Examining transdisciplinary research historically, philosophically and contextually, the book evaluates its evolving methodology and quality criteria. Authors demonstrate its practical application in various case studies, such as developing nature-based solutions in education, sustainable farming practices and developmental initiatives in subsistence marketplaces. The synthesis of the case experiences enables researchers to link their concepts, relationships and modes of knowledge production to transformative action, aiding efforts to address complex challenges arising from climate change, biodiversity crises and inclusive growth.

How to Organise Transdisciplinary Research for Transformative Action and Knowledge Co-Production is a key resource for scholars and students of business and management, education, research methods and sociology. It is also prime reading for educators, research funding agencies and management practitioners seeking actionable recommendations on how to implement transdisciplinary research.

This book examines how the Soviet past is culturally negotiated, reimagined, and recreated in new temporal regimes; how the Soviet project is "recycled" and used as a key component in the construction of a new Russian collective identity; and how it has metamorphosed from a historical dimension to the sphere of myth.

These processes, conceptualized under the term "Soviet myth," are crucial for understanding the growing nostalgia for the USSR in Russia, recent cultural and ideological developments, and current domestic and foreign policies. The scope of this study extends from the late Soviet period to the present, but most chapters examine the pivotal decade in the formation of the Soviet myth, 2012-2022. Written by experts in the field, the book presents a broad spectrum of examples of how the Soviet legacy has been transmuted into the realm of mythology in visual arts, film, television, urban narratives, music, and video games.

Soviet Myth in Post-Soviet Russia is of value to researchers studying Slavic and Russian studies, in particular post-Soviet culture, languages, literatures, anthropology, and political science.

This book examines parental educational anxiety in contemporary mainland China, offering a systematic analysis of its cultural roots, conceptual structure, formation mechanisms, and consequences.

Through vivid case studies, the authors delve into three key aspects of educational anxiety: concerns about academic performance, the competitive environment, and parenting self-efficacy. They present a dynamic framework that illustrates how family practices, school expectations, and social competition interact to generate and amplify anxiety. The book also investigates the wide-reaching effects of this phenomenon, demonstrating how it disrupts family relationships and undermines psychological well-being. To address these challenges, the authors propose practical, integrated strategies aimed at reducing parental educational anxiety, offering actionable solutions for families, schools, and policymakers.

Blending empirical evidence with an innovative analytical perspective, this volume is a valuable resource for scholars and practitioners in education, mental health, and family studies.

Exploring how wide-ranging debates have supported, extended, repositioned, or conflicted with the original notion of Communities of Practice (CoPs) as sites of situated learning, this book argues that they can be cultivated and managed in higher education settings to create and support an inclusive culture for teaching and research, and career development.

Against the backdrop of more traditionally orientated volumes that focus on CoPs as a tool for supporting teaching and learning in the classroom, this scholarly work tackles university culture related to curriculum development, knowledge exchange activities, research, and academic careers to offer a critical appraisal of often disparate themes and epistemological perspectives in which CoPs have been applied. Critical in approach and theoretical in nature, chapters explore how CoPs can support an inclusive university research culture, offering insights on their management, cultivation and legacies. Contributions also look at their ability to help build external relationships between academics, practitioners and businesses, as well as discussions on individual identity construction and participation.

Ultimately examining the potential for CoPs to shape the future of academic institutions, this book will appeal to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students in higher education, inclusive education and educational policy.

Chapters discuss teaching methods such as the use of games, integration of theory, global panel data, and student-centered learning, alongside how to teach in different contexts across democratic and autocratic societies. The book further highlights classic works on autocracy and perspectives beyond the canon, such as studies of informal institutions and parastatal organizations, giving teachers the tools required to provide well-rounded and engaging courses on autocracy.

Teaching Autocracy and Autocratic Politics is a key resource for educators looking to produce an effective and ethically sensitive programme on autocracy. Instructors teaching classes on comparative politics and political science more broadly will also find the volume useful.

Contributing authors address the timely themes of Net Zero, smart cities and the transformative influence of AI to build an analysis of the current path to digital technocracy. They adopt an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the emergence of a concentrated global economic elite and examine key questions pertaining to manifestations of technologically enhanced population management strategies. Incorporating national case studies across China, Iran, the USA and elsewhere, Rise of the Digital Technocracy evaluates how the digitally engendered fear and suspicion embedded in the deployment of evolving technological tools are used as means of undermining and assuming increasing control of political systems.

