Human movement and mobility are at an all-time high, making it more important than ever to understand how discourses around migration shape and influence individuals and the socioeconomic conditions of the countries they both inhabit and leave behind.

Featuring both intercontinental and intracontinental perspectives, authors Kunle Musbaudeen Oparinde and Rodwell Makombe present new, much-needed data from the African continent in terms of how discourses around migration are socially constructed in Africa and how this compares globally. Collected from social media and online platforms, this data spotlights the everyday realities of Nigerians and Zimbabweans, and by extension many Africans, in their quest to relocate. Unpacking reasons for migration, as well as the dominant discourses post-migration, the authors analyse the inherent feelings of migrants, potential migrants, unwilling but forced migrants and those who have chosen to remain in their countries despite harsh socioeconomic realities.

Examining this pressing field of study in an underexplored regional context, Social Constructions of Migration in Nigeria and Zimbabwe takes a refreshing new angle to deepen our understanding around the causes and effects of migration.

The Global Environmental Crisis presents a new perspective on our inattention and inaction in the face of a major crisis.

We cannot proceed without scientific knowledge, but we cannot exclusively rely on it. What we need, in addition to scientific knowledge, is utopian imagination to make us understand the nature of the crisis and to suggest an alternative vision of a viable future.

This book is an essential resource for students and instructors across the social sciences, especially sociology and environmental studies. It will also be a crucial and accessible text for general readers interested in climate change and how to imagine a better world for themselves and future generations.

The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary African Women highlights the achievements and progress being made by African women across a wide range of sectors in society. Without glossing over the very real challenges which women in Africa continue to face, this landmark handbook demonstrates how women across the continent are deploying their agency to achieve notable progress in areas as diverse as:

• Pandemics
• Climate Change
• Science & Technology
• Entrepreneurship
• Higher Education
• Youth & Older People

Challenging prevailing narratives and stereotypes about African women, this handbook provides a more positive perspective into African women's progressive actions for sustainable development. It will be an essential read for readers across the fields of gender, environment, political science, history, development studies, religious studies and African Studies.

Since the 2010s, populism and illiberal politics have been on the rise. Demagogue leaders preach simplified rhetoric to vilify the powerless, polarising city and rural areas and sparking such shocking events as the US insurrection on 6th January 2021.

This interdisciplinary book argues for a politics of representativity and accountability to help transform people's experiences, showing that where they live matters and, therefore, so do they.

This book demonstrates how place-based politics can draw on, and benefit from, collective local knowledge, rather than deferring to a nameless central government. Analysing democratic theory and using rich case studies, from protest movements to citizens' assemblies it shows how it can return a sense of control to the people.

Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis expands postcolonial precarity studies by addressing the current climate crisis and threats to the habitability of the planet from a range of ecocritical and environmental perspectives. The collection uses planetary thought-action praxis that acknowledges the interconnectedness of all forms of life in addressing the socioecological issues facing humanity: accelerating climate change, over-exploitation of natural resources, and the Global North-South divide. With reference to contemporary cultural productions, such praxis seeks to examine the ideas, images, and narratives that either represent or impede potential disasters like the so-called sixth extinction of the planet, that inspire the dismantling of carbon democracies arising in the wake of neoliberalism, and that address rising inequality with precarious conditions in the transition to renewable energy. The different chapters explore literary and visual representations of planetary precarity, identifying crisis-responsive genres and cultural formats, and assessing approaches to environment-re/making that call for repair, recovery and sustainability. In imagining future habitability, they deploy diverse critical frameworks such as queer utopias, zero-waste lifestyles, alternative ecologies, and adaptations to the uninhabitable. The collection tackles problems of global vulnerability and examines precarity as a condition of resilience and resistance through collective actions and solidarities and innovative constructions of the planet's survival as a shared home. It engages with current postcolonial debates, uses intersectional methodologies, and introduces contemporary literary, visual concepts, and narrative types.

This book examines and theorizes about the emergence, growth, impact, collapse, and rejuvenation of a sex worker movement in India, exploring the manner in which the two pandemics - HIV and COVID-19 - bookended a feminist movement through more than a quarter of a century, shaping its trajectory over the course of that time.

