic traditions of his day, deserves to be rediscovered, and this edition achieves precisely this.

Renu’s Recipes: Delicious and Diabetic-Friendly Dishes
Discover a culinary journey where health meets indulgence with Renu’s Recipes. This all-in-one cookbook is your gateway to diabetic-friendly cuisine that doesn’t compromise on flavour or simplicity. Perfect for home cooks of all levels, this book curates a diverse selection of easy-to-make dishes from various global cuisines.
Key Features:
Diabetic-Friendly: Savour delectable dishes designed to meet the dietary needs of persons with diabetes, packed with flavours they crave but thought they couldn’t have.
Comprehensive and Accessible: From breakfast to desserts, including mains, sides, salads, snacks and special categories such as recipes for grandchildren.
Learn and Explore: Master diverse cooking techniques such as baking, steaming and stir-frying. Discover a variety of herbs and enjoy wholesome salads that make every meal nutritious.
Benefits:
Unlock the joy of cooking with recipes that are both healthy and enticing. Renu’s Recipes empowers you to bring the richness of home-made meals to your table, ensuring every bite is as nourishing as it is delicious.
Why Choose Renu’s Recipes?
This cookbook is your go-to resource for achieving culinary excellence while prioritising health. Whether you are managing diabetes or simply embracing a healthier lifestyle, Renu Sood’s expertly crafted recipes promise to elevate your cooking experience.
Join Renu Sood on a journey of flavour and wellness. Embrace wholesome cuisine and enjoy the satisfaction of home-made goodness with every meal.

This book groups together three kinds of experience: the experience of the sublime, of 'epiphany' which is generally a profound experience of something ordinary, and the feeling of 'thrills' which can be a shiver down the spine or sudden tears. 

These 'strong experiences' have been extensively studied, but almost always separately from one another, and in a variety of disciplines, and so this is the first major attempt to bring them together under a relatively simple psychological account. The book reviews some of the work on the sublime and epiphanies, including life-changing epiphanies, in the literary critical, philosophical and psychological literature. It explores how we can feel that we know things which are deeply important without being able to put what we know into words, and it also offers an introduction to some basic psychological ideas about knowledge. The book focuses on the physical aspects of the experience, and their relation to emotions, and looks in detail at what the body actually does when we feel goosebumps and similar sensations. It continues to outline some of the simple psychological notions which support this account of strong experiences, including how surprise works, and other related notions such as curiosity, attention and empathy, and why ordinary things can sometimes be perceived as though they are sources of profound insight.

The final section briefly summarises various devices in literary texts which can be used to trigger strong experiences in a reader. It concludes by noting that our strong experiences of literary texts and other aesthetic objects are related to our more general aesthetic experience.

• Joint winner of The Literary Encyclopedia book prize 2024, category ‘Literatures written in languages other than English'
• Winner of the Nancy Staub Publications Award 2024
• Winner of the AATI Book Award 2024 for Literary, Critical Theory, and Cultural Studies

- Sicilian puppet theater is a unique nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular theatrical tradition based on the masterpieces of medieval and Renaissance chivalric literature. It flourished not only in southern Italy and Sicily, but also in the diasporic Italian urban communities of North and South America and North Africa, bringing immigrants together for nightly performances of the same deeply cherished chivalric stories. Even though this art form was designated by UNESCO as an “intangible cultural heritage of humanity” in 2001, it remains largely unknown today because by the late 1950s Sicilian puppet theater companies had ceased to perform the full Paladins of France cycle that used to extend nightly for well over a year. Thus, the only means we have left to explore the substance of this once widely enjoyed cultural phenomenon are the scripts dating from opera dei pupi’s heyday. Most of these invaluable documents, however, have been lost, while the few sets still in existence are either privately owned by the remaining puppeteer families and collectors or tucked away in the archives of Italian institutions. Thanks to the newly accessible scripts of the preeminent Catanese-American puppeteer Agrippino Manteo (1884–1947), whose career stretched from Sicily to Argentina to New York, students, scholars, and the general public can now explore the cycle of chivalric narratives staged during the golden age of Sicilian puppet theater.

- The many delicate hand-written notebooks containing Agrippino Manteo’s dramatic repertory are not only of interest for their historical and aesthetic value. These masterfully executed theatrical adaptations invite readers into a chivalric world featuring knights and damsels from across the globe – from Europe to Africa to East Asia – who share the stage with a host of wizards, fairies, giants, and monsters, in alternating episodes of love, enchantment, adventure, and warfare. The concerns with which they engage, such as justice, identity, duty, love, freedom, and virtue, transcend the categories of elite and folk, local and global, medieval and modern, interrogating what it means to be human.

- This book provides the most comprehensive history to date of the Manteo Family's Sicilian Marionette Theater across three generations and brings to light for the first time the contents of Agrippino Manteo’s extensive Sicilian puppet theater scripts, including translations of 8 selected plays and 270 extant play summaries of the famous Paladins of France cycle. Accompanying comparative analyses uncover the creative process of adaptation from Italian Renaissance masterpieces of chivalric poetry to nineteenth-century prose compilations to Agrippino’s opera dei pupi scripts.

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

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

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

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

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.

The World of Wu Zhao is a carefully curated set of more than 120 translated stories—all annotated and contextualized—on a range of topics from Zhang Zhuo’s 張鷟 eighth century collection of miscellany, Collected Records of Court and Country (Chaoye qianzai 朝野僉載). The book provides English readers with a sense and feel for the empire during the reign of Wu Zhao 武曌 (624–705, also known as Empress Wu and Wu Zetian), China’s first and only female emperor. 

The World of Wu Zhao moves outward from the female sovereign’s personal and intimate domain of the inner palace. The text includes chapters on a number of different themes and topics: the female emperor’s male favorites, the culture of the court , cruel officials, as well as sections on flora and fauna, the common folk, artisans and craftsmen, Buddhist and Daoist monks, the military, spirits and the supernatural, the borderlands, and local officials. Chapters are introduced through “speaking artifacts” such as saddles, swords, bronze tallies, porcelain figurines of camels and grooms, official tallies, Buddhist cave paintings and funerary monuments—contemporary to the reign of the female emperor. This lively and fresh perspective on medieval China will amuse and shock readers, prompting them to recalibrate everything they think they know about medieval China.

Self-Presentation and Self-Praise in Open Communication Digital Enterprises presents the findings of an interdisciplinary study of the ‘self-entrepreneurial self’ and, in particular, the rationale behind its need to self-present under the current socio-economic and business conditions. It addresses the complex landscape of the levels, typologies, categories, triggers, as well as both internal and external factors impacting self-praise in the context of a digital workplace (with the focus on enterprise social media) and professional networking platforms. 