Innovative in its inter-connected analysis of global elites and technocracies, this book is essential reading for scholars and students of sociology, social policy, political theory and human-oriented data science. Professionals in bureaucracies, think-tanks and policy making will also benefit from its theoretical and practical insights.

Education Fiction aims to inspire readers who are passionate about critically exploring possible futures of education and learning. This edited volume addresses key educational issues of our present and future through a collection of short stories. In today's educational landscape, shaped by rapid AI developments, a climate crisis, and growing commercial interests, Education Fiction provides a space to reflect on current trends and envision alternative possibilities for education.

This book introduces the concept of education fiction and demonstrates its versatility. Each short story is accompanied by critical reflections that connect imagination to educational research and practice, highlighting how fiction can make research more accessible, engaging, and emotionally resonant. By moving beyond the constraints of academic formality, education fiction encourages thinking otherwise and imagining education futures.

This book is written for everyone with an interest in education, particularly educators and researchers seeking to reimagine education. It can also be used in teacher education, professional development, and futures-thinking workshops for educators, faculty, and educational leaders.

The authors argue that student services must be approached through a growth mindset. They propose actionable, student-focused strategies using social support structures, boundary setting, fostering belonging and personal value systems. Readers will be inspired by the personal narratives of resilience from ten current and recent college students and the authors' own lived experience as a college administrator and a first generation student with a background in foster care, making this a nuanced and highly practical book. Readers are shown how institutions can implement organizational-wide changes to reinforce individual interactions that are strengths-based and trauma-informed, creating an open and supportive ecosystem.

How to Build Resilience in College Students is a crucial resource for college and university administrators, counselors and student services staff members. Faculty teaching in higher education and researchers focusing on young people will also benefit from the evidence-based insights and practical recommendations.

Sally Sales examines the troubled relationship between psychoanalysis and working-class experience, critiquing its class-blind theories and practices while exploring ways to address these exclusions.

In this book, she traces psychoanalysis from its inception to the present, highlighting how it has marginalized working-class lives by privileging internal psychological states over external realities, universalizing class differences, and reducing classed suffering to individual pathology. It explores key areas such as childhood, mothering, rural living, psychotherapy training, and clinical practice, offering a critical yet constructive analysis of psychoanalytic traditions.

This book is essential for clinicians, psychotherapists, and students of psychoanalysis, offering insights into class dynamics and their impact on therapeutic practices, challenging readers to rethink psychoanalytic theories and practices to better address the lived realities of working-class individuals.

The concept of the "common concern of humankind" (CCH) has gradually been incorporated into international law. Following the 2025 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on climate change, its international legal status is beyond doubt. International law attributes significant consequences to the CCH qualification, which essentially fall within the sphere of State responsibility. Ulti-mately, States have taken on board the responsibility of fulfilling the obligations they have undertaken for the benefit of humanity and the international community as a whole, and not merely to pursue their own individual and collective inter-ests. Today, the concept of CCH is associated with two global challenges: climate change and biodiversity loss.

This book explores the possibility of extending the CCH designation to include the "intentional destruction of the cultural heritage of humankind" (IDCHH). A comprehensive definition of IDCHH is provided. The arguments in favour of such inclusion are based on a systematic comparison of the qualifying features of the two legal concepts: CCH and IDCHH. These arguments also consider a modern, integrated approach to solving major global problems internationally, which recog-nises the destruction of cultural heritage, climate change and the loss of biodiver-sity as interconnected phenomena requiring consistent and uniform political and legal responses.

This book's central thesis is that notions of monstrosity and geographic marginality were central to the formation of an English identity in the Middle Ages. Medieval Christian theologians believed that geography was divinely ordered, so their perception of Britain as being in the monstrous periphery of the world caused anxiety among its inhabitants that we can see expressed across media and genres.

Medieval cartography, for centuries scorned as crude, is now the subject of numerous careful studies; monsters, likewise long ignored in scholarship, are now of great interest. This book sits at the crossroads of these two discourses (critical cartography and monster studies), treated separately in most scholarship. Nearly twenty years after its initial publication, Maps and Monsters in Medieval England remains the only extended study of the role of monsters on medieval maps and of the ways that ideas about geography shaped the role of monsters in other contexts, where they were marshaled as part of an ongoing effort to define what it meant to be human, English, and Christian.

This volume is intended for professional scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates. Translations are provided for all Latin and Old English texts to render the volume accessible to a wider range of readers.

