This book will fill an important gap in the knowledge of Middle Eastern cities by reconstructing the historical process of Sanandaj's formation and development until the rise of modernization in Iran. It discusses the nature of Kurdish settlements and the interaction between the social and spatial forces that have conditioned the processes and patterns of city formation and development over time. It identifies distinctive aspects of Kurdish settlements, such as their extroverted connection with the landscape, and the fluent interplay between private and public realms in female experience, providing a foundation for further studies of other Kurdish cities in the region. It will be an excellent resource for students and researchers of urban studies, geography, social science, and Kurdish studies.

This book provides the details of developing a digital pedestrian map construction system over the intermittently connected mobile network. Over the past couple of decades, countries across the world, both developing and developed, have witnessed a significant number of disasters. Thus, it has become mandatory for each of the disaster-prone countries to equip themselves with appropriate measures to cope with the challenges of providing post-disaster services. Some of the serious challenges are incapacitated communication infrastructure, unstable power supply and inaccessible road networks. Out of these challenges, the destruction of road networks, especially in developing countries, acts as a major hindrance to effective disaster management. To be more specific, the success of a disaster response operation generally depends on the speed of evacuation and transportation of adequate amount of relief materials at the right time to the disaster-affected areas. Hence, map-based navigation support is a primary requirement for post-disaster relief operations. This book also provides the solution of the two other important post-disaster management services such as situational awareness and resource allocation. Both of these services are invariably dependent on the existence of navigation support. Finally, in order to offer such services, the other challenge is to address the problem of incapacitated communication infrastructure. This book also deals with such challenges in post-disaster scenarios and develops automated post-disaster management services.

This book explores the challenges and considerations of researchers who work on the educational margins of society. It investigates the diverse and specific research strategies that have been developed to ensure research is authentic, ethical, rigorous, situated and, where possible, empowering. Traversing cutting-edge global research, the chapters demonstrate the effectiveness of specific research methods when researching within educational margins related to particular 'wicked problems'. Against a backdrop of increasing scrutiny of the conduct of researchers working with marginalised people, this book provides an informed and empowering overview of research methods for those working with marginalised groups.

New Religious Movements: A Guide for the Perplexed examines the phenomenon of new faiths and alternative spiritualities which has become a feature of the contemporary world. Those interested in the spiritual dimension to life are no longer limited to the major world faiths, but can draw upon a rapidly-expanding range of new religions. Some of these are derived from the major religions, some are a re-working of ancient traditions, while others signify a completely new departure in spiritual experience. This book analyses the concepts we use to discuss new religions, and surveys a range of different movements which were established in the second half of the 20th century. Paul Oliver explores the organization of the movements, and the psychological aspects of life within them; the distribution of power and authority within movements; the position of women in relation to such organizations, and finally, the nature of the evolution and expansion of such movements in relation to post-modern society. This book is ideal for students wishing to understand the more perplexing elements of this contemporary phenomenon. >

Although written from a biblical/Christian perspective this book's theme has practical value for everyone. It presents a new relational paradigm supported by love, justice, mutuality, and other spiritual qualities. The author believes scripture teaches that all human beings are created to live in fulfilling relationships even those who are homosexual. People of faith, family, & community are urged to support same gender couples by validating their committed partnership; however, nearly 50% of American citizens and church members do not support legalizing same gender marriage. This historical perspective on marriage reveals marriage has experienced considerable positive change and practice during the past 75 years and needs to be redefined. Until the 20th century procreation (be fruitful and multiply) was marriage's major purpose. While procreation remains important, mutuality has become the major emphasis. As written in Genesis 2:18 (NRSV), God sought a partner for the man. In many marriages partnership has replaced patriarchy, providing an enriching relational experience in family life. The author presents a new relational paradigm which includes both heterosexual and homosexual couples seeking a lifelong committed relationship. Marriage of male and female and the union of same gender couples will share the title, partnership safeguarded by the same legal standards. For male and female, their title will be a marital partnership; for same gender couples their title will be a same gender partnership.

This book examines how social cleavage lines shape issue voting and party competition. Based on a study of German elections between 1980 and 1994, it analyzes whether cleavage group members put more weight on policies that address their personal self-interest than voters who are not affected by the cleavage line. Furthermore, it analyzes the consequences of cleavage groups' deviating patterns of voting behavior for the formal game of party competition. More concretely, the author asks whether equilibrium positions of parties within the policy space are pulled away from the mean due to the more extreme policy demands of cleavage groups in the electorate.