In order to reflect the complexity of the topic at hand and interconnectivity of the constructs addressed, insights from such fields as socioeconomics, sociology, social psychology (specifically identity studies), software and services (IT sector), business intelligence and business analytics, digital media communication, organisational behaviour or corporate communication are thus combined with a mixed qualitative-quantitative methodological approach utilised to provide an in-depth exploration of the evolving constructs.

From the broader socio-economic perspective of hyper globalisation, the impact of the neoliberalism economy on workplace relations, and ultimately on employee behaviour, are considered first to lay the background and introduce the relevant concepts. 

Self-presentation and in particular self-praise are considered in their multiple forms against the backdrop of precarious work relations dictated by neoliberalism, leading, among other things, to self-exploitation, but also to putting self-interest above anything else.

The focus is placed on the triggers and manifestations of the social self (how a person thinks the others perceive them) and the situational self (a person’s self-image in a specific situation) in the digital workplace, where individual (cultural) values are frequently overridden by those dictated by a given corporate culture, as aligned with the prevailing market conditions. These in turn impact workplace or employee identity. 

This exploratory and explanatory study contributes to a rather limited number of research endeavours on self-praise, conducted within narrow disciplines and specific frameworks, with the particular research gap being a lack of studies on self-presentational and self-praise activities in the corporate environment, which can primarily be observed in the virtual context of enterprise social media (ESM) and such tools of remote communication as conference calls or collaboration software, but also on professional networking platforms. Here situational antecedents (broadly what occurred before) and the audience (with their reactions) to such self-promotional activities serve as main prerequisites, thus completing the frame of analysis.

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

The practice of architecture as a learned profession is a fairly recent invention in the history of architecture, one that was an uneasy fit with professional ideals from its inception in the nineteenth century, and the value of which is under assault today from globalizing economic forces. Unfortunately, the profession’s longstanding internal tensions have prevented it from articulating a durable ethical rationale for its protections that would help it stand up to those assaults. This book proposes crafting just such a durable ethical rationale through the public good the architecture profession serves. 

But the concept of the public is itself a recent historic phenomenon, one also experiencing both tremendous pressures and instability from many of the same sources destabilizing the architecture profession—globalization, neo-liberal economics, the rise of individualism, and the destruction of privacy. Therefore, to bring architecture and the public good together in any sustained way, both architecture’s instabilities and the public’s must be better understood. The book accomplishes this task by addressing the profession’s long-standing internal struggles that prevent it from articulating a strong ethical defense, the recent economic forces which are dispersing the profession’s center much as they have the world’s middle classes, the Enlightenment-derived concept of the bourgeois public and its more recent decline and reinvention, the importance of dissecting the shifting boundaries between the public and private realms, and finally a new approach to reassert the many ways in which architecture can not only serve the public good, but also become a protagonist in its renewal as a guiding ideal for our times.

Medieval intellectuals were fascinated to compare their culture with others, often, though not always, looking at differences in religion. They did so using a number of different genres, among them dialogues between representatives of different ‘laws’ (i.e., religions), travellers’ stories, geographies, philosophical treatises and ethnographic reports.

The main focus will be on the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and on Western European Christian writers, including Peter Abelard, Ramon Llull, William of Rubruk, John of Piano Carpini, Gerald of Wales, Marco Polo and Roger Bacon. But it will also discuss some Jewish writers, such as Judah Halevi and Maimonides, and some Islamic ones such as Ibn Fadlan and al-Idrisi.

Historians have greatly underestimated the sophistication and variety of this facet of medieval intellectual life, because it does not fall neatly into one of our current subject divisions (such as history of philosophy or history of literature) and because anthropology and comparative religion are usually presumed to be modern disciplines, without medieval precedents. The aim of this book is to show that there existed a medieval ancestor to these disciplines, in which the similar questions to those that interest specialists today were discussed, but within a different context and with different aims. By studying a series of outstanding texts in this field, the study thus aims to establish Cultural Comparisons as an independent branch of medieval studies.

The Lure of Economic Nationalism addresses an important topic, namely, the continued appeal of economic nationalism. It places economic nationalism in both historical and contemporary contexts. It begins with a historical consideration of mercantilism and the writings of Friedrich List, considering both from multiple perspectives in economic history and policy and international relations. It then turns to the political psychology of zero-sum thinking, its role as a heuristic device but also its significant limitations.

The book considers both the aggressive trade policy of the Trump Administration in the United States and the Brexit process in the United Kingdom. It also advocates for the alternative to economic nationalism in the form of a rules-based, multilateral trading system and the World Trade Organization. It argues that going beyond zero-sum outcomes is better suited to address current problems. It considers the rising tides of ethnonationalism and the alternative of civic nationalism. It even addresses economic nationalism in the recent COVID-19 pandemic and multilateral approaches to pandemic preparedness. 

The Lure of Economic Nationalism is written in an accessible manner and draws deeply from research in economics and political science. It will be of interest to policymakers, economists, political scientists and to the informed public.

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.

This text will examine U.S. Supreme Court cases which highlight, feature and illuminate some facets of natural law reasoning since the Court’s decree in Roe v. Wade. For most of our constitutional and legal history, there has been an exhilarating debate about whether natural law commands or encourages certain legal resolutions – even from the time of the Founders. Most would concur that the legal philosophy of Jefferson and other Founders favored a natural law basis for this republic and its corresponding rights. And while the proposed text accepts that the concept and understanding of natural law reasoning has both supporters and detractors in contemporary settings, earlier Supreme Court rulings on controversial subject matter used natural law language with regularity. Since the 1970s, the idea of a perennial, immutable and unassailable natural law has lost favor. And given the recent surge in controversial case law and conflicting decisions on highly charged topics, a return to first principles grounded in nature and natural law might be beneficial. Indeed, the proposed research hopes to gauge its current relevance, usage and reliance in more modern judicial cases.

Bringing together the ideas of many philosophers, among others Hegel, Kierkegaard, Bergson, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Deleuze and Derrida, the book aims to give a coherent synthesis of ideas about change and aims to see how one can take a process view of various features of humanity, such as knowledge, relations between people, language and morality, and how, vice versa, that might contribute to process philosophy. Beginning with evolution and moving on to consider knowledge in its dynamic aspect of learning, the book takes a process view of the individual and society.

Generalised Darwinism is discussed not only in terms of biology but also in economics, organisation, language and science in terms of interactors and replicators. The key processes of variety generation, selection and transmission are fundamentally different from those in biology. Therefore, a theory of knowledge and its change is presented that in some ways is similar to evolution but also different in important ways. This theory discusses neural Darwinism. It proposes how discovery might work, in a cycle of discovery, in an interchange of stability and change, and how differences in cognition work in the combination of different sources (cognitive distance). This theory is applied to knowledge, organisations and science. The discussion explains and applies the notions of entropy and organisational focus. Recognising that absolute, objective truth is problematic, it discusses the notion of warranted assertion. The notions of sense and reference are discussed in an explanation of meaning, and the notions of order and variety in terms of langue and parole, and the role of parole in poetry. The change of meaning is further developed in terms of the hermeneutic circle to deal with order and change of meaning. It uses the notion of a script and the hypothesis of an object bias.

