This book develops a sociological framework for understanding how societies produce and transform meaning. Rather than treating meaning as a fixed property of individuals or texts, it introduces relational meaning-making, in which meanings stabilise in particular situations while remaining open to alternatives. Revisiting Max Weber's concept of Sinn and Alfred Schutz's phenomenology, the book rethinks identity, agency and social structures. Drawing on Weber, Mead and Parsons, it explores why sociological theory has struggled to grasp the dynamics of meaning, and examines the contemporary crisis of meaning, self-referential individuals, and the implications of digital communication and generative AI. This book argues that relational meaning-making is a fundamental process through which society interprets and reshapes itself.

Grounded in critical theory, southern studies, archival methodologies, and anticolonial thought, Record, Document, Archive illuminates how the U.S. South is made knowable through the acts, objects, and systems that produce records, documents, and archives. Rather than treating "the South" as a fixed geography or predetermined object of study, this innovative, forward-thinking collection reframes region as an ontological and epistemological project shaped by-and resistant to-Eurocentric regimes of documentality.

Bringing together activists, archivists, and scholars across disciplines, the essays in Record, Document, Archive trace the extent to which documentality has governed life and death in the U.S. South, from Indigenous Removal, enslavement, and Jim Crow to contemporary regimes of immigration enforcement, border policing, and the legal erasure of queer and undocumented lives. "Record" emphasizes embodied, affective, and more-than-human acts of marking experience. "Document" interrogates the pedagogical, legal, and evidentiary force of documentation, highlighting counter-hegemonic methods that unsettle dominant southern narratives. "Archive" addresses curation, access, and governance, advancing liberatory memory work that confronts archival violence and privilege while imagining new possibilities for justice-oriented futures.

By attending to the anticipatory acts that precede narrative and law, Record, Document, Archive opens pathways toward "southern elsewheres"-modes of knowing, remembering, and belonging that resist rigid epistemologies and orient scholarship toward liberation.

The Palgrave Companion to Stanley Cavell's Aesthetic Thought is a collection dedicated to the intersections between Stanley Cavell's aesthetic thought and an array of major philosophical figures: Kant, Nietzsche, Schelling, Wittgenstein, Austin, Heidegger, Benjamin, Arendt, Derrida, Diamond, Bugbee, and others. It offers a comprehensive account of Cavell's aesthetic legacy by exploring its indebtedness and relevance to these philosophical interlocutors. The volume's premise is that Cavell's conversational mode of philosophizing is intimately connected to his original understanding of art and film and to their centrality in his work. The featured essays elucidate different aspects of this connection, as each chapter reconstructs Cavell's dialogue with another thinker on a subject chosen from the vast gamut of Cavell's work: aesthetic experience, philosophical style, perfectionism, reading, literary form, modernism, film genres, and more. The Palgrave Companion to Stanley Cavell's Aesthetic Thought offers cutting-edge perspectives on traditional Cavellian themes while also opening unexpected avenues of "doing things with Cavell." It addresses scholars and students interested in Cavell, aesthetics and the arts, dialogical thinking, and their significance for modern philosophy at large.

This book explores how histories of technology, engineering, and information science can help us better understand history, while also informing how we envision and build more equitable futures. The chapters extend vibrant conversations in the history of technology as well as other fields, including Ccience and Technology Studies (STS), cybernetic studies, literary studies, development studies, discard studies, engineering ethics, and infrastructure studies. In doing so the authors pay tribute to Ronald R. Kline, one of the leading historians of technology and STS scholars of our era. This book showcases cutting-edge research around the state of technology studies today and its influences across and beyond academic fields.

This book has a clear and constant focus on the ultimate aim of language teaching: helping learners to develop the ability to communicate effectively. Drawn from 15 different countries, the authors discuss exactly what effective communication involves and what teachers should aim for when helping learners to develop. They then expand into the different ways in which materials can help teachers and learners to achieve this.