This book provides a comprehensive investigation of the political dimensions of civil religion in the United States. By employing an original social-psychological theory rooted in semiotics, it offers a qualitative and quantitative empirical examination of more than fifty years of political rhetoric. Further, it presents two in-depth case studies that examine how the cultural, totemic sign of 'the Founding Fathers' and the signs of America's sacred texts (the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence) are used in attempts to link partisan policy positions with notions that the country collectively holds sacred. The book's overarching thesis is that America's civil religion serves as a discursive framework for the country's politics of the sacred, mediating the demands of particularistic interests and social solidarity through the interaction of social belief and institutional politics like elections and the Supreme Court. The book penetrates America's unique political religiosity to reveal and unravel the intricate ways in which politics, political institutions, religion and culture intertwine in the United States.

"China's e-Science Blue Book 2020" has been jointly compiled by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Cyberspace Administration of China, Ministry of Education of the PRC, Ministry of Science and Technology of the PRC, China Association for Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. It was focusing on the new situation, new progress and new achievements of China's e-Scientific in the past two years. During the "13th Five-Year Plan" period, Chinese scholars make full use of advanced information technology to carry out scientific research work, and have achieved a series of major scientific and technological achievements. This book has collected 28 research reports about China's e-Science application in the past two years to introduce the application in the frontier research of science and technology, the progress of e-Science in major projects and the achievements of informatization in interdisciplinary. As such it provides a valuable reference resource for researchers and students in this area and promotes further e-Science research.

Social movements have shown themselves to be one of the most dramatic and effective forms of political action. America, founded as the result of a challenge to one kind of political order, has been, in part, recreated as a result of movements of collective protest.

Social movements continue to arise in America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. In the present age, when such social movements abound, it is crucial to investigate the theoretical similarities and underpinnings of older and current collective protests. With chapters on AIDS, the Iranian revolution, the New Left, environmentalism, and many other subjects, as well as essays delineating classical and contemporary theories, Social Movements provides a well-rounded and provocative perspective on this most compelling form of political expression.

This book analyzes practical and moral influences on voting decisions. Undermining the widespread assumption that economic self-interest is the key determinant of voting choices, it discovers that moral considerations rooted in religious traditions are often the more decisive. This finding is confirmed through a close analysis of tangible problems, such as child neglect and crime, problems which one would expect to trouble practical voters. Further, this book suggests that political ideologies influence party affiliation, rather than the other way around. It defines four categories of states in terms of human development and income equality-South, Heartland, postindustrial, and "balanced." It then explains why political color (red, purple, or blue) and societal problems vary across these categories. Voters' moral ideologies, it shows, combine with a state's measure of income equality and human development to shape a state's readiness to pursue practical solutions to societal problems. Finally, it shows that moral ideologies of the religious right and authoritarianism, two very different concepts, are in fact intertwined empirically. This book thus suggests that education-a key driver of human development, anti-authoritarianism, and deliberative voting-should begin in preschools that are both nurturant and instructive.

This book looks at how hearing loss among adults was experienced, viewed and treated in Britain before the National Health Service. We explore the changing status of 'hard of hearing' people during the nineteenth century as categorized among diverse and changing categories of 'deafness'. Then we explore the advisory literature for managing hearing loss, and techniques for communicating with hearing aids, lip-reading and correspondence networks. From surveying the commercial selling and daily use of hearing aids, we see how adverse developments in eugenics prompted otologists to focus primarily on the prevention of deafness. The final chapter shows how hearing loss among First World War combatants prompted hearing specialists to take a more supportive approach, while it fell to the National Institute for the Deaf, formed in 1924, to defend hard of hearing people against unscrupulous hearing aid vendors. This book is suitable for both academic audiences and the general reading public. All royalties from sale of this book will be given to Action on Hearing Loss and the National Deaf Children's Society.

This book brings into dialogue approaches from anthropology, sociology, visual art, theatre, and literature to question what kinds of relations, frames and politics constitute pain across disciplines and methodologies. Each chapter offers a unique window onto the notoriously difficult problem of how pain is defined and communicated. The contributors reimagine the value of images and photography, poetry, history, drama, stories and interviews, not as 'better' representations of the pain experience, but as devices to navigate the complexity of pain across different physical, social, and intersubjective domains. This innovative collection provides a new access point to the phenomenon of pain and the materialities, affects, structures and institutions that constitute it. This book will appeal to readers seeking to better understand pain's complexity and the social and affective ecologies through which pain is known, communicated and lived.

