This book provides a concise and comprehensive description of all of the borders of every country in the contemporary world, including physical boundaries, their historical evolution, and border-related conflicts with other countries. Nation Shapes: The Story behind the World's Borders examines the importance of country boundaries, the disconnects between these borders, related factors such as cultures, religions, and economies, and how conflicts over boundaries between neighboring countries are articulated. The book is organized geographically and by region of the world: the Americas, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, East and Southeast Asia, and Australia and Oceania. It provides comprehensive descriptions of the boundaries of each country in the world, the historical evolution of these boundaries, and current and potential future boundary disputes and conflicts. While the work contains an entry for each country, the emphasis is on countries of major importance in the modern global economy.

This unique collection of 12 research projects carried out by experienced practitioners in the play sector in the UK and USA puts forward a range of perspectives on children's play and adults' relationships with it. Drawing on a diverse range of research methodologies, the studies consider adults' memories of play; the co-production of spaces where children can play (in adventure playgrounds, out of school clubs, children's zoos, children's museums and public space); therapeutic approaches to playwork; playwork and wellbeing; supporting the play of severely disabled children and young people; play and contemporary art practice; and children's use of technology in a playground. Offering a fresh look beyond the dominant singular voice of developmental psychology, this book is essential reading for anyone studying or working with children at play.

Presents an Integrated Approach, Providing Clear and Practical Guidelines Are you a student facing your first serious research project? If you are, it is likely that you'll be, firstly, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task, and secondly, lost as to how to go about it. What you really need is a guide to walk you through all aspects of the research project, from planning and conducting your research project to writing and presenting it. Guide to Research Projects for Engineering Students: Planning, Writing and Presenting is the guide you need to do the job efficiently. Specifically Designed with Engineering and Technical Science Students in Mind The book is organized into three sections, broken down into concise chapters that focus on a specific topic and the skills required. The section on planning shows you how to choose a project, research a topic, write a project proposal, plan the project, select methods and methodologies, and keep records. The section on writing provides help on writing the different sections of a research report as well as introduces you to the strategies and language conventions required for writing an effective research report. Finally, the section on presenting covers creating effective figures and layout, preparing for a project presentation, and the dos and don'ts in delivering a presentation. Advice on how to use IT tools effectively is given throughout the book. Contains highly practical content-includes tips on how to conduct research, write it up effectively, and avoid common errors and pitfalls in grammar and style Offers guidance on using IT tools (which are indispensable in research) Includes pertinent examples of best practices on conducting research and research writing The authors have drawn on their many years of experience teaching engineering students, either in supervising engineering students in their research projects or teaching technical communication skills.

First published Open Access under a Creative Commons license as What is Rhythmanalysis?, this title is now also available as part of the Bloomsbury Research Methods series. In recent years, there has been growing interest in Henri Lefebvre's posthumously published volume, Rhythmanalysis. For Lefebvre and subsequent scholars, rhythmanalysis is a research strategy which offers a means of thinking space and time together in the study of everyday life, and this remains its strength and appeal. This book addresses the task of how to do rhythmanalysis. It discusses the history and development of rhythmanalysis from Lefebvre to the present day in a range of fields including cultural history and studies of place, work and nature. For Lefebvre, it is necessary to be 'grasped by' a rhythm at a bodily level in order to grasp it. And yet we also need critical distance to fully understand it. Rhythmanalysis is therefore both corporeal and conceptual. This book considers how the body is directly deployed as a research tool in rhythmanalytical research as well as how audio-visual methods can get at rhythm beyond the capacity of the senses to perceive it. In particular, the book includes detailed discussion of research on different forms of mobility - from driving to dancing - and on the social life of markets - from finance to fish. Dawn Lyon highlights the gains, limitations and lively potential of rhythmanalysis for spatially, temporally and sensually attuned practices of research. This engaging text will be of interest to students and researchers in sociology, criminology, socio-legal studies, geography, urban studies, architecture, anthropology, economics and cultural studies.

This book discusses salient moments of multilingual encounters and brings together contributions focused on the interplay between language use by individuals and societies, and language-related inequalities or opportunities for speakers. The chapters demonstrate how biographical and speaker-centred approaches can contribute to an understanding of linguistic diversity, how researchers can empirically account for lived experiences of languages, and how such accounts are embedded in a larger discussion on social (in)equality. Together the chapters make a powerful case for the importance of speaker-centred methodologies in multilingual and multilingualism research. The book is a rich source of theoretical and methodological reflections and will thus be a valuable resource for both experienced researchers and students beginning to explore biographical research methods.