The chapters are organized into four sections - Proposals for Action, Materials Analysis and Evaluation, Materials Development Projects and Materials Development Research - with each section followed by comments from one of the editors on the commonalities shared by the chapters in the section and the issues that they raise. All of the chapters propose ways of developing and using materials to facilitate the development of communicative ability in any language. They are written to be accessible to newcomers in the field, and stimulating to experienced teachers, teacher trainers, materials developers and researchers.

This book offers a critical rethinking of digital urban transformation through a planning centered lens. It moves beyond technocentric views to examine how intelligent technologies shape governance, decision-making, and sustainability outcomes. The book explores key areas including housing, mobility, water management, environmental resilience, and digital civic engagement, showing that technology is deeply embedded in institutional and social contexts. It highlights how data driven systems introduce new opportunities for coordination while raising challenges related to ethics, bias, and accountability. By linking digital innovation to planning theory and governance, this book provides a clear framework for understanding how cities can achieve more inclusive and resilient futures.

Welcome to the world of sports writing, where success lies in the trust established between journalists, athletes, coaches, and other personnel who make magic, both on the field and off it.

Acclaimed sports journalists Nicole Kraft and Jean-Jacques Taylor deliver a behind-the-scenes look at the challenges and triumphs of capturing and communicating sporting events. Beyond statistics and scores that dominate headlines, sports journalism is about sharing the stories of the teams, players, coaches, administrators, executives, topics, controversies, and individual events.

Learning the artistry of sports writing, you will learn to showcase the narratives, emotions, and human stories that shape the games. The authors teach essential skills, including:
- Asking the right questions and listening carefully to the answers
- Building relationships with players, coaches, and staff
- Excelling at storytelling that engages readers
- Reaching audiences through social media
- Leveraging the power of AI in ethical ways

Discussion questions and actual assignments will help you build relationships and hone your journalism skills from day one, empowering you to uncover stories that excite and engage readers on a profound level.

This Palgrave Pivot book examines how AI-based technologies shape children's everyday lives and imagines possible digital futures. Drawing on qualitative interviews and a child-rights approach, the authors map how new AI tools are used and understood at home, at school, and among peers. They trace shifts in family routines; education, care, and health practices; and peer cultures associated with AI; cutting through the current hype to assess both promises and risks.

Building on prior work on the datafication of childhood and family life, Children and AI: Changing Digital Childhoods? rethinks AI's implications for children's wellbeing, rights, and life chances amid rapid market diffusion. It highlights potential harms, including widening digital divides and privacy violations, and calls for child-centred, safety-by-design legal and policy frameworks. Timely and interdisciplinary, it will interest scholars, students, and policymakers across childhood studies, digital and family sociology, internet studies, children's rights, and education.

From a murdered teenager being interviewed as though he were alive, to a widow speaking with a chatbot made through voice cloning the digital relics of her late husband, AI-generated versions of the deceased are becoming uncanny in their humanlike form. Are personal memories, so central to our sense of personality, individuality and agency, already lost to a future in which we feel compelled to embrace the humanlike comfort of bots?

Memorybot is the story of the consequences of generative AI on human memory. It reveals how in regenerating past lives, and through mining and sharing present ones, AI removes the once memorial limits of a living individual. The most traumatic and joyous parts of human existence are perpetually subject to a continuous extraction of memories. Hoskins argues that we are witnessing the emergence of a new societal paradigm, characterised by the increasing dominance of hybrid memory, the erosion of anonymity, and the effective end of human forgetting.

Written by a leading international scholar of memory studies, Memorybot is a haunting read for anyone concerned about the growing influence of AI technologies and services, and for the fields of media, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, history and memory studies.

This book explores how people imagine, create, and sustain societal futures through the interplay of imagination, change, and preservation. Drawing on possibility studies and creativity research, it uses the concept of creative preservation as a unifying framework for understanding how communities creatively renew and take care of what already exists rather than only pursuing radical novelty.

