Ultrasocial argues that rather than environmental destruction and extreme inequality being due to human nature, they are the result of the adoption of agriculture by our ancestors. Human economy has become an ultrasocial superorganism (similar to an ant or termite colony), with the requirements of superorganism taking precedence over the individuals within it. Human society is now an autonomous, highly integrated network of technologies, institutions, and belief systems dedicated to the expansion of economic production. Recognizing this allows a radically new interpretation of free market and neoliberal ideology which - far from advocating personal freedom - leads to sacrificing the well-being of individuals for the benefit of the global market. Ultrasocial is a fascinating exploration of what this means for the future direction of the humanity: can we forge a better, more egalitarian, and sustainable future by changing this socio-economic - and ultimately destructive - path? Gowdy explores how this might be achieved.

Like all other forms of modern media, video games impact society and human behavior in often surprising ways. Understanding the growing effect of digital entertainment on twenty-first century culture is critical to anticipating the future of social interactions. Cases on the Societal Effects of Persuasive Games investigates the connection between multimedia technologies and game-based learning for an improved understanding of the impact and effectiveness of serious games in modern societies. With examples from the fields of education, business, healthcare, and more, this book serves as a crucial reference source for researchers, educators, developers, and students in higher and continuing education.

In recent years hundreds of high-profile 'free speech' incidents have rocked US college campuses. Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter and other right-wing speakers have faced considerable protest, with many being disinvited from speaking. These incidents are widely circulated as examples of the academy's intolerance towards conservative views. But this response is not the spontaneous outrage of the liberal colleges. There is a darker element manufacturing the crisis, funded by political operatives, and designed to achieve specific political outcomes. If you follow the money, at the heart of the issue lies the infamous and ultra-libertarian Koch donor network. Grooming extremist celebrities, funding media platforms that promote these controversies, developing legal organizations to sue universities and corrupting legislators, the influence of the Koch network runs deep. We need to abandon the 'campus free speech' narrative and instead follow the money if we ever want to root out this dangerous network from our universities.

This book focuses on human trafficking in Europe for labour and sexual exploitation. It includes empirical work on trafficking throughout Europe, identifying underlying causes in globalisation, migration policies and gender inequality. It questions whether European responses-from policy makers or civil society are adequate to meet the challenge.

Following Oscar Wilde's 1895 trials for committing "acts of gross indecency with men," he lost his freedom, his family, his reputation, his will to create, and even his will to live. This book sets out to examine what it was about late-Victorian society that allowed this to happen, indeed needed it to happen, and what the trials tell us about the taste and morals of late-Victorian England. Michael S. Foldy argues that the prosecution of Wilde was directly linked to many larger social, cultural, and political issues that transcended the legal and moral concerns about his homosexuality. Analyzing the trial testimony and the coverage in the press, Foldy considers the various images and metaphors used to describe the threat that Wilde posed to English society, and he investigates the social and cultural contexts that dictated how those images were perceived. Foldy shows how the public construction of Wilde's identity as "deviant" was both informed and limited by existing heterosexist structures of repression and mechanisms of restraint and by the emergence of a new variant of homophobia. He suggests that Lord Rosebery, the prime minister of the time, may himself have been a homosexual, and that the successful prosecution of Wilde was necessary to prevent a larger and infinitely more damaging revelation. Ultimately, Foldy locates the meaning of the trials within the rhetorical context of the contemporary public debate over the "health" of England-a debate whose terms had been defined largely by moral conservatives-and demonstrates that in a nation that had many reasons to be concerned about its future, Wilde was perceived to represent a constellation of potent threats to the health of British society.

Building on the work of Elinor Ostrom (Governing the Commons) the author examines how the different shared goods of a democratic society are shaped by technology and demonstrates how club goods, common pool resources, and public goods are supported, enhanced, and disrupted by technology. He further argues that as the common good is undermined by different interests, it should be possible to reclaim technology, if the members of the society conclude that they have something in common.