Educational research is widely believed to be essentially empirical, consisting mainly of collecting and analysing data, with randomised control trials as the 'gold standard'. This book argues that good educational research is often philosophical in nature. Offering a critical overview of the current state of educational research, the authors argue that there are two factors in particular that distort it. One is that throughout the world it is expected to serve the interests of the state in securing educational improvements, as measured by standardised examination results, and to demonstrate 'scientific' credentials sufficient to guarantee absence of ideological bias and carry conviction. The other is that learning to do educational research is generally seen as a matter of being trained in empirical 'research methods'. The authors demonstrate, by contrast, that good educational research needs the rigorous thinking characteristic of philosophy, and that philosophical treatments themselves sometimes constitute such research.

This book presents different research designs, their respective purposes and merits as well as their underlying assumptions. Research designs are characterised by a certain combination of knowledge aims and strategies for data production. An adequate design is the key to carrying out a successful research project. Nevertheless, the literature on design is scarce, compared to the literature on methods. This book clarifies the basic distinction between variable-oriented designs and case designs, and proceeds to integrated, comparative and intervention-oriented designs. A step-by-step guide to the design process and the choices to make is also included. The book's clear style makes it an excellent guide for master students and PhD students doing their first research exercises, while it is also useful for more experienced researchers who want to broaden their design repertoire and keep up to recent innovations in the field of research design.

In the study of European politics and society ever-greater importance is attached to the role of ideational factors such as identity and discourse. The editor brings together specialists from critical discourse analysis and critical approaches to communications, history, literature, cultural studies, media, sociology, politics and International Relations to discuss the discursive construction of ethnic, national and regional identities and analyse how specific identity discourses condition and constrain knowledge and action with regard to various socio-political issues in Europe.

Rethinking Research in the Art Museum presents an original and radical perspective on how research can function as an agent of change in art museums today. The book analyses a range of art organisations and draws on numerous interviews with museum professionals to outline the limitations of existing models of museum research. Arguing for a more democratic formulation in tune with the current needs and ambitions of the art institution, Emily Pringle puts forward a framework for practitioner-led, co-produced research that redefines how knowledge is created in the museum. Recognising that museums today negotiate multiple agendas, the book outlines the value of constructing the art museum professional as a practitioner researcher and their work as a mode of practice-based research, be they educators, archivists, curators or conservators. Locating these arguments within the framework of new museology, critical pedagogy, professional and organisational studies and epistemology, the book offers insights and guidance for those interested in how art museums function and the role research plays within these complex institutions. Rethinking Research in the Art Museum provides a timely and important resource for museum professionals and scholars, students, artists and community members. It should be of particular interest to those invested in exploring how art museums can continue to make the most of their unique resources, whilst becoming more collaborative, inclusive and relevant to the twenty-first century.

Cause is a problematic concept in social science, as in all fields of knowledge. We organise information in terms of cause and effect to impose order on the world, but this can impede a more sophisticated understanding. In his latest book, Richard Ned Lebow reviews understandings of cause in physics and philosophy and concludes that no formulation is logically defensible and universal in its coverage. This is because cause is not a feature of the world but a cognitive shorthand we use to make sense of it. In practice, causal inference is always rhetorical and must accordingly be judged on grounds of practicality. Lebow offers a new approach - 'inefficient causation' - that is constructivist in its emphasis on the reasons people have for acting as they do, but turns to other approaches to understand the aggregation of their behaviour. This novel approach builds on general understandings and idiosyncratic features of context.

First published Open Access under a Creative Commons license as What is Inclusive Research?, this title is now also available as part of the Bloomsbury Research Methods series. This book describes and defines inclusive research, outlining how to recognize it, understand it, do it, and know when it is done well. In doing so it addresses the areas of overlap and distinctiveness in relation to participatory, emancipatory, user-led and partnership research as well as exploring the various practices encompassed within each of these inclusive approaches. The author, Melanie Nind, focuses on how and why more inclusive approaches to research have evolved. She positions inclusive research within the key debates and shifts in policy, defines key ideas and terms, discusses the contested nature of inclusive research and illustrates a range of approaches using exemplars. The aim is to discuss the range of challenges involved and to examine the degree to which these challenges have so far been met.

This book presents an overview of the wide variety of digital genres used by researchers to produce and communicate knowledge, perform new identities and evaluate research outputs. It explores the role of digital genres in the repertoires of genres used by local communities of researchers to communicate both locally and globally, both with experts and the interested public, and sheds light on the purposes for which researchers engage in digital communication and on the semiotic resources they deploy to achieve these purposes. The authors discuss the affordances of digital genres but also the challenges that they pose to researchers who engage in digital communication. The book explores what researchers can do with these genres, what meanings they can make, who they interact with, what identities they can construct and what new relations they establish, and, finally, what language(s) they deploy in carrying out all these practices.

