Böcker utgivna av Palgrave MacMillan

This edited volume examines the critical issues of the 21st century through the prism of Ernest Gellner's work. The contributors look critically at Gellner´s legacy, questioning whether he remains an inspiration for today's social theorists. Chapters proactively probe Gellner's thoughts on a variety of pressing topics-modernity, postcolonialsm, nationalism, and more-without losing sight of current debates on these issues. This volume further brings these debates to life by having each chapter followed by a comment by an academic peer of the chapter author, thus transforming the text into a lively and dynamic conversation.

This book analyses transcultural and autofictional works relating to youth and childhood by three major contemporary authors in France: Azouz Begag, Maryam Madjidi, and Laura Alcoba, of Algerian, Iranian, and Argentinian heritage respectively. Studying texts and societal issues in France from the turn of the millennium to June 2023, it analyses the authors' relationship with both France and the "home" country, and the problematic pull of return. It highlights how each author uses autofiction and life writing differently. Begag uses autofiction for playful yet compulsive self-reinvention, Madjidi uses it in a search for authenticity, while Alcoba's autofictional approach highlights the difficulties of dealing with traumatic memory. Issues analysed include the effects of migration on individuals and their descendants, and the writers' multiple cultural belongings and constant self-repositioning. A substantial overview is given of each author's oeuvre, along with societal context for the country of origin or descent, followed by close textual analysis. This is a companion volume to a monograph on Québec.

Surveying all referendums around the world since 1793, Dr Qvortrup and contributors provide a thorough account of why and when citizens have been asked to vote on policy issues. Referendums Around the World is essential reading for political scientists and others interested in direct democracy as well as representative government.

This book offers a unique look into the world of policing and the frontline of Brazil's war on drugs. It analyzes the tensions produced by attempts to modernize Rio de Janeiro's public security policies. Since the return of democracy in 1985, Rio's police forces have waged war against armed drug gangs based in the city's favelas, casting the people who live in these communities as internal enemies. In preparation for the Olympics in 2016, the police sought to 'pacify' the favelas and their populations through the establishment of Pacifying Police Units (UPPs) in many of the city's favela communities. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with the police, this book follows officers across the institutional hierarchy in their daily activities, on patrol, and during training. Tracing the genealogies of contemporary forms of policing-as-warfare through the notion of 'colonial war' and 'cultural war', it highlights the material and ideational dimensions of war as a cosmological force that shapes Brazilian social relations, subjectivities, landscapes, economies, and politics. It draws on the Deleuzian notion of 'war machine and state dynamics' to show how practices of elimination co-exist with attempts to transform favela territories and their people and analyzes the link between the moral universe of policing and right-wing populism in Brazil. Through rich and nuanced ethnography, it offers a critical perspective on militarized policing and 21st century forms of authoritarianism.

Drawing on research into leadership and emotional intelligence, this updated second edition presents a framework that can lead to effective change implementation. It reflects on more recent arguments, research and changes in the areas of leadership and change, such as relational leadership, shared leadership, and the significant role of purpose beyond profit. Two new chapters explore the dark side of leadership and mindful leadership.Set against a backdrop of increasing complexity, the book responds to the need for organisations to continuously change and transform and book addresses the real challenges of effective implementation. Exploring these concepts at individual, team and organizational levels, this book recognises the complexity of the topic and combines rigour with relevance to underpin the framework with empirical evidence.

Focusing on the work of Hartmut Rosa, this book provides an in-depth account of the extent to which we, as humans, are obliged to face up to the uncontrollability of the world. Rosa is widely regarded as one of the most original contemporary European social theorists. Along with the concepts of 'acceleration', 'alienation', and 'resonance', the notion of 'uncontrollability' [Unverfügbarkeit] ranks among the most important reference points in Rosa's critical theory, especially in his recent work. It is no accident, then, that - following his extensive inquiries into 'acceleration' and 'alienation' and the publication of his magnum opus on 'resonance' - Rosa has found it necessary to offer a brief, but powerful, account of the place occupied by the concept of 'uncontrollability' in his critical theory. The first half of this book comprises a detailed outline of Rosa's central arguments on 'uncontrollability', before moving, in the second half, to a thorough assessment of the most significant limitations of his approach. This book will appeal to students and scholars of the social sciences and humanities - particularly to those interested in social theory, social philosophy, and the history of ideas.

