This book places islanders' struggles and knowledge at the forefront of island studies. Written by experts from diverse fields and locations, it covers a wide range of topics, from the history of island studies to critical ocean studies. In remapping the field of island studies from Okinawa, an emerging hub of community-based knowledge and interdisciplinary collaboration between leading critics and theorists in geography, linguistics, tourism, literature, international relations, and peace studies reveals the challenges for the future of island studies. The book consists of two parts: the first offers a collection of individual contributions that demonstrate the vital role that the field's interdisciplinarity can play in creating bridges between the political and social issues islanders and the islands face and the disciplines involved. The second part provides a cross-disciplinary discussion between the authors and scholars of island studies in Okinawa, including local experts, and suggests new ways to think about the future of island studies that are intricately linked to islanders' agency, preservation of languages and heritage, and the security of the islands. As such, the book directly addresses the current state of the field as well as with its future.

When it comes to any current scientific debate, there are more than two sides to every story. Controversies in Science and Technology, Volume 4 analyzes controversial topics in science and technology-infrastructure, ecosystem management, food security, and plastics and health-from multiple points of view. The editors have compiled thought-provoking essays from a variety of experts from academia and beyond, creating a volume that addresses many of the issues surrounding these scientific debates. Part I of the volume discusses infrastructure, and the real meaning behind the term in today's society. Essays address the central issues that motivate current discussion about infrastructure, including writing on the vulnerability to disasters. Part II, titled "Food Policy," will focus on the challenges of feeding an ever-growing world and the costs of not doing so. Part III features essays on chemicals and environmental health, and works to define "safety" as it relates to today's scientific community. The book's final section examines ecosystem management. In the end, Kleinman, Cloud-Hansen, and Handelsman provide a multifaceted volume that will be appropriate for anyone hoping to understand arguments surrounding several of today's most important scientific controversies

This book studies the Chinese "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI), also called "New Silk Road", and focuses on its regional and local effects. Written by experts from various fields, it presents a range of case studies on the geopolitical, socio-economic, ecological and cultural implications of the BRI for European regions and their stakeholders. The book is divided into four parts, the first of which discusses the history of and China's motivations for the BRI. The second part explores the global phenomenon from a number of regional standpoints. In turn, the third part presents studies on the political, socio-economic, cultural and ecological implications of the New Silk Road project. The final part highlights the tourism prospects in connection with the Silk Road project, as tourism has established itself as an important economic sector in many regions along the historic Silk Road. This book will appeal to scholars of economics, international relations and tourism, decision-makers, managers, chambers of commerce and entrepreneurs with special interests in establishing collaboration with the Chinese market.

What are the origins of nationalism and why is it capable of arousing such intense emotions? In this major study, Azar Gat counters the prevailing fashionable theories according to which nations and nationalism are modern and contrived or 'invented'. He sweeps across history and around the globe to reveal that ethnicity has always been highly political and that nations and national states have existed since the beginning of statehood millennia ago. He traces the deep roots of ethnicity and nationalism in human nature, showing how culture fits into human evolution from as early as our aboriginal condition and, in conjunction with kinship, defines ethnicity and ethnic allegiances. From the rise of states and empires to the present day, this book sheds new light on the explosive nature of ethnicity and nationalism, as well as on their more liberating and altruistic roles in forging identity and solidarity.

Technology for Facilitating Humanity and Combating Social Deviations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives provides a state-of-the-art compendium of research and development on socio-technical approaches to support the prevention, mitigation, and elimination of social deviations with the help of computer science and technology. This book provides historical backgrounds, experimental studies, and future perspectives on the use of computing tools to prevent and deal with physical, psychological and social problems that impact society as a whole.