Feeling with Demons offers a renewed approach to early modern witchcraft through the lens of the history of emotions. It examines the intellectual, judicial, and emotional frameworks that shaped witch-hunting in Old and New England, as well as the personal and communal tensions that fuelled accusations, their connections to demonic possession, and the arguments advanced by those who challenged the trials.

Drawing on demonological treatises, sermons, witchcraft pamphlets, and trial records, this book investigates the emotional worlds of accused witches, victims, witnesses, as well as judicial and religious authorities. It asks which feelings demonologists encouraged or condemned; which emotions contemporaries associated with witchcraft; how alleged victims understood their affective experiences; how the accused were expected to respond before judges and juries; and what it meant, emotionally, to undergo demonic possession. By examining what people feared, hated, envied, despised, or raged against, Feeling with Demons opens revealing windows onto the experiences and lives of early modern men and women in the English Atlantic.

This book speaks to students and researchers of witchcraft, witch-hunting, and demonology, as well as to readers interested in the humanities, the social sciences, and Christian religious thought. Its emotional perspective also fosters dialogue with psychology, anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, gender studies, philosophy, and theology.

This monograph explores British Conflict Related Metal Boxes (CRMBs) and the memories they contain that come directly from, or are influenced by, the First World War.

This book identifies for the reader many of the 'tins' and other CRMBs from the period of the First World War that were used to convey 'comforts' to the soldiers and sailors serving during the war. It details, often for the first time in print, the background context to the 'gift-giving' and places it in context regarding funding, eligibility, design and production. All of the examples given in the book (with the exception of one item that is so rare that it is represented only by a photograph) are taken from the author's own collection which has allowed for a more in-depth examination and analysis of the materiality of these objects. So many of these objects are either so rare or are held in museums or collections which make understanding how they 'feel', far beyond the reach of literature or internet image accession can ever achieve alone.

This book is for students and researchers of modern conflict archaeology, material culture, military history and social history as well as collectors of militaria, antiques and social history objects.

This volume traces the historical development of Lutheran churches in southern Africa from colonial establishment through apartheid to contemporary unity efforts. The study examines mission-to-church transitions, responses to apartheid, and multiple attempts at achieving unity including the formation of FELCSA, LUCSA, and includes:

• Comprehensive historical analysis of Lutheran churches in southern Africa from colonial establishment to contemporary unity efforts
• Examination of mission-to-church transitions and responses to apartheid within Lutheran denominations
• Critical assessment of unity initiatives including FELCSA, LUCSA, and joint theological education at LTI
• Analysis of the 1964 UELCSA and 1975 ELCSA formations and their impact on racial divisions within Lutheran churches
• Documentation of failed unity attempts and the 2008 collapse of unity talks with lessons for future efforts

This title has been co-published with UKZN Press. T&F does not sell or distribute the print versions in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The Unexpected Consequences of State Support for Religion: An Empirical Analysis of Christian-Majority addresses the consequences of one of the most basic decisions a government must make when dealing with religion: the decision to support a state religion or to provide separation of religion and state and religious freedom.

Drawing on the rational choice literature on religion and politics as well as the broader literature on religion in the social sciences, this book takes the perspective that politicians and governments decide on government-religion policy based on their own interests. It tests five potential consequences of supporting a state reli>gion in Christian-majority countries: religiosity (how religious are people in the country?), governmental legitimacy, levels of both public and private morality in a country, social trust, and patterns of violence and social unrest. Many empirical analyses reveal unexpected costs and benefits of supporting a state religion. For example, while most assume that when governments support a religion, it is at least in part because they believe it will increase their legitimacy, this book finds, with some exceptions, that this is not the case. Similarly, it finds an incentive structure that perversely incentivizes increased discrimination against religious
minorities.

The Unexpected Consequences of State Support for Religion will appeal to scholars and students of politics, religion, and sociology, particularly those interested in Christian nationalism and government and state politics.

Drawing on the rank-scale hypothesis of Systemic Functional Linguistics, this book explores the synergetic relationships among syntactic complexities at the sentence, clause, and group levels. It also examines how these relationships vary among academic English writers of different proficiency levels.

Viewing language as a dynamic, self-organizing, and self-regulating system, the book examines how changes in complexity at higher levels affect their constituent units. Linguistic complexity is conceptualized systematically across four dimensions: sentence, clause, group, and word. Dependency grammar is employed as an accessible, quantitative metric for complexity analysis. Through an analysis of academic texts produced by three groups of writers with varying levels of proficiency-Chinese Master's students, Chinese Doctoral students, and native English-speaking Doctoral students-the study identifies features of academic writing related to proficiency and uncovers interrelationships among the four dimensions of linguistic complexity. Based on these findings, the book proposes a synergetic model of linguistic complexity that illustrates how these dimensions interact and achieve dynamic balance in English academic writing across different proficiency levels.