This book offers a unique understanding of how researchers' linguistic resources, and the languages they use in the research process, are often politically and structurally shaped and constrained, with implications for the reliability of the research. The chapters are written by both experienced and novice researchers, who examine how they negotiated the use of their own, and others', linguistic and communicative resources when undertaking their research in politically-charged, and linguistically and culturally diverse contexts. The contributing authors are either from the Global South, or engaged in work which is contextualised within the Global South; or they face linguistic structural hegemonies in the Global North which challenge their research processes. They utilise diverse theoretical, methodological and disciplinary approaches to produce a collection of engaging and accessible accounts of researching multilingually in their contexts. These accounts will help readers to make theoretically and methodologically informed choices about the political dimensions of languages in their own research when researching multilingually.

This book offers a unique understanding of how researchers' linguistic resources, and the languages they use in the research process, are often politically and structurally shaped and constrained, with implications for the reliability of the research. The chapters are written by both experienced and novice researchers, who examine how they negotiated the use of their own, and others', linguistic and communicative resources when undertaking their research in politically-charged, and linguistically and culturally diverse contexts. The contributing authors are either from the Global South, or engaged in work which is contextualised within the Global South; or they face linguistic structural hegemonies in the Global North which challenge their research processes. They utilise diverse theoretical, methodological and disciplinary approaches to produce a collection of engaging and accessible accounts of researching multilingually in their contexts. These accounts will help readers to make theoretically and methodologically informed choices about the political dimensions of languages in their own research when researching multilingually.

Higher education research is a developing field internationally, which is attracting more and more researchers from a great variety of disciplinary backgrounds within and beyond higher education institutions. As such, it is an arena within which a wide range of theories, methods and methodologies is being applied. This volume of Theory and Method in Higher Education Research contains contemporary contributions to international debates regarding the application and development of theory and methodology in researching higher education. Amongst the theories discussed are actor-network theory, institutional logics, strategic positioning and threshold concepts. In terms of method and methodology, contributions consider validity in qualitative research, measuring competences, international-comparative research, shadowing, participatory research and participant-centred approaches to interviewing.

This collection showcases the diversity and disciplinary breadth of small stories research, highlighting the growing critical mass of scholarship on small stories and its reach beyond discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives. The volume both takes stock of and seeks to advance the development of small stories research by Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Michael Bamberg, as a counterpoint to conventional models in narrative studies, one which has accounted for "atypical" yet salient activities in everyday life, such as fragmentation and open-endedness, anchoring onto the present, and co-constructive dimensions in stories and identities. With data from different languages and contexts, emphasis is placed on the analytical aspects of the paradigm toward producing models for the analysis of structures, textual and interactional choices, and genres of small stories. Chapters on the role and commodification of small stories in digital environments reflect on the paradigm’s recent extension to the analysis of social media communication. This book will appeal to scholars interested in narrative inquiry and narrative analysis, in such fields as sociolinguistics, literary studies, communication studies, and biographical studies.

This open access book discusses challenges in school improvement research and different methodological approaches that have the potential to foster school improvement research. Research on school improvement and accountability analysis places high demands on a study's design and method. The potential of combining the depth of case studies with the breath of quantitative measures and analyses in a mixed-methods design seems very promising. Consequently, the focus of the book lies on innovative methodological approaches. The book chapters address design, measurement, and analysis developments as well as theoretical and conceptual developments. The relevance of the research presented in the chapters for educational accountability is discussed in the book's discussion chapter. More specifically, authors present one specific innovative methodological approach and clarify that approach with a concrete example in the context of school improvement, based on empirical data when possible. In this way, this book helps researchers designing complex useful studies.

This handbook offers a contemporary and comprehensive review of critical research theory and methodology. Showcasing the work of contemporary critical researchers who are harnessing and building on a variety of methodological tools, this volume extends beyond qualitative methodology to also include critical quantitative and mixed-methods approaches to research. The critical scholars contributing to this volume are influenced by a diverse range of education disciplines, and represent multiple countries and methodological backgrounds, making the handbook an essential resource for anyone doing critical scholarship. The book moves from the theoretical to the specific, examining various paradigms for engaging in critical scholarship, various methodologies for doing critical research, and the political, ethical, and practical issues that arise when working as a critical scholar. In addition to mapping the field, contributions synthesize literature, offer concrete examples, and explore relevant contexts, histories, assumptions, and current practices, ultimately fostering generative thinking that contributes to future methodological and theoretical breakthroughs. New as well as seasoned critical scholars will find within these pages exciting new ideas, challenging questions, and insights that spur the continuous evolution and grow the influence of critical research methods and theories in the education and human disciplines.

