Freedom of speech is a fundamental human right and conside-red a core value in liberal democracies. However, it is also one of our time’s most contested issues, constantly claimed either to be too wide-ranging, allowing continuous repression of minority groups, or too limited – restricting dissent and democratic deli-beration. In this book we depart from conventional approaches to fr…
The history curriculum is never static. It is the result of an ongoing relationship between the present and the past. What is selected for study, as well as what is omitted, reflects the priorities and concerns of the present. This chapter presents a brief disciplinary history, highlighting the changing, and persisting, priorities from the nineteenth c…
Should we talk? This book treats this question, and many others, as beingempirical in nature: if we were to live through a given situation in 1000 par-allel lives, where in one half we talked and in the other half we didn’t talk,in which of the halves would we fare better?The results of such a thought experiment vary betweenRachel,Dimitri,andSteve– or any other conversation that we may ex…
The story behind this book has its origins in some work that I began in 1981, with a group of students classed as requiring ‘Special Education’ – that is to say, students who had spent more than three years in school, but had still not learned to read or write. The events took place at a public school, the Escola Paula Brito, in the Rocinha favela of Rio de Janeiro.I had a…
Climate change education and climate change communication share sim-ilar goals and desired outcomes, and their definitions reflect these similari-ties. Climate change education, or climate change environmental education, encompasses a range of “interdisciplinary learning opportunities that people of all ages need to develop the competencies, disposi…
Whether a proposition is established depends on prior evidence. Prior evidence must warrant not only sufficiently high confidence in the truth of the proposition, but also high confidence that further evidence will not call the proposition into question, i.e., that confidence in the proposition will remain sufficiently high in the light of new evidence. We can refer to these as the ‘threshold…
Maya Puspa steps out of her home and salon with confidence and grace, narrowly avoiding the puddles that have transformed her lane into a muddy track. She smiles, arching her thin, penciled-on eyebrows as she turns to a group of elderly men gathered over a chessboard. It is her evening walk and, cheerily greeting the men, Maya strides out of her lane and onto a city street. Maya li…
With the signing in 2016 of the Amsterdam Pact1, the EU Member States committed to an Urban Agenda designed to encourage and promote integrated planning and development in pursuit of a more sustainable and equitable settlement pattern. The Urban Agenda acknowledges the significant role that cities have played in Europe’s development following the industrial revolution. It also recognises the …
In a 2017 speech, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe declared that the Confederate monuments should be removed because they helped to keep racism alive in present-day institutions and attitudes. President Donald Trump, for his part, argued that those attempting to remove the monu-ments were seeking to rewrite history in order to remove all traces of ideas with whi…
Many people have grown up, lived, worked and died on Indian tea plantations. Although a small number have left in search of a better life elsewhere, they have often been replaced by their relatives. However, most workers have not experienced a life outside the plantations, which have cocooned their families for generations. Therefore, when long-standing owners be…
About 25 years after Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the ‘end of history’, ideological and strategic competition between democracies and autocra-cies has firmly reentered international relations. The rise of China has fuelled debates about the economic performance of authoritarian regimes compared with democratic ones (Zhao 2010; Acemoglu and Robinson 2012). Ques…
To better understand why the NGOs walked out of the meeting on that day, it is necessary to understand the nature of the Kimberley Process, an organisation that was established to tackle the issue of conflict diamonds, also known as blood diamonds. Blood diamonds constitute a segment of the rough diamond trade that is linked to egregious …
ato san from Japan is a 90-year-old master of flower arrangement (ike-bana). She is still practising and also teaches her traditional craft from her Kyoto home. In the three years since she obtained a smartphone, it has become central to her work and life. Sato san arranges her students’ lessons via the messaging application LINE, on which she has over 100 …
With an increasing number of African countries having discovered com-mercially viable quantities of oil and gas in recent years, including, for example, Kenya, Chad, Ghana and Uganda, there is both excitement and trepidation about the prospects for increased incomes and investments, economic growth and development on the continent. This is due to compara-tive historical evidence of the link bet…
After the Arab Uprisings in 2010–2011, which saw one authoritarian regime after the other toppled across the region, questions about the causes and consequences of civil society in transitional settings have acquired a new salience. Especially in the Arab world, the role of Muslim civil societies in fostering the democratization process has focused on the minds of scholars (Bozzo and Luizard …
Knowledge has been the focal concept in this book series. Beyond the many con-ceptualizations of and ascriptions to this term, knowledge denotes the human under-standing of concrete and abstract phenomena of the world in which we live. Human understanding differs from data and information in that it is built and rests in peo-ple’s minds. Whereas bits of data or parcels of commodity …
Coastal history has been a reference point in maritime, harbor, and naval history, coastal urban history and interdisciplinary marine studies,4but it is only in the last twenty years that climate change has stimulatedenvironmental humanities5practitioners to focus on water, sustainable management of its resources, and multidisciplinary studies.6 In the pro…