This book offers valuable insights for researchers, educators, and graduate students. It provides theoretical exploration and practical guidance for teaching and assessing academic writing.

This book provides a new take on the longstanding puzzle of intervention effects in questions, whereby specific scopal expressions block the interpretation of wh-elements when they occupy a particular position in the semantic representation.

Its central argument is that intervention effects are not a homogeneous phenomenon with a uniform underlying structure mapped to a single interpretive mechanism. Rather, they have distinct sources-a distinction that, to date, has not been systematically made in the study of intervention. The work distinguishes two types of intervention: one stemming from focus-based interpretation failure and another rooted in topicality constraints. Consequently, it proposes a new typology that clarifies the field and paves the way for future cross-linguistic research.

Semanticists, syntacticians, pragmatics researchers, and experts in logic and the philosophy of language will find this book illuminating.

The Syntax of Dutch presents a synthesis of current thinking on Dutch syntax. Its principal focus is on describing the Dutch language; technical issues related to linguistic theory are addressed only if new light is shed on the subject.

The work is organized around the four lexical categories verbs (volumes 1-3),nouns (volumes 4-5), adjectives (volume 6), and adpositions (volume 7). It includes a general introduction to the semantic, morphological, and syntactic properties of these categories, their argument structure, their modification possibilities, and issues related to word order. The functional categories (determiners, complementizers, etc.) are discussed in relation to the lexical categories with which they occur. Volume 8 concludes the work by considering a number of issues that extend beyond proper sentence grammar: main-clause external elements, coordination, and ellipsis.

The Syntax of Dutch will be an indispensable resource for researchers and advanced students of languages and linguistics interested in the Dutch language.

The Syntax of Dutch presents a synthesis of current thinking on Dutch syntax. Its principal focus is on describing the Dutch language; technical issues related to linguistic theory are addressed only if new light is shed on the subject.

The work is organized around the four lexical categories verbs (volumes 1-3),nouns (volumes 4-5), adjectives (volume 6), and adpositions (volume 7). It includes a general introduction to the semantic, morphological, and syntactic properties of these categories, their argument structure, their modification possibilities, and issues related to word order. The functional categories (determiners, complementizers, etc.) are discussed in relation to the lexical categories with which they occur. Volume 8 concludes the work by considering a number of issues that extend beyond proper sentence grammar: main-clause external elements, coordination, and ellipsis.

The Syntax of Dutch will be an indispensable resource for researchers and advanced students of languages and linguistics interested in the Dutch language.

The Syntax of Dutch presents a synthesis of current thinking on Dutch syntax. Its principal focus is on describing the Dutch language; technical issues related to linguistic theory are addressed only if new light is shed on the subject.

The work is organized around the four lexical categories verbs (volumes 1-3),nouns (volumes 4-5), adjectives (volume 6), and adpositions (volume 7). It includes a general introduction to the semantic, morphological, and syntactic properties of these categories, their argument structure, their modification possibilities, and issues related to word order. The functional categories (determiners, complementizers, etc.) are discussed in relation to the lexical categories with which they occur. Volume 8 concludes the work by considering a number of issues that extend beyond proper sentence grammar: main-clause external elements, coordination, and ellipsis.

The Syntax of Dutch will be an indispensable resource for researchers and advanced students of languages and linguistics interested in the Dutch language.

The Syntax of Dutch presents a synthesis of current thinking on Dutch syntax. Its principal focus is on describing the Dutch language; technical issues related to linguistic theory are addressed only if new light is shed on the subject.

The work is organized around the four lexical categories verbs (volumes 1-3), nouns (volumes 4-5), adjectives (volume 6), and adpositions (volume 7). It includes a general introduction to the semantic, morphological, and syntactic properties of these categories, their argument structure, their modification possibilities, and issues related to word order. The functional categories (determiners, complementizers, etc.) are discussed in relation to the lexical categories with which they occur. Volume 8 concludes the work by considering a number of issues that extend beyond proper sentence grammar: main-clause external elements, coordination, and ellipsis.

The Syntax of Dutch will be an indispensable resource for researchers and advanced students of languages and linguistics interested in the Dutch language.