Practice and research of peace education has grown in the recent years as shown by a steadily increasing number of publications, programs, events, and funding mechanisms. The oft-cited point of departure for the peace education community is the belief in education as a valuable tool for decreasing the use of violence in conflict and for building cultures of positive peace hallmarked by just and equitable structures. Educators and organizations implementing peace education activities and programming, however, often lack the tools and capacities for evaluation and thus pay scant regard to this step in program management. Reasons for this inattention are related to the perceived urgency to prioritize new and more action in the context of scarce financial and human resources, notwithstanding violence or conflict; the lack of skills and time to indulge in a thorough evaluative strategy; and the absence of institutional incentives and support. Evaluation is often demand-driven by donors who emphasize accounting given the current context of international development assistance and budget cuts. Program evaluation is considered an added burden to already over-tasked programmers who are unaware of the incentives and of assessment techniques. Peace education practitioners are typically faced with forcing evaluation frameworks, techniques, and norms standardized for traditional education programs and venues. Together, these conditions create an unfavorable environment in which evaluation becomes under-valued, de-prioritized, and mythologized for its laboriousness. This volume serves three inter-related objectives. First, it offers a critical reflection on theoretical and methodological issues regarding evaluation applied to peace education interventions and programming. The overarching questions of the nature of peace and the principles guiding peace education, as well as governing theories and assumptions of change, transformation, and complexity are explored. Second, the volume investigates existing quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods evaluation practices of peace educators in order to identify what needs related to evaluation persist among practitioners. Promising practices are presented from peace education programming in different settings (formal and non-formal education), within various groups (e.g. children, youth, police, journalists) and among diverse cultural contexts. Finally, the volume proposes ideas of evaluation, novel techniques for experimentation, and creative adaptation of tools from related fields, in order to offer pragmatic and philosophical substance to peace educators' "next moves" and inspire the agenda for continued exploration and innovation. The authors come from variety of fields including education, peace and conflict studies, educational evaluation, development studies, comparative education, economics, and psychology.

The effects of globalization on poverty and inequality are a key issue in contemporary international politics, yet they have been neglected in international relations and comparative politics literatures. Arie M. Kacowicz explores the complex relationships between globalization and the distribution of wealth as a political problem in international relations, analyzing them through the prism of poverty and inequality. He develops a political framework (an 'intermestic model') which captures the interaction between the international and the domestic domains and explains those effects with a particular emphasis upon the state and its relations with society. He also specifies the different hypotheses about the possible links between globalization and the distribution of wealth and tests them in the context of Latin America during the years 1982-2008, with a particular focus on Argentina and the deep crisis it experienced in 2001-2.

World leaders have not been able to find solutions to the growing problem of global insecurity associated with failed and failing states in many regions. Governance and Security As A Unitary Concept is the first compilation of contemporary commentaries - from twenty contributing authors on six continents - to examine governance and security together rather than as complementary yet separate entities. This is the potency of its design.

Governance in modern human affairs determines action or gridlock, wealth or penury, peace or conflict, health or illness, progress or arrested development. Security does not mean just physical security but also human, environmental, economic, resource and cultural security.

The construct of the book is an innovative approach to governance and security as a unitary concept. The strength and virtue of the book is the diversity and overlapping perspectives of the authors, looking in, from within.

Tom Rippon and Graham Kemp, editors
Written by Eric Abitbol, Quassy Adjapawn, Laura Balbuena Gonz lez, Alan Breakspear, Rosemary Cairns, Michael Canares, Les Chipperfield, Dale Christenson, Roy Cullen, Douglas Fry, Roger Girouard, Peter Gizewski, Graham Kemp, Barbara Mann, Moses Muthoki, Mary-Anne Neal, Tom Rippon, Susanne Thiessen, Serge Vidalis and Mar a Eugenia Villarreal.
Foreword by Terrance Power.

Published by Agio Publishing House in collaboration with Avalon Institute Inc.