This book is the first English-language monograph about the institutional development of sociology in (North) Macedonia. It maps and discusses the contexts, goals, and merits of the pioneering attempts for sociological research in the interwar period, early post-war educational and publishing politics, the institutionalization of sociology in socialist Macedonia in the course of the 1960s, its cross-national exchanges, as well as its major trajectories and debates up until the present days. Against the backgrounds of the political and intellectual histories of Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav Macedonia, it argues that the development of the sociological activities, themes, and arguments is entwined with the Macedonian nation- and state-building.

This open access book sets out simple solutions to managing complex catastrophes. It focusses on four kinds of crises - climate change, crime-war cascades, epidemics and financial crises. These catastrophes are conceived as complex and prone to cascade effects. This book is optimistic in explaining that there are identifiable simple institutions that international society can strengthen and some simple principles that can help humankind to control the expanding gamut of complex catastrophes that confront the planet including simple, stable institutions and regulatory bodies. It draws on a wide range of current and past crises and challenges, from the Cold War to COVID-19, and from Weapons of Mass Destruction to restorative diplomacy with States like China, to provide an urgent and timely path forward. It speaks to those interested in criminology, public policy and international relations, political science, sociology, public health and economics.

This open access book explores the politics of emotions under the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey and the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. It examines how emotional politics and particularly the use of Neo-Ottomanist narrative in Turkey created a new national mood and contributed to the durability of Erdoğan's rule. The author analyzes the interactions between national narratives, symbolic politics, and politics of emotions and argues that these interactions are the basis of the popular support the AKP has enjoyed over twenty years. Since Erdoan came to power, the Turkish regime has played a significant role in Middle Eastern conflicts and the European refugee crisis has made Turkey a topic of international interest. Ukraine's crisis will only increase this interest. Furthermore, with increasing authoritarianism, violations of human rights, and the current economic crisis, the country has been in turmoil since the Gezi Park protests in 2013. This book appeals to scholars of political science and sociology as well as policymakers interested in the rise of authoritarianism.

This open access book explores how medieval societies conversed about the city and citizen in texts, visual imagery and material culture. It adopts a long-term, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural perspective, bringing together contributions on the early, high, and later Middle Ages, covering both the medieval East and West, and representing a wide variety of disciplinary angles and sources. The volume is first and foremost about medieval perceptions and their articulation in text, image and material form. The principal focus is not on cities or citizenship per se, but on those who used such concepts, wrote about them, and visualized and depicted them. At the same time, the book seeks to address why the city remained such a salient concept also in non-urban contexts - the periphery, the desert, the monastery - and how medieval thinking on the ideal city and civic community could involve denunciation of the earthly city and its institutional trappings. It thus pushes scholarly boundaries, but also seeks to escape deeply entrenched notions of citizenship as either a form of political participation or legal status.

This edited collection offers a reappraisal of character as a precondition for caricature and addresses how the two began to merge, becoming increasingly interlinked over the course of the long eighteenth century. It emphasises the need to understand character more fully, arguing that the nuances and origins of caricature can only be appreciated in light of the genre's prehistory and reliance on popular character types. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in approach, the collection makes use of a variety of theories and addresses fiction in its broadest sense, expanding and reconceptualising critical, historical and theoretical discussion of character. Chapters draw from disability studies, cultural materialism, gender studies and the history of sexuality, spatial theory and performance studies.

This volume explores contemporary African women's creative writing, highlighting their contributions to ecofeminist theology. Contributors address the following questions: How do contemporary African women writers depict the Earth/land/environment and its relationship to women in various contexts? How is religion featured in African women's writing? How does religious literature (scriptures) form an intertextual layer in African women's writing? The contributors proceed by analyzing the intersection of religion, gender, class, sexuality, colonialism, and ecology in selected texts written by African women. They bring these texts into conversation with broader eco-feminist theological scholarship, exploring the potential of literary writing to contribute to theological discourse of liberation and social justice in the African and global arena.