Focusing on the sex workers' collective Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) in Kolkata, the book asks these questions: How did a sex workers' collective rise from the margins of Indian society during the HIV pandemic, to become the vanguard of a global sex work movement, with half a million members, and partner collectives stretching across the world? What were the strategies deployed by the collective to engage with the health, social, and political landscapes surrounding it? Moreover, what were the factors that led to the splintering of a solidarity that had endured for a quarter of a century? Finally, what does the DMSC story tell us about social movements that rise from the extreme margins of society in postcolonial contexts? Drawing on empirical research, the author explores the conceptual and practice implications for the fields of social movement, feminist, public health, and postcolonial political scholarship. The book suggests that activist, public health, social work, and policy initiatives in poor women's communities in postcolonial contexts need to be informed by the temporal, community, organizational, institutional, and affective markers that emerge in the research.

The first book to examine the DMSC sex work movement in India as a significant feminist movement of our times, this book will be of interest to researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including South Asian Studies, Sociology, Social Work, Public Health, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Political Science.

This edited volume looks at the ways in which films, literature, photography and social media construct images of homelands and diasporas as well as the ways in which they facilitate exchanges between them. The volume presents with a dialogue between these representations and analyses how they are constructed, disseminated, appropriated and/or challenged in relation to recent political developments in South Asia and in the diaspora.

Focusing on images and narratives about South Asia and its diaspora, the book aims to re-centre the political nature of representations, as it addresses the interplay between representation, imagination and identity, with a specific focus on the South Asian diasporic experience.

This book will interest students and scholars of media, communication, popular culture, cultural studies, Asian studies, politics and sociology.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of South Asian Diaspora.

After assuming power in 1980, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) has sought to control the narrative of the struggle for liberation from colonialism, to the exclusion of other players such as the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU). This book investigates the ways in which photographs are being used within Zimbabwe, especially on social media, to challenge the prevailing narrative and reclaim the memories of the subjugated.

The book analyses the photographs produced by Zenzo Nkobi during the struggle against colonialism. Drawing on the memories of veterans from ZAPU and its military wing the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZPRA), the book shows that photographs can both act as a conduit for existing narratives, and as a tool for shaping memory narratives, and evidencing ZPRA military prowess ahead of other movements.

At a time when Zimbabwe is reassessing the legacy of liberation, this book offers a powerful multidisciplinary assessment for researchers across the fields of history, memory, political science, African studies, and media studies.

Dissident Women, Beguines, and the Quest for Spiritual Authority focuses on the responses of a group of twenty-first-century women to the lives and writings of thirteenth-century beguine mystics, and reveals how the struggle to discover their own inner spiritual authority connects two groups of women across centuries.

For contemporary women who are disenchanted with the institutional church and who seek spiritual direction, models deeply rooted within the tradition may not be the most helpful. The author explores the value of exemplars from the fringes, ushering Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete into the spotlight. The contemporary women studied developed a relationship with the beguines that transformed and influenced their own journeys. Their encounters underline the importance of re-membering the beguine mystics, the value of contemplative engagement with historical mystics, and the need for explicit validation of the richness of the edges of tradition within spiritual direction.

Dissident Women, Beguines, and the Quest for Spiritual Authority will be of particular interest to scholars of mysticism and spirituality as well as practical, pastoral, and feminist theology.

The concept of self-sufficiency involves the notion of sustainable, circular, and carbon-neutral cities. This book examines how urban planning can lead to greater self-sufficiency.

It sheds light on how urban and regional circular and self-sufficiency development can effectively contribute towards the ultimate goals of the United Nations (UN) Agenda 2030 and the European Union (EU) Green Deal. It not only embraces the scientific fields of regional and urban studies but also addresses environmental sustainability-related and regional resilience aspects, such as renewable energy production, sustainable mobility, and the circular economy. This book offers a full toolkit of knowledge on how to effectively implement planning approaches for circular and self-sufficiency development at both urban and regional levels. It begins by presenting a theoretical framework and debate on urban and regional planning approaches that can effectively make cities and regions circular and self-sufficient in certain development domains, such as producing intra-city electric energy, sustainable mobility, and promoting a circular economy. Further, it advances a range of policy development proposals aiming at providing a comprehensive introduction to contemporary thinking about how cities and regions can design innovative planning and governance processes and, where appropriate, build capacity to implement systemic and integrated climate-neutral policies, building on existing place-based territorial capital and experiences developed by local and regional networks. The chapters are written by established authors in their respective domains.

This book will thoroughly prepare students and provide knowledge to academics, researchers, and policymakers in the fields of urban and regional planning/development and studies, environmental sustainability, regional resilience, human geography, economic development, and public/EU/UN policies.

