Neoliberal education reforms promise (but often don't succeed) to improve student outcomes and provide more equitable educational opportunities to students with different backgrounds.

They hold schools accountable for their performance through high-stakes testing and linking performance to rewards and sanctions, and by empowering parents. This book presents a critical and objective appraisal of these neoliberalist education reforms. Mustafa Toprak considers the practical elements of neoliberal reforms, including voucher systems, choice, accountability, competition within and between schools, educational inequalities, and high-stakes testing, and in doing this, contributes to social justice debates and the idea of education as a common good. He uses reforms in Chile as a case study and offers a critique of its neoliberal educational reforms. Rather than discrediting all the central tenets of neoliberal education, Toprak considers the pros and cons of these reforms for students, teachers, schools, and societies and proposes new reforms to ensure that policies accurately and responsively address the needs of all stakeholders.

This book analyses major discourses of cultural diversity and human rights. The chapters contained in this book examine critically major issues confronting cultural diversity and human rights, both locally and globally. They analyze the challenges that different societies are confronted with, as they attempt to implement, protect and defend cultural diversity and human rights in an ever-changing world, and culturally diverse environment. Topics covered include celebrating cultural diversity in sport, human rights legacies of the African slave trade and the long-term implications of colonialism, assessment of human rights and sports, effectiveness in intercultural dialogue in dominant discourses of cultural diversity and human rights, and the rising importance of cultural diversity and human rights in sport for children and youth.

This book will be helpful to readers to explore their own views and consider more broadly what may be in the best interests of a fair and just society, as envisioned in human rights treaties, human rights education in schools, and cultural diversity.

This book examines the issues arising from British contested history by looking at how it came to be constructed, how it developed, and how attitudes over time have begun to change towards it. It considers how this narrative was first created through the writing of British history. It explores the private spaces of the court, the political places of the state, and the public places of the street. Beyond British shores this history has also been enacted through international heritage sites when objects were removed and taken back to Britain. Conclusively, it explores how the historic spaces of a maritime city, has further entrenched an already complex history of the nation. How this research brings new insights into this field is by looking at it through the lens of place, space, and the spatial turn. The underlining research questions are: What role does place and space play in historical constructions of the past? How do place and space contribute to contested history? How can these places and spaces be re-appropriated and reused, and endowed with new meanings?

An Irish Times Best Book for Summer 2025

In this book Joseph Dunne exposes the damage done by obsession with measurable outcomes in schools and universities. He argues for an education that respects the interpersonal fabric of learning and teaching, and that takes account of difficulties in late modern societies regarding childhood, citizenship, the relative prestige accorded to different kinds of knowledge, and the forging by individuals of a coherent identity across a whole life-course. To ask about good education, he claims, is necessarily to pose the larger question of the human good. Central to the book is a concern to elucidate the kind of practices that can best help persons to pursue this good, a concern that deepens through reflection in the final chapters on the challenges and fulfilments opened by the spiritual dimension of human life. Making his case in a series of inter-related essays, Dunne draws on his decades-long experience in teacher-education, informed by a reading of classical Greek philosophy and of several recent thinkers - including Raimond Gaita, Alasdair MacIntyre, Iris Murdoch and Charles Taylor - who are key conversation partners throughout.

Analytic philosophy of religion and philosophical theology are known for being focused on issues pertaining specifically to Judeo-Christian theism. This volume answers the call for novel work on a broader range of ideas about the spiritual, engaging with key concepts and neglected recent literature from other traditions.

Alternative Conceptions of the Spiritual engages with polytheism, animism, panspiritism and theophanism as propounded by recent philosophers and members of lesser-known spiritual traditions and new religious movements. Summarizing and assessing their core ideas and arguments with both clarity and sympathy, Dumsday combines respectful dialogue with logical rigour. Providing an accessible introduction to a rich and nuanced set of traditions largely overlooked in contemporary philosophical scholarship, the work will be welcomed by philosophers, theologians and students of new religious movements.