This is a revisionist history of press censorship in the rapidly expanding print culture of the sixteenth century. Professor Clegg establishes the nature and source of the controls, and evaluates their means and effectiveness. The state wanted to control the burgeoning press, but there were difficulties in practice because of the competing and often contradictory interests of the Crown, the Church, and the printing trade. By considering the literary and bibliographical evidence of books actually censored and by placing them in the literary, religious, economic and political culture of the time, Clegg concludes that press control was not a routine nor a consistent mechanism but an individual response to particular texts that the state perceived as dangerous. This will be the standard reference work on Elizabethan press censorship, and is also a history of the Elizabethan state's principal crises.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Circumcision, Genital Integrity, and Human Rights. Authors are international experts in their fields, and the book contains the most up-to-date information on the issue of genital cutting of infants and children from medical, legal, bioethical, and human rights perspectives.

This book explores the current impasse that global regulators face in the digital sphere. Computer technology has advanced human civilization tenfold, but the freedom to interact with others in cyberspace has made individuals, discrete communities, organizations and governments more vulnerable to abuse. In consequence, political decision-makers are seriously considering granting limited legal immunity to victims who decide to 'hack- back.' Many victims frustrated by the slow pace of law enforcement in cyberspace have chosen to 'take the law into their own hands,' retaliating against those who have stolen valuable data and damaged network operations. Political deliberations about limited immunity for hackbacks usually ignore global justice and moral justifications for 'active defense' policies. Typically, cyber security policies balance deterrence against two different understandings of morality and the 'good life' : fairness or welfare. This book proposes a third moral rationale for cyber security policies : capability theory, developed principally by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Properly formulated, a capability-based defense of retaliatory hackbacks can minimize attribution and cyber-escalation risks, deter bad behavior by casual computer users, disingenuous security experts, big tech companies, criminals and rogue governments, and satisfy calls for more retributive and distributive justice in the 'open world'. This book will appeal to legal theorists, political philosophers, social activists, investors, international relations scholars and businesspeople in the tech community.

Abortion in Popular Culture: A Call to Action brings together scholars who examine depictions of abortion in film, television, literature, and social media. By examining texts ranging from medical dramas of the 1960s and recent films such as Never Rarely Sometimes Always and Unpregnant to dystopian novels and social-media campaigns, the essays analyze a range of narrative styles, rhetorical strategies, and cinematic techniques, all of which shape cultural attitudes toward abortion. They also analyze cultural shifts, including the willingness or reluctance of networks and cable channels to acknowledge medication abortion and the role that abortion plays in family planning. As a whole, however, the essays argue that popular culture can play a significant role in destigmatizing abortion by including a wider range of narratives and doing so with nuance and empathy. With reproductive rights under attack in the United States, each essay is a call to action for writers, producers, directors, showrunners, authors, and musicians to use their platforms to tell more positive and accurate stories about abortion.

Developing directly from Fuller's recent book Humanity 2.0, this is the first book to seriously consider what a 'post-' or 'trans'-' human state of being might mean for who we think we are, how we live, what we believe and what we aim to be.

Challenging Reproductive Control and Gendered Violence in the Americas: Intersectionality, Power, and Struggles for Rights utilizes an intersectional Chicana feminist approach to analyze reproductive and gendered violence against women in the Americas and the role of feminist activism through case studies including the current state of reproductive justice in Texas, feminicides in Latin America, raising awareness about Ni Una Mas and anti-feminicidal activism in Ciudad Juarez, and reproductive rights in Latin America amidst the Zika virus. Each of these contemporary contexts provides new insights into the relationships between and among feminist activism; reproductive health; the role of the state, local governments, health organizations, and the media; and the women of color who are affected by the interplay of these discourses, mandates, and activist efforts.

Journalist Allum Bokhari has spent four years investigating the tech giants that dominate the Internet: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter. He has discovered a dark plot to seize control of the flow of information, and utilize that power to its full extent-to censor, manipulate, and ultimately sway the outcome of democratic elections. His network of whistleblowers inside Google, Facebook and other companies explain how the tech giants now see themselves as "good censors," benevolent commissars controlling the information we receive to "protect" us from "dangerous" speech. They reveal secret methods to covertly manipulate online information without us ever being aware of it, explaining how tech companies can use big data to target undecided voters. They lift the lid on a plot four years in the making-a plot to use the power of technology to stop Donald Trump's re-election.

Jeremy Cander has designed a home that cures depression. Jack Nesteby, a Canadian reporter, wants the story. In a New Ulm, Minnesota bar called The Broken Gate, they meet, but a flood and an accident change both men forever.

