The Soviet Afro-Asianists explores Soviet intellectual and cultural history through the prism of postcolonial connections. Julie Hessler focuses on a cohort of writers and artists, mostly non-Russians from the Caucasus and Central Asia, who played a central role in the Soviet Union's cultural outreach to postcolonial countries in Asia and Africa. Interspersing analysis of the creative work with stories of their lives, Hessler considers three key themes: travel and literary and artistic impressions; ideals, particularly those connected to friendship and socialist internationalism; and civic action through organizations for peace, Afro-Asian solidarity, and international friendship.

Born shortly before or after the Russian Revolution, these artists and intellectuals became involved in "Afro-Asian" organizations in the 1950s. They identified passionately with anti-imperialism and with the promise of socialism. Focusing on a particular dimension of the Thaw - the opening of Soviet culture to new influences from the postcolonial world - The Soviet Afro-Asianists traces their path across the second half of the Soviet period, ending with the challenges they faced during the perestroika years.

An ethnography of how people use reproductive practices to transmit and reinvent American Judaism.

In Gestating Judaism, Cara Rock-Singer develops a new analytic technique called ethnodrashy (a combination of rabbinical midrash and sociological ethnography) to explore the centrality of reproductive bodies to the intellectual, political, and spiritual life of American Judaism. She considers how, in reproduction, religious practices like the mikveh combine with secular practices like fertility treatments in ways that challenge the popular idea that religion occupies a separate sphere of life from politics or science. In fact, Rock-Singer shows how Jewish feminists have leveraged the work of reproduction to intervene in important conversations about both politics and theology. Drawing together religious studies, gender studies, and science and technology studies, Gestating Judaism shows how Jewish tradition is transmitted and reinvented through the ongoing labor of reproduction.

Offers an accessible new way to think critically and transparently about how researchers, especially those doing ethnographic work, can balance their personal commitments with long-term research.

For ethnographers, spending a year or longer in a faraway place conducting fieldwork is becoming increasingly untenable due to competing life responsibilities and rising workloads, as well as disability, precarity, and geopolitical factors. If ethnographic methods are to remain relevant and viable for a diverse group of people in anthropology and beyond, Goekce Guenel and Chika Watanabe argue, we need to examine how our personal and professional lives intersect and shape one another.

In Patchwork Ethnography, Guenel and Watanabe take seriously the conditions that render long-term fieldwork difficult for so many. Without being prescriptive, the book offers concrete ways for scholars to unpack the competing commitments in their lives and make those challenges feel more manageable. Blending theoretical analysis with practical exercises, the authors guide readers to rethink the relationship between their personal lives and their scholarship. Ultimately, they point to ways for transforming limitations into catalysts for fresh insights. By highlighting how shifting labor and living conditions profoundly alter knowledge production, Patchwork Ethnography calls for a paradigm shift in ethnographic research.

This book contributes to the current research area by achieving an understanding of the organization of our academic activities and by finding evidence for the generic conditioning of texts on the linguistic strata. Drawing on a functional theory, the current study selects naturally occurring abstracts in journal articles from a variety of academic disciplines, viz. linguistics, economics, science, management, and geography. The aim is to find out how the linguistic realizations of a text enact the purpose of a discourse in certain institutionalized academic settings. The result of the study could be incorporated into the language learning classroom and benefit especially those students who are learning to write academic papers. Through reading this proposed book, target readers may be better informed of the "generic expectations" of research paper abstracts.

The book argues that, in line with the latest research results and the author's educational experience, the existing, positive image of a second and foreign language (L2) teacher seems to be no longer valid. There is a strong need to dispel some of the commonly existing beliefs concerning the teaching profession by providing a thorough and multi-faceted account of issues connected with this field. This is in line with the assumption that shedding more light onto L2 educators' actual status is a great significance for creating a more realistic image of these educators who have to constantly cope with new and old challenges. Modern education systems in many countries are constantly evolving in the face of growing teacher shortages and low attractiveness of the profession. Therefore, there seems to be an urgent need to develop a better understanding of the well-being of teachers and its implications for L2 teaching and learning. This book presents a comprehensive conceptual framework to analyze teachers' well-being and its influence on the quality of their professional performance. The book is of significance and relevance not only to L2 educators and L2 teacher trainers, but also to students and university graduates who are considering becoming teachers in the future. The content of the book is a valuable asset for policy makers who are interested in creating meaningful and efficient working conditions for those who are teachers and those who plan to become satisfied and motivated educators in the future.