Is it possible to teach, learn and train for something that is not yet known? This open access book is the first to present research-based studies of the values and dangers of unforeseen events related to education. The climate emergency, the Covid-19 pandemic, the rise of authoritarianism and extremism have placed new demands on different sectors' views of knowledge, as well as the content and facilitation of education. The unforeseen interferes with the everyday life of everyone. The authors present pedagogy of the unforeseen as an opportunity, a productive moment, one can utilize for learning in which traditional views of knowledge, methods and strategies must be challenged. They argue that less emphasis should be placed on goals and results in school-based education and for teaching methods that better prepare students for unforeseen events.

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 Western Norway University.

Human species supremacy is one of the most persistent fictions at work in the field of modern British imperial history today. This open access collection challenges that assumption, and investigates what histories of empire look like if reimagined as the effect of biocultural, chemical and cultural processes, rather than the result of effects by humans that have been visited upon cultural landscapes, fauna and biomes.

In understanding the boundaries between human and nonhuman worlds as porous and open to mutual transformation, and foregrounding interspecies interactions, Biocultural Empire seeks to understand the conditions of imperial power, experience and knowledge as a remix of 'nature' and 'culture'. Bringing empire's 'biocultural histories' to the fore, it asks imperial historians to reckon with an interpretative framework which refuses the sovereignty and boundedness of the imperial subject by seeing it as inseparable from its social and ecological formations. Through this biocultural framework this collection highlights how relentlessly the human species bias of western liberal thought persists at the heart of imperial projects and their histories, and offers a new anti-colonial method that represents a significant intervention in the field of British imperial history.

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 University of Illinois, USA and University of British Columbia, Canada.

This book explores the history and development of the British daily newspaper strip. It considers such strips within their political, commercial and societal contexts and fills in a crucial section of publishing history that has been largely overlooked by both comics and newspaper studies to date. Beginning with an examination of the role of the image within British publishing in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the book moves on to explore the arrival and development of the first daily strips. It considers the links that bound these strips to surrounding cultural forms, their relationship to their host newspapers, and their position within the wider structures of the emerging popular press. Subsequent chapters cover a range of topics including the impact of the world wars, the anti-comics campaigns of the 1940s and 50s, and how changes to British publishing and wider society shaped the newspaper strips of the final decades of the twentieth century. Culminating with a discussion of the way in which strips became established within the broadsheet press from the 1960s, the book builds to provide a detailed overview of the twentieth century development of this most neglected cultural form.

This open access book analyzes the relation between dominant frameworks of LGBTQ+ identity in India and non-elite, non-metropolitan communities such as kothis and hijras, a spectrum of feminine-identified people usually assigned male at birth. Going beyond the well-known 'third gender' hijra community, this is the first book to study the discourses and practices of related but underrepresented groups like kothis and dhuranis in small-town and rural India while simultaneously examining their relation to and role within LGBTQ+ identity politics.

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the book demonstrates that non-elite groups facilitate the transregional expansion of organized queer politics and become more consolidated as gender/sexual identities in the process. Yet, they often remain irreducible to emerging identity categories and become subordinated through hierarchies of scale and language that serve to contain such communities and related discourses as local and vernacular. The book shows how this process, in effect, denies them an equal role in transnational LGBT politics; reinforces class/caste hierarchies within and beyond queer communities; and delegitimizes or erases articulations of gender/sexual difference that contravene dominant understandings of gender/sexual identity aligned with transnational capitalism, liberalism, or nationalism. Simultaneously, it reveals how non-elite communities rearticulate dominant identity categories in more equal, liberatory ways.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. This book was made possible with generous support from the University of Iowa's Office of the Vice President for Research and College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Tracing the development of Catholic ideas in Japan and China during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, this book provides an overview of the evolution of the missionary strategy in East Asia while focusing on the early emplantation of Catholicism in Korea.