Ethics and morality are explored by how the individual constructs their identity and develops in their tension between authenticity and conformity in society. Aristotle’s multiple causality of action is employed to discuss power and sources of dependence and ways to deal with them. Networks as a source of identity and the decentralisation of governance to communities are discussed along with the notion of restorative justice. The concluding chapter considers the historical development and the different forms of ethics and morality, in relation to institutions, and how in evolution an instinct for benevolence has developed and is related to the intrinsic next to extrinsic value of relationships.

The Puritan Ideology of Mobility: Corporatism, the Politics of Place, and the Founding of New England Towns before 1650 examines the ideology that English Puritans developed to justify migration: their migration from England to New England, migrations from one town to another within New England, and, often, their repatriation to the mother country. Guided by the Protestant scholasticism of Cambridge University, Puritan leaders accepted the ancient corporatist image of society as a living, organic body politic, a model which they applied to nations, colonies, business corporations like the Massachusetts Bay Company, and towns.

But if a town, a colony, or a nation were a living body, how could Puritans justify withdrawing from one body to form a new social body, as they so often did? Drawing on the prevailing humoral theory of health, Puritans leaders believed that if a social body became “distempered” because of insufficient resources or political or religious disagreements, it might become necessary to bring about a new body politic in order to restore balance and harmony to the existing one. This theory gave rise to a robust “politics of place” in colonial New England, where one’s choice of residence could make a strong political statement.

In order to facilitate the founding of new town bodies, colonial elites were endowed with unique privileges of mobility. But these entrepreneurs also needed ordinary inhabitants to make a successful migration, so that the various “members” of the new social body all benefited from the opportunities conferred through the privilege of migration. The body of a new town was articulated through the social ritual of land distribution, carried out in proportion to rank according to Aristotelian “distributive justice.” The book will trace this process at work in the founding of Ipswich and its satellite towns in Massachusetts.

International student migration makes a significant contribution to higher education in the United Kingdom, with Southern Africa, and Nigeria in particular, positioned joint sixth in the top ten of sending countries. Many of these student-migrants, in supplementing their finances to fund their studies in the United Kingdom, undertake employment. Temporary and/or part-time employment is integral to the student-migrant experience, despite the express purpose of their admission into the United Kingdom designated for study purposes and not work. This explicit object is reflected in restrictions affixed to international students’ employment rights whilst studying; they are generally restricted to a maximum of 20 hours of work per week during term time and proscribed from working full time or as independent contractors. Given the scant regard this topic has received in the existing literature, this study offers an examination of students’ lived employment experiences under these rules. Adopting a qualitative methodology through interviews and ethnographic observations with cohorts of international student workers from sub-Saharan Africa, the study presents a holistic picture of the lived experiences, through employment practices, of this group of student-migrant-workers. The study aims to offer contributions to the existing body of literature in two principal ways. First, it accounts for the employment experiences of student-migrants through the analytical framework of ‘precarity’ by examining the various manifestations of insecurity in the students’ lived realities, nuanced by structures of migration control and labour market temporalities. The study highlights that these students are forced to contend with intersecting forms of insecurities in their labour market encounters. This reifies their dependence on certain forms of employment and relationships, and renders them increasingly susceptible to unfavourable work conditions including low pay, exploitation, discrimination and abuse. This aspect of the study is concluded by advancing an argument that higher education institutions, as the primary sponsors of these students, must do more to forearm them with candid insights on what to expect of the temporary employment market and furnish them with a comprehensive knowledge of their accruable employment rights. 

For the second contribution, adopting the socio-legal schema of legal consciousness, the study considers the student-migrants’ relationship with the law by way of the legal restrictions on their employment and interrogates their agency in their efforts to derogate from these rules. These derogations are conceptualised as ‘semi-legality’, an analytical construct that marks an indeterminate halfway point between utter illegality and compliance, as it applies to labour. The study highlights that there are two discernible plots towards enabling semi-legal employment and evading detection thereof. The first involves the students undertaking work with different employers simultaneously; meanwhile, the second entails students contracting for work through the use of private limited companies as a trading structure. The study argues that the specifics of the student’s violation of visa rules has profound distinctive implications for their legal consciousness’ disposition and more so the manner in which they simultaneously resist and make recourse to the law and its institutions towards resolving workplace grievances. 

It has been suggested that, if CARICOM nations wish to accelerate their development, they should embrace laissez-faire economic policies. However, laissez-faire economic policies have reinforced the very economic and social structures that have contributed to their low level of development; furthermore, laissez-faire economic policies ignore social attitudes that can greatly influence a nation’s development. Moreover, low-skilled labor-intensive production processes, which once propelled growth in CARICOM nations, will no longer perform a similar role because production processes are becoming more and more knowledge-skills intensive, and nations wishing to attract foreign manufacturing investment or high-tech services may not be able to do so without an adequate pool of the necessary knowledge skills. CARICOM nations must therefore try to accumulate a pool of knowledge skills that can help their economies become internationally competitive.

The book presents the first integrated study of the relationship between official Islamic leadership (muftiship), non-official Islamic authorities, grassroots Muslim communities and the state in post-Communist Eurasia, encompassing Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, the Volga-Urals, Crimea, the North Caucasus, Azerbaijan and ex-Soviet Central Asia. Its analysis is positioned within the current secularism/de-secularisation debate. The book is based on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including the author’s interviews with Islamic official and popular leaders and authorities, which she conducted over two decades in various parts of Eurasia. The book employs a history-based perspective and compares the nature and role of official Islamic leadership and the state-Muslim relations across Eurasia with those in both the Middle East and Western Europe. It argues that in most of the post-Soviet lands, the official Islamic leadership and its relations with the state have largely retained their particular national and broader Eurasian character, which distinguishes them from what prevails in the Middle East and Western Europe. At the same time, the increasing political ‘Europeanisation’ of Lithuania and Ukraine since 2014 and, to some extent, Belarus, has accounted for their divergence towards the Western model of state-Muslim relations. In conclusion, it analyses the impact of globalisation and the advance of global Salafism, in particular, on Islamic leadership and state-Muslim relations across post-Soviet Eurasia. 

