This book explores the intricate terrain of international religious freedom discourse.It examines the evolution and controversies surrounding the formulation and interpretation of the freedom of religion or belief as a universal right within the United Nations.From legal and philosophical standpoints to the political dimensions of the subject, the book navigates through the complex terrain, shedding light on challenges to the universality and non-discriminatory implementation of this fundamental freedom. Beyond theoretical and legal debates, the study reveals how actors within the United Nations have strategically 'defamed' the freedom of religion or belief, reshaping its interpretation away from its original 1948 objectives.The book explores the dynamic interplay of postmodern views, legal intricacies, and political perspectives, contributing to a potential diminishment of the normative force of related legal provisions. It addresses critical topics including religious tolerance, blasphemy, defamation of religion, and apostasy, offering a comprehensive understanding of the evolving landscape of international human rights discourse. This is an indispensable resource for scholars, policymakers, and anyone seeking a profound insight into the challenges and transformations shaping the global pursuit of religious freedom.
A newcomer has missed her train in a seemingly sleepy English town and finds herself propositioned by a regular to kill the town's sheriff in exchange for a hefty reward.
In this pseudo-verbatim play, Scottish playwright Rob Drummond explores the anti-vaxxer movement after the famous Wakefield paper and during the COVID pandemic through the eyes of three people with vastly different experiences.
This open access book shows what teaching for democratic citizenship and peace can look like in classrooms in violent and less-violent contexts around the world. It features chapters written by leading scholars and practitioners based in Canada, Chile, Columbia, Cyprus, Mexico, Spain, the UK and the USA. It includes sections on navigating contested history and heritage; language teaching that bridges social identities; teaching democratic engagement with conflictual issues; and students Sharing Authority and Handling Systemic Violence. The chapters cover a wide range of topics with local and global significance including indigenous praxis as peace building, social conflicts, transformative hope, teacher training, and student voice. Vignettes of practice accompany each chapter, grounded in careful scholarship and teaching experience. The book shows how teachers and young people can feasibly nurture and learn non-violent ways of dealing with difficult conflicts and social tensions, to become agents of democratic revitalization and peacebuilding in their own communities and beyond. The contributors also engage critically with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), SDG 4 and 16 in particular, arguing that teachers and teacher educators can make a crucial difference in meeting these goals.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Weatherhead Canada Program.
This edited collections brings together different approaches to born-digital literature across the foreign language learning curriculum, with practical applications for curriculum design and course planning. The book develops a framework that takes into account the increasing appearance of born-digital literature and how it shapes the interaction between creator and audience. It covers a broad variety of types of born-digital literature which so far have not been an explicit focus in the context of language teaching, while also providing a grounding in the current discussions around digital literacies in education. In response to the pace of change in recent years in the accessibility and wider use of new types of digital literature, this volume focuses on innovative approaches from a wide range of educational contexts while considering the needs of learners from diverse backgrounds. Running themes across the chapters are: creativity, learner autonomy, critical reading, reader response and teacher development. The volume includes contributions from both renowned scholars in the field and the new voices of early career researchers, from Belgium, Germany, Japan, Libya, Spain, Sweden and the UK.
The Recurrence of the End Times: Voegelin, Hegel, and the Stop-History Movements explores the deep connection between modern political ideologies and the secular eschatological hopes and dreams of a post-Christian society. Focusing primarily upon the thought of 20th century German émigré political scientist Eric Voegelin, the book argues that we cannot understand the globalized world in which we live unless we appreciate the lasting influence of the various "End of History" speculators-specifically, G.W.F Hegel, Alexandre Kojève, and Francis Fukuyama. Through a Voegelinian lens, he dissects the relationship between these three thinkers, also claiming that while Voegelin may have misunderstood Hegel, his critiques of the Hegelian approach to history offer fresh and important perspectives on the contemporary world. This makes a forceful argument that the idea of history as a teleological path, leading toward some goal-whether perfect harmony between nations, a technocratic utopia, a return to some romanticized idyllic "state of nature," or what Kojève and Fukuyama called the "universal and homogenous State"-has vast, and perverse, implications for the trajectory of American foreign and domestic policy.