In general, I distinguish between four models of the kind of text gener-ally (in publishing and reviews) classified as “family memoirs”. As with all forms of literature, there are no definitive barriers between the forms I clas-sify as distinct. Part of my interest in contemporary auto/biographical writ-ing lies in how writers continually open up possibilities for self-representation throug…
Longstanding residents—members of formerly migrant groups whose families had been in Marshall for over a generation—often told stories that compared their own families’ migrant histories with Mexican migrants’. Many of these stories described similarities between the narrators’ migrant ancestors and contemporary Mexicans. In the passage above …
It was a damp morning during the summer of 2009 in Guatemala when Lola1climbed up a steep path with her eldest daughter and myself to collect ripe maca-damia nuts from her small parcel of land. During a short break, and with a view over the community houses, smoke billowing from their hearths, she points to a small piece of land where the cemetery lies. She tells me that her grandp…
For the Maya, the landscape in which they live, the k’aax (forest), has a moral ecology. It is the place where they feel “at home in the world,” where they are situated in an everyday engagement with their environment. It is also where their history, identity, spiritual beliefs, communion with other species, and ulti-mately their survival are rooted. The ethnic boundary that t…
On June 3, 1992, presidential hopeful Bill Clinton performed a saxo-phone rendition of Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” on The Arsenio Hall Show.1 In doing so, he aligned himself with perhaps the most recogniz-able music celebrity of all time—a cultural icon whom rock critic Greil Marcus described as “the country’s most extreme embodiment o…
n July 2016, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded my proposal to develop “visual case studies” to highlight institutions and their approaches, with the hope that insights into their successes would be valuable for anyone interested in the evolving story of higher education. I invited seven leaders from the Frontier Set to participate in our research so we could highlight their unique …
Although many music education policies outline an explicit agenda for diversity,little attention has been paid to the complex situations that arise when negotiatingdiversity in practice.The Politics of Diversity in Music Educationaims to remedythis knowledge gap by critically attending to the ways in which difference ispromoted, represented, negotiated, navigated, contained, or challenged in va…
The nineteenth century witnessed a series of revolutions in the production, circulation, and reproduction of images. Thanks to changes in printing and imaging technology and shifts in the practices of artists, publishers, and photographers, images became more readily available, in a wider range of media than ever before. Working in the new field of lithography,…
The world is rapidly urbanizing. With around 55 per cent of the world’s 7.63 billion people living in urban areas (United Nations, 2019) we are facing conditions of “planetary urbanism” (Friedmann, 2016) and “planetary urbanization” (Brenner & Schmid, 2012; Swyngedouw & Kaika, 2014). The global urban population is expected to grow by 2.5 billion between 2018 and…
Oral History at a Distance is the first publication to explore both the ideas behind and application of oral history in remote projects. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, working from a distance is now an ongoing and necessary approach in the oral historian’s toolkit. In this volume, the experienced team members of Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History provide a road map for adapting tr…
This book is about white working-class American men who opposed social democratic labor unions and politics in the century that culminated in the New Deal. It follows five generations of miners who, beginning in the 1850s, discovered and developed a rich swath of zinc and lead that straddled the boundaries between Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma. By the 1920s, the Tri-State district le…
Sometimes animals surprise us by doing something that seems uncannily human-like.Marmosets (South American monkeys of the family Callitrichidae) are tiny, weighing only around 300–400g, and though they are primates they look entirely unlike humans, perhaps even a little more like squirrels. However, like humans they form pair bonds, and collaborate in childcare…
Rice straw is a residual byproduct of rice production at harvest. The total biomass of this residue depends on various factors such as varieties, soils and nutrient man-agement and weather. At harvest, rice straw is piled or spread in the field depending on the harvesting methods, using stationary threshers or self-propelled combine harvesters, respectively. The amount of rice straw t…
In recent years, the emergent field of critical infrastructure studies has turned to interdisciplinary analysis of infrastruc-tures as complex worldmaking systems: They produce shared space and time, connect cultures and subjectivities, negotiate power relations, inequalities, or the mediation and circulation of material agency.1 Infrastructures often appear as networks of media technologies th…
Few studies have addressed recent emigration from European countries. The refu-gee crisis and migratory pressure have helped keep academic attention over the last few decades focused on immigration, asylum, reception and integration in Europe. However, these dynamics promoting entries into European countries coexist with other fairly significant dynamics promoting departures fro…
On 1 January 2007, Romania became a full member of the European Union. Thestatethat joined the EU was already since 1991 a constitutional republic with abicameral Parliament elected by popular vote and with a dual executive formed by adirectly elected president and an appointed prime minister. In the lead-up to itsaccession, Romania had to amend and adopt numerous laws in order to bring themint…