In competitive and contested democratic elections, insuring integrity is critical. Evaluating Elections shows why systematic analysis and reporting of election performance is important and how data-driven performance management can be used by election officials to improve elections. The authors outline how performance management systems can function in elections and their benefits for voters, candidates and political parties. Journalists, election administrators and even candidates often ask whether recent elections were run well, whether there were problems in the administration of a particular state's elections and how well elections were run across the country. The authors explain that such questions are difficult to answer because of the complexity of election administration and because there is currently no standard or accepted framework to assess the general quality of an election.

D-scoring Method of Measurement presents a unified framework of classical and latent measurement referred to as D-scoring method of measurement (DSM). Provided are detailed descriptions of DSM procedures and illustrative examples of how to apply the DSM in various scenarios of measurement. The DSM is designed to combine merits of the traditional CTT and IRT for the purpose of transparency, ease of interpretations, computational simplicity of test scoring and scaling, and practical efficiency, particularly in large-scale assessments. Through detailed descriptions of DSM procedures, this book shows how practical applications of such procedures are facilitated by the inclusion of operationalized guidance for their execution using the computer program DELTA for DSM-based scoring, equating, and item analysis of test data. In doing so, the book shows how DSM procedures can be readily translated into computer source codes for other popular software packages such as R. D-scoring Method of Measurement equips researchers and practitioners in the field of educational and psychological measurement with a comprehensive understanding of the DSM as a unified framework of classical and latent scoring, equating, and psychometric analysis.

Silence is crucial to our social world. Responding to the growing scholarly interest in social sciences and humanities for more in-depth engagements with social silence, this book explores what it means to trace silences and to include traces of silences in our scholarly representations. What qualifies as silence, and how does it relate to articulation, to voice, visibility and representation? How can silences be sensed and experienced viscerally as well as narratively? And how do we think with and interpret silences in the face of potential unknowability? Grounded in ethnographic research in the Netherlands, Israel, Turkey, China, and Indonesia, the chapters all contribute to a theorization of silence that embraces multivocality, unintelligibility and uncertainty of interpretation. As a collection of cutting-edge scholarly work at the intersection of anthropology and history, Tracing Silences argues for an in-depth engagement with the unspeakable and unspoken, through a range of modes and methods, and in the historical, social, and political ways in which they emerge and are enacted in the particularities of people's lives. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of history, anthropology, sociology, political science and archival studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.

This book examines some of the major and most commonly used methods and statistics necessary for social science research. It is meant primarily for the beginners, and hence does not require any prior training in research methodology or statistics. The methods discussed include aggregate data analysis, the method of survey research, experimental and quasi-experimental research designs, participant observation, content analysis, and focus groups study. In a separate chapter the issue of quantitative and qualitative research methods and their uses has been discussed. An attempt has been made to assess these methods especially from the point of view of their adoption and application by social scientists working in the developing economies. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan or Bhutan)

In this book, Stefan Battle weaves together autoethnographic narrative and ethnographic performance material from his own life and those of four other Black men, to show the untold impact of racial trauma on these everyday lives. By engaging readers with these experiences, stories and pain, the book aims to help to stop racial trauma and heal the race-based grief of the many Black men who need to speak out against racial injustice United States. Battle organizes the book as a performative account of a one-day workshop that he might teach to college students or other adults. He uses individual activities including an interview with a White woman regarding her relationship to race and racism, a staged reading in which five Black men share their stories, an audience discussion about race and racism, and Battle’s performative talk, sharing the author’s desire for people of all races, to self-reflect and then talk among themselves about race and racism. Battle’s powerful book reveals that each Black man’s unique story is important and that understanding something of a person’s hidden context for processing the traumas of racism can lead to new understanding and healing. To this end, Battle examines issues such as Black men's mental health, and the wider societal systemic racism in the US that provokes tension and harm to the racial victimization of Black men. Suitable for students and scholars of qualitative research and autoethnography in the Social Sciences, Communication Studies, Education, Social Work, and Africana or Black Studies, this book will also be of interest to anyone seeking to better understand and engage with the Black male experience in the US.

• First book that considers research methods within the luxury context. • Each aspect is supported by real-life case studies and examples from international luxury brands. • Pedagogy to aid learning is integrated throughout, including review challenges and problem-solving exercises. • Supplemented by online resources, including chapter-by-chapter PowerPoint slides.