THE RICHARD & JUDY NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER 'A suspenseful epic' Daily Telegraph 'A triumph' Financial Times 'Heartbreaking' Mail on Sunday 'Deeply moving' Sunday Times Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry Rasheed. Nearly two decades later, a friendship grows between Mariam and a local teenager, Laila, as strong as the ties between mother and daughter. When the Taliban take over, life becomes a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear. Yet love can move a person to act in unexpected ways, and lead them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism.

Immigrant laborers who came to the New South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found themselves poised uncomfortably between white employers and the Black working class, a liminal and often precarious position. Campaigns to recruit immigrants primarily aimed to suppress Black agency and mobility. If that failed, both planters and industrialists imagined that immigrants might replace Blacks entirely. Thus, white officials, citizens, and employers embraced immigrants when they acted in ways that sustained Jim Crow. However, when they directly challenged established political and economic power structures, immigrant laborers found themselves ostracized, jailed, or worse, by the New South order. Both industrial employers and union officials lauded immigrants' hardworking and noble character when it suited their purposes, and both denigrated and racialized them when immigrant laborers acted independently. Jennifer E. Brooks's Resident Strangers restores immigrant laborers to their place in the history of the New South, considering especially how various immigrant groups and individuals experienced their time in New South Alabama. Brooks utilizes convict records, censuses, regional and national newspapers, government documents, and oral histories to construct the story of immigrants in New South Alabama. The immigrant groups she focuses on appeared most often as laborers in the records, including the Chinese, southern Italians, and the diverse nationals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, along with a sprinkling of others. Although recruitment crusades by Alabama's employers and New South boosters typically failed to bring in the vast numbers of immigrants they had envisioned, significant populations from around the world arrived in industries and communities across the state, especially in the coal- and ore-mining district of Birmingham. Resident Strangers reveals that immigrant laborers' presence and individual agency complicated racial categorization, disrupted labor relations, and diversified southern communities. It also presents a New South that was far from isolated from the forces at work across the nation or in the rest of the world. Immigrant laborers brought home to New South Alabama the turbulent world of empire building, deeply embedding the region in national and global networks of finance, trade, and labor migration.

This is the first book to capture the poignant stories of transnational African families and their use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in mediating their experiences of migration and caring across distance.

Transnational Families in Africa analyses the highs and lows of family separation as a result of migration in three contexts: migration within South Africa from rural to urban areas; migration from other African countries into South Africa; and middle-class South Africans emigrating to non-African countries. The book foregrounds the importance of kinship and support from extended family as well as both the responsibilities migatory family members feel and the experience of loss by those left behind.

Across the diverse circumstances explored in the book are similarities in migrants' strategies for keeping in touch, but also large differences in relation to access to ICTs and ease-of-use that highlight the digital divide and generational gaps. As elsewhere in the world, and in spite of the varied experiences in these kinship circles, the phenomenon that is the transnational family is showing no signs of receding.

This book provides a groundbreaking contribution to global debates on migration from the Global South.

Tucked into the files of Iowa State University's Cooperative Extension Service is a small, innocuous looking pamphlet with the title Lenders: Working through the Farmer-Lender Crisis. Cooperative Extension Service intended this publication to improve bankers' empathy and communication skills, especially when facing farmers showing "Suicide Warning Signs." After all, they were working with individuals experiencing extreme economic distress, and each banker needed to learn to "be a good listener." What was important, too, was what was left unsaid. Iowa State published this pamphlet in April of 1986. Just four months earlier, farmer Dale Burr of Lone Tree, Iowa, had killed his wife, and then walked into the Hills Bank and Trust company and shot a banker to death in the lobby before taking shots at neighbors, killing one of them, and then killing himself. The unwritten subtext of this little pamphlet was "beware." If bankers failed to adapt to changing circumstances, the next desperate farmer might be shooting.This was Iowa in the 1980s. The state was at the epicenter of a nationwide agricultural collapse unmatched since the Great Depression. In When a Dream Dies, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg examines the lives of ordinary Iowa farmers during this period, as the Midwest experienced the worst of the crisis. While farms failed and banks foreclosed, rural and small-town Iowans watched and suffered, struggling to find effective ways to cope with the crisis. If families and communities were to endure, they would have to think about themselves, their farms, and their futures in new ways. For many Iowan families, this meant restructuring their lives or moving away from agriculture completely. This book helps to explain how this disaster changed children, families, communities, and the development of the nation's heartland in the late twentieth century. Agricultural crises are not just events that affect farms. When a Dream Dies explores the Farm Crisis of the 1980s from the perspective of the two-thirds of the state's agricultural population seriously affected by a farm debt crisis that rapidly spiraled out of their control. Riney-Kehrberg treats the Farm Crisis as a family event while examining the impact of the crisis on mental health and food insecurity and discussing the long-term implications of the crisis for the shape and function of agriculture.

