This fascinating book looks at the select group of third parties that have made a real difference in U.S. politics and governance. Third parties have been a fixture in the American political landscape since the beginning of the two-party system. More than 300 of these groups have surfaced, but only a handful have made a real difference. Third-Party Matters: Politics, Presidents, and Third Parties in American History tells the intriguing stories of those 11 parties, starting with the antislavery Liberty Party of 1840. The parties deemed worthy of inclusion were selected because they met at least one of three criteria. They were spoilers who changed the outcome of an election, they had an important influence on government policy or the future of politics, and/or they had popular appeal, attracting at least ten percent of the vote. This investigation reveals the background behind each party's rise, what it stood for, who its leaders were—including larger-than-life personalities like Teddy Roosevelt, George Wallace, and Ross Perot—and the ultimate outcome of the election(s) in which the party participated.

This book focuses on integrity throughout the PhD journey and beyond, and is organised around two main themes: (1) integrity in relation to the capabilities developed by doctoral candidates for professional practice; and (2) integrity and coherence at the PhD system level. The working methods of key participants such as PhD candidates, supervisors, university managers, government agencies and politicians are central to achieving integrity goals within PhD programmes. In this context, a number of constructs are developed that inform the practice-based elements of the book in relation to conducting doctoral research, research supervision, academic writing, and research training support systems; in particular, these include our Moral Compass Framework for professional integrity, notions of collective morality, decision-making when faced with 'wicked' problems, connected moral capability and our double-helix model of capability development, negotiated sense in contrast with common sense, completion mindsets and contexts, mindfulness, liminality, and mutual catalysis in joint authorship. While the data the book employs stems from practice-led research within the Australian doctoral system, the conclusions drawn are of global relevance. Throughout the book, wherever appropriate, comparisons are made between the Australian context and other contexts, such as the doctoral systems of the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.

This book presents modern Bayesian analysis in a format that is accessible to researchers in the fields of ecology, wildlife biology, and natural resource management. Bayesian analysis has undergone a remarkable transformation since the early 1990s. Widespread adoption of Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques has made the Bayesian paradigm the viable alternative to classical statistical procedures for scientific inference. The Bayesian approach has a number of desirable qualities, three chief ones being: i) the mathematical procedure is always the same, allowing the analyst to concentrate on the scientific aspects of the problem; ii) historical information is readily used, when appropriate; and iii) hierarchical models are readily accommodated. This monograph contains numerous worked examples and the requisite computer programs. The latter are easily modified to meet new situations. A primer on probability distributions is also included because these form the basis of Bayesian inference. Researchers and graduate students in Ecology and Natural Resource Management will find this book a valuable reference.

Once before, as it now is again, pragmatism was a transformative, world-wide intellectual movement that championed a new paradigm of how we should think and act in order to meet the challenges of the modern sciences, frame inclusive and democratic public policy, and teach ethical habits of inclusive, meaning-filled, growth-fostering daily living. During pragmatism's time of eclipse after World War II, Richard J. Bernstein and a few other stubborn visionaries struggled to keep its embers alive while successfully steering philosophy out of its "linguistic turn." In "The Pragmatic Turn," Bernstein reflects on the lessons classical pragmatism can still teach us, criticizes the ideas of some leading contemporary thinkers, and calls younger scholars to join him in working on key philosophical issues of the present and the future.
"Richard J. Bernstein and the Pragmatist Turn in Contemporary Philosophy: Rekindling Pragmatism's Fire" is the response of twelve younger critics - some fresh voices, some already well-known - and Bernstein's response to each of them. It is a lively, accessible, inter-generational conversation that exemplifies pragmatism's spirit, including discussions of classical pragmatists like Peirce, James, Dewey, Mead, and Locke, and contemporary pragmatists like Putnam, Rorty, Brandom, and Habermas.

Britain remains mired in the most severe and prolonged economic crisis that it has faced since the 1930s. What would it take to find a new, more stable and more sustainable growth model for Britain in the years ahead? This important volume written by a number of influential commentators seeks to provide some answers.

Diversity is an unavoidable aspect of twenty-first century living. The authors in this volume engage in cross-difference conversations with other thinkers from earlier periods and other philosophical traditions in order to reconstruct pragmatism and cosmopolitanism in ways that are more attuned to our lived experience of diversity.

"Political Communications" offer a unique insight into the 2005 British General Election from the perspectives of those responsible for organizing, reporting, and understanding the campaign. It contains definitive accounts of what happened from those most intimately involved in preparing the main party strategies as well as leading academic, media and polling experts.

Does the novel have a future? Questions of this kind, which are as old as the novel itself, acquired a fresh urgency at the end of the twentieth-century with the rise of new media and the relegation of literature to the margins of American culture. As a result, anxieties about readership, cultural authority, and literary value have come to preoccupy a second generation of postmodern novelists. Through close analysis of several major novels of the past decade-including works by Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Kathryn Davis, Jonathan Franzen, and Richard Powers-Late Postmodernism examines the forces shaping contemporary literature and the remarkable strategies American writers have adopted to make sense of their place in the culture.