This collection of essays examines representations of the English countryside and its mutations, and what they reveal about a nation's, communities' or individuals' search for identity - and fear of losing it. Based on a pluridisciplinary approach and a variety of media, this book challenges the view that the English countryside is an apolitical space characterised by permanence and lack of conflict. It analyses how the pastoral motif is actually subverted to explore liminal spaces and temporalities. The authors deconstruct the "rural idyll" myth to show how it plays a distinctive and yet ambiguous part in defining Englishness/Britishness. A must read for both scholars and students interested in British rural and cultural history, media and literature.

This first-person narrative tells the true story of Marguerite Kirchner, whose multicultural family was living in Germany when WWII began. We have remained as true as possible to Marguerite's account which reveals to readers the cruelty of war and the innocence of past generations. As a child, her family lived a luxurious life. Her mother was a French aristocrat, and her father a wealthy Austrian diplomat, and so her story begins. Always defiant, Margie was forced into a labor camp for dissident teenagers. She attended the University of Berlin during the Berlin bombings, became a young teacher in the Polish war zone, was captured as a prisoner of war and escaped, and after the war, worked for the Allied Forces, helping repatriate those who had been displaced. Her story demonstrates cunning and great courage. She went from affluence to poverty and survived the war on her wits alone, dependent on only herself and the skills she'd acquired from traveling with her family. Only after the war does she reflect on what her single-minded struggle for survival cost her, and a new journey, of a very different kind, begins.

Drawing on a wide range of case studies, Cultures of Financialization argues that, in our age of crisis, the global economy is more invested than ever in culture and the imagination. We must take the idea of 'fictitious capital' seriously as a way to understand the power of finance, and what might be done to stop it.

This book provides a theoretical framing to analyse and examine the interaction between origin and destination in the migrant integration process. Coverage offers a set of concrete conceptual tools, which can be operationalised when measuring integration. This title is the first of two complementary volumes, each of which is designed to stand alone and provide a different approach to the topic. Here, the chapters offer a detailed look at integration across eight key areas: labour, education, language and culture, civic and political participation, housing, social ties, religion, and access to citizenship. Readers are presented with an examination into the globally available knowledge on interactions between emigration/diaspora policies on one hand and integration policies on the other. Migrants actively belong to two places: the land they left behind and the home they are seeking to build. This book gives an insightful argument for the need to include information about countries and communities of origin when examining integration, which is often overlooked. It will appeal to academics, policymakers, integration practitioners, civil society organisations, as well as students.Overall, the chapters establish a cohesive analytical framework to this important topic. A complementary volume: Migrant Integration between Homeland and Host Society Volume 2: How countries of origin impact migrant integration outcomes: an analysis, edited by A. Di Bartolomeo, S. Kalantaryan, J. Salamonska and P. Fargues builds upon this foundation and presents an empirical approach to migrant integration.

This book synthesizes the critical advances in holistic understanding of innovation intermediation. It aims to enable researchers, policy-makers, analysts and practitioners to understand and exploit the best practice in designing and deploying interventions in support of an emergent high-tech geographically-bound sectoral innovation system. The book presents a systematic review of innovation intermediaries' literature and mixed-methods empirical evidence across a range of projects, building a new comprehensive model of activities and resources deployed. The book highlights the emerging New Space industry in Scotland as a primary case study, but lessons learned can applied to scholarly analysis, policy and operational design of all innovation intermediaries' interventions, which makes this book essential reading in management, innovation studies, political studies and sociology of technology.

This book provides perspectives on depopulated areas and regional social capital from positivistic field surveys. Among the developed countries of the world, Japan has a very small amount of national land, with almost 70% of it being in mountainous locations. Concentration of populations and economic capital into large metropolitan areas along with many depopulated and population-aged regions in the mountainous parts can be seen in the country. A very clear regional disparity has arisen in Japan, especially since the era of its high economic growth. This book also offers critical suggestions for the shrinking societies of the developed world in the era of Society 5.0, the fifth stage of society where economic development is achieved and social issues are resolved by the fusion of cyber and physical space. To begin, the book refers to an outline of depopulation and depopulated areas in Japan. Then, it deals with issues of depopulation, out-migration from a mountainous village, revitalization of local industries, and maintenance of daily living functions in these areas. This book is suitable for students and scholars of the social sciences, regional planners, staffs of government offices, members of NPOs, general citizens, and the many other people who are interested in sustainability of a region and a community in a shrinking social environment.