This book explains how the Columbia model of sociology, which was based on the methodology of P.F. Lazarsfeld, became a dominant sociological school of thought in American and European postwar sociology.

Providing an overview of Lazarsfeld's inventions and his methodological, organisational, and institutional innovations, it describes the means by which a particular model of sociology was gradually adopted in departments headed by Lazarsfeld and in the work of his successors. With attention to the use by Lazarsfeld of methodological texts published by prestigious publishing houses in his research and teaching, his activity in international organisations - including the UN - his collaboration with figures such as Robert K. Merton and Raymond Boudon, and his attempts to show how the roots of his empirical research methodology lay in the work of early European scholars, this volume shows how a particular sociological paradigm came to prevail over others for more than a decade.

It will therefore appeal to scholars of sociology with interests in the history of the discipline and questions of research methodology.

Love and Sexuality in Social Theory considers the role that love and sexuality play in private and public life.

Drawing on both classical and contemporary social theory, this book presents both theoretical and empirical studies of love and sexuality as social factors, from the earliest reconstructions of modern emotional life to the most recent analyses of liquid love. With attention to the consequences that passions and desires have both on morals and behaviour, it departs from the analysis of society in terms of the division of labour and utilitarian mechanisms to consider how a society based on performances values human energy and emotional behaviour in a contradictory way. This book, therefore, presents and discusses classic authors, from Georg Simmel and Pitirim Sorokin to Marianne Weber and Simone De Beauvoir, through the work of Erving Goffman and ending with contemporary authors such as Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, and Eva Illouz.

By presenting love as the social foundation of altruism, an essential element in modern conceptions of subjectivity, and a force shaping intimacy and contemporary social life, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, particularly those interested in social theory and the sociology of emotions.

Achille Mbembe is a key thinker in contemporary African philosophy who has been influential in literary and cultural theory, African literature, and postcolonial studies. Oliver Coates introduces key concepts within Mbembe's thought in relation to African history, literature, and philosophy.

This accessible guide:

• Considers examples from African literature in Arabic, English, French, and Yoruba, and shows the relevance of Mbembe's thought beyond Anglophone writing;
• Explores how Mbembe's work relates to contemporary global events and charts Mbembe's intellectual development between Cameroon, France, and the USA;
• Discusses core concepts from across Mbembe's career, including the positioning of Africa within Western and Afrodiasporic thought, the colony, postcolony, necropolitics, decolonization, Afropolitanism, technology, and the environment;
• Reveals Mbembe's engagement with key global events, including the #RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter movements, and the call for the restitution of African objects in Western museums.

Offering a clear and accessible route into what can be a complex area, this book shows the significance of Mbembe's thought across literature, history, postcolonial studies, gender studies, and critical theory.

This book is a sweeping reexamination of the evolution of the state, covering the indigenous orders of pre-Columbian America, the Spanish, Portuguese, and British Empires in the Americas, and their major successor states of Mexico, Brazil, and the United States.

Exploring the mechanisms of colonial order construction and the way in which that process prepared the ground for the emergence of national empires after independence, Niaz contends that the destruction of indigenous demography and culture was so complete that the societies and states of the New World are colonial in their basic fabric, thereby diverging from the Asian and African experience of European colonial rule. Independence from European empires intensified repression, instability, and inequality in each of the successor states, turning the rhetoric of equality and revolutionism into a legitimizing device for extraordinarily brutal regimes that completed the colonizing mission begun by European states. The volume examines these contradictions from a South Asian perspective and places the Americas in the broader narrative of the world's historical experience of governance and arbitrary rule.

New World Empires is intended for academics, professionals, and students interested in American Studies, political studies, and the history of governance in the Americas.

This book explores the history of slavery in the Atlantic World through the lens of emotion. Combining methods from the history of emotions with those from slavery studies often for the first time, this collection provides new and important perspectives on the role that emotion played in various slave societies across the Atlantic World.

Exploring slavery in Cuba, the United States, and British and French colonies, this book reveals how emotions were central to enslavers' creation, justification, and perpetuation of the system of slavery. Simultaneously, chapters also evidence the ways in which the enslaved utilised emotion as a form of refusal, resistance, and survival. Finally, the book considers the legacies and afterlives of slavery, including how emotion can inform our understanding of slavery's longer-term implications.

