Open each window in this magical advent calendar to discover a story or activity book hidden behind it. There are 12 magical Sticker Dolly Story books featuring fairies, mermaids and unicorns, and 12 little activity books, including drawing, doodling, puzzles and three sticker books.

Fiona Watt (Author)
Fiona Watt is an Editorial Director and writer at Usborne Publishing. She graduated from Exeter University with a Bachelor of Education in Art and Design. She taught for three years at a primary school in Kent, before spending two years at a British school in The Netherlands. She started working at Usborne in 1989 and has written and edited hundreds of books including baby and novelty, sticker, art and craft, cookery, science and activity books. She has written all the titles in the award-winning THAT'S NOT MY® series and many in the highly successful Sticker Dolly Dressing series. She is the sixth biggest-selling UK children's author, with over 10 million of her books sold in the UK since records began.

Zanna Davidson (Author)
Zanna writes fiction and non-fiction for Usborne. Her favourite things to write about are small monsters and talking animals. She used to live in London but now lives in a cottage on the edge of some woods. She is only sorry there are no bears or witches in them.

Heather Burns (Illustrator)
Heather Burns is from a little market town called Uttoxeter in the middle of England. She graduated from the University of Lincoln with a degree in Illustration in 2013 and has been working as a freelance illustrator ever since.

Sylwia Filipczak (Illustrator)
Sylwia was born in Lodz, Poland and still lives there with her husband and two children. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz, Poland.

Pathways across Cultures: Intercultural Communication in South Africa is a uniquely South African communication textbook. Local examples of communication methods from a wide range of cultural groups are used to explain theories of communication and complex intercultural concepts. It covers some of the rich cultural histories of the rainbow nation, such as Khoisan cave drawings, highlighting the intercultural communication styles of the early peoples who lived in South Africa. The book also includes critical commentary on western theories and approaches to studying intercultural communication.

With a view to decolonising how intercultural communication is taught in South Africa, where possible the chapters in this book have been co-authored with emerging scholars. This approach provided mentoring opportunities for emerging scholars to develop case studies. As a result, this book has a wide-ranging perspective on intercultural communication that is representative of South Africa’s own cultural diversity.

Along with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights serves as the main watchdog for the promotion and protection of fundamental rights in the Americas. Drawing on the case law of the Court, this volume analyses crucial developments over the years on both procedural and substantive issues before the Inter-American Court. The book discusses access to legal aid, third party interventions, positive obligations and provisional measures, the evaluation of evidence and the use of external referencing by the Court, the protection of vulnerable groups, including indigenous peoples, migrants, women and children. It also explores other contemporary issues such as coerced statements, medical negligence, the use of force, amnesties, forced disappearances, the right to water, judicial protection in times of emergency, the relation of the Inter-American Court with national courts and with other international jurisdictions like the European Court of Human Rights and the International Criminal Court, and with national courts, reparations and revisions of cases by the Inter-American Court, and present-day challenges to the Inter-American system of human rights. Due to its multifaceted and comprehensive character, this scholarly volume is an essential reference work for both legal scholars and practitioners working with regional human rights systems in general and with the Inter-American human rights system in particular.

The little stories and the traditions that grew up around Saint Martin de Porres of Peru are fascinating and every bit as charming as the stories told of Saint Francis of Assisi. But as Garcia-Rivera shows, these deceptively simple stories reveal much more. For the first time Garcia-Rivera unpacks these stories, using the semiotic method and insights garnered from the works of Robert Schreiter, Eugene Genovese, and Antonio Gramsci.To build this method of theological reflection Garcia-Rivera addresses such questions as: does an authentic Latin American theology exist? If it exists, where and how can it be expounded? What does Saint Martin de Porres beatification process tell us? How do the little stories reflect and extend the great theological debate of Valladolid in 1550, with BartolomA de las Casas and Juan Gines de Sepulveda arguing whether the Indians were even human beings? Using the semiotics of culture to delve into these stories, the author provides rich and astonishing insights into the power of the little story, told and retold over time by ordinary folk, that make possible the Big Story of universal principles of human reality.

