This is the first study to bring space into conversation with religious competition, conflict and violence in the contemporary world. Lily Kong and Orlando Woods argue that because space is both a medium and an outcome of religious activity, it is integral to understanding processes of religious competition, conflict and violence. The book explores how religious groups make claims to both religious and secular spaces, and examines how such claims are managed, negotiated and contested by the state and by other secular and religious agencies. It also examines how globalisation has given rise to new forms of religious competition, and how religious groups strengthen themselves through the development of social resilience, as well as contribute to resilient societies. Throughout the book, case studies from around the world are used to examine how religious competition and conflict intersect with space. The case studies include topical issues such as competing claims to the Temple Mount/Haram el-Sharif in Jerusalem, opposition to the "Ground Zero mosque" in New York City, and the regulation of religious conversion in India and Sri Lanka. By helping readers develop new perspectives on how religion works in and through space, Religion and Space: Competition, Conflict and Violence in the Contemporary World is an innovative contribution to the study of religion.

This unique collection highlights the importance of landscape, politics and piety to our understandings of religion and place. The geographies of religion have developed rapidly in the last couple of decades and this book provides both a conceptual framing of the key issues and debates involved, and rich illustrations through empirical case studies. The chapters span the discipline of human geography and cover contexts as diverse as veiling in Turkey, religious landscapes in rural Peru, and refugees and faith in South Africa. A number of prominent scholars and emerging researchers examine topical themes in each engaging chapter with significant foci being: religious transnationalism and religious landscapes; gendering of religious identities and contexts; fashion, faith and the body; identity, resistance and belief; immigrant identities, citizenship and spaces of belief; alternative spiritualities and places of retreat and enchantment. Together they make a series of important contributions that illuminate the central role of geography to the meaning and implications of lived religion, public piety and religious embodiment. As such, this collection will be of much interest to researchers and students working on topics relating to religion and place, including human geographers, sociologists, religious studies and religious education scholars.

Digital media is changing the ways in which religion is practiced, understood, proselytised and countered. Religious institutions and leaders use digital media to engage with their congregations who now are not confined to single locations and physical structures. The faithful are part of online communities which allow them a space to worship and to find fellowship. Migrant and mobile subjects thus are able to be connected to their faith -- whether home grown or emerging -- wherever they may be, providing them with an anchor in unfamiliar physical and cultural surroundings. As Asia rises, mobilities associated with Asian populations have escalated. The notion of 'Global Asia' is a reflection of this increased mobility, where Asia includes not only Asian countries as sites of political independence, but also the transnational networks of Asian trans/migrants, and the diasporic settlements of Asian peoples all over the world. This collection features cutting edge research by scholars across disciplines seeking to understand the role and significance of religion among transnational mobile subjects in this age of digital media, and in particular, as experienced in Global Asia.

Justin O'Connor and Lily Kong The cultural and creative industries have become increasingly prominent in many policy agendas in recent years. Not only have governments identified the growing consumer potential for cultural/creative industry products in the home market, they have also seen the creative industry agenda as central to the growth of external m- kets. This agenda stresses creativity, innovation, small business growth, and access to global markets - all central to a wider agenda of moving from cheap manufacture towards high value-added products and services. The increasing importance of cultural and creative industries in national and city policy agendas is evident in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, Australia, and New Zealand, and in more nascent ways in cities such as Chongqing and Wuhan. Much of the thinking in these cities/ countries has derived from the European and North American policy landscape. Policy debate in Europe and North America has been marked by ambiguities and tensions around the connections between cultural and economic policy which the creative industry agenda posits. These become more marked because the key dr- ers of the creative economy are the larger metropolitan areas, so that cultural and economic policy also then intersect with urban planning, policy and governance.

Contents:
Acknowledgements. Questions in a crisis: The contested meanings of globalisation in the Asia Pacific. Phillip Kelly and Kris Olds. Global Discourses. Reflections on golobalisation and its (il)logic(s). Bob Jessop. Globalism and the politics of place. Arif Dirlik. The globaisation of the system of business knowledge. Nigel Thrift. Resisting Globalisation: Environmental politics in Eastern Asia. James H. Mittelman. Regional reformations. The political economy of globalisation in East Asia: The Salience of 'Region Building'. Richard Higgott. INvesting in the future: East and Southeast Asian firms in the global economy. Peter Dicken and Henry Wai-chung Yeung. Rethinking globaisation: Re-articulating the spatial scales and temporal horizons of trans-border spaces. Ngai-Ling Sum. Reterritorializing the state. Servicing the global economy: reconfigures states and private agents. Saskia Sassen. Globalisation and the limits to national economic management. Cayetano Paderanga Jr. Global Lives. Class formation, hybridity and ethnification in declining global hegemonies. Jonathan Friedman. Citizens in Transnational nation-states: The Asian experience. Nina Glick Schiller. Globalisation, transmigration nd the renegotiation of ethnic identity. Lily Kong. Globalisation, Postcolonialism and new represenations of the pacific Asia Metropolis. Dean Forbes. References. Index.

Most books that analyse the crucial subject of globalisation only look at it from a western perspective. This is the first detailed study to look at globalisation specifically in the Asia-Pacific region. An impressive collection of leading, interdisciplinary scholars explore various dimensions of globalisation, and their relationship to development processes in the region.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference of Young Computer Scientists, Engineers and Educators, ICYCSEE 2015, held in Harbin, China, in January 2015. The 61 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 200 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics related to intelligent computation in Big Data era, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, algorithms, natural language processing, image processing, MapReduce, social network.