This book seeks to break new ground, both empirically and conceptually, in examining discourses of identity formation and the agency of critical social practices in Malaysia. Taking an inclusive cultural studies perspective, it questions the ideological narrative of 'race' and 'ethnicity' that dominates explanations of conflicts and cleavages in the Malaysian context. The contributions are organised in three broad themes. 'Identities in Contestation: Borders, Complexities and Hybridities' takes a range of empirical studies-literary translation, religion, gender, ethnicity, indigeneity and sexual orientation-to break down preconceived notions of fixed identities. This then opens up an examination of 'Identities and Movements: Agency and Alternative Discourses', in which contributors deal with counter-hegemonic social movements-of anti-racism, young people, environmentalism and independent publishing-that explicitly seek to open up greater critical, democratic space within the Malaysian polity. The third section, 'Identities and Narratives: Culture and the Media', then provides a close textual reading of some exemplars of new cultural and media practices found in oral testimonies, popular music, film, radio programming and storytelling who have consciously created bodies of work that question the dominant national narrative. This book is a valuable interdisciplinary work for advanced students and researchers interested in representations of identity and nationhood in Malaysia, and for those with wider interests in the fields of critical cultural studies and discourse analysis. "Here is a fresh, startling book to aid the task of unbinding the straitjackets of 'Malay', 'Chinese' and 'Indian', with which colonialism bound Malaysia's plural inheritance, and on which the postcolonial state continues to rely. In it, a panoply of unlikely identities-Bajau liminality, Kelabit philosophy, Islamic feminism, refugee hybridity and more-finds expression and offers hope for liberation". Rachel Leow, University of Cambridge "This book shakes the foundations of race thinking in Malaysian studies by expanding the range of cases, perspectives and outcomes of identity. It offers students of Malaysia an examination of identity and agency that is expansive, critical and engaging, and its interdisciplinary depth brings Malaysian studies into conversation with scholarship across the world". Sumit Mandal, University of Nottingham Malaysia "This is a much-needed work that helps us to take apart the colonial inherited categories of race which informed the notion of the plural society, the idea of plurality without multiculturalism. It complicates the picture of identity by bringing in religion, gender, indigeneity and sexual orientation, and helps us to imagine what a truly multiculturalist Malaysia might look like". Syed Farid Alatas, National University of Singapore

Are we inside the era of disasters or are we merely inundated by mediated accounts of events categorized as catastrophic? America's Disaster Culture offers answers to this question and a critical theory surrounding the culture of "natural" disasters in American consumerism, literature, media, film, and popular culture. In a hyper-mediated global culture, disaster events reach us with great speed and minute detail, and Americans begin forming, interpreting, and historicizing catastrophes simultaneously with fellow citizens and people worldwide. America's Disaster Culture is not policy, management, or relief oriented. It offers an analytical framework for the cultural production and representation of disasters, catastrophes, and apocalypses in American culture. It focuses on filling a need for critical analysis centered upon the omnipresence of real and imagined disasters, epidemics, and apocalypses in American culture. However, it also observes events, such as the Dust Bowl, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11, that are re-framed and re-historicized as "natural" disasters by contemporary media and pop culture. Therefore, America's Disaster Culture theorizes the very parameters of classifying any event as a "natural" disaster, addresses the biases involved in a catastrophic event's public narrative, and analyzes American culture's consumption of a disastrous event. Looking toward the future, what are the hypothetical and actual threats to disaster culture? Or, are we oblivious that we are currently living in a post-apocalyptic landscape?

This book elucidates and maps the societal impact of experience and heritage, participation, and entrepreneurship in the cultural sector. The contributions address and explore the relevance of culture, cultural entities, and heritage as collective memories and reservoirs of experience for other social systems, change and societal innovators like entrepreneurs. Insofar, cultural activities can be understood as a bridge between past experiences and future challenges. The first key focus is the participation of people in various contexts, initiatives, and projects. Such participation unleashes creativity and connects different societal layers - culture, economy, and innovation. Accordingly, a second focus is the entrepreneurial efforts and ideas that originate within arts and culture. Readers will find critical empirical and theoretical studies that challenge the current understandings of the cultural sector from different theoretical perspectives and with different methodological approaches. A variety of topics are explored within the thematic areas of cultural heritage, managerial practices, participation, and cultural entrepreneurship, as well as their inter-relations. Ultimately the aim is to provide the reader with a better understanding of the sometimes conflicting, sometimes mutually fertilizing areas of the arts, culture, business, management, and innovation. The book will be of interest to scholars, students, professionals, and policymakers.

The digital divide is an global phenomenon that negatively affects groups around the world. International Exploration of Technology Equity and the Digital Divide: Critical, Historical and Social Perspectives explores and presents research that centers on the historical, political, sociological, and economic factors that engender global inequities. Acquiring such insights and knowledge is an important step towards rectifying socially ingrained inequities and a necessary step in working towards global justice in meaningful ways. This book aids those researching, teaching, and studying in the area of digital equity or in the broader contexts of social and global justice. Moreover, this reference provides valuable insights for professionals and researchers interested in examining issues of technology equity from various critical social theories.