Perovskite-based ceramics are a significant class of innovative materials with fascinating physical properties, which are now receiving intensive research attention in condensed matter physics and in the area of practical device applications. Perovskite Ceramics provides a state-of-the-art review on the latest advances in perovskite-based ceramic materials, as well as the development of devices from these materials for different applications. Perovskite Ceramics: Recent Advances and Emerging Applications is divided into two main parts. The first part focuses on the basics of perovskite-based ceramic materials and includes chapters on the fundamentals, synthesis and processing, characterization, and properties of these materials. Chapters are also included on bulk and thin materials, phase transitions, polaronic effects and the compensation and screening of ferroelectricity. This section will allow the reader to familiarize themselves with the standard traditional approach, but it will also introduce new concepts that are fast evolving in this field. The second part presents an extensive review of up-to-date research on new and innovative advances in perovskite-based ceramic materials. Chapters cover multiferroic applications, lead-free perovskites, energy storage applications, perovskite-based memories, light manipulation and spectral modifications, and solar cells and fuel cells. All these fields of research are rapidly evolving, so the book acts a platform to showcase latest results on optical strategies and materials for light manipulation, and spectral up- and down-conversion too (mainly rare earth doped oxides and complexes). The book will be an essential reference resource for academic and industrial researchers working in materials research and development particularly in functional and oxide ceramics and perovskites.

On a dark and stormy night, an unnamed narrator is visited by two women: one a former lover, the other a stranger. They ruthlessly question their host and claim to know his greatest secret: that he is, in fact, a woman. In increasingly desperate attempts to defend his masculinity, perplexed by the stranger's dubious claims to be the writer Amparo Davila, he finds himself spiralling deeper into a haunted past that may or may not be his own. This surreal novel enfolds a masterful exploration of gender in taut, atmospheric mystery.

Today's global markets demand that companies of all sizes look to international markets for potential customers. The successive crises that have taken place in the last decade make the internationalization of companies essential. This situation is further aggravated in the case of SMEs, as surviving only from national markets is becoming increasingly difficult. Indeed, the economic sphere is in constant flux, which demands that companies have a great capacity for adaptation to face the new challenges of an ever more globalized and difficult market. In this context, new forms of business communication are emerging, especially through the web and new technologies. Digital marketing and the dissemination of corporate information have become key processes for the success of companies. It is therefore crucial to research different digital marketing processes and ways of breaking down linguistic and cultural barriers between users from different sociolinguistic contexts. Innovative Perspectives on Corporate Communication in the Global World contains different contributions focused on the description of methods, processes, and tools that can be adopted to achieve corporate internationalization goals. The chapters provide a comprehensive review of the why, what, and how of disseminating corporate information and promoting corporate digital communication into internationalization processes. These strategies can be related to the development of digital tools, the design of new corporate communication strategies, the proposal of new ways of breaking social and linguistic barriers between technology users, or the creation of new methodologies aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of digital marketing strategies. This book is ideal for marketers, managers, executives, entrepreneurs, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students interested in new corporate communication strategies and their effectiveness.

Informed by Gloria Anzaldua's and Jose Carlos Mariategui's work, as well as by Andean cosmology, Omar Rivera turns to Inka stonework and architecture as an example of a "Cosmological Aesthetics." He articulates ways of sensing, feeling and remembering that are attuned to an aesthetic of water, earth and light. On this basis, Rivera brings forth a corporeal orientation that can be inhabited by the oppressed, one that withdraws from predominant modern/Western conceptions of the human. By providing an aesthetic analysis of cosmological sensing, Rivera sets the stage for exploring physical dimensions of anti-colonial resistance, and furthers the Latinx and Latin American tradition of anti-colonial and liberatory philosophy. Seeing aesthetic involvements with the cosmos as a source for embodied modes of resistance, Rivera turns to the work of Maria Lugones and Enrique Dussel in order to make explicit the aesthetic dimensions of their work. Andean Aesthetics and Anticolonial Resistance creates a new dialogue between art historians, artists, and philosophers working on Latin American thought, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. It weaves together a Latin American philosophy that connects pre-Columbian cosmologies with contemporary thinkers. Rivera's original approach introduces us to the living, evolving and aesthetic alternatives to coloniality of power and of knowledge, overhauling current understandings of decolonial theory and opening the tradition in transformative ways.