Science fiction first emerged in the Industrial Age and continued to develop into its current form during the twentieth century. This book analyses the role Jewish writers played in the process of its creation and development. The author provides a comprehensive overview, bridging such seemingly disparate themes and figures as the ghetto legends of the golem and their influence on both Frankenstein and robots, the role of, Jewish authors and publishers in developing the first science fiction magazine in New York in the 1930s, and their later contributions to new and developing medial forms like comics and film. Drawing on the historical context and the positions Jews held in the larger cultural environment, the author illustrates how themes and tropes in science fiction and fantasy relate back to the realities of Jewish life in the face of global anti-Semitism, the struggle to assimilate in America, and the hope that was inspired by the founding of Israel.
Locked in a common fight against Imperial Japan, the United States and Nationalist China became allies, but significant fissures in their relationship soon developed. Neither ally would accommodate each other's core interests in strategies necessary to win the war. This disconnect continued after Japan's surrender, as the United States pressed Chinese Nationalists and Communists to join a coalition government that neither wanted. During the civil war, the United States supported the Nationalists, but never to the degree they thought mattered. After the Communist triumph, America served its national security and anti-Communism, by helping the Nationalists defend Taiwan, but hedged against assisting Chiang Kai-shek to reconquer the mainland. Twice in the 1950's tensions in the Taiwan Strait nearly expanded into nuclear conflict.
Over the course of the past two decades, horror cinema around the globe has become increasingly preoccupied with the concept of loss. Grief in Contemporary Horror Cinema: Screening Loss examines the theme of grief as it is represented in both indie and mainstream films, including works such as Jennifer Kent's watershed film The Babadook, Juan Antonio Bayona's award-sweeping El orfanato, Ari Aster's genre-straddling Midsommar, and Lars von Trier's visually stunning Melancholia. Analyzing depictions of grief ranging from the intimate grief of a small family to the collective grief of an entire nation, the essays illustrate how these works serve to provide unity, catharsis, and-sometimes-healing.
In Smallpox in Washingtons Army: Disease, War and Society during the Revolutionary War, the author argues that smallpox played an integral role in military affairs for both the British and Continental armies, and impacted soldiers and civilians throughout the War for American Independence. Due to the Royal army's policy of troop inoculation and because many British soldiers were already immune to the variola virus, the American army was initially at a disadvantage. Most American colonists were highly susceptible to this dreaded disease, and its presence was greatly feared. General George Washington was keenly aware of this disadvantage and, despite his own doubts, embarked on a policy of inoculation to protect his troops. Use of this controversial, innovative, and effective medical procedure leveled the playing field within the armies. However, by 1777, smallpox spread throughout America as soldiers interacted with civilian populations. Once military action moved south, American and British auxiliary troops and the enslaved Southern population all succumbed to the disease, creating a disorderly, dangerous situation as the war ends. Washington's implementation of isolation policies as well as mass troop inoculation removed the threat of epidemic smallpox and ultimately protected American soldiers and civilians from the dangers of this much feared disease.
Every week we read more and more stories of someone who commits suicide, gets fired, gets canceled, abandoned, or worse, because of a conflict or misunderstanding involving social media. Using theories that originated in studies of extremism and terrorism, Jessica Emami analyzes the processes that drive people to punish others using social media. Professor Emami makes a case that cyberpunishment is driven by outrage against our personal sense of morality, and a deep desire for our act of punishment to be acknowledged by others. Moreover, she demonstrates that todays social media platforms are by their very structure unable to curb or resist cyberpunishment.
In Understanding the Boundary between Disability Studies and Special Education through Consilience, Self-Study, and Radical Love, the authors explore what it means to engage in boundary work at the intersection of traditional special education systems and critical disability studies in education. The book consists of fifteen groundbreaking accounts that challenge dominant medicalized discourses about what it means to exist within and around special education systems that create space for new conceptions of what it means to teach, lead, learn, and exist within a conciliatory space driven by radical love and disability justice principles. The book pushes readers to consider how their own personal, professional and programmatic future transformational actions can be driven by disruption and the desire for freedom from the hegemony of traditional special education and White and Ability supremacy.
Intersectional Automations explores a range of situations where robotics, biotechnological enhancement, artificial intelligence (AI), and algorithmic culture collide with intersectional social justice issues such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and citizenship. As robots, machine learning applications, and human augmentics are artifacts of human culture, they sometimes carry stereotypes, biases, exclusions, and other forms of privilege into their computational logics, platforms, and/or embodiments. The essays in this multidisciplinary collection consider how questions of equity and social justice impact our understanding of these developments, analyzing not only the artifacts themselves, but also the discourses and practices surrounding them, including societal understandings, design choices, law and policy approaches, and their uses and abuses.