This book is one of two volumes that examines the role of political communication, media and language in transforming politics, governance and democracy in southern Africa. Interdisciplinary in approach, this first volume assesses themes including participatory politics, mass media, digital censorship, and social media in Sub-Saharan politics. It also considers how politicians utilise language and the media to legitimate their authority, influence citizens' behaviour, and the ways in which they vote. It will appeal to all those interested in governance, political communication, media studies and African politics.

This book offers a genealogical critique of how food scarcity was governed in colonial Kenya. With an approach informed by the 'analysis of government', the study accounts for the emergence and persistence of dominant approaches to promoting food security in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa - policies and practices that prioritize increased agricultural production as the principal means of achieving food security. Drawing on a range of archival sources, the book investigates how those tasked with governing colonial Kenya confronted food as a particular kind of problem. It emphasizes the ways in which that problem shifted in conjunction with the emergence and consolidation of the colonial state and economic relations in the territory. The book applies a novel conceptual approach to the historical study of African food systems and famine, and provides the first longitudinal and in-depth analysis of the dynamics of food scarcity and its government in Kenya.

This comprehensive Handbook provides chapter length surveys of the history of Christian missions and Christian churches on the African continent since the time of Christ. Africa is rapidly becoming the most Christianized region of the world. While common narratives about Christianity tend to present Christianity as a set of ideas and beliefs imposed on Africa from the outside, such narratives hold little meaning for African Christians or for those seeking to understand Christianity in Africa as an indigenous faith. The aim of the Handbook is to propose a set of scholarly starting points for a new set of narratives. The chapters collected here communicate an idea of Christianity as it has been embraced among African peoples at particular historical moments. It therefore grants voice to the various strands of African Christianity on their own terms, and offers scholarly study of what these voices teach us about how the world's most adhered to religion is practiced and understood on the continent of Africa.

This book analyses the effects of public governance reforms on gender equality policy in Finland. Recent economic crises, rising austerity and increasing opposition to gender equality have led to the defunding of gender equality bodies, and the side-lining of gender equality as a political goal. This policy backlash has taken place alongside transformations to the state and governance, that have changed the discourses, knowledge, actors, and practices of gender equality policy. This book contributes to these discussions by demonstrating the subtleties of the constantly changing governance reform agendas, their operation in practice, and how they intertwine with other elements of the gender equality policy backlash. It is based on more than 100 interviews with civil servants, politicians, non-governmental organisations, social partners, and think tanks, and a broad range of policy documents and media material. It will appeal to students and scholars of gender studies, public policy and governance.

This book traces the emergence and development of cultural and creative industries (CCI) policy in Europe in the last 25 years. Why and how CCI policy has been designed and implemented in Europe is a central question of the book, in particular with regards to negotiations and relations between policy actors across established policy domains. There are many policy publications and reports on best practice and general descriptions of how policy systems work, fewer describe policy development over time and from a comparative perspective. Drawing mainly on research in policy studies, this book aims to improve knowledge of the dynamics of cultural and creative activities as well as that of policymaking in a changing policy landscape and increasingly cross-disciplinary research frameworks.

Working in the tradition of world philosophy, this book puts Western virtue ethics in conversation with traditional Indian philosophies. The book begins with a contribution from Michael Slote on 'World Philosophy: The Importance of India, ' which is followed by contributions covering metaethical topics such as the relationship between Western virtue ethics and various Indian philosophical traditions, and applied topics such as environmental ethics, business ethics, ethics and science, and moral psychology. Contributors include scholars working in both North America and India.