In an era of increasing global polarization, the ability to engage in meaningful talk across different languages and cultures has never been more urgent. L2 educators and learners play pivotal roles in facilitating this. However, this challenge requires more than mere fluency; it demands a pedagogical shift that encourages L2 learners to uncover and question hidden assumptions while seeking solutions to problems they may identify.

Towards Critical Dialogue in the Language Classroom offers a timely response, viewing the L2 classroom not only as a site for language acquisition but also as a space for critique, inquiry, and analysis supported by respectful mutual engagement and dialogue in the L2. This book bridges the gap between foundational theory and classroom practice. The first part provides a deep historical and philosophical exposition of dialogue, from manifold sources, through the transformative problem-posing pedagogy of Paulo Freire to contemporary thinkers and educators. The second part translates these ideas into a documentation of classroom practice, detailing activities implemented in an actual L2 context. The book illustrates how to support L2 learners as they move towards critical dialogue. They engage with linguistic functions, use interactive tasks relating to potentially controversial themes, and uncover and question gender socialization embedded in everyday life.

What sets this work apart is its combination of rigorous theoretical grounding and a lived pedagogical narrative. Documenting incremental steps of classroom practice towards critical dialogue, this book serves as encouragement for L2 educators, researchers, and curriculum designers who seek to honor student voices and prepare L2 learners to thoughtfully reshape the world around them.

Teaching Second Languages through Dialogue and Interaction: Action, Turns, and Sequences advances an interaction-focused approach to second language teaching by placing social actions, turns, and sequences as central objects of instruction. Drawing on interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, and second language acquisition research, the book demonstrates how dialogue and social interaction can be taught systematically rather than left to incidental exposure or communicative practice alone.

While learning to say "what's next" in interaction is a critical competence for language learners, such interactional abilities are rarely addressed explicitly or coherently in instructional materials. This book shows how teachers can design and integrate materials that target the organization of talk itself, linking words, grammar, and multimodal resources to the social actions they accomplish. Presenting foundational research alongside empirically grounded teaching units across several languages, Huth illustrates how learners can be guided to recognize, produce, and respond to actions such as openings and closings, requests, complaints, stance-taking through so-called "little words," and other recurrent interactional practices. Additional teaching resources freely available to download complement this volume, encouraging practical applications and flexible personalization.

Research-based and classroom-tested, this book offers practical resources for designing lessons, developing assessments, and supporting curricular change. It will be of interest to current and future language teachers, as well as to students and researchers in second language teaching, second language acquisition, applied linguistics, and related fields focusing on language use as social action.

An Introduction to Foreign Language Learning and Teaching provides an engaging, student-friendly, up-to-date guide to the field of foreign language learning and teaching.

Aimed at students with no background in the area and taking a task-based approach, this thoroughly revised fourth edition:

• introduces the theoretical and practical aspects of both learning and teaching, and provides discussion and workshop activities throughout each chapter of the book, along with further reading and reflection tasks;
• deals with classroom- and task-based teaching, including content-based instruction, and content- and language-integrated learning. It also covers lesson planning and testing, making the book suitable for use on practical training courses;
• analyses different learning styles and suggests strategies to improve language acquisition;
• introduces discussions about technology-supported (GenAI) foreign language teaching and learning;
• includes examples from foreign language learning in Russian, French, Danish, and German, as well as English.

Written by experienced teachers and authors, An Introduction to Foreign Language Learning and Teaching is essential reading for students beginning their study in the area, as well as teachers in training and those already working in the field.

This book is accompanied by online support materials at www.routledge.com/9781032747958, which contain additional information, exercises, and weblinks.

This book offers a historical-anthropological study of Swedish Protestant missionaries in the Congo Free State during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It examines how a Swedish mission society, working in the Congo Free State during the brutal regime of King Leopold II, attempted to reshape Congolese society by transplanting Western Christian ideals into the local Kikongo-speaking context. The author analyzes the relationship between missionaries, the violent colonial state, and the Bakongo people among whom they worked, showing how mission stations became contested sites where Christian ideals were translated into institutional practices and repeatedly destabilized by colonial violence and existing social arrangements. The chapters document the missionaries' activities and experiences using rich archival sources, drawing on Swedish-language mission archives and their personal writings such as letters, diaries, and reports. They tell a story of missionary efforts to improve the lives of Congolese converts, as well as failures, misunderstandings, and abuses of power. The author combines detailed empirical narrative with critical examination of topics including family and kinship, labor and economy, and state formation in a colonial context. By approaching Protestant mission in colonial contexts as a project of institutional reorganization, the book reframes familiar debates about domination, translation, hybridity, and local agency in mission studies and colonial history. It also offers a broader framework for understanding how transformative projects depend on the alignment of institutions, practices, and modes of governance, and why they tend to falter when such alignment cannot be secured.