Taken together, the studies in this collection highlight the importance of placing emotions firmly at the centre of the study of Atlantic Slavery. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Slavery & Abolition.

Humanism is appealed to today whenever we want to tackle the conditions of dehumanization in the contemporary world. But for humanism to be viable in the twenty first century, this book argues, it needs to be pluralized.

Employing theoretical, historical, and sociological arguments, this book moves beyond the discourse of critique. It engages theories of religion and secularism, as well as postmodern, postcolonial, and decolonial critiques of Western humanist projects, to uncover the ideas and practices of religious and secular humanisms when they challenge dehumanization in the pursuit of conditions of flourishing for all. Through studies of the Solidarity movement in Poland and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, the book demonstrates the centrality of humanist traditions to the emergence of religious-secular solidarities that transformed the political landscapes of the world. By highlighting the instances in which humanisms functioned as checks on each other's absolutist claims, the book contends that humanisms supply a constructive path for addressing the challenges of our time-a time of radically divided societies and intolerant, even violent, forms of nationalism. A challenge to the critiques of humanism that seek to identify it solely as the legacy of the West, as anti-religious discourse, or relegate it to the domain of power constellations, Pluralizing Humanism highlights the rich plurality of humanist discourses and the need for their mutual engagements. It points to humanist ideals as constitutive of politics that can guide our human power because they are irreducible to it.

As such, this book will appeal to social scientists, social theorists, religious studies scholars, and ethicists with interests in religion, secularism, social movements, and humanist thought and practice.

The present work is a comprehensive catalog of publications that were produced and printed by the Divine Word Missionaries (Societas Verbi Divini, S.V.D.) in Shandong province, China. It was compiled by the late Prof. Dr. Roman Malek, S.V.D. (1951-2019), an internationally renowned expert for the history of Christianity in China and former director and editor-in-chief of the Monumenta Serica Institute (MSI) in Sankt Augustin, Germany.
The catalog comprises nearly 400 entries, arranged in alphabetical order according to the original titles, in Chinese, German or Latin, and occasionally in English. Each entry provides detailed bibliographical information, excerpts from the book information included in the contemporary editions of the Catalogus Librorum of the S.V.D. Mission Press, a short explanation in English on the respective title and a Table of Contents.
The S.V.D. publications cover a broad range of fields, including apologetic and catechetical material, e.g., reprints of works of the old China mission, books for teaching the faith and prayer books; biblical materials, i.e., translations from and works on the Bible; educational material, such as textbooks for the schools run by the S.V.D. in Shandong; dictionaries and grammars for Chinese, German and Latin; Catholic periodicals; books on Chinese culture; hymn books; and finally, materials for evangelization (posters, pictures, etc.).
The Bibliotheca Sinica Christiana makes an important contribution to documenting the printing activities of a specific Catholic missionary society, the S.V.D., in China in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. It aims at stimulating further research into the S.V.D. China mission and into the history of religious printing in the modern era in China at large.

Design Discourse in Abrahamic Traditions reconnects discussion of design arguments to its Jewish, Christian, and Muslim history. The ancient idea that there is evidence of purpose in nature remains one of the most debated topics in science and religion, but also one with great potential for inter-religious and interdisciplinary dialogue. This volume revitalizes current discussion by retrieving perspectives from the Abrahamic history of design arguments and engaging them with contemporary ideas. Beginning with the encounter ancient philosophy and creation beliefs, the book proceeds to delve deep into issues ranging from the nature of theological and teleological language to the implications of evolution and evil. This rich exploration showcases how, far from being irrelevant in a post-Humean, post-Darwinian world, design arguments continue to merit both popular-level and academic attention. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars working at the intersection of science and religion, philosophers of religion, and theologians.

Religion in Diverse Societies: Crossing the Boundaries of Prejudice and Distrust contributes to existing cutting-edge research on the constructive way in which religion can support the promotion of respect, dignity, and justice for all people, considered as essential features in shaping sustainable, diverse, and peaceful societies. Through a combination of theoretical perspectives and theological analysis, applied to "real-life" contexts, the diverse contributions examine the role of religion in helping to achieve this and thereby challenge the attitudes and practices that create walls of prejudice and distrust.

This timely volume provides a critical discussion of the complex role of religions in the public and political spheres in a range of global contexts and furthers the inter-religious, international, and interdisciplinary understanding of how religion can contribute to promoting and helping create inclusive and diverse societies.