The goal of sustainable development is to meet the socio-economic and environmental objectives without comprising the needs of future generations. Since the Rio Summit of 1992, the concept of sustainability has captured our imaginations and aspirations and efforts to develop its indicators have increased. A range of sustainability indicators have been developed within various socio-economic, environmental and cultural contexts- including biodiversity, economy, energy, water, land use and transport. Sustainability indicators are widespread in international development arena. They have become popularized among governments, non-governmental organizations, private sector and the wider public. Based on multiple cases across the world, this book explores opportunities and challenges associated with the practical application of sustainability indicators. The book reflects diversity of professionals of inter-disciplinary backgrounds covering contemporary issues within different socio-economic and environmental contexts. Each chapter presents practical examples of the merits and challenges of using sustainability indicators and draws conclusions and lessons learned. The book targets a range of audience from students, academics to development practitioners and policy-makers. The two editors of this book: Dr. Agnieszka Ewa Latawiec and Dr. Dorice Agol are inter-disciplinary scientists who both have experience in research at the environmental conservation and development nexus.

What is "cancel culture." A new phrase in popular circulation for less than two years, it has provoked passionate denunciations from observers concerned with civil liberties, especially rights of free speech and expression, and apologetic defenses from opponents who advocate equity and accountability in light of new mores. Still others deny that "cancel culture" exists at all, while many claim never to have heard of it. In Cancel Culture: Tales from the Front Lines, noted historian and critic Paul du Quenoy presents a series of case studies that reveal the new phenomenon known as "cancel culture" as experienced or claimed in media, academia, the arts, public space, and other areas of ideological controversy. More than a bald denunciation or frustrated description of an unfamiliar new concept, this groundbreaking approach seeks to understand "cancel culture" as a process - how it starts and stops, where it comes from and leads, and how and, indeed, whether it might one day end. This penetrating and highly original analysis sheds light on a society grappling feverishly with fundamental issues of freedom and liberty.

This book brings together social sciencists to create an interdisciplinary dialogue on the topic of social change as a cultural process. Culture is as much about novelty as it is about tradition, as much about change as it is about stability. This dynamic tension is analyzed in collective protests, intergroup dynamics, language, mass media, science, community participation, art, and social transitions to capitalism, among other contexts. These diverse cases illustrate a number of key factors that can propel, slow-down and retract social change. An emancipatory and integrative social science is developed in this book, which offers a new explanatory model of human behavior and thought under conditions of institutional and societal change.

Making of the Future is the first English?language coverage of the new methodological perspective in cultural psychology-TEA (Trajectory Equifinality Approach) that was established in 2004 as a collaboration of Japanese and American cultural psychologists. In the decade that follows it has become a guiding approach for cultural psychology all over the World. Its central feature is the reliance on irreversible time as the basis for understanding of cultural phenomena and the consideration of real and imaginary options in human life course as relevant for the construction of personal futures. The book is expected to be of interest in researchers and practitioners in education, developmental and social psychology, developmental sociology and history. It has extensions for research methodology in the focus on different sampling strategies.

Chinese Research Perspectives on Society, Vol. 2 includes analyses of some important social issues in China for 2011-2013, including the urban-rural income and its reform; new development in Chinese social security; reform and development of medical and healthcare industries; living and health issues of the senior population; and employment difficulties, among others.

This book differs from most others of its kind, by looking at the Hong Kong issue from China's perspective, which in turn mirrors China's own situation. Through a legal lens, the author conducts a political and cultural examination of the past and the present, and provides a comprehensive overview of the many theories and problems concerning Hong Kong. Including reflections on the theory of administrative absorption of politics, a historical review of "one country, two systems" and an analysis of the form and nature of the Basic Law, it offers a valuable reference resource for studying the historical, political and legal context of Hong Kong under the principle of "one country, two systems". Instead of over-simplifying the issue of Hong Kong or only seeing it as a Chinese regional issue, the book regards it as a central Chinese issue and the key to understanding China.

This book examines the connection between central-local government relations and the transition of contemporary China, the urbanization process and social development. Based on empirical investigations and theoretical research, it argues that this is the key to understanding the transition of central-local government relations from the overall fiscal rationing system in the 1980s and the tax distribution system in the 1990s. The former system provided the incentive for local government to "set up a number of enterprises" and resulted in rapid local industrialization, while the latter system enabled the local governments to move from "operating the enterprises" to "operating the land and cities". The book analyzes two aspects of the profound impact of the change in central-local government relations on the behavior of local governments: land quota acquisition and urbanization, thus providing valuable insights into the economic and social development of contemporary China.