This book engages with current debates around refugeedom by examining cultural production that represents and interrogates the construction of refugees and the refugee experience on the borders of contemporary Europe. The refugee subject is produced by discursive regimes and border practices inherited from colonial projects that construct the diametrically opposed concepts of citizen and refugee, and their attendant administrative sub-categories. In the early twenty-first century these categories have been strengthened by the politicisation of forced migration and the hardening of 'Fortress Europe'. While the predominant response to the increasing numbers of refugees seeking asylum in Europe has been to harden the borders (regime), on the one hand, or to stress the common humanity of those displaced (refuge), on the other, this volume argues that both approaches result in refugees becoming objectified, othered, and abstracted as vectors ofexile. It explores what recent cultural production can achieve in engaging with and representing issues of dispossession, detention and resettlement, and probes the limits of artistic potential to mediate the refugee experience. It examines transnational approaches to cultural production that both occupy and exceed the borders of Europe, with a focus on borderscapes, spaces of detention, and (neo-)colonialism. Bringing together original contributions from an international range of scholars, it analyses contemporary textual and visual representations of forced migration to argue that other forms of solidarity and hospitality towards refugees in Europe and beyond must be possible.

This volume brings together scholars, practitioners, activists, and students to reflect on socio-political transitions taking place in countries across South Asia and their implications for democracy and education. It provides an important intervention for comparative education in South Asia by looking at the kind of ideological tensions that exist within the education systems, and how these competing agendas are visible at different levels. At a time when students have been protesting for their rights across educational institutions in South Asia, where the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated inequalities with learning losses, and job losses, this collection creates a space to reflect on the limitations and possibilities of education in democracies across South Asia.

This book chronicles over two decades of critical, artistic investigations by Paul Vanouse. His bio-media artwork utilizes the tools of the life sciences reflexively, to challenge tropes and cultural politics surrounding DNA, biotechnology, and life itself. DNA has been called a "Truth Machine", "God's Blueprint", the "Code of Codes" and the "Book of Life". Vanouse's work explores questions at the heart of such evocative metaphor and hyperbole: how does DNA link us together, how does it differentiate us and how are the grand metaphors, which grant DNA complete centrality, misconstruing the complexity of life. Furthermore, how do technologies of genetic typing and identification fit within a broader cultural and political history of difference making, particularly the construction of race. Melding critical theory, artist's manifesto, participatory observation and histories of the sciences, this book offers insight into both an artistic practice and the bio-techno-sciences it interrogates.

This book explores the historical relationship between 'technonatures' and urban transformations in the Global North. In recent years, various interdisciplinary movements such as Urban Political Ecology, STS and New Materialism have affected urban history and generated new scholarly insights into the formation of cities and urban life based on notions of hybridity, entanglement and metabolism. While scholars have increasingly attempted to grasp the socio-natural and technical complexity of cities, studies dealing with urban transformation within urban history have, however, mostly concentrated on political actors or broader social and economic changes. Seeking to introduce the concept of technonatures to the field of urban environmental history, this book instead takes its empirical and analytical starting point in the technonatural fabric of cities. Focusing on urban rivers, dumps, railways, flood walls and housing, the chapters of the book thus examines how different entanglementsof environment, technology and agency have shaped cities and processes of urbanization in the Global North from the seventeenth century onwards. By foregrounding the transformative role of urban natures, materialities and technologies in shaping the politics of urban life and cities more broadly, the book aspires to probe the potentiality of technonatures as a conceptual and analytical strategy for urban environmental historians.

This book studies British literary writers' engagement with adaptations of their work across literary, theatrical, and film media in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It considers their critical, reflective, and autobiographical writings about the process of adaptation, and traces how their work was shaped, as well as delimited, by their involvement with adaptations to different media and intermedial writing. Linking canonical and non-canonical writers both chronologically and contemporaneously, and bridging studies of prose fiction adaptation from nineteenth-century theatre to early twentieth-century film, this book offers an interdisciplinary, transhistorical, cultural, and analytical study of adaptation and the variable positions of writers within and across media.

With flashing lights, bright colors, and big money, game shows have been an integral part of American culture since the days of radio. While the music that accompanies game shows is charming and catchy, it presents two unique, opposing challenges: first, it must exhibit unity in its construction so that, at any point and for any length of time, it is a tuneful, recognizable signifier of the show to which it belongs; at the same time, it must also possess the ability to be started and stopped according to the needs of gameplay without seeming truncated. This book argues that game show music, in particular from 1960 to 1990, deploys a variety of shared techniques in order to manage these two goals, including theme-derived vamps; saturation of motivic material; and harmonic, rhythmic, and formal ambiguity. Together, these techniques make game show themes exciting, memorable, and perfectly suited to their role.