When Spanish conquerors arrived in the Western Hemisphere, they took the bizarre step of presenting a formal argument to Indigenous people about the legal legitimacy of colonization. In a ritual that repeated itself across the Ameri cas, the conquistadors stood in front of people they planned to colo-nize and recited the text of a document known as the Requerimiento. The first part ofthis tex…
In their definitive review of the Asian rice economy in the 1970s, Barker and Herdt wrote: “Most Asian rice farms are small ... and employ inten-sive labour practices in place of mechanisation ... [R]ainfall is the domi-nant climatic variable, and the rice crop is normally limited to the rainy season ... Rice dominates not only production and consumption patterns, but is also ine…
Agricultural development in Asia has undergone multiple phases and has experienced a remarkable evolution that also advanced general economic development. The region has become a major agricultural producer in the world due to the Green Revolution in the second half of the twentieth century (Hazell 2009). In particular, its rice exports have become essentia…
In July of 2013, I huddled closely with Yesenia, a mother of two and a respected community leader. We sat on a low wooden bench in the quiet green courtyard behind her home, high in the brown mountains of Andean Peru. I met Yesenia while doing research on the gendered impacts of Peru’s conditional cash transfer program, Juntos. Like most of the othe…
This open access edited book attempts to break new ground in investigating multiple facets of Vietnamese language, education and change in global contexts, engaging with global Vietnam through complex lenses of language and education. Issues of language, globalization, and global identities have often been framed through the lens of hierarchical/binary power relations, and/or through a dichotom…
Entrance into the sacred heart of the Sancang forest requires a steep descent of 337 unevenly aligned, concrete steps. With every passing year, the tentacles of tree roots make further advances in their inevitable quest to reclaim the forest floor. Ka handap; ka luhur – the Sundanese (West Javan) terms for descending and ascending – I climb the steps several times a day following gibbons fr…
The court of Star Chamber remains notorious even now: commentators sometimes invoke its name to suggest that a judicial body or legal action is not quite lawful, something secretive and illegitimate. The court provoked concern in its own time, too, though its vilification deepened after its death. With roots in the mid fourteenth century, St…
Most Korean1 televi sion dramas end with a still screen image, designed to act as a cliff-hanger to each episode. The tension is left to linger for a while; then the credits start to run, accompanied by background music against the still screen frame, revealing the names of the drama series sponsors one by one. Since the mid-2000s, the names of Korean municipalities have started appearing in…
The implementation of these professional training courses assumed a far more engaging significance than what is commonly assumed by those who believe it their exclusive prerogative to interpret the transfer of the skills re-quired to carry out given activities. It also drew attention to the need to mod-ulate the interpretative key to the social role associated with the activities to be carried …
Sure, paleontologist and historians can make a virtue out of necessity (see, e.g.,Muir,1991; Zemon Davis,2010:5–6; Peltonen,2012; Bassi,2016), but the com-monsensical assumption is that immediate observation and interrogation of phenom-ena in their entirety are preferable—time travel would be more effective.1However,the recourse to traces is getting more frequent not only for studying the h…
The coup in Myanmar on 1 February 2021 abruptly reversed a decade-long flirtation with economic and political freedoms. The country has since descended into civil war, the people have been plunged back into conflict and poverty, and the state is again characterised by fragility and human insecurity. As the Myanmar people oppose the regime and fight for their rights, the international community …
The Yagwoia-Angan people, whose selfhood I explore, live in a rugged mountainous region that stretches across the Eastern Highlands, Morobe, and Gulf provinces of Papua New Guinea (PNG). The Yagwoia population is approximately 13,000 in size, and my long-term ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork was primarily with two major groups,…
Globalization is a topic that is frequently in the news, with the economic andsociopolitical impacts of globalization often receiving a considerable mediacoverage. By contrast the effects of globalization on education and curricula receivefar less attention. Nonetheless, the potential impacts of globalization on education areof international interest, and some have argued that competition betwe…
In Marx: A Very Short Introdution, Peter Singer identifies the central vision that unifies Marx's thought, enabling us to grasp Marx's views as a whole. He sees him as a philosopher primarily concerned with human freedom, rather than as an economist or a social scientist. In plain English, he explains alienation, historical materialism, the economic theory of Capital, and Marx's ideas of commun…
The Magna Carta is arguably the greatest constitutional document in recorded history, yet few people today understand either its contents or its context. This Very Short Introduction, which includes a full English translation of the 1215 Magna Carta, introduces the document to a modern audience, explaining its origins in the troubled reign of King John, and tracing the significant role that it …
Liberalism is one of the most central and pervasive political theories and ideologies, yet it is subject to different interpretations as well as misappropriations. Its history carries a crucial heritage of civilized thinking, of political practice, and of philosophical-ethical creativity. This Very Short Introduction unpacks the concept of liberalism and its various interpretations through t…
Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Law is at the heart of every society, protecting rights, imposing duties, and establishing a framework for the conduct of almost all social, political, and economic activity. Despite this, the law often seems a highly technical, perplexing mystery, with its antiquated and often impenetrable jargon, obsolete procedures, and endless stream …