In this book, Richardson’s research spans a decade and two cities - Sydney, Australia and Montreal, Canada - focusing on three metro-style rail infrastructure case study projects: one ongoing, one failed and one upgraded after reaching fifty years of age – to build an irrefutable case that the news media is highly influential to policy, and that these influences are complex, messy and changing. News Media Influence on Rail Infrastructure Policy offers scholars and industry practitioners in the arenas of policy analysis, politics and media communications a method for astutely guiding large-scale projects through the complex and changing landscape of 24/7 news media. It is underpinned by empirical research that identifies and endeavors to close a considerable gap in current understanding and practice. This gap represents a failure to recognise and respect mediatization – the many powerful influences impacting a policy arena that has drawn the ire of the news media. The result of this failure is ineffective communication that does little to advance the policy piece and, in the worst instances, leads to policy immobilisation or poor policy decision-making. Drawing significantly on Actor­–Network Theory, Richardson identifies the influential actors and alliances at play when policy is subjected to media discourse, and he proposes a framework for tracing and managing them. In doing so, he demonstrates that such a framework is not only vital for the successful negotiation of policy and projects in the media, but also to an (r)evolutionary recasting of public, expert and media actors in the development and decision-making process.

ESCAPE?FROM?PLAUEN tells the story of war's depravation but also tells the story of faith and the will to triumph against all odds. "An artist as well as a writer, Renate Stoever has an artist's sensibility that lends beauty to her writing. As a result, the reader is not just an observer, but also a participant in her experience. This memoir of a remarkable life is a polished gem. It will keep you turning pages until the last word." -Christine Royer, retired Vice-President of Public Affairs, Barnard College, N.Y. "I've been a professional editor for more than thirty years, and Escape From Plauen is better writing than the work of most professional writers I've edited. This is an amazing story, and it is incredibly well written." -Mike Slizewski, professional editor "Parts of this book moved me to tears...creating powerful images of destruction...great choice of words describing the emotion, terror, and horror of war...as seen first hand through the eyes of a child. What a great read...riveting...." -Carol Kreit, author of First Wives' Tool Kit. This is a true story about the ravages of war seen through the eyes of a 9-year-old girl in Plauen, Germany. The political and economic causes of what are considered by many to be the greatest armed struggle since the Great War have been widely coined into books and movies. In more ways then we would like to admit, we still live with the results of that victory, but other than "Slaughterhouse-Five," Kurt Vonnegut's fictionalized account of the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany in 1945, few works have been written about the actual events in the fire-storm of that devastation. None are seen through the eyes of an innocent child caught within the terror caused by events beyond comprehension. ESCAPE?FROM?PLAUEN is a first-hand account of life in the German city of Plauen before Hitler's defeat, the end of Nazi Germany and through the destruction caused by the wrath of the Soviet Army. Caught between Stalin's advancing Communist Army in the East and the Allies march from the West, the women, children, and elderly of Germany had no place to hide long after the collapse of the Wehrmacht. What was there left to bomb in late 1944 and 1945 but women and children? Renate was born in the German city of Plauen before the start of the Second World War. Enduring the daily hardships of the War, Renate and her family escaped to the West from Communist East Germany in 1947. Within a week of her 1953 arrival in the United States, Renate started to work in a small shop sewing beads on moccasins. A year later she used her artistic ability to become a top designer in the Lace and Embroidery industry. Renate married in 1962, and helped her husband establish a successful Wall Street firm. After winning a writing competition in the New Yorker Staats Zeitung, a German-American weekly newspaper, friends encouraged her to spend more time writing. Renate and her husband live in New Jersey.

In the United States, elite colleges and universities have largely been reserved for wealthy, predominantly white Americans, closing off access for students of colour. Statutory laws have embedded discriminatory tactics into the admissions process, resulting in students of colour remaining underrepresented at top-tier universities. Discriminatory practices mandate the need for institutions to prioritize diversity through affirmative action. If legal battles against affirmative action create bans on the policy, many colleges and universities will remain predominantly white institutions. This book takes an historical look at the pivotal role affirmative action has played in higher education. It examines the admissions process through the eyes of a beneficiary of affirmative action and is the first text to share insights on the role eligibility plays in allowing universities to consider race in admitting applicants. Detailed are the different types of affirmative action and how some colleges and universities use the policy as a tool to consider race and ethnicity as part of a holistic evaluation of applicants. This work makes the case that race-conscious admissions practices remain necessary in the fight for racial equity in higher education.

Geoffrey Kimball presents the first grammar of the American Indian language Yukhíti Kóy, better known in English as Atakapa, once spoken in coastal southwestern Louisiana and coastal eastern Texas. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a drastic fall in the Atakapa population, and by the first decades of the twentieth century the Atakapa language ceased to be spoken. The grammar is based on the field notes collected by Albert Samuel Gatschet in January of 1885, with additional material collected by John R. Swanton in 1907–8. Gatschet worked with two speakers of the language, Kišyuc, also known as Yoyot, and her cousin Tottokš, whose English names were Louison Huntington and Delilah Moss, respectively. John R. Swanton wrote a grammatical sketch of Atakapa in 1929 based on Gatschet’s notes and in 1932 published the texts Gatschet had gathered, as well as a dictionary. The materials, originally written phonetically, have been phonemicized, and the nature of the grammar has been elucidated. The nine surviving texts in Yukhíti have been phonemicized, analyzed, and translated, and the parallels between them and other traditional oral literatures of Native American languages of the Southeast are discussed. This reference grammar includes a vocabulary of all words contained in the field notes.  