The book has an introduction outlining the conceptual framework that gives meaning to the six collected texts that follow. This framework derives from the work of Pierre Bourdieu. He stated that ‘everything is social,’ which means that all discourses have to be understood in their own terms (as ‘structured structures’) and in relation to the social conditions in which they developed (‘structuring structures’). As social individuals we are constrained by the structures defining our situation but we also have the capacity to alter those structures. With particular reference to the ‘field’ of politics, the Introduction considers theoretically the nature of the ‘presentation of self’ (Goffman) of citizens and the nature of parliamentary democracy as ‘presentation’ or ‘representation’ (as discussed in Habermas: The structural transformation of the public sphere).

The six main chapters reproduce texts written or spoken about politics at intervals in the period from 1960 until 2020. Brief introductions to each chapter will contextualise these texts both in terms of their significance in my developing awareness of political discourse and also in terms of the historically changing nature of the field of politics itself in the United Kingdom. Having an a-political upbringing, the author suggests that he gradually acquired a political competence but, equally, developed the view that the domination of political discourse has become exclusive and that there is now a need to reassert social relations in society and to recognize the extent to which political activity sustains the social control of a privileged minority.

The book has an Epilogue which considers some recent arguments about ‘populism’ and also reflects on the extent to which the ‘new normal’ heralded by some for a post-Covid future has the capacity to circumscribe the influence of politics. The author reflects on whether deployment of Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic violence’ - the process by which the attitudes of the few are imposed on the many – might lead to the possible resurgence of social movements which are sceptical about political power. The author suggests that there may be a need for a new ‘quietism’ as advanced by Fénelon in the court of Louis XIV at the end of the 17th century and as considered by Richard Rorty in “Naturalism and quietism” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, 2007. 

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

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

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

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is a technological breakthrough that will revolutionize human life. Advancements in the area of AI are happening all across the globe and this technology is not only reshaping business and government and also being applied in the daily lives of individuals. 

AI has been integrated in many industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, retail and consumer, technology, communication and entertainment, energy, transportation and logistics. The application of AI in these industries has helped in not only making processes more efficient but also reducing cost. There are many applications of Ai which are yet to be researched and put into practice. A lot needs to be done to capitalize the full potential of this technology. Companies are, therefore, investing a plenty of funds in R&D activities to harness its maximum benefit.

International Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence is an effort to engage the practitioners, researchers and users in a discussion on AI and also to provide snapshots of the status of AI in different parts of the world. 

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.

The book provides a comprehensive discussion of the new humor that has appeared on the internet. The book is divided into five sections: First, the introduction, which explains the idea that humor has changed since the widespread adoption of the internet and social media. The introduction reviews the theoretical tools that will be applied throughout the book: a discussion of humor theory and memes and how they function. The discussion is kept engaging and readable but is nonetheless based on rigorous scholarship, presented clearly by a well-known humor researcher.

Part 1 collects several chapters on the new humorous genres that have appeared on the internet: the humorous meme, the compilation video, online digital cartoons, the “stuff white people like” phenomenon, Dogecoin, the joke crypto-currency, and of course satirical news, such as The Onion. The overall point is that many of these phenomena are completely native to the internet/social media or have been significantly affected by the distribution via the internet.

Part 2 considers in more detail a number of examples of humorous memes: they include the Cheryl She Shed meme, the BoatyMcBoatface incident in which the crowdsourcing of the name for a boat went awry, Pastafarianism, the joke religion, grumpy cats, and the Chuck Norris memes. Part 3 considers multimodal humorous genres: the Hitler rant, photobombing, embarrassment (“cringe”) comedy, rant-to-music videos, and music video parodies. Here too, these new genres can exist only due to the availability of platforms such as Youtube or TikTok. Part 4 looks at the dark side of internet humor, considering the use of humor by the alt. right on 4chan and 8chan, trolling, and related phenomena. The last chapter looks at humorous cartoon “mascots” such as Pepe the Frog and Kek, which have been appropriated by the right.

The first comprehensive guide to humor in the age of the internet and social media, this book will make you laugh (for the examples) and will enlighten you (for the analyses). Hopefully.

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

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

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

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

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

Insurgent Play: Social worlds of urban disruption explores play as a transgressive expression that counters the existing urban order (neoliberal, authoritarian, militarised). Insurgent play is disruptive, yet through disruption it brings social worlds into being, undergirds global subcultures and overcomes hostile urban environments characterised by ever-diminishing spaces for free expression. Acts of insurgent play are claims on space lasting from brief moments to years, animating patches of the city designed for commercial, industrial and logistical imperatives. Even in public spaces designed for leisure and play, insurgent play brings different expressions at different speeds, transgressing designated uses and bodily expectations. Through insurgent play people find belonging in the city, especially for those excluded from other spaces based on race, class, sexuality and citizenship. As such, stories of insurgent play are stories of alternative ways of inhabiting cities stemming from the widespread human desire and need for play, for joy and for sociality.
Insurgent Play draws upon examples from street skateboarding. Street skateboarding disrupts the city in the pursuit of play, enlivens patches of space through temporary claims, and initiates encounters with authorisers, property owners and citizens gravid with hostility with instants of wonder. Insurgence is a way of being, and the desire for insurgent play cannot be placated by better urban planning or formal expertise. Nor will multiplying designated play spaces, creative precincts and ‘flexible’ public spaces stop people seeking out space to create their own worlds of disruption.
The book makes four arguments. First, insurgent play is bodily expression that can challenge, disrupt and transgresses dominant ways of city-making. Second, insurgent play takes us to parts of the urban landscape that we might not otherwise go, politics we might not otherwise recognise and encounters we might otherwise overlook. Third, claims on the city made through insurgent play enliven urban space through transformative power. In this way, these claims territorialise patches of the built environment intended for other uses. Last, insurgent play space is generated from below, never above. Insurgent play shapes, and is shaped by, identities that position adherents in opposition to prevailing urban orders.

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.