This book explores the ways in which the broad range of technologies that make up the smart city infrastructure can be harnessed to incorporate more playfulness into the day-to-day activities that take place within smart cities, making them not only more efficient but also more enjoyable for the people who live and work within their confines. The book addresses various topics that will be of interest to playable cities stakeholders, including the human-computer interaction and game designer communities, computer scientists researching sensor and actuator technology in public spaces, urban designers, and (hopefully) urban policymakers. This is a follow-up to another book on Playable Cities edited by Anton Nijholt and published in 2017 in the same book series, Gaming Media and Social Effects.

The concept of "chaos", and chaos theory, though it is a field of study specifically in the field of mathematics with applications in physics, engineering, economics, management, and education, has also recently taken root in the social sciences. As a method of analyzing the way in which the digital age has connected society more than ever, chaos and complexity theory serves as a tactic to tie world events and cope with the information overload that is associated with heightened social connectivity. The Handbook of Research on Chaos and Complexity Theory in the Social Sciences explores the theories of chaos and complexity as applied to a variety of disciplines including political science, organizational and management science, economics, and education. Presenting diverse research-based perspectives on mathematical patterns in the world system, this publication is an essential reference source for scholars, researchers, mathematicians, social theorists, and graduate-level students in a variety of disciplines.

Early in the morning of September 5, 2002, camouflaged and heavily armed Drug Enforcement Administration agents descended on a terraced marijuana garden -- a medicinal and spiritual refuge for the sick and dying. The DEA raid on the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana, a sanctuary for severely ill patients who were using marijuana as medicine, stirs the opening of Weed Land, an up-close journalistic narrative that chronicles a transformative epoch for marijuana in America. Moving from the passage of California's Proposition 215, the nation's first medical marijuana law, through law enforcement raids and the emergence of a lucrative cannabis industry, Weed Land reveals the changing political, legal, economic, and social dynamics of pot. It offers an independent, meticulously reported account of the clashes and contradictions of a burgeoning California cannabis culture that stoked pot liberalization elsewhere, leading to marijuana legalization votes in Colorado and Washington. Written by Peter Hecht, an award-winning journalist from The Sacramento Bee, Weed Land takes readers into the laboratories of researchers who challenged federal drug policy with clinical studies revealing the medical benefits of cannabis. It also explores an exploding marijuana marketplace that pitches compassionate healing with the pure joy of pot. And it takes readers inside the law enforcement backlash -- and unfolding consequences -- of a federal crackdown on America's largest marijuana economy.

Recent years have seen contestations of democracy all around the globe. Democracy is challenged as a political as well as a normative term, and as a form of governance. Against the background of neoliberal transformation, populist mobilization, and xenophobic exclusion, but also of radical and emancipatory democratic projects, this collection offers a variety of critical and challenging perspectives on the condition of democracy in the 21st Century. The volumes provide theoretical and empirical enquiries into the meaning and practice of liberal democracy, the erosion of democratic institutions, and the consequences for citizenship and everyday lives. With a pronounced focus on national and transnational politics and processes, as well as postcolonial and settler-colonial contexts, individual contributions scrutinize the role of democratic societies, ideals, and ideologies of liberal democracy within global power geometries. By employing the multiple meanings of The Condition of Democracy, the collection addresses the preconditions of democratic rule, the state this form of governance is in, and the changing ways in which citizens can (still) act as the sovereign in liberal democratic societies. The books offer both challenging theoretical perspectives and rigorous empirical findings of how to conceive of democracy in our times, which will appeal to academics and students in social and political science, economics and international relations amongst other fields. The focus on developments in the Middle East and North Africa will furthermore be of great usefulness to academics and the wider public interested in the repercussions of western democracy promotion as well as in contemporary struggles for democratization 'from below'.

This book presents the results of the most complete and updated assessment of cognitive resources of students in Latin America: the Study of Latin American Intelligence (SLATINT). During four years, top researchers of the region used a standardized set of cognitive measures to assess 4,000 students aged between 14 and 15 years from six countries: Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Peru. The data collected and now analyzed in this volume is a first step to understand the human cognitive capital of the region, a crucial resource for any country today. Intelligence research has shown that the cognitive skills of a population are strongly associated with the school performance of its students and the development of a nation. This makes Intelligence Measurement and School Performance in Latin America a valuable tool both for Latin American researchers and authorities engaged in the improvement of each country's human resources and for psychologists, educators and other social scientists dedicated to the study of the impact of intelligence in the development of nations.

