group of men crowds around the news anchor’s desk looking ready for a fight. They wear full combat gear— camouflage, helmets, bulletproof vests. All of them are young and big, seemingly chosen for this task on the basis of size rather than se niority. Their drab uniforms contrast with the cheerful lighting of the tv station, which is better suited to weather reports…
n a large cement building on a remote part of Camp Atterbury army base in south-central Indiana, a group of US soldiers prepares to visit a mock Afghan village. The village, part of a simulation, is populated by privately contracted role players acting as Afghan farmers, merchants, religious figures, elders, and other villagers. As part of their predeployment training, the soldiers will survey…
This book offers a comprehensive review of current research on the higher education experiences of neurodivergent undergraduate students and those with invisible disabilities. Grounded in principles of social justice and equity, this work draws from design thinking, the neurodiversity model, and Universal Design for Learning, to explore the context of higher education in relation to neurodiverg…
For the first time in the history of humankind, global goals exist that guide our future. The UN’s 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a detailed framework for public, private, and civil society actors globally to bring about sig-nificant and transformative change towards a world that works for 100 percent of humanity and the …
The design of educational spaces dedicated to school is a rather recent topic in Italy,since until the end of the nineteenth century and the unification of the country,1children were educated exclusively in private or ecclesiastical environments; andonly later, the school education was recognized for its significant role in theteaching and learning processes (Pennisi 2012). The evolution of the…
Since beginning this project, I have practiced a daily routine of scrolling through news sites and taking screenshots of Anthropocene-related stories. I have quickly accumulated quite an archive. Browsing through my collection, I log that most of the climate headlines are dark, dim, and foreboding. I also notice an increasing number of announcements about the end o…
Substitute the term ‘place’ for the apricot-cocktail glass, and you have the overall theme of this book. It puts forward an account of London’s urban landscape by considering it as a constellation of places linked by paths of movement between them.The aim of this book is to describe these places as faithfully as possible through phenomenological description grounded in partic…
The Suez Canal is one of the most important artificial waterways in the world. Since its opening in November 1869, it had proven to be vital for both trade and military affairs and for great and regional actors. It is one of the most significant and sensitive chokepoints in the world, and the latest events in March 2021 served as a token …
In Peki, an Ewe town in the Ghanaian Volta Region, death is a matter of public concern. By means of funeral banners printed with synthetic ink on PVC, public lyings in state, cemented graves and wreaths made from plastic, death occupies a prominent place in the world of the living. Rest in Plastic gives an insight into local entanglements of death, synthetic materials and power in Ewe community…
This collection gathers the contributions of ten scholars on the topic of transnational cultural and physical mobility originating in China. These contributions aim to open conversations among Chinese Studies scholars by applying a Mobility Studies perspective. Exploring diverse narratives and forms of representation from people of Chinese heritage, the book is divided into three parts that eac…
In the following, I would like to present some central aspects of Hannah Arendt’sthinking and work that identify her as a non-academic and non-intellectual.In do-ing so,I would like to take up the criticism often levelled at her and turn it in a pos-itive way.The criticism not only concerns her reportEichmanninJerusalem,her sup-posedly conservative nostalgia for the Greek polis, or her critiq…
This book sets out with a programmatic agenda to find new ways of “speaking for the social” in projects of technical and infrastructural change. It takes as its starting point the ongoing challenge of com-munication between scholars in the social sciences and humanities who study the social dimensions of technical and infrastructure projects, and those working in engineering and policy who …
Humans are a walking species. We tread on the surface of the Earth. Without this primary mobility we would not be here and even when other means of getting around have become accessible, we don’t cease to walk. Our walking leaves traces. This is inevitable. No culture or civilisation or society can escape from this primordial mark-making. Some of these traces cluster and congregate into patte…
Language politics has always been inherently interdisciplinary, as highlighted by the range of disciplines contributing to and represented in the field — and linguistics and political science are not always the primary ones. The scope of the field is further enlarged by the two different ways that the phrase ‘language politics’ can be parsed: th…
Chinese intellectuals like to blame things on institutions. After all, Chinese people areindustrious, prudent, and entrepreneurial. Yet modern Chinese history since theopium war has been characterized by one humiliation after another, and althoughthe founding of communist China gave the country independence, it came at the costof being self-isolated from the world and having a poor economy. Wha…
In the millions of words written about the pandemic that entered global consciousness in 2020, masculinities featured in contradictory ways. On the one hand, some commentators expressed concerns that the characteristics of masculinity make boys and men poorly suited to managing the pandemic well. They were considered at risk of poor mental h…