A collection of essays rather than a single, continuously argued monograph, Hawthorne’s Histories, Hawthorne’s World collects together the essays Professor Colacurcio has written on Hawthorne since the publication of his ground-breaking Province of Piety, elaborating and refining his analyses of how Hawthorne’s most memorable early tales “do history,” but proceeding then to explore the later productions of that author’s distinguished career. The result, in Colacurcio’s patient analysis, is something like Hawthorne’s history of his own times. To be sure, The Scarlet Letter returns to the rich theme we know as “the matter of the Puritans,” but rides up from a moment, and clearly implies, the vibrant but troubled women’s movement; and, imagining the world Hester Prynne as good as predicted, The Blithedale Romance deepens the sensitive but cautious inquiry. Contemporaneous too is the subject of The House of the Seven Gables which, stopping just short of discovering that property is theft, dares to inquire into the murky sources of aristocratic wealth and privilege in his present New England. From the moment between the early tales and the three American romances, the tales and sketches written at the Old Manse in Concord reveal Hawthorne’s fascinated and troubled response to that swirl of contemporary reform movements which historians know as “Freedom’s Ferment”; several encounter Emerson explicitly, and even more question the life-implications of “idealism as it appears in 1842,” as Emerson had defined his Transcendentalism.  From the so-called “Last Phase” of Hawthorne’s career, Colacurcio presents, along with some remarks “Chiefly About War Matters” (1862) and, more briefly still, the unfinished romances, a major reading of the work Hawthorne called Our Old Home (1863); growing out of the Notebooks the author kept while serving as American Consul to Liverpool in the mid-1850s, this now nostalgic, now fierce mix of excursion and critique reveals a great deal about Hawthorne’s social intelligence, and about his biases. Finally, Colacurcio offers a patient but somewhat resistant reading of The Marble Faun, a major effort to identify the “puritanic” element in the developing American identity but revealing, at the same time, an unsteady Narrator’s increasing hesitance about the epistemology of the “Romance.”  Literary genius beginning to doubt its gift.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Darcie DeAngelo is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. As an environmental and medical anthropologist trained in visual methods, her work engages with human–nonhuman relations such as the love between landmine detection rats and their handlers, the excitement of dogs and humans as they hunt for rats in cities, and the kinship of humans and their sourdough starters. From 2023 to 2024, she was the Annie Clark Tanner Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah where she is writing her second book, For the Love of Rats, which explores the surprising relationships between rats and humans across time and space. Her first book is forthcoming with the UC Press Atelier Series. She also edits the journal Visual Anthropology Review. Find more of her work here: https://www.darcie-deangelo.com/

Rebecca Kastleman is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her work engages with modern drama, theater, and performance and its intersections with social thought. Her book manuscript in progress, Profaning Acts: Drama After Religion on the Modern Stage, reveals how a resurgent fascination with religion transformed the twentieth-century theater. Her research has appeared in venues, including Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, American Quarterly, PAJ, and Modernism/modernity Print Plus.

Joshua O Reno is Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University. He has written books on the subject of waste, including Waste Away (2016) and Military Waste (2019), as well as one, with Britt Halvorson, on White supremacy and the American Midwest, Imagining the Heartland (2022), all of which were published with the University of California Press. With Holly High and Pluto Press, he edited As if Already Free on the legacy of David Graeber. He has a new book expected in 2024 from the University of Chicago Press titled Home Signs, which is an autoethnographic account of living beyond and beside language.

Leah Zani is a public anthropologist and author based in Oakland, California. She uses creative and literary methods to investigate the social impact of explosives. Zani’s most recent book, Strike Patterns, won the 2023 Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) Gold Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Strike Patterns is a hybrid memoir combining their fieldwork in the former battlefields of Laos with their experiences being raised by two trans parents, one of whom is a Vietnam War veteran. She is also the author of Bomb Children, an academic monograph of ethnography and poetry, and is currently working on a book about dynamite.

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

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

A variety of students and practitioners have read the first edition, or attended John’s seminars, only to remark “Why haven’t we learned this in our traditional coursework?” or “This book brings so much clarity to the fields of sustainability and environmental sciences.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

First published in 1851, Henry Murger’sScènes de la vie de bohèmebrought together the stories he had written for a small arts newspaper in Paris. These semi-fictionalized tales, drawn from the daily lives of Murger and his friends, portray the struggles and celebrations, the loves and losses, of young writers and artists as they eked out an existence on the impoverished margins of society. While the nineteenth-century Parisian setting is fascinating in itself, the stories have retained their contemporary relevance as the continuing popularity of Puccini’s opera adaptation (La Bohème) and the Broadway success of Jonathan Larson’s Rent—both based on Murger’s stories—have demonstrated. 

Life in bohemia continues to attract young people in great numbers, just as it has done for almost two centuries, and it is Murger’s bohemia, with all its energy and eccentricities, that underlies that appeal. Balancing humor and despair, and optimism and desperation, Murger’s characters, much like today’s bohemians, manage to confound landlords and bill collectors, endure cold and hunger, find love and lose it, party without restraint and confront the devastating deaths of friends and lovers. 

With this new translation, readers can once again encounter the point of origin for the bohemian cultures that have flourished ever since, not only the source for Puccini’s and Larson’s phenomenally popular musical works as well as for numerous films and songs over many decades but also a classic work of literature that will re-introduce English readers to Rodolphe and Mimi, Marcel and Musette, Schaunard and Colline, after too long an absence.

This book is divided into three sections.
The first section examines the political relationships/structures of Somalia’s clans with focus on the pre–Siad Barre era. Somalis are largely one people further linked by one religion (Sunni Islam). Establishing their connectivity is crucial in view of this project’s contention that Indigenous methods of conflict resolution that have so far worked in the north (Somaliland and Puntland) can work in the south-central regions where conflict still pervades.
The next section examines the conflict in Somalia from events leading to the exit of Siad Barre (the point where the conflict really begins) and the growth of the Aristocratic/Gerontocratic system of government in the north to address the situation. It will capture the rise of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) in the south-central areas whose aim was the stability of the regions under their control. The gains, gaps and setbacks of these Indigenous systems will also be discussed in this section.
The third section captures the intervention of Ethiopia and the United States in Somalia’s conflict and how the African Union (AU) was drawn into the fray to legitimize this intervention. Here the book deals with the following (research) question: Should the AU have gone ahead with the intervention plans of the US/Ethiopia that were directed at debilitating the ICU, or, should focus have been directed at supporting local structures put in place by the ICU to foster stability as had been done in the north by the clan elders? This section discusses the current state of affairs in view of what was forfeited.

Did you know that the uranium used to bomb the citizens of Hiroshima was mined at a forbidden site known as ‘the money place’ by First Nation people in northern Canada? Or have you heard about the environmental damage and social upheavals at the Atomic City of Oak Ridge? And how about the bikini swimwear? Did you know that the gaze on a woman’s belly button was that of military men carrying out atomic bombardments of the Bikini Atoll while fetishising ‘sex bombs’ and (an)atomic ‘bombshells’? And how about the poor Pacific Islanders who got their atolls blown to pieces? Have you heard about the colonial history of violence and oppression of those whose only aspiration was to live in peace with their coconut islands? And everyone is talking about climate change these days. Did you know that the debate emerged as a reaction to the fear of ordinary citizens wondering if atomic bombs would blow up the entire sky?

If some of this was news to you, it might have to do with how the story of atomic bombs has been told. The truism that history is written by its winners is very much the case in the literature about how the bomb came about, with numerous apologetic books most often written by U.S. scholars. These are usually cast as stories of the tormented souls of scientists who made a ‘Faustian bargain’ with the military in pursuit of atomic knowledge. The physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the nuke’s ‘father’, is repeatedly centre stage, as in the case of the recent film about him. These are elitist stories that more often than not ignore the suffering and violence of the bomb to laypeople in general, and to marginalised groups in particular. This book offers alternative perspectives.