Afrofuturism in Black Panther: Gender, Identity, and the Re-making of Blackness, through an interdisciplinary and intersectional analysis of Black Panther, discusses the importance of superheroes and the ways in which they are especially important to Black fans. Aside from its global box office success, Black Panther paves the way for future superhero narratives due to its underlying philosophy to base the story on a narrative that is reliant on Afro-futurism. The film's storyline, the book posits, leads viewers to think about relevant real-world social questions as it taps into the cultural zeitgeist in an indelible way. Contributors to this collection approach Black Panther not only as a film, but also as Afrofuturist imaginings of an African nation untouched by colonialism and antiblack racism: the film is a map to alternate states of being, an introduction to the African Diaspora, a treatise on liberation and racial justice, and an examination of identity. As they analyze each of these components, contributors pose the question: how can a film invite a reimagining of Blackness?
Electronic Dance Music: From Deviant Subculture to Culture Industry explores the subculture's emergence as a deviant subculture. This text analyzes how industry professionals, fans, and public officials helped usher in a new age of EDM, arguing that while the defining features of the subculture made it attractive, they also laid the foundations for outsiders to commodify the movement as a culture industry. Conner and Dickens explore the concept of "commodified resistance" as the mechanism by which the movement's politically dissident features were removed and its place as a multi-billion-dollar industry made possible. Ultimately, this text advocates the continued utility of the culture industry thesis through an empirical analysis of the EDM subculture.Check out an interview with the author on the New Books Network podcast here: https://newbooksnetwork.com/electronic-dance-music
Forecasting is integral to all governmental activities, especially budgetary activities. Without good and accurate forecasts, a government will not only find it difficult to carry out its everyday operations but will also find it difficult to cope with the increasingly complex environment in which it has to operate. This book presents, in a simple and easy to understand manner, some of the commonly used methods in budget forecasting, simple as well as advanced. The book is divided into three parts: It begins with an overview of forecasting background, forecasting process, and forecasting methods, followed by a detailed discussion of the actual methods in Parts I, II, and III. Part I discusses a combination of basic time series models such as percentage average, simple moving average, double moving average, exponential moving average, double as well as triple, simple trend line, time-series with cyclical variation, and time-series regression, with single and multiple independent variables. Part II discusses some of the more advanced, but frequently used time series models, such as ARIMA, regular as well as seasonal, Vector Autoregression (VAR), and Vector Error Correction (VEC). Part III provides an overview of three of the more recent advances in time series models, namely ensemble forecasting, state-space forecasting, and neural network. The book concludes with a brief discussion of some practical issues in budget forecasting.
This volume is the first book to focus specifically on the topic of comparative glossing. It brings together new research on glossing practices from traditions in both the West and East Asia, with a focus on Japan. It also touches on the relation between glossing in the medieval manuscript tradition and the modern linguistic use of the gloss. Its purpose is to present a sample of the most recent studies on glossing as it is practiced across very different parts of the world, highlighting the many shared features found across space and time.Glosses take many forms and serve numerous functions according to when and where they are produced. They constitute a cross-cultural phenomenon anchored in language, and are the manifestation of hermeneutic processes involved in the transfer of knowledge from one linguistic area to another. Glosses are an integral part of all the stages of this transfer, which is characterized by the necessity to decode and explain the message, encompassing basic grammatical commentary and wider exegetical discussions.
The Kwoma, the subject of this book, are one of a number of peoples in the Sepik River region of northern Papua New Guinea who have created some of the most distinctive visual art in the Pacific. Through case studies of their painting, sculpture, architecture and ritual this book examines in detail how people in this society understand their art as a cultural phenomenon. This includes how they understand its origins in the spirit world, how they judge quality in art and how they understand artistic creativity. The book contrasts Kwoma beliefs with the radically different approach to art found in the modern West. The modern Western concept of art first emerged not in the eighteenth century in the Enlightenment, or even later, as anthropologists and art historians often assume, but several centuries earlier in the Renaissance. The book gives an account of radical changes that took place culturally in Europe between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries in the way human intellectual creativity was understood, and how this gave rise to a new concept of art, one that remains unchanged in the modern West today.
In the Name of the Goddess: A Biophilic Ethic explores a dynamic, holistic ethic of interconnections, ecological sustainability, and eco-justice through goddess worship and eco-feminism. Donna Giancola proposes principles to establish social harmony and ecological balance through moral, political, and spiritual values and practices that provide a comprehensive foundation for integrating wisdom and action in daily life, communities, and international policies.