From the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's resistance against the Dakota Access pipeline to the Nepalese Newar community's protest of the Fast Track Road Project, Indigenous peoples around the world are standing up and speaking out against global capitalism to protect the land, water, and air. By reminding us of the fundamental importance of placing Indigenous politics, histories, and ontologies at the center of our social movements, Indigenous Resurgence positions environmental justice within historical, social, political, and economic contexts, exploring the troubling relationship between colonial and environmental violence and reframing climate change and environmental degradation through an anticolonial lens.

From the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's resistance against the Dakota Access pipeline to the Nepalese Newar community's protest of the Fast Track Road Project, Indigenous peoples around the world are standing up and speaking out against global capitalism to protect the land, water, and air. By reminding us of the fundamental importance of placing Indigenous politics, histories, and ontologies at the center of our social movements, Indigenous Resurgence positions environmental justice within historical, social, political, and economic contexts, exploring the troubling relationship between colonial and environmental violence and reframing climate change and environmental degradation through an anticolonial lens.

The liberating promise of big data and social media to create more responsive democracies and workplaces is overshadowed by a nightmare of election meddling, privacy invasion, fake news and an exploitative gig economy. Yet, while regressive forces spread disinformation and hate, 'guerrilla democrats' continue to foster hope and connection through digital technologies. This book offers an in-depth analysis of platform-based radical movements, from the online coalitions of voters and activists to the Deliveroo and Uber strikes. Combining cutting edge theories with empirical research, it makes an invaluable contribution to the emerging literature on the relationship between technology and society.

'Koa Beck writes with passion and insight about the knotted history of racism within women's movements and feminist culture, past and present. Curious, rigorous, and ultimately generous, White Feminism is a pleasure and an education.' Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author of Good and Mad 'Intellectually smart and emotionally intelligent, Beck brilliantly articulates how feminism has failed women of colour and non-binary people. She illuminates the broad landscapes of systemic oppression and demands that white feminism evolve lest it continue to be as oppressive as the patriarchy.' Patrisse Khan-Cullors, cofounder of Black Lives Matter, author of When They Call You a Terrorist and joint recipient of the Sydney Peace Prize 'Don't judge this book by its cover. Koa Beck knows that feminism includes all women and girls by definition, and is writing to overcome anti-feminist divisions that divide and defeat us.' Gloria Steinem A timely and impassioned exploration of how our society has commodified feminism and continues to systemically shut out women of colour. Join the important conversation about race, empowerment, and inclusion with this powerful new feminist classic and rousing call for change. Koa Beck, writer and former editor-in-chief of Jezebel, boldly examines the history of feminism, from the true mission of the suffragettes to the rise of corporate feminism with clear-eyed scrutiny and meticulous detail. She also examines overlooked communities, including Native American, Muslim, transgender, and more - and their difficult and ongoing struggles for social change. In these pages she meticulously documents how elitism and racial prejudice has driven the narrative of feminist discourse. She blends pop culture, primary historical research, and first-hand storytelling to show us how we have shut women out of the movement, and what we can do to change things for a new generation. Combining a scholar's understanding with hard data and razor-sharp cultural commentary, White Feminism is a witty, intelligent and profoundly eye-opening book that will challenge long-accepted conventions and completely upend the way we understand the struggle for women's equality.

This is the story of lifelong musician Buzzy Martin, music teacher to the hardened criminals inside the walls of San Quentin Prison-and what he learned, note by incredible note.

From Josh Tickell, one of America's most celebrated documentary filmmakers, comes a "fascinating, easy-to-follow blueprint for how eating in ways that nourish and regenerate the soil can not only help reverse global warming, but also bring greater vitality to our lives" (Wolfgang Puck). "A must read for anyone committed to healing our bodies and our Earth" (Deepak Chopra), Kiss the Ground explains an incredible truth: by changing our diets to a soil-nourishing, regenerative agriculture diet, we can reverse global warming, harvest healthy, abundant food, and eliminate the poisonous substances that are harming our children, pets, bodies, and ultimately our planet. This "richly visual" (Kirkus Reviews) look at the impact of an underappreciated but essential resource-the very ground that feeds us-features fascinating and accessible interviews with celebrity chefs, ranchers, farmers, and top scientists. Kiss the Ground teaches you how to become an agent in humanity's single most important and time-sensitive mission: reverse climate change and effectively save the world-all through the choices you make in how and what to eat. Also a full-length documentary executive produced by Leonardo DiCaprio and narrated by Woody Harrelson, "Kiss the Ground both informs and inspires" (Marianne Williamson, #1 New York Times bestselling author).