This unique collection highlights the importance of landscape, politics and piety to our understandings of religion and place. The geographies of religion have developed rapidly in the last couple of decades and this book provides both a conceptual framing of the key issues and debates involved, and rich illustrations through empirical case studies. The chapters span the discipline of human geography and cover contexts as diverse as veiling in Turkey, religious landscapes in rural Peru, and refugees and faith in South Africa. A number of prominent scholars and emerging researchers examine topical themes in each engaging chapter with significant foci being: religious transnationalism and religious landscapes; gendering of religious identities and contexts; fashion, faith and the body; identity, resistance and belief; immigrant identities, citizenship and spaces of belief; alternative spiritualities and places of retreat and enchantment. Together they make a series of important contributions that illuminate the central role of geography to the meaning and implications of lived religion, public piety and religious embodiment. As such, this collection will be of much interest to researchers and students working on topics relating to religion and place, including human geographers, sociologists, religious studies and religious education scholars.

Justin O'Connor and Lily Kong The cultural and creative industries have become increasingly prominent in many policy agendas in recent years. Not only have governments identified the growing consumer potential for cultural/creative industry products in the home market, they have also seen the creative industry agenda as central to the growth of external m- kets. This agenda stresses creativity, innovation, small business growth, and access to global markets - all central to a wider agenda of moving from cheap manufacture towards high value-added products and services. The increasing importance of cultural and creative industries in national and city policy agendas is evident in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, Australia, and New Zealand, and in more nascent ways in cities such as Chongqing and Wuhan. Much of the thinking in these cities/ countries has derived from the European and North American policy landscape. Policy debate in Europe and North America has been marked by ambiguities and tensions around the connections between cultural and economic policy which the creative industry agenda posits. These become more marked because the key dr- ers of the creative economy are the larger metropolitan areas, so that cultural and economic policy also then intersect with urban planning, policy and governance.

In this first book to explore the Chinese diaspora from geographical perspectives, leading scholars in the field consider the profound importance of meanings of place and the spatial processes of mobility and settlement for the Chinese overseas. They trace the Chinese diaspora everywhere it has become a significant force, from Southeast Asia to Oceania, North America, Latin America, and Europe. Providing an important historical perspective, the contributors analyze the sharp differences between sojourning Chinese prior to the 1960s and the transnational Chinese of the current era, especially in terms of spatial distribution, mobility, economic status, occupational structure, and identity formation. Anyone interested in the powerful phenomenon of Chinese migration will find this comprehensive work an invaluable resource.

Since the turn of the millennium it has become clear that the Asia-Pacific Region is, economically, the fastest growing continent in the world, and is likely to remain so for some time despite the setbacks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Asia-Pacific's share of the world's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) doubled from 15 per cent to 30 per cent between 1970 and 2017 and is projected to account for half of global GDP by 2050. With South East and South Asia also growing rapidly, with over half the world's population and three of the world's five largest economies, Asia is soon poised to home half of the world's middle class - a class that is both the driver and the product of higher education. The quality of a country's system of higher education may be seen both as a gauge of its current level of national development as well as of its future economic prospects. It is therefore natural that the putative "Asian Century" should generate interest in the region's higher education systems which, on the one hand, share common characteristics-a fixation with credentials and engineering, high technology (especially among male students), and business degrees-while at the same time are also highly differentiated, not only across countries but also within. As such, a better understanding of higher education achievements, failings, potential, and structural limitations in the Asia-Pacific Region is imperative. This handbook presents a number of significant country case-studies and documents cross-cutting trends relating to, among other things: the trilemma faced by governments juggling competing claims of access, accessible cost, and quality; the balance between teaching and research; the links between labour markets (demand) and higher education (supply); preferred fields of study and their consequences; the rise of the research university in Asia; the lure of institutions of international reputation within the region; new education technologies and their effects; and, trends in government policy within the wider region and sub-regions.

This is the first study to bring space into conversation with religious competition, conflict and violence in the contemporary world. Lily Kong and Orlando Woods argue that because space is both a medium and an outcome of religious activity, it is integral to understanding processes of religious competition, conflict and violence. The book explores how religious groups make claims to both religious and secular spaces, and examines how such claims are managed, negotiated and contested by the state and by other secular and religious agencies. It also examines how globalisation has given rise to new forms of religious competition, and how religious groups strengthen themselves through the development of social resilience, as well as contribute to resilient societies. Throughout the book, case studies from around the world are used to examine how religious competition and conflict intersect with space. The case studies include topical issues such as competing claims to the Temple Mount/Haram el-Sharif in Jerusalem, opposition to the "Ground Zero mosque" in New York City, and the regulation of religious conversion in India and Sri Lanka. By helping readers develop new perspectives on how religion works in and through space, Religion and Space: Competition, Conflict and Violence in the Contemporary World is an innovative contribution to the study of religion.

This book shows how power relations that define and challenge the concept of "nation" are played out in and through landscapes.

Has the era of globalization neutralized the institution of "nation?" This thought-provoking book focuses on attempts to build "nation" through landscape. Specifically, it explores strategies employed by Singapore, a multiracial society, to create a Singapore "nation" with an emphasis on the role of landscapes. As such, the authors cast a keen eye on religious buildings, public housing, heritage landscapes, and street name changes as tangible methods of nation-building in a postcolonial society.

The authors point out that notions of "identity" and "nation" are social constructs rooted in history. They then illustrate how "nation" and "national identity" are concepts that are negotiated and disputed by varied social, economic, and political groups -- some of which may actively resist powerful state-centrist attitudes. Throughout this work, the role of the landscape prevails both as a way to naturalize state ideologies and as a means of providing possibilities for reinterpretation in everyday life. Insightful and informative, this is a crucial reference for geographers as well as scholars of international political economy, postcolonial and cultural studies, and Asian history.