Reading Ricoeur through Law, edited by Marc de Leeuw, George H. Taylor, and Eileen Brennan, is the first collection of essays solely focused on Ricoeur's thinking about law, bringing together both established and emerging scholars to offer a systematic and critical examination of Ricoeur's legal thinking. The chapters not only explore the specific contribution Ricoeur makes to the field of jurisprudence but also examine how Ricoeur's work on law fits, complements, or changes his overall anthropology, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. The book provides a complex insight into how law, ethics, and politics intertwine both from within law as normative rule setting, as well as through the wider social-political and historical context in which law and legal institutions affect our inter-subjective and communal life as lived "with and for others in just institutions." The collection also makes available in English "The Just between the Legal and the Good," a key text in Ricoeur's reflections about law and justice. The core topics of this collection are rights, justice, responsibility, judging, interpretation, argumentation, punishment, and authority, but contributors also offer original insights in how Ricoeur's philosophical reconceptualization of symbolism, action, ideology, narrative, selfhood, testimony, history, trauma, reconciliation, justice, and forgiveness can be made productive for our understanding of law and legal institutions.
This volume explores, both in theory and in practice, what "social coordination" is and how public policies can help or hinder the processes of social coordination. In particular, these chapters examine the institutional incentives that motivate public policy decisions and their implementation to achieve specific individual and social goals. Some chapters in this volume are more theoretical, applying insights from the Austrian, Virginia, and Bloomington schools of political economy to public policy issues. Other chapters are more practical, exploring the broader implications of these theories to real-world public policy puzzles. Authored by individuals from a variety of disciplines with diverse interests in public policy, this work includes discussions of topics such as environmental policy, housing policy, and education policy, among others. A unifying theme across the chapters is that policymakers often advise one-size-fits-all solutions to complicated public policy questions but ignore the multitude of incentives faced by the "players of the game" and the subsequent development of diverse forms of social coordination. Social coordination is often left out public policy analysis but is crucial to the success of informal and formal institutional arrangements. The chapters aim to disentangle these issues of social coordination in public policy in theory and practice.
Turkey and Russia are two of the most significant powerhouses in Eurasia. The foreign policies of two countries directly impact the regional dynamics in Black Sea, Central Asia, Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the Balkan regions. The changes in the bilateral relations between the two countries go well beyond the Black Sea region. In the past, the Russian Empire played a significant role in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey took part in containing the USSR during the Cold War by joining the NATO in 1952. In the twenty-first century, however, Turkey and Russia invested in bilateral trade and established significant partnerships in the strategic defense and energy sectors. In the same period, the competition between Turkey and Russia heightened, giving way to military confrontation in multiple fronts. This book argues that the changing balance of power in the region has triggered adjustments in the foreign policies of Russia and Turkey in the twenty-first century. The decline of the US influence in the region have brought about increased engagement between Turkey and Russia in the form of partnerships and competition for influence.
Gender Equity: Global Policies and Perspectives on Advancing Social Justice provides an in-depth analysis of global perspectives on advancing public and social gender policy. Shedding new light on inequalities faced by women and girls around the world,, the essays in this collection emphasize cultural biases and societal prejudices women face in STEM and in creative economies as well as in political decision making processes. In doing so, the volume highlights the interlinked relationship between the advancement of global policy and the very interpretation of gender equality.
This book examines the life of the Sixteenth Karmapa and his contributions to the preservation and transmission of Tibetan Buddhism in exile. The author analyzes the life and activity of the Karmapa through the lens of cross-cultural interaction between Buddhism and the West with a particular focus on Asian agency.
A brilliant new account of one of the world's most remote, mysterious and misunderstood places: Easter Island.
The definitive guide to water-efficient gardening to grow healthy, resilient plants in the face of climate change. Conserving water has always been appealing. Yet with rising temperatures, groundwater depletion, violent floods and intense periods of drought all on the rise, the need for water-wise gardening techniques has never been so important. In The Water-Efficient Gardener, environmental gardening specialist Angela Youngman delves into the ways we can not only protect our gardens against the impacts of climate change but transform them into colourful and biodiverse havens. This practical guide is illustrated throughout with helpful photographs and insightful case studies to inspire a range of beautiful outdoor spaces. From inventive methods for collecting rainwater to drought-tolerant plant recommendations and advice on minimising the impact of flooding on lawns, Angela presents clear solutions to the challenges of modern-day gardening. An issue that will affect all gardeners in Britain and beyond, find the joy in sustainable gardening with this timely read.
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