Aestheticization of evil is a frequently used formula in cinema and television. However, the representation of evil as an aesthetic object pushes it out of morality. Moral judgments can be pushed aside when evil is aestheticized in movies or TV series because there is no real victim. Thus, situations such as murder or war can become a source of aesthetic pleasure. Narratives in cinema and television can sometimes be based on a simple good-evil dichotomy and sometimes they can be based on individual or social experiences of evil and follow a more complicated method. Despite the various ways evil is depicted, it is a moral framework in film and television that must be researched to study the implications of aestheticized evil on human nature and society. International Perspectives on Rethinking Evil in Film and Television examines the changing representations of evil on screen in the context of the commonness, normalization, aestheticization, marginalization, legitimization, or popularity of evil. The chapters provide an international perspective of the representations of evil through an exploration of the evil tales or villains in cinema and television. Through looking at these programs, this book highlights topics such as the philosophy of good and evil, the portrayal of heroes and villains, the appeal of evil, and evil's correspondence with gender and violence. This book is ideal for sociologists, professionals, researchers and students working or studying in the field of cinema and television and practitioners, academicians, and anyone interested in the portrayal and aestheticization of evil in international film and television.

In 1984 Fredric Jameson wrote that "everything in our social life-from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself-can be said to have become 'cultural' in some original and yet untheorized sense." The essays in this special issue track the status of this claim some thirty years later, inquiring into the relationship of art, aesthetics, and cultural production to political economy today. At a moment when interpretation (including "ideology critique" and "symptomatic reading") has been variously supplanted by descriptivism, empiricism, and the return of metaphysics, contributors here pursue the possibilities for an engaged cultural criticism that is attentive to form while rejecting a depoliticized formalism. Spanning a wide range of cultural sites-from recent Hollywood cinema to post-broadcast television, manufactured landscape photography, contemporary West African art, and "new materialism" in philosophy-they ask what the "formal tendencies" of contemporary cultural production (including theory itself) can tell us about the cultural logic of contemporary capitalism. The collection includes a new interview with Jameson conducted by the editors. Contributors: Jennifer Bajorek, Nico Baumbach, Jonathan Beller, Alexander R. Galloway, Fredric Jameson, Sulgi Lie, Alberto Toscano, Amy Villarejo, Damon R. Young, Genevieve Yue

Global esports explores the recent surge of esports in the global scene and comprehensively discusses people's understanding of this spectacle. By historicizing and institutionalizing esports, the contributors analyze the rapid growth of esports and its implications in culture and digital economy. Dal Yong Jin curates a discussion as to why esports has become a global phenomenon. From games such as Spacewar to Starcraft to Overwatch, a key theme, distinguishing this collection from others, is a potential shift of esports from online to mobile gaming. The book addresses why many global game players and fans play and enjoy online and mobile games in professional game competitions, and therefore, they investigate the manner in which the transfer to, from and between online and mobile gaming culture is occurring in a specific subset of global youth. The remaining focus identifies the major platforms used to enjoy esports, including broadcasting and smartphones. By analyzing these unexamined or less-discussed agendas, this book sheds light on the current debates on the growth of global esports culture.

This insightful book examines all aspects of the design process and implementation of questionnaire surveys on the activities of business, public sector, and non-profit organizations. Anthony Arundel discusses how different aspects of the survey method and planned statistical analysis can constrain question design, and how these issues can be effectively resolved. Throughout this engaging yet practical book, Arundel promotes good practices for questionnaire design, sample construction, and survey delivery systems including online, postal, and verbal methods, with a focus on obtaining high-quality data in line with ethics and confidentiality requirements. Chapters include constructive advice on questionnaire design and testing, survey implementation, and data processing, analysis, and reporting, with examples of time and financial cost budgets. Considering the recent developments in survey methods, the book explores how to use web probing as a substitute for cognitive testing and examines the use of tablets and smartphones in answering questionnaires. Combining theoretical and practical insights into survey design, implementation, and data processing and analysis, this book will be essential reading for business and management scholars and students, with a particular interest in research methods and organization studies. It will also be useful for practitioners and business managers seeking to understand how to create and use surveys.