Moroccan Judeo-Arabic Dialects as Jewish Languages provides an in-depth analysis of the diachrony and synchrony of the Judeo-Arabic dialects formed in Morocco from the 16th onwards, their diversity, their constituents, their forms, their categories, and their uses in community and family life.

Drawing on extensive linguistic data from a wide range of sources, including manuscripts and oral performances, this book examines the phonetics, phonology and morphology of the Judeo-Arabic dialects to offer insightful analyses and discoveries. Framed by a theoretical and methodological introduction, this book combines the findings of fieldwork with hundreds of informants from over 130 urban and rural Moroccan Jewish communities, for whom Judeo-Arabic is their mother tongue and primary language, with the advantages of modern linguistic, sociolinguistic, and socio-pragmatic analyses that allow for a better understanding of natural dialectal phenomena and their interpretation.

The book will be relevant to scholars of Arabic dialectology, sociolinguistics, and Jewish languages.

The Puzzle of Paul in Acts explores the long-standing historical challenge of Luke's story of Paul through a fresh analysis of its major issues based in contemporary linguistic and historiographical theory.

Luke's story of Paul has long been subject to debate in New Testament criticism; it is surprisingly similar to, yet unavoidably different from, Paul's autobiography in his letters. This book provides a new model of historical interpretation built on "linguistic description" and "historical explanation" to reanalyze the central issues in the criticism of Paul in Acts, including the genre and historical content of Luke-Acts, the relation of Acts and Galatians, the "we" material in Acts, and Paul's fabled Athenian address. It advances a new argument that Luke constructed an independent and reliable account of Paul and that he collaborated with plausibly identifiable eyewitness sources in his narrative.

The Puzzle of Paul in Acts is suitable for students and scholars of Paul and Luke-Acts, as well as those working in early Christianity, early Christian historiography, and ancient Greek language and linguistics.

This book explores how in medieval Italy people perceived, interpreted, and sought to influence weather and climatic phenomena through the lens of sanctity. Focusing on hagiographic narratives from the early to the late Middle Ages, it reconstructs a rich corpus of miracle stories in which saints calm storms and hail, bring rain during droughts, or protect sailors and river travellers from tempests.

By reading these accounts as cultural texts, the volume offers a history of miraculous weather in medieval Italy, spanning the centuries before the Medieval Warm Period and the onset of the Little Ice Age. At the same time, it situates the evidence of the peninsula within a broader European and Mediterranean framework, highlighting the particular importance of maritime and coastal environments. The volume has a strong comparative structure, in which medieval sources are in constant dialogue with tales from antiquity and artistic works. Combining cultural history and historical anthropology, the study sheds light on how medieval communities understood climate variability, articulated fear and hope in the face of natural forces, and embedded weather events within systems of belief and ritual. The result is a nuanced contribution to the cultural and environmental history of the Middle Ages and to the history of human-climate relations.

Its primary audience comprises students and scholars specialising in medieval studies, the history of religion, hagiography, and cultural history.

This book is a study of the dynamic, multi-faceted, and even unorthodox things that are happening within Muslim-majority societies. The mission is to bring together in a single volume an array of anthropological observations of individuals, groups, and movements in contemporary Islamic settings, focusing neither primarily on religion nor on nonreligion or secularism but on the range of activities that people engage in under the umbrella of Islam.

This volume includes 14 chapters by anthropologists in a wide array of Muslim-majority countries, from Morocco to Turkey, Bangladesh, Uzbekistan, and Indonesia. It features explorations of unorthodox piety (including "algorithmic faith" and ex-Muslim "digital migration"), economics (Islamic currencies and "market Islam" in the form of Guelen movement), gender (online female entrepreneurship, heavy metal women, queer-feminist pilgrimage, as well as transgender and anti-transgender movements), and arts and environments (eco-Islam, modernist Islamic art, and Ottoman objects and authority). The collected essays illustrate clearly that Islam is much more than "Islamism" or, worse, Islamic terrorism and that contemporary Muslims are creative makers of their own forms of modernity, usually respectful of but also actively reimagining the "discursive tradition" that is Islam.

This volume should be of interest to scholars and students of Islam (and other religions), as well as general readers, who want to see beyond the stereotypes of Islam and appreciate today's Muslims as makers of their own, often unorthodox, cultural realities.