This research monograph investigates the immediate effects of peer feedback on text revisions and the long-term effects of peer feedback on writing performance. It also examines students' processing of peer feedback in revision and explores their perceptions of peer feedback. Peer feedback, an activity in which learners read others' drafts and make comments on them orally and/or in written mode, is widely employed in English as a foreign/second language (L2) writing instruction. Extensive studies investigating its effects have been conducted, and yet very few studies have examined how the effects take place and whether the effects sustain. To address the research gaps, this book reports a rigorous peer feedback intervention conducted during a semester-long College English course at a Chinese university. This research yields a deep understanding of the effects of peer feedback and provides an example of how a mixed methods approach can be employed in second language writing research. This book is a valuable research resource for researchers, practitioners and policymakers on an international scale.

The comprehensive volume brings together cutting-edge research and practical insights on language testing, assessment, and evaluation across West and South Asia. Featuring voices in India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, the book offers a rich blend of theory, case studies, and classroom-based evidence-highlighting innovative practices that shape one of the world's most linguistically and culturally diverse regions. The book is structured into five thematic sections and provides logical progression from foundational concepts to innovative applications. It explores vital themes ranging from assessment policy and teacher training to digital innovations and AI-enhanced assessment frameworks.

An essential resource for researchers, educators, administrators, and policymakers, this volume provides actionable strategies for improving English language testing in West and South Asia's multilingual and evolving educational landscape.

This book offers a nuanced and original analysis of the complex relationship between Islam and the state in post-Soviet Uzbekistan. Situating religious revival within the country's historical, political, and social transformations, it reveals the paradoxical dynamics that have shaped contemporary Islamic life. The study traces how state efforts to promote "official Islam" while repressing "unofficial" expressions have produced unintended consequences, including the radicalization of some believers. By illuminating the dialectical tensions between governance, control, and religious agency, the book provides a groundbreaking account of the power struggles that define Uzbekistan's religious and political landscape. Drawing on historical materials and contemporary data from previously inaccessible sources, it makes a significant contribution to the sociology of religion, political sociology, social scientific studies of Islam, and political science.

The life and work of an American Jewish convert to Islam who became a leading voice of the global Islamic Revival, explored through the lens of emotion in transnational religious identity

Maryam Jameelah (1934-2012)-born Margaret Marcus in White Plains, New York-followed an unlikely journey, from comfortable suburban childhood to influential voice of the twentieth-century global Islamic Revival. Jameelah's more than twenty books and pamphlets, translated into a dozen languages, were notable for their unrelenting critique of modernity and arguments for the superiority of Islam in opposition to the West. In this exploration of her life and work, Justine Howe shows how Jameelah harnessed negative emotions-what Howe calls an "antimodern affect"-to call attention to what she saw as the catastrophes wrought by materialism and secularism. For Jameelah, galvanizing these emotions formed the basis of global Muslim solidarity that could be mobilized for a reinvigorated Islamic future.

Tracing Jameelah's successive incarnations-from Reform Jew to highly mobile spiritual seeker and finally to fervent Muslim polemicist-Howe analyzes how women, gender, and family became the central nodes of Jameelah's vision. Projecting herself as an embodiment of Muslim femininity as she pursued a career as a public intellectual, Jameelah subverted the very boundaries and prescriptions she sought to impose on others. Howe's exploration of the multivalent threads that animated Jameelah's religious imagination reveals unexpected entanglements of American Judaism, global Islam, feminism, and anticolonialism.

Established in the late fourteenth century in what is now Sindh Province, Pakistan, the Makli necropolis grew over three centuries to a site of more than seventy monumental tombs and mosques, and hundreds, if not thousands, of graves. Makli's distinctive architecture sheds light on the intersection of transregional artistic styles through its accretional building practices by generations of craftspeople. Over its long history, Makli became a site layered with multiple meanings as regional elites and everyday Sufi devotees sought to be buried in the shadow of saints-and as the living visited the necropolis to enact devotions and duty.

Here, Fatima Quraishi uses rarely consulted archives in Pakistan alongside close analysis of Makli's built environment to understand the site as an artistic and architectural palimpsest, mutually established by elite patronage and humble devotions. At Makli, the passage of time merges with changes in religion and society to reveal the vibrant lives and afterlives of tombs integral to the communal life of surrounding areas. By studying what has long been treated as an interstitial space between Central Asia and India, Quraishi's work speaks to wider explorations of borderlands of the premodern past.