There's no escaping it: everyone experiences seasons of pain and despair.   In 2019, when Amber Haines resigned from her position as church curate and walked out the church doors for the last time, she entered her own season of pain and despair. That season taught her--and her husband, Seth Haines--that the journey toward hope starts with recognizing "the deep down things." In The Deep Down Things, Amber and Seth point to a simple truth: even in the darkest times, there are tangible signs of hope all around us. The authors demonstrate how tasting, touching, feeling, holding, and participating in these tangible acts of hope picks us up, builds our strength, and moves us into beauty, even in times of despair. They invite readers to participate with those signs of hope and thereby experience the divine love of God, even in the struggle of their everyday lives. A lifeline for those who desperately need it, this book helps readers overcome despair, find hope, and spread that hope to an aching world.

This book offers rich critical perspectives on the marketing of a variety of toys, brands, and product categories. Topics include marketing undertaken by specific children's toy brands such as American Girl, Barbie, Disney, GoldieBlox, Fisher-Price, and LEGO, and marketing trends characterizing broader toy categories such as on-trend grotesque toys; toy firearms; minimalist toys; toyetics; toys meant to offer diverse representation; STEM toys; and unboxing videos. Toy marketing warrants a sustained scholarly critique because of toys' cultural significance and their roles in children's lives, as well as the industry's economic importance. Discourses surrounding toys-including who certain toys are meant for and what various toys and brands can signify about their owners' identities-have implications for our understandings of adults' expectations of children and of broader societal norms into which children are being socialized.

Princesses today are significant figures in girls' culture in the United States and around the world. Although the reign of girls' princess culture has generated intense debate, this anthology is the first to bring together international and interdisciplinary perspectives on the multitude of princess cultures, continuously redrawn and recast by grownups and girls from the Ancien Regime to the New Millennium. Essays critically examine the gendered, racialized, classed, and ethnic meanings of royal figures and fairytale and pop culture princesses inscribed in folk tales, movies, cartoons, video games, dolls, and imitated in play and performance. Focusing on the representation and reception of the princess, this collection sheds new light on the position of princess cultures mediating the lives, imaginations, and identities of girls from toddlers to teenagers - and beyond.

Princesses today are significant figures in girls' culture in the United States and around the world. Although the reign of girls' princess culture has generated intense debate, this anthology is the first to bring together international and interdisciplinary perspectives on the multitude of princess cultures, continuously redrawn and recast by grownups and girls from the Ancien Regime to the New Millennium. Essays critically examine the gendered, racialized, classed, and ethnic meanings of royal figures and fairytale and pop culture princesses inscribed in folk tales, movies, cartoons, video games, dolls, and imitated in play and performance. Focusing on the representation and reception of the princess, this collection sheds new light on the position of princess cultures mediating the lives, imaginations, and identities of girls from toddlers to teenagers - and beyond.

This book offers rich critical perspectives on the marketing of a variety of toys, brands, and product categories. Topics include marketing undertaken by specific children's toy brands such as American Girl, Barbie, Disney, GoldieBlox, Fisher-Price, and LEGO, and marketing trends characterizing broader toy categories such as on-trend grotesque toys; toy firearms; minimalist toys; toyetics; toys meant to offer diverse representation; STEM toys; and unboxing videos. Toy marketing warrants a sustained scholarly critique because of toys' cultural significance and their roles in children's lives, as well as the industry's economic importance. Discourses surrounding toys-including who certain toys are meant for and what various toys and brands can signify about their owners' identities-have implications for our understandings of adults' expectations of children and of broader societal norms into which children are being socialized.

Happiness has been used as guide to the good life for thousands of years. It can, however, just as easily lead us awry as direct us towards a life well lived. We must learn to see happiness as something more nuanced and differentiated. By doing so the target we set up can bring us much more life satisfaction. This is not to deny the importance of happiness, we just need to see our aim more clearly. Many attempts to deal with the vast amount of psychological pain that exists in the world today have been to look at what causes distress. A new field of positive psychology has emerged which then tries to look at the issue from the other end of the telescope and look at what makes people happy. This book is an attempt to understand happiness philosophically: what it is, how we are responsible for it and what we can do to get more of it. Happiness is our alarm to detect good. These alarms, though, are often set to detect what is bad, so we don't even see what is good. We also often see good as something we need to possess and control to extract that feeling of happiness. We then expunge any feeling of good. By changing how we view good, we can change our experience of happiness to something more controllable and enduring.

This collection examines LEGO from an array of critical and cultural studies approaches, foregrounding the world-renowned brand's ideological power and influence. Given LEGO's status as the world's largest toy manufacturer and a transnational multimedia conglomerate, Cultural Studies of Lego: More Than Just Bricks considers LEGO media's cultural messages; creativity with and within LEGO artifacts; and diversity within the franchise, including gender and race representation. The chapters' in-depth analyses of topics including LEGO films, marketing tactics, play sets, novelizations, and fans offer compelling insights relevant to those interested in the LEGO brand and broader trends in the children's popular culture market alike.

This book continues the ICTMA tradition of influencing teaching and learning in the application of mathematical modelling. Each chapter shows how real life problems can be discussed during university lectures, in school classrooms and industrial research. International experts contribute their knowledge and experience by providing analysis, insight and comment whilst tackling large and complex problems by applying mathematical modelling. This book covers the proceedings from the Twelfth International Conference on the Teaching of Mathematical Modelling and Applications.
Covers the proceedings from the Twelfth International Conference on the Teaching of Mathematical Modelling and ApplicationsContinues the ICTMA tradition of influencing teaching and learning in the application of mathematical modellingShows how real life problems can be discussed during university lectures, in school classrooms and industrial research