In this edited collection, contributors analyze how the media is navigating Africa's most populous nation, Nigeria, and its mediated democracy. Despite its constitutional role, recognizable as the fourth estate of the realm, the Nigerian media has a history of confronting daunting challenges headlong. This book captures an array of the challenges faced, from British colonialism and military rule to democratic dispensation. Ordinarily, democracy is purposefully streamlined to elevate freedom of expression to an inalienable right and a necessary corollary of democracy. Yet, media freedom in Nigeria has been tortuous and nebulous, and there is a paradoxical difference in how the state relies on the media for partnership while also obstructing accountable journalism that would hold the state and the media itself accountable. The editors provide a poignant outlook of the onerous interactions and dialectics of media and democracy, and the cascading state power. Contributors argue for open democratic deliberations, civic space, and freedom of the press, all rooted in public good. Scholars of journalism, political communication, media studies, and African studies will find this book of particular interest.

Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, debates over pornography have raged, and the explosive spread in recent years of sexually explicit images across the Internet has only added more urgency to these disagreements. Politicians, judges, clergy, citizen activists, and academics have weighed in on the issues for decades, complicating notions about what precisely is at stake, and who stands to benefit or be harmed by pornography. This volume takes an unusual but radical approach by analyzing pornography philosophically. Philosophers Andrew Altman and Lori Watson recalibrate debates by viewing pornography from distinctly ethical platforms - namely, does a person's right to produce and consume pornography supersede a person's right to protect herself from something often violent and deeply misogynistic? In a for-and-against format, Altman first argues that there is an individual right to create and view pornographic images, rooted in a basic right to sexual autonomy. Watson counteracts Altman's position by arguing that pornography inherently undermines women's equal status. Central to their disagreement is the question of whether pornography truly harms women enough to justify laws aimed at restricting the production and circulation of such material. Through this debate, the authors address key questions that have dogged both those who support and oppose pornography: What is pornography? What is the difference between the material widely perceived as objectionable and material that is merely erotic or suggestive? Do people have a right to sexual arousal? Does pornography, or some types of it, cause violence against women? How should rights be weighed against consequentialist considerations in deciding what laws and policies ought to be adopted? Bolstered by insights from philosophy and law, the two authors engage in a reasoned examination of questions that cannot be ignored by anyone who takes seriously the values of freedom and equality.

Winner of the British Society of Criminology Annual Book Prize 2022. As the labour market continues to exploit workers by offering precarious, low-paid and temporary jobs, for some duality offers much-needed flexibility and staves off poverty. Based on extensive empirical work, this book illustrates contemporary accounts of individuals taking extraordinary risks to hold jobs in both sex industries and non-sex work employment. It also opens a dialogue about how sex industries are stratified in the UK in terms of race and culture against the backdrop of Brexit. Debunking stereotypes of sex workers and challenging our stigmatisation of them, this book makes an invaluable contribution to discourses about work, society and future policy.

This volume is a compilation of new original qualitative and ethnographic research on pimps and other third party facilitators of commercial sex from the developed and developing world. From African-American pimps in the United States and Eastern European migrants in Germany to Brazilian cafetaos and cafetinas this volume features the lives and voices of the men and women who enable diverse and culturally distinct sex markets around the world. In scholarly, popular, and policy-making discourses, such individuals are typically viewed as larger-than-life hustlers, violent predators, and brutal exploiters. However, there is actually very little empirical research-based knowledge about how pimps and third party facilitators actually live, labor, and make meaning in their everyday lives. Nearly all previous knowledge derives from hearsay and post-hoc reporting from ex-sex-workers, customers, police and government agents, neighbors, and self-aggrandizing fictionalized memoirs. This volume is the first published compilation of empirically researched data and analysis about pimps and third parties working in the sex trade across the globe. Situated in an age of highly punitive and ubiquitous global anti-trafficking law, it challenges highly charged public policy stereotypes that conflate pimping and sex trafficking, in order to understand the lived experience of pimps and the men and women whose work they facilitate.