For more than four centuries, Britons have been dominating and colonising other peoples and territories. Britain’s Empires tells that story without flinching from the oppressive and exploitative side of the imperial mission that shaped world history. It also aims to tell the story of the colonial past as one marked by change and reinvention, where each new era was embarked upon as a break with the past.

This is history of the many different British Empires – the Old Colonial System (1600-1776), the Empire of Free Trade (1776-1870), the New Imperialism (1870-1945), Decolonisation (1945-1990) and the era of humanitarian intervention (1990-2020).

As well as explaining the importance of ‘primitive accumulation’ to kickstarting British capitalism in the Old Colonial Era, Heartfield shows that the New Imperialism of the 1880s was in large part a response to economic exhaustion in the mother country, and an attempt to find a new purpose in the colonies. Britain’s Empires also explains the dynamics of decolonisation in the post-war era, the rebalancing of Britain’s relation to the world that allowed it to create an arm’s length relation to newly independent ex-colonies, while carrying on extensive military interventions overseas. The book concludes with an assessment of the post-Cold War resurgence of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the less developed world, in an important retrospective account.

Britain’s Empires explains how imperial policy dominated andskewed the history of societies across the world, from Canada and the West Indies to Ireland, from Africa to the Middle East, from India to China and into Australasia; but also how the peoples of those territories imposed themselves on Britain, challenging slavery, standing up to colonial overlords and eventually overthrowing them.The book explains how the reinvention of Britain’s Empire reworked its critics protest to reinvent colonisation as a struggle against slavery in the mid-nineteenth century, and a civilising mission at that century’s end. The capacity of Empire to foster local native allies helped stabilise a polity of extraordinary reach. But as Heartfield explains, the subordination of a quarter of the world’s landmass was often a defensive reaction to internal limitations and other imperial challenges. The history of Britain’s Empires, explains Heartfield, is one of constant challenge and change, where vanquished become victors, and heroes often turn out to be villains.

How are breasts and breastfeeding shown in literature? Why does the depiction of breastfeeding in literature matter? What messages do we get from literature about the feeding of infants and children and about women’s bodies? Is this different in different cultures? What causes cultural and historical differences and what can we learn from them?

This cross-cultural study analyses images and descriptions of breasts and breastfeeding in children’s books and literature for adults, in both English and Swedish. It explores how breastfeeding is depicted in literature in the two languages and discusses why there are differences in the cultures. Literary, feminist, anthropological, sociological, historical, and cultural research is used to support this analysis and to suggest explanations for the differing depictions. For example, the book discusses the concepts of women being nude versus women being naked; nakedness, the book argues, is more acceptable in Swedish literature and society, whereas a naked female is immediately perceived as nude in English-speaking cultures, and nudity is always sexualised. It discusses the male gaze and challenges ways of seeing women’s bodies in literature; a question here is whether women can see their bodies without being influenced by the pervasiveness of the male gaze. Another example of a difference between the two cultures is the rise of formula-feeding and supposedly scientific ways of understanding and managing bodies in many Western countries, including English-speaking ones, and this in turn influences decreasing familiarity and comfort with seeing breasts and breastfeeding in literature, whereas rates of breastfeeding are still high in Scandinavia, which suggests more understanding, acceptance and support of natural bodily functions. In addition, issues such as whether a more feminist political approach might affect how breastfeeding is depicted and how it is treated in society are considered.

While this intercultural exploration of breasts and breastfeeding in literature is academic and relies on extensive research, the book also suggests that this reflects popular culture today. Given the rise of the #MeToo movement and our new awareness of people’s rights to their own bodies and to consent, it is important that we explore depictions in the media of women’s bodies and encourage positive representations. Avoiding naked females in literature or primarily showing them in sexualised contexts suggests a sense of shame and fear about female bodies, or emphasises the idea that women are to be objectified.

In short, this book will focus on a topic not yet seen in any depth in academic research and will raise fresh awareness of the power of literature to influence how readers see their own and other people’s bodies, and will also illuminate cultural and historical differences that affect what writers describe and illustrators depict in literature when it comes to breasts and breastfeeding. The book challenges the currently prevailing ways of depicting female bodies in literature and discusses the way societal norms influence the writing and illustrating of literature.

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

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

This is a book about dying, or, more accurately, about the representation of dying in the theatre. Its chief concern is how actors undertook to translate words and concepts into forms legible and significant to an audience. It deals with the ways in which playwrights wrote about death and attitudes towards death in their cultures. Nevertheless, the emphasis is on the practice of acting.

Before the nineteenth century, when death began to be confined behind closed doors, it was widely available as a spectacle. Death and the suffering that preceded it were in plain sight; no effort was made to hide the diseased and moribund. The absence of medical means of alleviating pain or of hygienic measures meant that the most distressing and abhorrent aspects of dying were out in the open. The contempt for human life shown by the law-courts and the death penalty for the slightest offence occasioned frequent and enthusiastically attended public executions. In addition, the Church and religion generally hoped, through elaborate rites and ceremonies, both before and after death, to invest it with an edifying value that could be extended for the greater good. The sacred and social ceremony makes a transition into an aesthetic and political performance, marking a more modern frame of mind.

Neoclassic decorum eschewed such displays; and, after a heyday of spectacular dying on the nineteenth-century stage, critics again began to insist on more moderate displays. This conformed to the growing emphasis on mental processes and psychological complexity. However, it runs counter to the theatre’s need for high color, extreme situations and fanciful invention. Denied house-room in literary drama, these desiderata found a welcome haven in the various manifestations of performance art.

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’sprior 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 or eight contributed chapters. 

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.

This book deals with the morality, identity, self-conception and prestige of states, all of which goes well beyond the narrow, rationalist defence of national interests, which dominates most IR studies. The honour of states – which is most clearly seen in situations of war – rests on the ideal conception of ‘all of us’, which includes all citizens, all classes and all generations, set against their opposite numbers outside of ‘our’ immediate sphere of domination. This state-based image of itself and its existential teleology constitutes its very essence, notwithstanding that it is often seen as a deviation (‘exception’) from the normal state of affairs, where the state is ‘just’ there to serve and support the economy and its principal actors.

The volume, which is particularly topical given the current belligerent state of Europe and the global struggle for hegemony, pursues this line of thinking along three different but interconnected routes. The first chapter delves into the morality question itself, tackling the complex relationship between politics, law and morals, and between states and citizens. The universe of moral judgements feeds off rigid distinctions between good and bad, I/we and the Other, restraint and self-restraint, liberty and puritanism. Political actors support it, law legitimates it, and citizens enact it. The second chapter deals with the question of the honour and prestige of states, historically and conceptually; this is a question that has been either ignored or misconceived by recent international relations theories, but which has now shown its renewed relevance and cries out for an explanation. Finally, the third article tackles the question of war and peace head-on. Its basic theorem is that the two are not contradictory but complementary: reasons for war are produced in times of peace. Both Kant’s thesis on ‘perpetual peace’ and its modern corollary, that is, that democracies do not go to war against each other, are seen as fallacious. The chapter ends by addressing the question of the background and rationale of the war in Ukraine, in the process critiquing the moral stance characterising the Western understanding of the situation.