Caring is Sharing? explores why and how mixed-sex couples make decisions around parental leave at the transition to parenthood, and how these decisions shape their work and family care practices during and after the leave period. It does this through a longitudinal qualitative comparative analysis of mixed-sex parent couples in England who do and do not share parental leave after the birth of t…
Packaged Plants offers an absorbing ethnography and cultural history of how the production and consumption of plants for food and medicine has gone through ‘metabolic rifts’, increasingly processed into commodities with adverse impact on health and aggravating existing economic and social inequities. The book also describes ultra-processed foods that are linked to metabolic syndrome, includ…
South-South Cooperation (SSC) is both an old concept and a new idea, an old analysis and a new policy directive. Although the notion has existed for decades, it has grown in importance and function, especially since the early 2000s. It has transformed global economic structures, forcing us to redefine traditionally understood words, most notably “region” and “development.” It h…
In recent years, rapid growth in practice and scholarship at the intersection of environment, conflict, and peace has given rise to the new field of environmental peacebuilding (Ide etal., 2021). Much of the work and research has focused on the environmental dimensions of conflict, peace, and peacebuilding. At the same time, interest has grown in the conflict, peace, and peacebuilding dimension…
There were a few pages about Peñón de los Baños on the internet, and my guide-book also briefly mentioned it. I had thought it would be more important, con-sidering the presence of Peñón in the historical documents I was collecting in the archives downtown. Real hot springs in the middle of Mexico City—naturewas difficult to locate amidst the densest …
In A Very Short Introduction to Politics, Kenneth Minogue begins with a discussion of issues arising from a historical account of politics, and goes on to offer chapters dealing with the Ancient Greeks and the idea of citizenship; Roman law; medieval Christianity and individualism; freedom since Machiavelli and Hobbes; the challenge of ideologies; democracy, oligarchy, and bureaucracy; power an…
Base isolation is an effective approach for reducing damages to structures and their contents under severe earthquake excitations. It is generally implemented by using special isolators, such as laminated rubber bearings (e.g., Kelly, 1986; Kikuchi & Aiken, 1997; Skinner et al., 1993; Yamamoto et al., 2009) and friction pendulum (FP) bearings (e.g.…
Long recognized as one of the main branches of political science, political theory has in recent years burgeoned in many different directions. Close textual analysis of historical texts sits alongside more analytical work on the nature and normative grounds of political values. Continental and post-modern influences jostle with ones from economics, history, sociology, and the law. Feminist conc…
Responding to the victimisation of children is a key societal challenge to which nations are increasingly committed. As victims, children have rights and needs that require services from both the justice and welfare sectors. In Europe, the Barnahus (“Children’s House”) model has been introduced as a way to strengthen children’s access to j…
For much of human history, actively sensing and being in resonance witheach other was part and parcel of social cohesion, was part of play, produc-tion, and reproduction. Such ways of deeply listening and attending to eachother have been significantly reduced or changed by contemporary modes ofdaily life and social organisation.Moving from the deep tissues of our humanbodies, this book suggests…
In 1969, an influential volume arising from a conference at LSE began with a declaration phrased to echo Marx and Engels: ‘A spectre is haunting the world: the spectre of populism’ [1]. More than half a century has gone by, and the warning re-mains timely. Donald Trump may be gone from the White House, but populism is still a powerful force in world politics. …
In2019,agraffitiartistsprayedamuralofFridaKahloonthebackofagunshopin Greensboro, North Carolina. The Mexican artist is shown with an ammunitionbelt around her hips, leaning back against the wall. In her hand, she holds a gunpointing downward,as if ready to lift her arms and shoot at the viewer.The mural copied a photograph of Kahlo which has long become a commodity.Itsdepictionof»Frida«reiter…
Cats and Conservationists is the first multidisciplinary analysis of the heated debate about free-roaming cats. The debate pits conservationists against cat lovers, who disagree both on the ecological damage caused by the cats and the best way to manage them. An impassioned and spirited conflict, it also sheds light on larger questions about how we interpret science, incorporate diverse perspec…
The fact that the tagline culminates in the emboldening of‘again’highlights therepetitionofdeath,whichprovidesthemotionpicture’sforwardmomentum.Inthefilm, protagonist and quintessential final girl, Teresa “Tree” Gelbman finds herselfcaptured in a Groundhog Day-esque loop in which she keeps being murdered, onherbirthday(Mondaythe18th),onlytowakeupagainthemorningofthatverysameday.The es…
Stalin's Quest for Gold tells the story of Torgsin, a chain of retail shops established in 1930 with the aim of raising the hard currency needed to finance the USSR's ambitious industrialization program. At a time of desperate scarcity, Torgsin had access to the country's best foodstuffs and goods. Initially, only foreigners were allowed to shop in Torgsin, but the acute demand for hard-currenc…
This volume features ten articles, each dealing with a particular aspect of the relationship between the Korean people and foreigners. It is a work conducted with a comparative/structuralist approach, which comprises a time span of over 1500 years and intends to give Korean studies that transnational aspect which is still neglected today.