Straight from the streets of the mid-1960s Bronx comes a book about one of the borough's most feared gangs - The Ducky Boys. While their unusual name alone might contradict their reputation, in the Norwood/Bainbridge section of the Bronx their appearances provoked an ominous dread. So much so, that when Richard Price needed inspiration for a terrifying gang in his novel (and later movie) The Wanderers, he knew exactly which gang to choose. Lost Boys of the Bronx tells the story of the Ducky Boys in their own words. It is a story of how a few pre-teen kids in the Botanical Gardens turned into a gang of hundreds - and a gang so alarming that rumors of their arrival would shut down local schools. This is also a study of the mostly Irish Bronx neighborhood in which the Ducky Boys were born, and where so many of the Ducky kids got caught up in the tumultuous times of the '60s where their fierce loyalty was the only thing that got them through. This is not your typical gang book. It neither praises nor demonizes the gang for the things they did, but rather simply reports what happened - warts and all. You'll see the truth behind the Ducky Boys' gang - their lives, their loves, their pranks and crimes, and so much more. To borrow from a particular product's slogan - with a name like the Ducky Boys, you knew they HAD to be tough.

This book examines the "oil-tourism interface", the broad range of direct and indirect contact points between offshore oil extraction and nature-based tourism. Offshore oil extraction and nature-based tourism are pursued as development paths across the North Atlantic region. Offshore oil promises economic benefits from employment and royalty payments to host societies, but is based on fossil fuel-intensive resource extraction. Nature-based tourism, instead, is based on experiencing natural environments and encountering wildlife, including whales, seals, or seabirds. They share social-ecological space, such as oceans, coastlines, cities and towns where tourism and offshore oil operations and offices are located. However, they rarely share cultural or political space, in terms of media coverage, public debate, or policy discussion that integrates both modes of development. Through a comparative analysis of Denmark, Iceland, Newfoundland and Labrador, Norway, and Scotland, this book offers important lessons for how coastal societies can better navigate relationships between resource extraction and nature-based tourism in the interests of social-ecological wellbeing.

Symbols and Legitimacy in Soviet Politics analyses the way in which Soviet symbolism and ritual changed from the regime's birth in 1917 to its fall in 1991. Graeme Gill focuses on the symbolism in party policy and leaders' speeches, artwork and political posters, and urban redevelopment, and on ritual in the political system. He shows how this symbolism and ritual were worked into a dominant metanarrative which underpinned Soviet political development. Gill also shows how, in each of these spheres, the images changed both over the life of the regime and during particular stages: the Leninist era metanarrative differed from that of the Stalin period, which differed from that of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods, which was, in turn, changed significantly under Gorbachev. In charting this development, the book lays bare the dynamics of the Soviet regime and a major reason for its fall.

This book is an invitation to question conventional and often misleading visions of globalization. No problem is global by nature: issues are transformed by the action of claims-makers to become 'problems' debated in supra-national forums, triggering policy choices and policy transformations. Contributions highlight how health issues, environmental issues and/or political issues are framed as global by a set of stakeholders (scientific experts, bureaucrats, political parties or actors, social movements, social networks, firms). As the volume maps the social logic behind the globalization of problems, it also presents an opportunity for the very cross-disciplinary collaboration it calls for: researchers mobilizing the "agenda-setting" paradigm of issue globalization and those working within the "social constructionist" model are both represented here, providing a unique opportunity to examine the dynamics of globalization from the perspectives of (political, media, economic) sociology, international relations, social movement studies, and beyond.

This book examines changes in the Persian Gulf security complex following the United States (US) invasion of Iraq in 2003, focusing on threats to the collective identities of two religious sects - Shia and Sunni. Although there is a growing body of literature examining security in the Persian Gulf, little focus has been given to the theoretical and methodological aspects of the problem. In this volume, Shayan analyses the causes behind the security changes which occurred in the region since 2003 and demonstrates how regional security dynamics are interlinked to perceived sectarian threats on the Shia and Sunni religious identities. This text is essential reading for political scientists, policy makers and scholars of international relations.