In 1884, twenty-three-year-old Corabelle Fellows left her family in Washington, DC, and journeyed out West to teach Native children in Nebraska and Dakota Territory. She hoped her missionary work would improve the lives of the Dakota and Lakota Sioux people by helping them assimilate into white culture, following the predominant government policy at the time. But after years of living among the Native people, it was Cora's perceptions of life, love, and faith that were transformed. It began with her friendship with Elizabeth Winyan, a remarkable Dakota woman who was a model of strength, compassion, and adaptability among her people. Winyan became a maternal figure for Cora in the strange land so far from the "civilized" city. She even saved Cora from being married against her will. Then Cora met Sam Campbell, a man from Scottish and Sioux stock. They fell in love and were married, though the match made national headlines after Cora's family disowned her. The couple struggled to find a place in the American frontier, straddling two worlds. For years their marriage was grist for the yellow press, and they became a sensational national story that led them to a brief stint as a sideshow attraction for traveling exhibitions and dime museums to support themselves. They would never live happily ever after, and the couple was plagued by racist rhetoric and sexist slander even after their divorce. Life Painted Red details Cora's experiences from her Washington, DC, exodus to her years living among the Sioux, and her scandalous, short-lived marriage to Sam Campbell.

Through an array of detailed case studies, this book explores the vibrant digital expressions of diverse groups of Muslim cybernauts: religious clerics and Sufis, feminists and fashionistas, artists and activists, hajj pilgrims and social media influencers. These stories span a vast cultural and geographic landscape—from Indonesia, Iran, and the Arab Middle East to North America. These granular case studies contextualize cyber Islam within broader social trends: racism and Islamophobia, gender dynamics, celebrity culture, identity politics, and the shifting terrain of contemporary religious piety and practice. The book’s authors examine an expansive range of digital multimedia technologies as primary “texts.� These include websites, podcasts, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube channels, online magazines and discussion forums, and religious apps. The contributors also draw on a range of methodological and theoretical models from multiple academic disciplines, including communication and media studies, anthropology, history, global studies, religious studies, and Islamic studies.

A deep dive into the new era of digital content production and distribution In the twenty-first century, the platforms that both create and host content have become nearly as important as media itself. Companies such as Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube have attained a massive hold on the public imagination and have become an almost ineluctable part of people’s everyday lives. While the workings of media distribution had until very recently remained inconsequential to the average consumer, the recent popularization of various online platforms has made the question of distribution immediate to everyone. Digital Media Distribution: Portals, Platforms, Pipelines provides a timely examination of the multifaceted distribution landscape in a moment of transformation and conceptualizes media distribution as a complex site of power, privilege, and gatekeeping. These tensions have local, national, and global consequences on the autonomy of creative workers, as well as on how we gain access to, engage with, and understand cultural products. Drawing on original research into distribution practices in industries as diverse as television, film, videogames, literature, and adult entertainment, each chapter explores how digitization has changed media distribution and its broader economic, industrial, social, and cultural implications. Bringing together experts from around the world and across the media industries, Digital Media Distribution: Portals, Platforms, Pipelines presents a vast array of critical approaches and illustrative case studies for understanding the factors that have an impact on the way media travels and moves throughout our digital lives.

This Open Access book provides a new understanding of the meanings and motivations behind the wearing of beards, moustaches and whiskers, and their associated practices and practitioners. Concerning Beards offers an important new long-term perspective on health and the male body in British society. It argues that the male face has long been an important site for the articulation of bodily health and vigour, as well as masculinity. Through an exploration of the history of male facial hair in England, Alun Withey underscores its complex meanings, medical implications and socio-cultural significance from the mid-17th to the early 20th century. Herein, he charts the gradual shift in concepts of facial hair and shaving - away from ‘formal’ medicine and practice - towards new concepts of hygiene and personal grooming. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Wellcome Trust. This book is part of the Facialities series, which explores the social, cultural and political significance of the face in human history.

Exploring sacred mountains around the world, this book examines whether bonding and reverence to a mountain is intrinsic to the mountain, constructed by people, or a mutual encounter. Chapters explore mountains in England, Scotland, Wales, Italy, Ireland, the Himalaya, Japan, Greece, USA, Asia and South America, and embrace the union of sky, landscape and people to examine the religious dynamics between human and non-human entities. This book takes as its starting point the fact that mountains physically mediate between land and sky and act as metaphors for bridges from one realm to another, recognising that mountains are relational and that landscapes form personal and group cosmologies. The book fuses ideas of space, place and material religion with cultural environmentalism and takes an interconnected approach to material religio-landscapes. In this way it fills the gap between lived religious traditions, personal reflection, phenomenology, historical context, environmental philosophy, myths and performativity. In defining material religion as active engagement with mountain-forming and humanshaping landscapes, the research and ideas presented here provide theories that are widely applicable to other forms of material religion.