Kevin Cawley recreates the tumultuous period for gender relations and explores interreligious interactions between Confucians and Catholics. Highlighting the textual production this period inspired, this book examines writings such as the catechism of the Italian Jesuit, Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), which went on to convert a group of elite Confucian scholars to the new religion. It also underscores the importance of the vernacular catechism written by Chong Yakchong (1760-1801), a convert from a prominent Confucian family, who was eventually executed. Chong's text made Catholicism easily understandable for women, as well as men from lower social classes, who eventually converted in significant numbers effecting real social change. Outlining the shift from rejection to acceptance of new texts composed by early Korean converts, this book explores emergent Catholicism in Japan, China and Korea, as well as the various challenges encountered and how the mission strategy changed as a result.

Exploring gender relations, both in relation to Confucianism and Catholics during this period, this book provides insight into this previously under researched aspect of East Asian Catholicism. In this study, we learn how religious persecution and political tactics manipulated, terrified and exterminated converts to Catholicism. From European Jesuits to Korean Confucians, this book outlines a fascinating journey of intercultural engagement between Western and Eastern worldviews.

This book reflects on how the pandemic impacted upon qualitative social research, but also how it affected the lives of the members of the Irish diaspora on the European continent. The crisis acted as a pressure cooker for those 'living abroad,' transforming distance and migration situations to resemble times gone by, when travel was far more prohibitive and emigration felt more permanent. At the same time, 'expat lives' were being thrown headlong into a new future, shaped more profoundly than ever by digital means. This work is a close examination of how Irish migrants in Germany construct their Irishness and, in doing so, maintain their belonging to Ireland across a geographic distance transformed by the pandemic. This work seeks to draw out the underlying patterns and meanings in the day-to-day practices of Irishness by members of Ireland's putative diaspora in Germany by interweaving a multitude of ethnographic vignettes and rich interview material with relevant and interestingtheoretical concepts. Interlocutors see Ireland as a site of personal memory - good, bad and in-between - and of meaning-making practices. Ireland is deeply personal to them; that understood, their practices of belonging to Ireland are nonetheless embroiled in the political goal of making Ireland visible abroad.

Explore the history, culture, and lived experiences of Ethiopian Americans in the USA.

Ethiopia, in East Africa, is the second most populated country in Africa, home to over 125 million inhabitants. For centuries, many Ethiopians had little exposure to the outside world, and even less to Americans. However, that started to change in the 1970s. In 1974, a military-backed government deposed Emperor Haile Selassie I, and many Ethiopians emigrated to the West.

Today, large populations of Ethiopian Americans live in cities such as Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. This book offers an accessible and detailed glimpse into their everyday lives. It includes an overview of Ethiopian art, media, and cuisine, biographies of accomplished Ethiopian Americans, and a revealing look into the ongoing struggle for equality and representation that many Ethiopian Americans experience.

Demonstrating how Chaucer uses the Bible in The Canterbury Tales as an authoritative literary source and model for his own literary production, this book explores the ways in which the Bible was a key tool for Chaucer's self-definition and innovation as an author.

Chad Schrock unravels Chaucer's Tales in the light of topics important to biblical reception in 14th-century England: authority, textuality, interpretation, translation, rephrasing and marginalia. When the Canterbury Tales are summed up in this way, they show the great extent to which Chaucer was drawing upon the Bible as a meta-poetical resource for his own poetry - its fictional tale-tellers and characters, its quotations, allusions and images, its plots, its imaginative engagement with an audience of listeners and readers, and its hidden intentions.

Schrock demonstrates that the Bible is a uniquely potent literary source for Chaucer because it combines infinite authority and plenitude with unprecedented freedom of interpretive invention. As a world-making text, the Bible's authority includes the literary as subcategory but surpasses and contextualizes it, which gives Chaucer's deferential biblical invention a different kind of freedom and safety. Within Chaucer's tales, a biblical image is often where a given narrative peaks and its plot comes clear, but a biblical world also and without strain contains his biblical fictioneers and whatever they make from the Bible, whether orthodoxy or heresy, whether sin or worship.