Thus, all three chapters revolve around issues that relate to the interaction of war and democracy and the underlying morality that both legitimates and underpins the actions of politicians as well as citizens.

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

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

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

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.

• 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.

Much has been written about political polarisation in the United States, but no one has examined it through the lens of recent U.S. history. There is nothing deterministic about how we became polarised, and it happened more recently than many think. To fully understand the problem, we must take the long view, the perspective provided by history, with its attention to change over time and the role of contingency. That’s what The Path to Paralysis does.

The book illuminates the broad forces that have shaped and reshaped American society and politics since the mid-1960s: the shift from an industrial to an information economy that produced economic inequality not seen since the 1920s; dramatic, unsettling changes in gender and sexuality; sharp conflict between those who embrace the culture of personal freedom that was a legacy of the 1960s and politically mobilised White evangelicals; persistent racial discord that transformed Southern politics and shattered the New Deal coalition; and dramatic changes in communication that transformed broadcasting into narrowcasting, creating alternate news and truths.

These developments had their origin in the late 1960s and have generated sharp political conflict for six decades. But they didn’t overwhelm the system until the 21st century. Ronald Reagan moved American politics to the right, but Republicans and Democrats forged compromise on issues as diverse as economic policy, civil rights, and immigration. After the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush tacked to the centre and sought bipartisan solutions to issues like welfare, education and immigration. Sharp conflict and governance were compatible.

The tipping point was the election of the nation’s first Black president and the economic collapse he inherited. Fault lines of religion, region, gender, sexual orientation, class, education and, especially, race widened. People chose sides and identified enemies, the number of true swing voters shrunk, fewer states and congressional districts were competitive, the two major parties became more monolithic, and appeals to the base drove strategy and what passed for policy. It was an atmosphere that provided fertile ground for a demagogue whose norm-busting appeals to White grievance and Christian Nationalism, as well as to regional and class resentment strengthened his appeal to an angry base and threatened the peaceful transition of power, the bedrock of American democracy for more than two centuries.

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.

Defining Hybrid Heroes: The Leadership Spectrum from Scoundrel to Saint defines the hero (and his or her journey) from a hybrid perspective, exploring the spectrum from scoundrel to saint. It utilizes a more dynamic and situational outlook, regarding heroism not only as a personal characteristic, but also as a series of heroic acts within a given situation.

The book examines the hybrid hero from several distinctive points of view, e.g. through lenses dominated by fiction, business, politics and psychology, and paints a new, more complex portrait that takes full advantage of the authors’ varied backgrounds. Inge Brokerhof has an academic background in psychology and has studied the impact of narrative fiction on workplace variables, such as career identity, employability and moral leadership. Stephan Sonnenburg has studied Joseph Campbell and the impact of the hero’s journey on creativity and innovation management. Greg Stone is a communications consultant who teaches executives and professors how to explain their work in clear and compelling language..

This book will be at once theoretical and practical, with a combination of substantial intellectual content to satisfy an academic audience and a series of specific recommendations to meet the needs of thinking managers seeking to improve their leadership skills. In the “real world” of business, leaders are often both scoundrel and saint. They are role models and anti-models at the same time. The authors show how they can make these warring traits work for them and how academics can gain a new perspective on approaching leadership and management.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

Did Spanish explorers really discover the sunken city of Atlantis or one of the lost tribes of Israel in the site of Aztec Mexico? Did classical writers foretell the discovery of America? Was Baja California really an island or a peninsula—and did romances of chivalry contain the answer? Were Amazon women hiding in Guiana and where was the location of the fabled golden city, El Dorado? Who was more powerful, Apollo or Diana, and which claimant nation, Spain or England, would win the game of empire? These were some of the questions English writers, historians, and polemicists asked through their engagement with Spanish romance. By exploring England’s fanatical consumption of so-called books of the brave conquistadors, this book shows how the idea of English empire took root in and through literature. 

The chapters in this book represent separate case studies regarding the use of romance strategies and tales of love and arms more generally in the imperialist myth-making of early modern England against the threat of imperial Spain, particularly those which were first used by Spanish authors to justify Spain’s own imperialist designs. With interwoven readings of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Dryden, Ben Jonson and Peter Heylyn, this book shows how the English colonial mindset developed through a concerted conversation with the reality of Spain’s presence in the colonial world, particularly in the historically contentious sites of Mexico, Peru, Guiana, California and Australia, producing emergent discourses of English nationalism and proto-imperialism as contextually contingent responses to the Spanish problem. By uncovering long-neglected Spanish romantic influences on canonical English works, this book also tracks for the first time the unique social, political and cultural circumstances of English hysteria with Spanish romance that primed the success of Don Quixote of la Mancha in England.

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.

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

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

‘The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory’ offers a unique and progressive survey of screen theory and how it can be applied to a range of moving-image texts and sociocultural contexts. Focusing on the ‘handbook’ angle, the book includes only original essays from two primary sources: established authors in the field and new scholars on the cutting edge of helping screen theory evolve for the twenty-first-century vistas of new media, social shifts and geopolitical change. The main purpose of this method is to guarantee a strong foundation and clarity for the canon of film theory, while also situating it as part of a larger genealogy of art theories and critical thought, and to reveal the relevance and utility of film theories and concepts to a wide array of expressive practices and specified arguments.

‘The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory’ seeks to avoid the typical republishing of seminal film theory texts and, instead, to provide progressive chapters on major topics that offer a survey summary of the history of that subject in film theory, including references from major texts; put forward an accessible and clear illustration of how the theory can be applied to media texts and industries; and create a vision for the possible future horizon of that topic. It is at once inclusive, applicable and a chance for writers to innovate and really play with where they think the field is, can, and should be heading.

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.

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

This book throws new light on post-colonial evaluations of the Partition and its effect on eastern India. Until very recently, a striking state of 'near silence' has existed concerning the violence encountered by those who fled across the Bengal border. 'Bengal Partition Stories' addresses this silence through the retelling of stories inspired by the division of Bengal, the mass exodus that followed and their repercussions on the cultural, social and economic character of the region, modern India as a whole and the newly-formed nation of Bangladesh.

Despite numerous critical enquiries into the history, politics and social dynamics that contributed to the partition of Bengal, there remains a distinct lack of in-depth exploration into the personal experiences of those directly affected. Through oral histories, interviews and fictional retellings of the event and its aftermath, 'Bengal Partition Stories' seeks to fill this gap by unearthing and articulating the collective memories of a people traumatised by the brutal division of their homeland.