In August 2008, long-standing tensions in the Caucasus region came to a head when Georgia dispatched troops into the de facto independent region of South Ossetia, with a view to re-establishing Georgian sovereignty over the area. In response, Russia launched a large-scale military intervention into the state of Georgia. Their use of force went beyond the boundaries of South Ossetia, into another breakaway region, Abkhazia, and also into Georgia Proper. In this volume, world-renowned scholars address multiple dimensions of that violent conflict and its aftermath, from the use of force to human rights and from transnational litigation to the use of international law 'rhetoric'. Drawing on a range of perspectives from International Law, as well as International Relations, the book probes the key issues arising from the particulars of the 2008 conflict and explores their wider implications for an international legal order based on the rule of law. This book is indispensable reading for all interested in the Euro-Asian region, and anyone searching for concrete examples with regard to the way that international law works today when inter-state conflicts erupt.

What happened to beauty? How did the university literature classroom turn into a seminar on politics? Focusing on such writers as Don DeLillo, Virginia Woolf, and James Merrill, this book examines what has been lost to literature as a discipline, and to literary criticism as a practice, as a result of efforts to reduce the aesthetic to the ideological. Green-Lewis and Soltan celebrate the return of beauty as a subject in its own right to literary studies, a return all the more urgent given beauty's ability to provide not merely consolation but a sense of order and control in the context of a threatening political world.

This book draws together a collection of essays looking at the ways in which charters and charter scholarship in different areas of Britain and Ireland, highlighting comparisons and contrasts in charter production and use. The book shows the crucial importance of charters as sources for understanding the history of royal administration and, more broadly, the perceptions and portrayals of kingly power, as well as developments in written culture.

As the concept of community resilience moves from the margins of practice and theoretical research to more mainstream scholarship, critical issues of conceptualization and use emerge. This is particularly true at the intersection of community development practice and community resilience theory. This book teases out limitations with current conceptualizations of community resilience, offers enhanced and alternative conceptualizations, and presents compelling case studies of new conceptualizations in action. This book is a starting place for scholarly conversations about the role of community resilience in community development practice. The frameworks presented here, will continue to gain more support in academic and non-academic arenas as resilience rhetoric increases in popularity. However, it is crucial for community practitioners to use these frameworks to actively cultivate resilience in their communities by building adaptive capacity in systematic ways. To move the field of community resilience forward, it is critical to understand the nuances of context and conditions in communities and how broader conceptualizations of resilience account for and utilize context to build adaptive capacity. This book was originally published as a special issue in the journal Community Development.

Green sheds light onto the mercurial and ill-defined boundaries of institutional governance within China’s unique system of higher education, a national system that remains misunderstood by scholars who continue to position it as little more than a research arm of the party/state. Through a synthesis of systems theory, complexity theory, and institutional logics, Green provides a relational accounting of "Higher Education with Chinese Characteristics" – a complex, adaptive social system whose paradoxical modernization ideology of pragmatic instrumentalism, in conjunction with a centralized-decentralized governance model, foments rational chaos at the institutional level. Specifically, his book highlights the concept of rational chaos – an observable phenomenon of evolutionary emergence experienced by subaltern actors engaged with the confusing and often paradoxical institutional logics of meso/micro-level governance. Moreover, developed through in-depth narrative interviews, Green’s conceptualization of collective-individualism provides a glimpse into the diverse patterns of identity that have developed within a single institutional governance context. These discrete identity formations, patterned through varying understandings of individual self-determinism, collective role fulfillment, norms and structures of governance, and subsequent changemaking efforts, call into question culturally deterministic research surrounding self-mastery, institutional autonomy, and academic freedom within the Chinese higher education context. His book highlights a subaltern institutional lifeworld accounting of higher education governance that will speak to anyone grappling with neoliberal commodification, managerialism, academic nationalism and the increasing onset of transnational academic (im)mobility. It is ideal for students and scholars of international comparative education, higher education governance, and Chinese studies.

MicroRNAs constitute a particularly important class of small RNAs given their abundance, broad phylogenetic conservation and strong regulatory effects, with plant miRNAs uniquely divulging their ancient evolutionary origins and their strong post-transcriptional regulatory effects. In Plant MicroRNAs: Methods and Protocols, experts in the field present chapters that focus on the identification, validation, and characterization of the miRNA class of RNAs, and address important aspects about heterochromatic small interfering RNAs. In addition, the methods contained in this volume emphasize miRNA analyses, but also include ways to distinguish one class of small RNAs from another. As a volume in the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology (TM) series, chapters include brief introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials and reagents, step-by-step, readily reproducible laboratory protocols, and notes on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls. Authoritative and easy to use, Plant MicroRNAs: Methods and Protocols provides the research community with a set of protocols that will help advance vital miRNA research for all plant species, both in typical model species and non-model species alike.