Low-lying Pacific island nations are experiencing the frontline of sea-level rises and climate change and are responding creatively and making-sense in their own vernacular terms. Pacific Climate Cultures aims to bring Oceanic philosophies to the frontline of social science theorization. It explores the home-grown ways that 'climate change' becomes absorbed into the combined effects of globalization and into a living nexus of relations amongst human and non-humans, spirits and elements. Contributors to this edited volume explore diverse examples of living climate change-from floods and cyclones, through song and navigation, to new forms of art, community initiatives and cultural appropriations-and demonstrate their international relevance in understanding climate change. A Prelude by His Highness Tui Atua Efi and Afterword by Anne Salmond frame an Introduction by Tony Crook & Peter Rudiak-Gould and nine chapters by contributors including John Connell, Elfriede Hermann & Wolfgang Kempf and Cecilie Rubow. Endorsement from Professor Margaret Jolly, Australian National University: This exciting volume offers innovative insights on climate cultures across Oceania. It critically interrogates Western environmental sciences which fail to fully appreciate Oceanic knowledges and practices. It reveals how climate science can be both 'a weapon of the weak' and 'an act of symbolic violence of the powerful'. A compelling series of studies in the Cook islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea and Samoa suggest not diverse cultural constructions of 'natural facts' but processes of knowledge exchange and at best a respectful reciprocity in confronting present challenges and disturbing future scenarios. 'Home-grown' Pacific discourses and ways of living emphasise the interconnections of all life on earth and in our cosmos; they do not differentiate between the natural and the moral, between environmental and cultural transformations. These studies evoke the creative agency of Oceanic peoples, too often seen as on the vanguard of victimhood in global representations of climate change, and offer distinctive visions for all humanity in these troubling times.

Nigeria's democratisation efforts since attaining political independence from Britain have been tumultuous and have spanned over three successive republics. A persistent bug decimating Nigeria's democracy and repeatedly leading to military coups has been brazen electoral violence perpetrated by the nation's political elite. Nigeria's 2019 Democratic Experience analyses and explains what went wrong in Nigeria's experiment with democracy. Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation and the world's seventh most populous nation, also contributes 70% of West Africa's population. She is sub-Saharan Africa's largest oil producer and has remained Africa's largest economy by GDP since 2014. The country has hundreds of diverse ethnic nationalities and languages grouped into 36 states (or federating units) and an independent federal capital territory. Though recognized as Africa's largest democracy, her democratisation process since the 1960s has remained tumultuous with massive electoral violence and political intolerance. This repeatedly compelled the military to intervene in the nation's political history in the years 1966, 1983 and 1985. It is these developments that provided the motivation for this volume to capture for posterity the conduct of the 2019 General Elections in Nigeria.

This volume is devoted to the central themes in Ivan Szelenyi's sociological oeuvre comprising of empirical explorations and their theoretical refinement in the last 50 years. The contributors have been asked to take interpretive and critical stances on his work, and to clarify the relevance of his insights. Ivan Szelenyi has been asked to write a concluding chapter, and respond to the present reflections on his work. The ensuing volume discusses Szelenyi's captivating scholarship as being grounded in a complex program for the political economy of socialisms and post-socialist capitalisms, and introduces him as a neoclassical sociologist whose research projects continue to investigate inequalities created by the interaction of markets and redistributive structures in various societies. Contributors include: Dorothee Bohle, Tamas Demeter, Gil Eyal, Bela Greskovits, Michael D. Kennedy, Tamas Kolosi, Karmo Kroos, Victor Nee, David Ost, Ivan Szelenyi, and Bruce Western.

