Nahr has been confined to the Cube: nine square metres of glossy grey cinderblock, devoid of time, its patterns of light and dark nothing to do with day and night. Journalists visit her, but get nowhere; because Nahr is not going to share her story with them.

The world outside calls Nahr a terrorist, and a whore; some might call her a revolutionary, or a hero. But the truth is, Nahr has always been many things, and had many names. She was a girl who learned, early and painfully, that when you are a second class citizen love is a kind of desperation; she learned, above all else, to survive. She was a girl who went to Palestine in the wrong shoes, and without looking for it found what she had always lacked in the basement of a battered beauty parlour: purpose, politics, friends. She found a dark-eyed man called Bilal, who taught her to resist; who tried to save her when it was already too late.

Nahr sits in the Cube, and tells her story to Bilal. Bilal, who isn't there; Bilal, who may not even be alive, but who is her only reason to get out.

Arabic Glitch explores an alternative origin story of twenty-first century technological innovation in digital politics-one centered on the Middle East and the 2011 Arab uprisings. Developed from an archive of social media data collected over the decades following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, this book interrogates how the logic of programming technology influences and shapes social movements. Engaging revolutionary politics, Arab media, and digital practice in form, method, and content, Laila Shereen Sakr formulates a media theory that advances the concept of the glitch as a disruptive media affordance. She employs data analytics to analyze tweets, posts, and blogs to describe the political culture of social media, and performs the results under the guise of the Arabic-speaking cyborg VJ Um Amel. Playing with multiple voices that span across the virtual and the real, Sakr argues that there is no longer a divide between the virtual and embodied: both bodies and data are physically, socially, and energetically actual. Are we cyborgs or citizens-or both? This book teaches us how a region under transformation became a vanguard for new thinking about digital systems: the records they keep, the lives they impact, and how to create change from within.

The recent heritage boom in China is transforming local social, economic, and cultural life and reshaping domestic and global notions of China's national identity. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted largely by young anthropologists in China, Grassroots Values and Local Cultural Heritage in China departs from the dominant top-down UNESCO-influenced narrative of cultural heritage preservation and approaches the local not as a fixed definition of place but as a shifting site of negotiation between state, entrepreneurial, transcultural, and local community interests. The volume takes readers along an unusual trajectory between a disadvantaged neighborhood in central Beijing, metropolitan centers in Anhui and Sichuan, Quanzhou in the southeast, and Yunnan in the southwest before finally ending at the great Samye Monastery in Tibet. Across these sites, the contributors converge in apprehending the grassroots as an arena of everyday life and belonging underpinning ordinary social interactions and cultural practices as diverse as funeral rituals, Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimages, and encounters between young contemporary artists and the Bloomsbury Group. In examining the diversity of local cultural practices and knowledge that underpin ideas about cultural value, this volume argues that grassroots cultural beliefs are essential to the liveability and sustainability of life and living heritage.

The first ever study in English dedicated to Albania in Late Antiquity to the Medieval period.

Central Asia often evokes images of imperial power rivalry dating back to the 19th century. Yet as the region's international politics becomes more complex in the age of globalization, the need for new ways of looking at its many actors is more pressing than ever. Today even the traditional great powers rely increasingly on subtle forms of influence to augment their military might and economic clout in order to achieve their objectives in Central Asia. Bearing this in mind, Soft Power in Central Asia examines the patterns of attraction and persuasion that help shape the political choices of countries in the region. Starting with an investigation of soft power projection by the US, Russia and China, it sheds light on normative transfer and public diplomacy of the European Union, Turkey and Israel, and concludes with a discussion of the Central Asian republics' active stance in the competition for the hearts and minds. Containing original chapters contributed by leading experts in the field, the volume will appeal to scholars and professionals with interest in international relations, political science and Central Asian studies.

This book explores how the museum concept has expanded beyond the boundaries of a single building into the historic city itself through musealization. Articulating the musealization of historic cities as a specific urban process, the book here presents a study of the transformation of the Sultanahmet district on Istanbul's historic peninsula, which has been the major focus of planning, conservation and museological studies in Turkey since the 19th century as the public face of the city. The author aims to offer empirically grounded and context-specific insight into the role of museums in the regeneration of historic cities. Musealization as an urban process varies in different geographical, cultural and ideological contexts, and across different time periods. By discussing the Sultanahmet district as a specific context of yet another city subjected to the musealization process, this book provides further insights into this important global phenomenon.

Hong Kong has been a unique society from its establishment as a political region separate from mainland China in the nineteenth century under British colonial rule until the present day as a special administrative region of the People's Republic of China. A hub of interregional and international migration, it has been the temporary and long-term home of people belonging to many racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. This book examines the evolution of the community established by clergy and congregants of the Russian Orthodox Church. This community was first developed in the 1930s and then revived after a hiatus of over two decades from the 1970s to the 1990s with the founding of the Orthodox Parish of Apostles Saints Peter and Paul (OPASPP) at the turn of the twenty-first century. This study demonstrates how the OPASPP has become a vital provider of knowledge about Russian language and culture as well as a religious institution serving both heritage and convert believers. The community formed by and around the OPASPP is important to foster Sino-Russian relations based on individual-to-individual contact and mutual exposure to Chinese and Russian cultures in a region of China which allows spiritual and social diversity with minimal political constraints.