This comprehensive Handbook is aimed at both academic researchers and practitioners in the field of complexity science. The book?s 26 chapters, specially written by leading experts, provide in-depth coverage of research methods based on the sciences of complexity. The research methods presented are illustratively applied to practical cases and are readily accessible to researchers and decision-makers alike. The Handbook'?s wide range of research methods are clearly illustrated with case studies that demonstrate their practical application. They range from the regeneration of communities to musical performance; from complex governance networks to psychotherapy; from gender dynamics to agent-based modelling; and the appropriate response to pandemics. Some unusual research methods ? based on art, psychology and multi-level networks ? are also included. Furthermore, the book incorporates discussions on the philosophical aspect of research methods and explores important theoretical concepts, such as exaptation, emergence, self-organisation and co-evolution. This is an ideal resource for academics and researchers in the field seeking and exploring new research methods. For decision-makers and researchers trying to address complex challenges it will be an essential source of inspiration that will arm them with effective state-of-the-art research methods for the future. Contributors include: P. Allen, P. Andriani, S. Banerjee, Y. Bar-Yam, P. Beautement, C.R. Booth, J. Bromley, H.L. Brown, J. Burton, G. Carignani, B. Castellani, G.C. Crawford, C. Day, C.J. Dister, R. Durie, E.G. Eason, K.M. English, J. Fortune, M. Gabbay, J. Goldstein, J.K. Hazy, K. Hopkinson, N. Hupert, E.S. Ihara, H.J. Jensen, J. Johnson, D.G. Kelty-Stephen, W.G. Kennedy, L. Kuhn, B. Lichtenstein, C. Lundy, B. McKelvey, E. Mitleton-Kelly, S. Mockett, G. Morcoel, S. Mukherjee, S.K. Palit, A. Paraskevas, B. Pourbohloul, R. Rajaram, F.A. Razak, K.A. Richardson, J. Rowan Scott, Y. Shapiro, S. Kim, J. Stead, H. Stuteley, A. Tait, C.J. Tompkins, L. Varga, X. Wan, P.R. Wolenski, M.E. Wolf-Branigin, K. Wyatt

This Handbook provides an overview and assessment of the state-of-the-art research methods, approaches and applications central to economic geography. Understanding spatial economic outcomes and the forces and mechanisms that influence the geography of economic growth is of utmost importance and demands substantial theoretical and empirical research in economic geography, spatial economics and regional science. Such research is critically dependent upon good and reliable empirical data, and it is here that this Handbook contributes, providing a broad overview of up-to-date research methods and approaches. The chapters are written by distinguished researchers from a variety of scholarly traditions and with a background in different academic disciplines including economics, economic human and cultural geography, and economic history. Researchers and academics in economics and economic geography will find this a fundamental reference point and will benefit from the comprehensive assessment of research methods and approaches in the field. Practitioners and policy-makers will also find the practical applications to be of utmost value. Contributors: M. Andersson, G. Arbia, B. Asheim, R. Basile, M. Birkin, R. Boschma, S. Brakman, J. Broecker, L. Broersma, H-H. Chang, G. Clarke, M. Clarke, L. Coenen, J. Corcoran, S. Dall'erba, G. Espa, A.M. Esteves, A. Faggian, M.M. Fischer, K. Frenken, M. Fritsch, D. Giuliani, K.E. Haynes, G.J.D. Hewings, M. Horvath, G. Ivanova, N. Kapitsinis, C. Karlsson, H. Khawaldah, M. Kilkenny, J. Klaesson, S. Koster, J.P. Larsson, J. Lesage, Y. Li, I. Llamosas-Rosas, P.A. Longley, T. Mitze, J. Moodysson, I. Noback, T. Norman, J. Oosterhaven, J. Parajuli, M. Partridge, D. Psaltopoulos, M. Schramm, D. Skuras, A. Stephan, P. Thulin, S. Usai, J. van Dijk, C. van Marrewijk, F. van Oort, F. Vanclay, A. Varga, H. Westlund

Synthesising diverse research avenues for politics, discourse, and political discourse, this cutting-edge Handbook examines the formative traditions, current theoretical and methodological landscape, and genres and domains over which political discourse extends. Drawing on rich and dynamic models in critical cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, metaphor analysis, context, and multimodality studies, leading scholars provide tools to analyse a broad range of traditional and modern genres of political communication. Taking a historical dive into formative traditions in political discourse, including rhetoric and social and poststructuralist theories, this Handbook revises these classical models of political communication against new empirical contexts, to offer the most fruitful, objective and universal methodologies to date. Examining propaganda, advertising, political speeches and election campaigns, this Handbook pays particular attention to newly arising genres and discourses which reflect the momentous changes in the public domain, fuelled by recent and developing events including the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war. Drawing diverse insights from a wide array of disciplines, this Handbook will prove invaluable to students and scholars of political theory, sociology, philosophy, linguistics, discourse analysis and communication studies who are looking for innovative methodologies with which to analyse political discourse.