Writing is a critical component for teaching children about advocacy and empowering student voice, as well as an essential tool for learning in many disciplines. Yet, writing instruction in schools often focuses on traditional methods such as the composition of five-paragraph essays or the adherence to proper grammatical conventions. While these are two components of writing instruction and preparation in education, they only provide a small glimpse into the depth and breadth of writing. As such, writing instruction is increasingly complex and requires multiple perspectives and levels of skill among teachers. The Handbook of Research on Writing Instruction Practices for Equitable and Effective Teaching serves as a comprehensive reference of issues related to writing instruction and leading research about perspectives, methods, and approaches for equitable and effective writing instruction. It includes practices beyond K-12, including best writing practices at the college level as well as the development of future teachers. Providing unique coverage on culturally relevant writing, socio- and racio-linguistic justice, and urgent writing pedagogies, this major reference work is an indispensable resource for administrators and educators of both K-12 and higher education, pre-service teachers, teacher educators, libraries, government officials, researchers, and academicians.

'Read any history of the Nineties in Britain and you will read about Britpop, Blair, the birth of the Premier League and the rise of new lads. I played no part in any of these events. Growing up in a tiny rural village on Dartmoor, no bands came within 100 miles, all the local farmers voted Tory, our nearest football team was in the fourth division, and the closest I got to being a new lad was when my older brother let me drink some of his Hooch.' In Watching the Nineties, much-loved comedian Josh Widdicombe tells the story of a strange rural childhood, the kind of childhood he only realised was weird when he left home and started telling people about it. From only having four people in his year at school, to living in a family home where they didn't just not bother locking the front door, they didn't even have a key. Using a different television show of the time as it's starting point for each chapter Watching the Nineties is part-childhood memoir, part-comic history of 90s television and culture. It will discuss everything from the dangers of recreating Gladiators in your front room, to Josh's belief that Mr Blobby is one of the great comic characters, to being the only vegetarian child west of Bristol. Together it tells the story of the end of an era, the last time when watching television was a shared experience for the family and the nation, before the internet meant everyone watched different things at different times on different devices, headphones on to make absolutely sure no one could watch it with them.

There are many cultural myths about serial killers, often propagated even by mental health professionals. Many assume there is a profile of a serial killer, that serial killers always go for the same victim type or always use the same MO, that they are more clever than ordinary people, and that they are inevitably charming and attractive. The truth is not as simple as that. There are different types of serial killers, and while there are many books that discuss the serial killer phenomenon especially in relationship to victim types or context, researchers have not yet been able to come up with a definition, or type, that covers the broad spectrum of serial killers and their complex psychological dynamics. Ramsland looks at the variety of serial killer types, illustrating that it is difficult to accurately depict these elusive, intriguing, and dangerous killers. There are many cultural myths about serial killers, often propagated even by mental health professionals. Many assume there is a profile of a serial killer, that serial killers always go for the same victim type or always use the same MO, that they are more clever than ordinary people, and that they are inevitably charming and attractive. The truth is not as simple as that. There are different types of serial killers and while there are many books that discuss the serial killer phenomenon especially in relationship to victim types or context, researchers have not yet been able to come up with a definition, or type, that covers the broad spectrum of serial killers and their complex psychological dynamics. Ramsland looks at serial killer types, illustrating that it is difficult to accurately depict these elusive, intriguing, and dangerous killers. This book examines a variety of serial killers, from sexual predators to psychotic killers, from murder teams to odd eccentric stalkers, in order to present the distinct psychological dynamics that set serial killers apart from other violent murderers. Among the motives addressed are lust, control, glory, profit, thrill, delusions, rage, the desire for company, the need to please a partner, and even murder as an intellectual exercise. Serial killers live double lives, hiding their violence even from those who live with them, so along with a study of motives are chapters devoted to how close associates have described killers, including parents, siblings, co-workers, lovers, and survivors. There is no profile of a serial killer, and this book establishes that in vivid and frightening detail.

If countless books and movies are to be believed, America's Wild West was, at heart, a world of cowboys and Indians, sheriffs and gunslingers, scruffy settlers and mountain men—a man's world. Here, Chris Enss, in the latest of her popular books to take on this stereotype, tells the stories of twelve courageous women who faced down schoolrooms full of children on the open prairies and in the mining towns of the Old West. Between 1847 and 1858, more than 600 women teachers traveled across the untamed frontier to provide youngsters with an education, and the numbers grew rapidly in the decades to come, as women took advantage of one of the few career opportunities for respectable work for ladies of the era. Enduring hardship, the dozen women whose stories are movingly told in the pages of Frontier Teachers demonstrated the utmost dedication and sacrifice necessary to bring formal education to the Wild West. As immortalized in works of art and literature, for many students their women teachers were heroic figures who introduced them to a world of possibilities—and changed America forever.