Concerns have arisen in recent decades about the impact of climate change on human mobility. Many people affected by climate change are forced or otherwise decide to migrate within or across international borders. Despite its clear importance, many questions remain open regarding the nature of the climate-migration nexus and its implications for laws and institutions. In the face of such uncertainty, this Research Handbook offers a comprehensive picture of laws and institutions relevant to climate migration and the multiple, often contradictory perspectives on the topic. Carefully edited chapters by leading scholars in the field provide a cross section of the various debates on what laws do, can do and should do in relation to the impacts of climate change on migration. A first part analyses the relations between climate change and migration. A second part explores how existing laws and institutions address the climate-migration nexus. In the final part, the chapters discuss possible ways forward. This timely Research Handbook provides much-needed insight into this complex issue for graduate and post-graduate students in climate change or migration law. It will also appeal to students and scholars in political science, international relations, environmental studies and migration studies, as well as policymakers and advocates. Contributors include: G. Appave, F. Biermann, I. Boas, M. Burkett, M. Byrne, C. Cournil, F. Crepeau, F. De Salles Cavedon-Capdeville, C. Farbotko, E. Ferris, F. Gemenne, K. Hansen, J. Hathaway, C. Hong, D. Ionesco, A.O. Jegede, S. Jodoin, S. Kagan, M. Leighton, S. Martin, B. Mayer, S. Mcinerney-Lankford, R. Mcleman, I. Millar, D. Mokhnacheva, C.T.M. Nicholson, E. Pires Ramos, A. Randall, A. Sironi, M. Traore Chazalnoel, C. Vlassopoulos, K. Wilson, K.M. Wyman

In today's world, it is crucial to understand how cities and urban spaces operate in order for them to continue to develop and improve. To ensure cities thrive, further study on past and current policies and practices is required to provide a thorough understanding. Urban Poetics and Politics in Contemporary South Asia and the Middle East examines the poetics and politics of city and urban spaces in contemporary South Asia and the Middle East and seeks to shed light on how individuals constitute, experience, and navigate urban spaces in everyday life. This book aims to initiate a multidisciplinary approach to the study of city life by engaging disciplines such as urban geography, gender studies, feminism, literary criticism, and human geography. Covering key topics such as racism, urban spaces, social inequality, and gender roles, this reference work is ideal for government officials, policymakers, researchers, scholars, practitioners, academicians, instructors, and students.

This Handbook discusses theoretical approaches to migration studies in general, as well as confronting various issues in international migration from a distinctive and unique international political economy perspective. With a focus on the relation between globalization and migration, the international political economy (IPE) theories of migration are systematically addressed. Original new contributions from leading migration scholars offer a complete overview of international migration. They examine migration as part of a global political economy whilst addressing the theoretical debates relating to the capacity of the state to control international migration and the so called 'policy gap' or 'gap hypothesis' between migration policies and their outcomes. An examination of the relationship between regional integration and migration, with examples from Europe, North America, the Middle East and North Africa, as well as South-East Asia - is also included. Aimed at political scientists and political economists with an interest in globalization and EU policymaking this collection will be accessible to students, academic and policymakers alike. Contributors: R.G. Anghel, A. Balch, M. Fauser, C. Finotelli, A. Geddes, W.J. Haller, F. Jurje, O. Korneev, S. Lavenex, A.I. Leon, S. McMahon, E. Nadalutti, H. Overbeek, F. Pasetti, H. Pellerin, M. Piracha, T. Randazzo, R. Roccu, M. Samers, G. Sciortino, K. Surak, L.S. Talani, R. Zapata-Barrero

Singapore's success as a global city is in no small part attributable to its stance on foreign labour and immigrants, illustrated by a largely welcoming but discerning immigration regime to fulfil vital socio-economic needs. However, this fairly liberal policy on immigration has been met with substantial disquiet over the last decade. Xenophobic tendencies have surfaced periodically and have been compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic.This edited volume spotlights these contemporary issues on immigrant integration in Singapore, and adopts a functional approach by explicitly bridging academic and practitioner perspectives. The chapters are organised into three sections. The first section on Challenges discusses various dominant trends - obstacles to immigrant integration based on ethnicity, culture and religion, and the fear and associated emotions that characterise reactions to immigration. The second section focuses on Communities, their perspectives and lived experiences in Singapore society. The latter differ substantially depending on migrant statuses and are contingent on social capital defined in relation to locals in the city-state. The last section seeks to illustrate the various Solutioning endeavours in tandem with the contentious nature of immigration. These concrete efforts range from ground-up initiatives, community-based collaborative approaches and government programming; all seeking to advance immigrant integration in Singapore.