Ozark Superstitions vJzark Superstitions VANCE RANDOLPH COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK 1947 TO THE MEMORY OF G. STANLEY HALL Preface For obvious reasons it is not practicable to credit every item in this collection to the individual from whom it was obtained, as I have done in Ozark Folksongs and some of my other books. But for the sake of the record, I set down here the names of certain persons who have directly furthered my investigations. Among these must be listed Mrs. Anna Bacon, Galena, Mo. Dr. Charles Hillman Brough, Little Rock, Ark. Miss Nancy Clemens, Springfield, Mo. Dr. George E. Hastings, Fayetteville, Ark. Mr. Charles S. Hiatt, Cassville, Mo. Mrs. Dorn Higgins, Sulphur Springs, Ark. Mr. Earl Keithley, Day, Mo. Mr. Lewis Kelley, Cyclone, Mo. Mr. Maurice Lamberson, Bentonville, Ark. Mr. Cass Little, Anderson, Mo. Mr. Ernest Long, Joplin, Mo. Mrs. May Kennedy McCord, Springfield, Mo. Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Mahnkey, Mincy, Mo. Mrs. Mabel E. Mueller, Holla, Mo. Mrs. Geraldine Parker, St. Louis, Mo. Miss Rubey Poyner, Southwest City, Mo. Mr. Otto Ernest Rayburn, Eureka Springs, Ark. Dr. Oakley St. John, Pine ville, Mo. Mr. Clyde Sharp, Pack, Mo. Mr. Elbert Short, Crane, Mo. Mrs. Isabel Spradley, Van Buren, Ark. Mr. Fred Starr, Greenland, Ark. Mrs. Olga Trail, Farmington, Ark. Mrs. Ruth H. Tyler, Neosho, Mo. Mr. John Turner White, Jefferson City, Mo. Mrs. Marie Wilbur, Pineville, Mo. and Dr. J. H. Young, Galena, Mo. I wish to acknowledge my indebt edness to these people, but they are in no way responsible for my interpretation of the material, nor for the general character of the book. of the preliminary studies upon which this volume is d were printed as early as 1927, in theJournal of American viii PREFACE Folklore. My books The Ozarks and Ozark Mountain Folks, published by the Vanguard Press in 1931 and 1932, contained accounts of backwoods folk belief. Many supernatural narra tives, and some notes on water witching, first appeared in Ozark Ghost Stories and Tall Tales from the Ozarks, published and copyrighted by E. Haldeman-Julius, of Girard, Kansas. Several yarns about witchcraft were printed in Folk-Say, a regional annual edited by B. A. Botkin and brought out by the University of Oklahoma Press other related items first saw the light in the quarterly University Review, published at the Uni versity of Kansas Citj I am grateful to the owners of these copyrights for permission to reprint the material here. V. R. Galena, Missouri June 10, 1946 Contents 1. INTRODUCTION 3 2. WEATHER SIGNS 10 3. CROPS AND LIVESTOCK 34 4. HOUSEHOLD SUPERSTITIONS 53 5. WATER WITCHES 82 6. MOUNTAIN MEDICINE 92 7. THE POWER DOCTORS 121 8. COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE 162 9. PREGNANCY AND CHILDBIRTH 192 10. GHOST STORIES 211 11. ANIMALS AND PLANTS 240 12. OZARK WITCHCRAFT 264 13. DEATH AND BURIAL 801 14. MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS 328 BIBLIOGRAPHY 343 INDEX 353 Ozark Superstitions

The purpose of this book is to explore new developments in the field of economic sociology. It contains cutting-edge theoretical discussions by some of the world's leading economic sociologists, with chapters on topics such as the economic convention, relational sociology, economic identity, economy and law, economic networks and institutions. The book is distinctive in a number of ways. First, it focuses on theoretical contributions, by pulling together and extending what the contributors believe to be the most important theoretical innovations within their own particular areas of the field. Second, there are contributions by leading economic sociologists from both the US and Europe, which gives the book both wider scope and appeal, while also creating the opportunity for some interesting dialogue between distinct theoretical traditions. The book will be of interest to researchers, Ph.D. students, and advanced students on both side of the Atlantic, and indispensible in advanced economic sociology courses.

THE NEW BOOK FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF EVERYBODY LIES 'Don't Trust Your Gut is a tour de force - an intoxicating blend of analysis, humor, and humanity' DANIEL H. PINK 'Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is an expert on data-driven thinking, and this engaging book is full of surprising, useful insights for using the information at your fingertips to make better decisions' ADAM GRANT Big decisions are hard. We might consult friends and family, read advice online or turn to self-help books for guidance, but in the end we usually just do what feels right. But what if our gut is wrong? As economist and former Google data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz argues, our gut is actually not that reliable - and data can prove this. In Don't Trust Your Gut, he unearths the startling conclusions that the right data can teach us about who we are and what will make our lives better. Over the past decade, scholars have mined enormous datasets to find remarkable new approaches to life's biggest self-help puzzles, from the boring careers that produce the most wealth, to old-school, data-backed relationship advice. While we often think we know how to better ourselves, the numbers, it turns out, disagree. Telling fascinating stories through the latest big data research, Stephens-Davidowitz reveals just how wrong we really are when it comes to improving our lives, and offers a new way of tackling our most consequential choices.

This book examines various aspects of youth and community work drawn from an Irish context but spanning European and international perspectives. Authors locate the subject matter at source, whilst exploring some of the impediments that policy, practice and actors must contend with. Significantly, the contributors locate their reflections within European and global contexts, whilst critiquing developing trends and outcomes so as to better understand key issues in Irish Youth and community work in particular and wider Irish civil society as a whole.

An array of subjects hand picked by the author which discuss thoughts as perceived by that author. Subjects all would love to discuss but somehow never seem to. Political, social, historical, legal, constitutional, insurance editorial, religious. To put it simply, a book on common sense that lays it all out for your perusal. A book that says what you want to talk about but never do.