The well-known challenges of international migration have triggered new departures in academic approaches, with 'diaspora studies' evolving as an interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary field of study. Its emerging methodology shares concerns with another interdisciplinary field, the study of the relations between law and literature, which focuses on the ways in which the two cultural prac…
Drawing on twenty-first-century French-language literature, this study shows how literature can not only serve as a means of "personal development", but also help repair the "brokenness" implied in victimhood, and redress individual and collective traumas. As it reflects on discourses of repair (and reparations), it questions the canonical theories on the functions of literature and proposes a …
Rwanda is a small land-locked country in the Great Lakes Region of central Africa. Bordering Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (see image 1 below), it is the most densely populated country in sub-Saharan Africa with a population of 12 million in July 2015.1 The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) won the parliamentary election in 2003 and continues…
Nuclear safety and security—the protection of nuclear facilities, weapons, technologies, and materials against accidents or attacks—is an under-studied area of international security studies.1 Periodically, the subject has received high levels of attention. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, for example, scholars and policymakers worried intense…
Security Sector Reform (SSR) is at a crossroads. SSR concepts and practices are embedded in international efforts to promote peace, security and development. They are widely considered an essential element of many multilateral and bilateral stabilization efforts and are a standard feature of the post-conflict toolkit.1 SSR is routinely commended for the way it can integrate siloe…
Although the vital importance of drinking water provision, and with this the core task of drinking water organisations, has essentially been stable for the past few decades, the challenges water companies meet, the way they operate, and certainly also thecitizens they serve, have undergone significant changes (Geldof et al. 2000; Tonkens 2008). For instance, over the past few decades the water …
In 2002, the world was astonished by the appearance of the new opera star Anna Netrebko at the Salzburg Opera Festival. She was young, incredibly talented and smashingly glamorous, almost akin to the legendary Maria Callas. She quickly became the face of the world new opera and also the face of the new Russia and of the post-Soviet space. Like a speeding ro…
On January 1, 2016, the Baltimore Sun marked the end of the city's "deadli-est year." In 2015, Baltimore counted 344 homicides-nearly 90 percent of them caused by gun violence.1 The historically high number of deaths drew condemnation nationwide. Decrying that "too many continue to die on our streets," the mayor fired the chief of police. Maryland's governor called the murde…
Historically, polytechnic schools rose to prominence in many national settings dur-ing the second half of the nineteenth century (Fox and Guagnini 2004). Over time, new areas of technology have been developed and incorporated into their repertoire, and waves of academisation have swept over the former polytechnics, transforming some of them into technical universities (Christensen and E…
Since the last decades of the twentieth century, most coun-tries, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, have beenseeking to transform their economies from depending onprimary natural resources to a knowledge-based one, pro-viding a permanent source for economic growth, and thusachieving sustainable development, and helping in diversi-fying the national economic framework, and multiplyingincome…
It is now widely accepted that for a country to thrive in the knowledge economy, it must develop high-level skills and competencies (human capital), as well as its scientific research, innovation and technological development capacity. Higher education, and universities in particular, are regarded as key to delivering these knowledge capabilities for development, based on the…
What happens when the idea of religious progress propels the shaping of modernity? In The Ahmadiyya Quest for Religious Progress. Missionizing Europe 1900 – 1965 Gerdien Jonker offers an account of the mission the Ahmadiyya reform movement undertook in interwar Europe. Nowadays persecuted in the Muslim world, Ahmadis appear here as the vanguard of a modern, rational Islam that met with a cons…
In their centuries-old history, the Roma (formerly known as Gypsies) experienced many difficult moments and cruel trials from their arrival in Europe until now. The history of the Roma in the USSR is no exception in this respect. Along with affirmative state policy towards them (at least until the end of the 1930s), they also fell victim to the massive political repressions of that time. In thi…
Over the past two decades, Canadian international history has slipped its traditional North Atlantic moorings. Studies of Canada’s postwar relation-ships with a waning United Kingdom or an ascendant United States have faded in popularity, replaced with a stream of publications on relations with the decolonized states of Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, countries whose citizens increasingly co…
he first statement above is extracted from an interview with China’s incumbent ambassador to the United States (US), former Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai, at the 24th Post Pacific Islands Forum Dialogue in Auckland in August 2012 (Liu & Huang, 2012). The second statement is taken from the outcome list of the eighth China–US Strategic and Econo…
The Nordic countries are among the highest spenders in Europe on legal aid, which provides people with legal services when they cannot other-wise afford legal assistance. Figures from 2012 provided by the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice CEPEJ (2014) show that, of 47 European countries, Norway spends the most on legal aid per inhabitant, Sweden comes sixth, Denmark eighth, Finl…
Internet voting has been an active topic of public discussions for many years. Itsproponents highlight the advantages of voting online, such as increased conve-nience and accessibility for voters who might have difficulty reaching a physicalpolling station.However, critics of Internet voting raise concerns about its security risks,including the potential manipulation of election results and vio…
Biocultural diversity refers to the dynamic interrelationship between the Earth’sbiological, cultural and linguistic diversity (Maffi2007). Proponents of the conceptespouse an ‘inextricable’ link between these three forms of diversity, drawing oninsights mostly from anthropology, ethnobiology, ethnoecology and human ecology (Maffi2005,2007; Posey1999). Biocultural diversity draws strength…