Metropolis, Gotham City, Mega-City One, Panem's Capitol, the Sprawl, Caprica City-American (and Americanized) urban environments have always been a part of the fantastic imagination. Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror focuses on the American city as a fantastic geography constrained neither by media nor rigid genre boundaries. Fantastic Cities builds on a mix of theoretical and methodological tools that are drawn from criticism of the fantastic, media studies, cultural studies, American studies, and urban studies. Contributors explore cultural media across many platforms such as Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, the Arkham Asylum video games, the 1935 movie serial The Phantom Empire, Kim Stanley Robinson's fiction, Colson Whitehead's novel Zone One, the vampire films Only Lovers Left Alive and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Paolo Bacigalupi's novel The Water Knife, some of Kenny Scharf's videos, and Samuel Delany's classic Dhalgren. Together, the contributions in Fantastic Cities demonstrate that the fantastic is able to "real-ize" that which is normally confined to the abstract, metaphorical, and/or subjective. Consequently, both utopian aspirations for and dystopian anxieties about the American city become literalized in the fantastic city. Contributions by Carl Abbott, Jacob Babb, Marleen S. Barr, Michael Fuchs, John Glover, Stephen Joyce, Sarah Lahm, James McAdams, Cynthia J. Miller, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Chris Pak, Maria Isabel Perez Ramos, Stefan Rabitsch, J. Jesse Ramirez, A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Andrew Wasserman, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, and Robert Yeates.

This book examines language education policy in European migrant-hosting countries. By applying the Multiple Streams Framework to detailed case studies on Austria and Italy, it sheds light on the factors and processes that innovate education policy. The book illustrates an education policy design that values language diversity and inclusion, and compares underlying policymaking processes with less innovative experiences. Combining empirical analysis and qualitative research methods, it assesses the ways in which language is intrinsically linked to identity and political power within societies, and how language policy and migration might become a firmer part of European policy agendas. Sitting at the intersection between policy studies, language education studies and integration studies, the book offers recommendations for how education policy can promote a more inclusive society. It will appeal to scholars, practitioners and students who have an interest in policymaking, education policy and migrant integration.

Rural poverty encompasses a distinctive deprivation in quality of life related to a lack of educational support and resources as well as unique issues related to geographical, cultural, community, and social isolation. While there have been many studies and accommodations made for the impoverished in urban environments, those impoverished in rural settings have been largely overlooked and passed over by current policy. The Handbook of Research on Leadership and Advocacy for Children and Families in Rural Poverty is an essential scholarly publication that creates awareness and promotes action for the advocacy of children and families in rural poverty and recommends interdisciplinary approaches to support the cognitive, social, and emotional needs of children and families in poverty. Featuring a wide range of topics such as mental health, foster care, and public policy, this book is ideal for academicians, counselors, social workers, mental health professionals, early childhood specialists, school psychologists, administrators, policymakers, researchers, and students.

Population ageing poses a huge challenge to law and society, carrying important structural and institutional implications. This book portrays elder law as an emerging research discipline in the European setting in terms of both conceptual and theoretical perspectives as well as elements of the law. Providing a deepened understanding of population ageing in terms of vulnerability, intergenerational conflict and solidarity, expert contributors highlight the necessity for a contextualized ageing concept. As well as offering a comparative analysis of active ageing policies across the EU, this book examines a range of topics including age discrimination in employment and the freedom of movement of EU citizens from the ageing individual's point of view. It also goes on to describe elder care developments, discussing the ageing individual's autonomy in relation to both traditional inheritance rights and growing instances of dementia. Timely and engaging, this book will appeal to academic scholars and students in relevant areas of law as well as those studying across the social sciences. Exploring a broad range of socio-legal issues in relation to demographic ageing, it will also inform legal practitioners and policymakers alike. Contributors include: M. Axmin, A. Blackham, C. Brokelind, J. Fudge, E. Holm, A. Inghammar, M. Katzin, M. Kullmann, T. Mattsson, P. Norberg, A. Numhauser-Henning, H. Pettersson, M. Roennmar, E. Ryrstedt, K. Scott, E. Trolle OEnnerfors, C. Ulander-Wanman, J.J. Votinius, A. Zbyszewska