Social media has emerged as a powerful tool that reaches a wide audience with minimum time and effort. It has a diverse role in society and human life and can boost the visibility of information that allows citizens the ability to play a vital role in creating and fostering social change. This practice can have both positive and negative consequences on society. Examining the Roles of IT and Social Media in Democratic Development and Social Change is a collection of innovative research on the methods and applications of social media within community development and democracy. While highlighting topics including information capitalism, ethical issues, and e-governance, this book is ideally designed for social workers, politicians, public administrators, sociologists, journalists, policymakers, government administrators, academicians, researchers, and students seeking current research on social advancement and change through social media and technology.

Jeanne Pitre Soileau, winner of the 2018 Chicago Folklore Prize and the 2018 Opie Prize for Yo' Mama, Mary Mack, and Boudreaux and Thibodeaux: Louisiana Children's Folklore and Play, vividly presents children's voices in What the Children Said: Child Lore of South Louisiana. Including over six hundred handclaps, chants, jokes, jump-rope rhymes, cheers, taunts, and teases, this book takes the reader through a fifty-year history of child speech as it has influenced children's lives. What the Children Said affirms that children's play in south Louisiana is acquired along a network of summer camps, schoolyards, church gatherings, and sleepovers with friends. When children travel, they obtain new games and rhymes, and bring them home. The volume also reveals, in the words of the children themselves, how young people deal with racism and sexism. The children argue and outshout one another, policing their own conversations, stating their own prejudices, and vying with one another for dominion. The first transcript in the book tracks a conversation among three related boys and shows that racism is part of the family interchange. Among second grade boys and girls at a Catholic school another transcript presents numerous examples in which boys use insults to dominate a conversation with girls, and girls use giggles and sly comebacks to counter this aggression. Though collected in the areas of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Lafayette, Louisiana, this volume shows how south Louisiana child lore is connected to other English-speaking places: England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as the rest of the United States.

Although US history is marred by institutionalized racism and sexism, postracial and postfeminist attitudes drive our polarized politics. Violence against people of color, transgendered and gay people, and women soar upon the backdrop of Donald Trump, Tea Party affiliates, alt-right members like Richard Spencer, and right-wing political commentators like Milo Yiannopoulos who defend their racist and sexist commentary through legalistic claims of freedom of speech. While more institutions recognize the volatility of these white men's speech, few notice or have thoughtfully considered the role of white nationalist, alt-right, and conservative white women's messages that organizationally preserve white supremacy. In Rebirthing a Nation: White Women, Identity Politics, and the Internet, author Wendy K. Z. Anderson details how white nationalist and alt-right women refine racist rhetoric and web design as a means of protection and simultaneous instantiation of white supremacy, which conservative political actors including Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Ivanka Trump have amplified through transnational politics. By validating racial fears and political divisiveness through coded white identity politics, postfeminist and motherhood discourse functions as a colorblind, gilded cage. Rebirthing a Nation reveals how white nationalist women utilize colorblind racism within digital space, exposing how a postfeminist framework becomes fodder for conservative white women's political speech to preserve institutional white supremacy.

Link prediction is required to understand the evolutionary theory of computing for different social networks. However, the stochastic growth of the social network leads to various challenges in identifying hidden links, such as representation of graph, distinction between spurious and missing links, selection of link prediction techniques comprised of network features, and identification of network types. Hidden Link Prediction in Stochastic Social Networks concentrates on the foremost techniques of hidden link predictions in stochastic social networks including methods and approaches that involve similarity index techniques, matrix factorization, reinforcement, models, and graph representations and community detections. The book also includes miscellaneous methods of different modalities in deep learning, agent-driven AI techniques, and automata-driven systems and will improve the understanding and development of automated machine learning systems for supervised, unsupervised, and recommendation-driven learning systems. It is intended for use by data scientists, technology developers, professionals, students, and researchers.

When law and economics first became an important part of the legal academy, it was a relatively straightforward application of microeconomic theory to legal issues. However, in the past 40 years the field has expanded its toolkit dramatically. This latest volume in the acclaimed Encyclopedia of Law and Economics maps the methodological territory in law and economics with a series of entries by distinguished scholars. These entries introduce and evaluate the law and economics mechanisms, including: the roles of microeconomic theory, public and social choice, history, complexity theory, philosophy, comparative law studies, behavioral economics and empirical techniques. Each one introduces a methodology, demonstrates its importance to the field of law and economics and assists the reader in navigating the leading literature on that topic. This volume will be an essential reference for all those who research or teach law and economics, law and society or empirical methods in law. Contributors include: N. Garoupa, D. Klerman, M.J. McGinnis, T.J. Miceli, M. Pargendler, D. Roithmayr, H. Spector, M.L. Stearns, T.S. Ulen