This book discusses opportunities and limitations to democratic participation in institutions and organizations across the life course. It demonstrates that democratic participation is not something that is learned once and for all and applied in formal political settings, but something that is lived every day throughout life in various contexts. Institutions and organizations frame human lives and strongly determine the ability to participate and co-determine their communities. They are places for learning, deliberation and the development of the common good. The book conceptually and empirically analyses the potential of democratic participation within various institutions. The contributions range from early childhood institutions, schools, youth programs, workplaces, and vocational education to cultural organizations and nursing homes for the elderly. The book thereby provides a cross-sectional and interdisciplinary knowledge base to inspire future research and practical efforts to promote democratic participation within and across institutions around the world.

Borders / Debordering: Topologies, Praxes, Hospitableness engages from interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives some of the most important issues of the present, which lay at the intersection of physical, epistemological, spiritual, and existential borders. The book addresses a variety of topics connected with the role of the body at the threshold between subjective identities and intersubjective spaces that are drawn in ontology, epistemology and ethics, as well as with borders inscribed in intersubjective, social, and political spaces (such as gender/sexuality/race, human/animal/nature/technology divisions). The book is divided in three sections, covering various phenomena of borders and their possible debordering. The first section offers insights into bordering topologies, from reflections on the U.S. border to the development of the concept of the "border" in ancient China. The second section is dedicated to practices as well as intellectual ontologies with practical implications bound up with borders in different cultural and social spheres - from Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar to contemporary photography with its implications for political systems and reflections on human/animal border. The third section covers reflections on hospitality that relate to migration issues, emerging material ethics, and aerial hospitableness.

The staggering rate of environmental pollution and animal abuse despite constant efforts to educate the public and raise awareness challenges the prevailing belief that the absence of serious action is a consequence of a poorly informed public. In recent decades alternative explanations of social and political inaction have emerged, including denialism. Challenging the information-deficit model, denialism proposes that people actively avoid unpleasant information that threatens their established worldviews, lifestyles, and identities. Environmental and Animal Abuse Denial: Averting Our Gaze analyzes how people avoid awareness of climate change, environmental pollution, animal abuse, and the animal industrial complex. The contributors examine the theory of denialism in regards to environmental pollution and animal abuse through a range of disciplines, including social psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, cultural history and law.