This book explains why the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is so difficult to resolve by showing that it consists of multiple distinct conflicts. Because these tend to be conflated into a single conflict, attempts at peace have not worked. Underpinned by conflict theory, observations of those involved and analyses of polling data, the book argues that peace will not be possible until each of the dispute's distinct conflicts are managed. Early chapters establish a theoretical framework to explain and define the different conflicts. This framework is then applied to the history of the dispute. The actions and perceptions of Israelis and Palestinians make sense when viewed through this framework. The Oslo peace process is examined in detail to explain how and why each side's expectations were not met. Ultimately, lessons in ways to build a future viable peace are drawn from the failures of the past.

Responding to widespread interest within cultural studies and social inquiry, this book addresses the question 'what is a mathematical concept?' using a variety of vanguard theories in the humanities and posthumanities. Tapping historical, philosophical, sociological and psychological perspectives, each chapter explores the question of how mathematics comes to matter. Of interest to scholars across the usual disciplinary divides, this book tracks mathematics as a cultural activity, drawing connections with empirical practice. Unlike other books in this area, it is highly interdisciplinary, devoted to exploring the ontology of mathematics as it plays out in different contexts. This book will appeal to scholars who are interested in particular mathematical habits - creative diagramming, structural mappings, material agency, interdisciplinary coverings - that shed light on both mathematics and other disciplines. Chapters are also relevant to social sciences and humanities scholars, as each offers philosophical insight into mathematics and how we might live mathematically.

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Cornwall, or as it is sometimes obscurely referred to, Merry Jack. Though this isn't the usual side of the county the tourists, travellers and residents see. This is the real Cornwall, the strange and twisted nooks and crannies of the county's bizarre history - past, present and future. Following on from the bestselling Portico Strangest titles now comes a book devoted to England's gloriously coastal, yet most haunted, region. Located in the toes of the outstretched legs of Britain's old man, Cornwall is a county with more strangeness than you can shake a Cornish pasty at. Cornwall is an area of outstanding natural beauty, as well as outstanding strangness - from ye olde tales of plundering pirates to foulish ghosts drinking in local pubs right through to the most famous of all myths - the bizarre beast that forever stalks Bodmin Moor. Spooky. Cornwall's Strangest Tales is a treasure trove of the hilarious, the odd and the baffling - an alternative travel guide to some of the county's best-kept secrets. Read on, if you dare You have been warned. Word count: 35,000

This book provides an in-depth analysis of the unique structure of the Nigerian popular music industry. It explores the dissonance between copyright's thematic support for creative autonomy and the practical ways in which the law allows singer-songwriters' (performing authors') creative autonomy to be subverted in their contractual relationships with record labels. The book establishes the concept of creative autonomy for performing authors as a key criterion for sustainable economic development, and makes innovative legal and policy recommendations to help stakeholders preserve it.

A Cultural History of The Human Body presents an authoritative survey from ancient times to the present. This set of six volumes covers 2800 years of the human body as a physical, social, spiritual and cultural object. Volume 1: A Cultural History of the Human Body in Antiquity (750 BCE - 1000 CE) Edited by Daniel Garrison, Northwestern University. Volume 2: A Cultural History of the Human Body in The Medieval Age (500 - 1500) Edited by Linda Kalof, Michigan State University Volume 3: A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Renaissance (1400 - 1650) Edited by Linda Kalof, Michigan State University and William Bynum, University College London. Volume 4: A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Enlightenment (1600 - 1800) Edited by Carole Reeves, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London. Volume 5: A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Empire (1800 - 1920) Edited by Michael Sappol, National Library of Medicine in Washington, DC, and Stephen P. Rice, Ramapo College of New Jersey. Volume 6: A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Modern Age (1900-21st Century) Edited by Ivan Crozier, University of Edinburgh, and Chiara Beccalossi, University of Queensland. Each volume discusses the same themes in its chapters: 1. Birth and Death 2. Health and Disease 3. Sex and Sexuality 4. Medical Knowledge and Technology 5. Popular Beliefs 6. Beauty and Concepts of the Ideal 7. Marked Bodies I: Gender, Race, Class, Age, Disability and Disease 8. Marked Bodies II: the Bestial, the Divine and the Natural 9. Cultural Representations of the Body 10. The Self and Society This means readers can either have a broad overview of a period by reading a volume or follow a theme through history by reading the relevant chapter in each volume. Superbly illustrated, the full six volume set combines to present the most authoritative and comprehensive survey available on the human body through history.