Media and refugees rhetorically live together and practically complement each other. Yet, it involves plenty of hidden political agendas and ethical issues in the (re)presentation of refugees in media. This collection raises questions: Should the media stand by refugees or maintain deliberate 'neutrality'? Should the media dehumanize the refugees further in their humanitarian conditions? Are the media entitled to publish photographs of refugees without informed consent? Should the media stand by the state being responsible for generating refugee crisis or should the state be accountable for rendering its people refugees? What effective roles can media play in redressing the refugee 'crisis' in the world? The book brings together scholars across disciplines and continents who reflect on the nexus between media and refugees in contexts around the world. It engages in cutting-edge methodological and theoretical discussions and challenges regarding the reciprocal engagement between media and refugees from both local and global perspectives.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of Norway's foreign policy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular focus on the latter. Covering themes such as security and defence, foreign aid and European integration, the author argues that despite often presenting itself as an idealist country and a "peace nation", Norwegian governments have demonstrated an understanding of power politics and a desire to, above all, promote national self-interests. The author explores the country's global relations with the US and NATO, with the countries of the European Union, and with great powers such as Russia and China. By adopting a historical perspective, the book demonstrates how continuity and stability have been fundamental features of contemporary Norwegian foreign policy. The book draws on a wide range of current and archival government sources, parliamentary debates and opinion pieces in news outlets, as well as an extensive selection of academic sources.

This book focuses on the aural and musical sphere of fictional audio-visual reconstructions of the Holocaust, a defining event in the history of the 20th century. Musicology has seen an increasing number of works on the function of film music and the construction of identity in media contexts in recent years. This project analyses the use of music in feature films about the Shoah. The analysis of 'the sound of Nazi violence', as well as the escape from and resistance against it, not only reveals a lot about the construction of the filmic characters' emotive states, but also tells us more about our own relationship to the past. The author understands the soundtrack of these films as an affective mediator of time, which connects filmic representations of the past with the present. Analysis focuses on the soundtracks of four films: Schindler's List, The Pianist, Taking Sides and Inglourious Basterds.

This book presents a history of Swedish sport, highlighting in particular the relationship between sport politics and people's changing attitudes towards sport from the eighteenth century until today. It scrutinizes the interaction between sport politics and people's different approaches to sport in everyday life. By investigating how different ways of pursuing and conceptualizing sport have progressed and interacted, and how they have influenced as well been influenced by sport politics, this book discerns the role of both governmental and municipal politics in the development of sport in Sweden.

This book investigates the ways in which new developments in areas of language teaching practice, such as policy-making, planning, methodology and the use of educational technology are locally adopted, adapted, initiated, and implemented in Vietnam and Cambodia. The region is responding to a large number of significant challenges, including large-scale education reforms, the effects of globalisation and the need for lifelong learning, as well as concerns about the quality of its language education system. By looking at the drivers, stakeholders, obstacles and affordances in one particular regional context, the authors examine how processes of change occur. This will help anyone involved in language development, from curriculum reform to materials development, and from programme evaluation to the setting of assessment standards. The book will be of particular interest to those involved in managing change in language education that attempts to mediate between global trends and local needs, as well as students and scholars working in language education, applied linguistics and related fields.

In this open access book, Tim Aylsworth and Clinton Castro draw on the deep well of Kantian ethics to argue that we have moral duties, both to ourselves and to others, to protect our autonomy from the threat posed by the problematic use of technology. The problematic use of technologies like smartphones threatens our autonomy in a variety of ways, and critics have only begun to appreciate the vast scope of this problem. In the last decade, we have seen a flurry of books making "self-help" arguments about how we could live happier, more fulfilling lives if we were less addicted to our phones. But none of these authors see this issue as one involving a moral duty to protect our autonomy.