This collection of essays covers a broad range of disciplines to produce a work that rethinks relationships and divisions in gender, geography, class relations, culture and much more to create a true 'politics of the possible'.

Broadly emphasizing forms, ideologies and class relations, Sangari's essays crisscross and cohere around several themes: the politics of social location and the connection between local, metropolitan and colonial geographies as they bear on debates about the nature of knowledge; the transnational and regional production of ideologies such as altruism under the aegis of colonialism; ways of theorizing women's labour, literacy and consent to patriarchal arrangements and dominant ideologies.

Sangari's analysis of Indian English and the relationships between 'literature' and the non-literary change, the way we consider the divisions between the metropolitan and the sub-continental. In her discussion of capitalism and colonialism, her egalitarian feminist viewpoint opens up and questions issues of cultural autonomy and hybridity. She also critiques the impact of race, caste, class, religion and misogyny on patriarchal ideology and its effect on women.

The 'politics of the possible' mapped by these essays presents itself in several areas: as a more sensitive feminist historiography; as the social potential for secular activity in seemingly impossible situations; in the historical possibilities that were offered by situations not doomed to inevitable outcomes; and as the elements of resistance produced by the contradictions of different structures of oppression..

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.

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.

Do translation theorists observe what translators do and develop theories based on that? Do translators gain ideas and tools from studying theories? Or does it go both ways? Or is it neither, and translation scholars are completely separated from practising translators?

In my own translation practice, academic work, and teaching, I find that translation theories, far from being scary and distant from what I do as a translator on a day-to-day basis, actually provide beneficial concepts and strategies that can help me make translatorial decisions. The work of translators like me, in turn, comes to influence the way academics understand and write about what translators do.

I summarise a wide range of translation theories, from across different time periods and parts of the world, and I then follow this by suggesting ideas that stem from these theoretical concepts and that can be of practical use to translators.

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.

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

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

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

The publication of the National Atlas of Finland in 1899 marks the beginning of the era of the modern national atlas. It is a period that coincides neatly with the twentieth century. The modern national atlas mirrors and embodies some of the important themes of this turbulent century, including the complex connections between nation, state and territory, the rise of state-sponsored science; the growth of nation-states; the geography of biopolitics. 

Between 1900 and 2000, more than seventy countries produced a national atlas, an official or quasi-official rendering of the nation-state in maps and accompanying text. A useful working definition of a national atlas is “a generally comprehensive, officially sanctioned single-country atlas.” This book considers the reasons behind and characteristics of this state-sponsored cartographic explosion. The changing form of the national atlas provides an intriguing window into the connections between science, state, territory and power.

The primary material for this study is a close reading of thirty-seven of these national atlases from countries across the world. They represent a wide range of countries from rich to poor, progressive to regressive, and capitalist to communist. In total, these atlases provide a range of different state arrangements and national experiences. 

The early modern period witnessed the rise of impressive empires in the Eurasian context, in Europe and not less so in the east – The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires. The construction of large and stable empires necessitated the constructions of unprecedented power mechanisms. History of law and legality in the early modern period was playing a crucial role in these changes.

Born in Spain and joining his family as refugees from the great expulsion from the Iberian peninsula, heading east to the Ottoman Empire, Karo, as the rest of Sephardi intellectuals, was deeply acquainted with both European [Canon law, ius comune] and Ottoman [Shari'a, Kanuname] legal traditions, and their transformative processes during the early modern period.

The codes of law, in the short and long version, composed by R. Karo mark a watershed turn, and they were never superseded until the present. In composing them, Karo intended to respond to the global changes in law, and to update Jewish Halakhah to current political and cultural circumstances. The books suggest both a global reading of Jewish law, and a sociological perspective of Halakhah. It adds a further dimension on modernization of Jewish culture. 

This anthology explores the relationships and interdependencies between literary production and distinctions of taste by examining how the material aspects of literary texts, such as the cover, binding, typography, and paper stock, reflect or even determine their cultural status. In the nineteenth century, for example, the industrialization of printing made possible a wide range of cheap formats, such as dime novels, pulp magazines, and paperbacks, which made literature available to a mass reading public. The increased demand for new content effectively lowered the cultural entrance level, which resulted in a tremendous expansion of popular or trivial fiction. These developments were often perceived as a threat to traditional literary institutions, which increasingly relied on material distinctions as a way of preserving their cultural authority, and some publishers even attempted to mimic the conventions of exclusivity by creating deluxe editions that were designed to preserve the privileged status of so-called “highbrow” texts. In many cases, the distinctions between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” taste actually had little to do with the content of the texts themselves, as books more often functioned as markers of socioeconomic status, like clothing or home décor. At the risk of being provocative, one might even go so far as to say that the concept of literary taste was more closely related to fashion sense than critical judgment. The anthology seeks to address this claim by examining how the tensions between consumerism and prestige reflect fundamental historical changes with regard to the development of technology, literacy, and social power.

The individual chapters cover a wide range of historical periods, genres, and national literatures, and they are divided into four sections that focus on different ways in which the materiality of literature is related to cultural prestige. The first section, “Material Forms and Literary Publishing,” focuses on how writers and publishers used the material properties of books to enhance their symbolic value and to challenge the idea of literature as a mass-produced commodity. These material strategies thus served to reinforce traditional distinctions of taste, which were closely aligned with the power of the literary elite, as the consumers of deluxe editions often sought to acquire respect and admiration within their social spheres. The second section, “Material Distinctions in Popular Fiction,” examines how the publishers of popular texts also used the material properties of books to enhance their symbolic and economic value, as works that were perceived as less prestigious were often more marketable, yet they could appeal to different groups of readers in different ways based on an alternative set of cultural distinctions. Instead of using books to signify their socioeconomic status, for example, fans of popular genre fiction more often fetishize special editions as a way of gaining prestige within their own reading communities. The third section, “Cultural Prestige and Graphic Narratives,” focuses on how the material properties of visual texts were also used to signify the differences between “low” and “high” art. The graphic novel format, for example, often served to enhance the status of previously lowbrow content by presenting it as a durable work that was worthy of being sold in bookstores and preserved in archives. The fourth and final section, “Electronic Publishing and Reading Practices,” also focuses on how new forms of electronic display are currently transforming the status of literary texts. While some contributors argue that e-books are potentially more prestigious than printed books, as they are less dependent on the economic imperatives of the publishing industry, others argue that printed books continue to serve a crucial non-literary function as markers of socioeconomic status. As with the other sections, therefore, the contributors in this section agree that distinctions of taste are still largely dependent on the materiality of literature, as the material properties of literary texts continue to reflect and influence their cultural prestige.

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.