This publication contributes to the serious games field by investigating original contributions and methods that use serious games in various domains. This comprehensive and timely publication works as an essential reference source, building on the available literature in the field of Serious Games for the economic and social development of countries while providing for further research opportunities in this dynamic and growing field. Thus, the book provides the opportunity for a reflection on this important issue, increasing the understanding of the importance of Serious Games in the context of organizations' improvements, providing relevant academic work, empirical research findings, and an overview of this relevant field of study. This text provides the resources necessary for policy makers, technology developers and managers to adopt and implement solutions for a more digital era.

This is a philosophical analysis of the 9/11 events against the ongoing historical background. This clearly written and accessible work presents a philosopher's response to the series of events known as '9/11' and the global culture in the United States - and global society - that followed. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the emerging post-9/11 culture, situating it in a broad context that includes politics, religious discourse, economic theory, and philosophical orientation. Before and After 9/11 reconstructs the events that led to and departed from the attacks on September 11, 2001. It criticizes the attempts to explain 9/11 by George W. Bush, his administration's neoconservatives, Samuel Huntington, and Bernard Lewis. It also pays particular attention to the importance of the economic dimension in the emergence of conflicts in an age of globalization. The aim is to provide a philosophical overview of 9/11, understood as a series of connected events within an ongoing historical context. This unique work will appeal to anyone seeking to understand the current world, including the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Get Your Shit Together is the first book that exclusively features recent artwork in color by beloved British artist David Shrigley. This volume celebrates Shrigley's absurd, deadpan sensibility through both his signature drawing style and accompanying text. Organized by chapters with titles such as Stupid, Nonsense, Dirt, Fear, Paranoia, Love, and Self Delusion, this collection is sure to delight die-hard Shrigley fans and new ones alike. This is the largest-format book to date on Shrigley's prolific work, and features design details such as a ribbon marker with one of his mordant sayings printed on it, as well as hand-written, humorous essays throughout.

Rural tourism marketing is a subject that remains significantly under-researched. Gunjan Saxena seeks to encourage a fuller understanding of rural tourism marketing by uncovering the lived experiences and enterprise of different actor groups as they respond to the impact of tourism on their communities and cultural identities. Marketing Rural Tourism presents actor narratives to reveal nuances inherent in their practices and perceptions as they develop, support or oppose tourism in their locality. By focusing on actors' experience and enterprise involved in the ongoing production, consumption and marketing of rural landscapes for tourism, this book enables an insight into varied storylines that underlie the processes of place making. Academics in the area of marketing and tourism as well as development studies will appreciate the contribution this book will make to the wider marketing discourse that circulates about rural destinations. The book will also be a valuable resource to undergraduate students looking to incorporate fresh conceptual insights into their projects, as well as postgraduate students looking to apply newer approaches to conceptualising tourism or place marketing.

The agricultural and food sectors have developed into a prominent industry, impacting economic markets on an international scale. In certain regions, there is a significant potential for creating increased competitive advantage in these business areas. Exploring the Global Competitiveness of Agri-Food Sectors and Serbia's Dominant Presence: Emerging Research and Opportunities includes academic coverage and perspectives on enhancing the competitiveness of the Serbian food industry in the global marketplace. Highlighting pertinent topics such as exports, international trade, and manufacturing considerations, this book is an ideal resource for academics, researchers, graduate students, and professionals actively involved in the agri-food industry.

This book explores the development of a range of cults of popular music as a response to changes in attitudes to meaning, spirituality and religion in society. At a time when fundamentalism is on the rise, traditional religions are in decline and postmodernity has challenged any system that claims to be all-defining, young people have left their traditional places of worship and set up their own, in clubs, at festivals and within music culture. "Pop Cults" investigates the ways in which popular music and its surrounding culture have become a primary site for the location of meaning, belief and identity. It provides an introduction to the history of the interactions of vernacular music and religion, and the role of music in religious culture. Rupert Till explores the cults of heavy metal, pop stars, club culture and virtual popular music worlds, investigating the sex, drug, local and death cults of the sacred popular, and their relationships with traditional religions. He concludes by discussing how and why popular music cultures have taken on many of the roles of traditional religions in contemporary society.