This volume brings together top articles on feminist political theory published in Contemporary Political Theory. With chapters on topics like abortion, the legacies of individual thinkers, and the role of care, the authors contribute varied but timely perspectives to the study of gender and politics.

An Independent Book of the Month

What was the mood of the British people during the middle and later years of the Second World War? How did they react to the major military and domestic events of the period? What issues were uppermost in their minds? What incidents caused particular public interest and controversy? These are some of the insights provided by this remarkable collection of contemporary wartime documents.

During the Second World War, Home Intelligence, a unit of the Ministry of Information, closely monitored British public attitudes on the home front and compiled secret reports on the state of popular morale which were circulated around Whitehall. In this volume, leading historian of the period, Jeremy Crang, brings together selected Home Intelligence reports from June 1941 to December 1944 to offer us a fascinating 'real time' glimpse into the mindset of the British people during these long years of struggle.

The reports provide a unique window into public responses to the shifting military fortunes of the war, including the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the British and Commonwealth victory at El Alamein, the strategic bombing of Germany, the defeat of Italy, and the Allied landings in Normandy. They also include much valuable information on the continuing stresses and strains of wartime life such as the blackout, rationing, fuel economy and strikes - as well as the V-weapon attacks of 1944 which brought back all the horrors of the Blitz. Alongside this, hopes and fears about the post-war world come to feature strongly and Home Intelligence carefully documented attitudes to the Beveridge report, as well as other aspects of reconstruction.

Introduced by the editor, and incorporating an extensive glossary, this collection is an exceptional record of popular opinion on the British home front as the tide of war gradually turned from defeat to victory. It is indispensable in understanding both the unity and diversity of wartime Britain, as well as the many-sided experience of living through 'Our People's War'.

This book documents an informal system of education that emerged in Ireland between the late 1750s and the end of the century, a system that operated largely without funding or direction by church or state. In a society as divided as eighteenth-century Ireland, it is remarkable that such a system could succeed, paving the way for the more formal reforms of Irish education that followed in the nineteenth century. Based on detailed evidence from newspaper advertisements, directories, educational prospectuses, textbooks, and other print documents from the period as well as previously unexamined manuscript resources, the author describes this system and how it functioned, emphasizing the transnational dimensions of print culture, English literature, and education reform.

This book introduces the idea of accidental collectives: the grouping of people that occurs as a by-product of the automated work of computers. Software has a growing influence in our lives automating and optimising mundane, time-consuming and repetitive tasks. In doing this, groups of people are automatically created as the result of classification and data analysis. Once grouped by the invisible agency of software, people interact and establish new relationships, generating new collectives and communities. With the support of case studies and real-life examples, this work explores the accidental nature of the generation of new social groups and questions the role of software in social interactions.

This book is the first volume to provide a comprehensive account of mega-event planning for the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. It offers a useful summary of the themes and debates relating to urban planning for the Paris Olympics, based on the results of a research programme (Observatory for Research on Mega-Event) funded by Gustave Eiffel University and Paris Est University and partly carried out with the organisers of the Games and their stakeholders. The authors address all aspects of the bidding process, the organisation of the Games and the construction of the social legacy of the Games.

Everybody wants to know what makes people happy. Artistic takes on the topic in literature, popular songs and cinema are widespread, but not terribly helpful. Psychological accounts are mostly about how to avoid unhappiness. So who actually is happy, and why? This book offers real answers from the real world of American society. Their source is the General Social Survey, a scientific poll of Americans offering some five decades of state-of-the-art data. An additional enhancement is a set of qualitative interviews commissioned by the author adding depth to the extraordinary breadth of the GSS. The approach of the book is distinctly sociological. Are married Americans happier than unmarried Americans? Does social class matter? How about college? The answers lie within this wide and deep dive into happiness in America.