Emerging from discussions held at the 4th International Conference of Possibility Studies, the volume begins at the level of global social and ecological systems, examining the extent to which social innovation can function as a force of preservation and regeneration. It then turns to intergenerational creative continuity and ageing to reveal novelty in what societies neglect in old age, before reflecting on methodological considerations from new materialism for addressing work on societal futures. The book then critically discusses the past and present disruptions in academia and proposes perspectives to care for and preserve the possibility for research to contribute meaningfully to societal change. It concludes by exploring the transformative potential of wonder and astonishment in education as a practice of caring and an attitude of exploring individual and collective possibilities.

A thought-provoking response to the growing concerns around how social scientists can provide frameworks to adjust to and contribute to a more caring and sustainable society, this book is for researchers and students in sociology and social theory, education and pedagogy, philosophy and critical theory, cultural and performance studies, creativity studies, sustainability studies, STS, and futures and possibility studies.

This book offers insights into the development and implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 4, the UN's global education agenda. It highlights important tensions within the agenda and identifies key topics to address as we move closer to--and beyond--the conclusion of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, 2015-2030). Novel research, new perspectives, and critical reflection on these topics will help determine the path forward in the coming years. To this end, this book presents an array of critiques, best practices, and promising areas for future activity related not only to SDG 4 but also to future global education agendas. Challenges and barriers to meeting global goals, as well as innovative ideas and solutions, are emphasized to inform SDG4 and its successor. This edited volume benefits from insider insights, practitioner knowledge, scientific findings, and philosophical inquiry related to the progress achieved (and not achieved) in the 2030 Agenda. The book consists of contributions from top academic and policy scholars around the world.

Phylis West Johnson and Tina Korani reveal how women are shaping the forthcoming Metaverse with a unique social perspective that promises to revolutionize society.

Examining women in leadership across the top Metaverse companies through interviews and analysis, Johnson and Korani highlight women's social contributions to the development of the Metaverse. These women, they contend, have fundamentally different conceptions of the Metaverse than those shown in mainstream depictions, foregrounding the potential to make meaningful change through content creation and social ideation over the potential to use it as a path to easy wealth.

Although women play a large role in fueling virtual platforms through content creation, their overall decision-making power appears limited in the larger Metaverse, reflecting similar societal tensions to those that women face in reality. Ultimately, however, this book embraces the Metaverse as a landscape rich with potential, emphasizing not only women's responsibility for creating this space but also the benefits to be gained from it as it influences the economic and political futures of humanity.

This open access book aims to explore the dynamic interplay between human behavior and environmental design in shaping future habitats. The interplay between environment and behavior is a critical area of study with profound implications for designing better habitats for human well-being. The book offers a detailed examination of how behavioral science informs environmental design, sustainability practices, and the creation of future living spaces. By integrating theoretical insights with practical applications, the book provides a comprehensive resource for understanding and influencing the ways in which our environments impact and are impacted by human behavior. The book is a conference proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Environment-Behavior Studies, Committee of Environment-Behavior of Architectural Society of China (CEB-ASC 2024)? focusing on the rapidly changing social and technological conditions. CEB-ASC 2024 features keynote speeches and multi-topic parallel sessions from distinguished practitioners, researchers, and educators. Representatives are from Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA), International Association for People-Environment Studies (IAPS), and Man-Environment Research Association (MERA). Professionals and scholars from different fields such as architecture, planning, landscape, psychology, sociology, and artificial intelligence from various countries are invited to the conference, delving into various related topics and contributing wisdom to achieving a more sustainable, intelligent, resilient, healthy, and inclusive living environment. By delving into the core theories, methodologies, and pedagogies, this book promises to be a vital resource for advancing our understanding of how human behavior and environmental design intersect to shape the habitats of tomorrow.

The industrial revolution, environmental crises and socio-economic challenges underline the need for sustainable growth. Financial mechanisms used for systemic restructuring of the economy and reducing its carbon intensity are an effective and at the same time necessary tool for large-scale transformations. The taxonomy of "green" projects is a system of classification of economic activities, categories of projects and assets that contribute to sustainable development and are aimed at improving the efficiency of using existing natural resources, reducing negative environmental impacts, improving energy efficiency, energy conservation, mitigation of climate change and adaptation to climate change. This book evaluates these approaches as a means of systemic restructuring of the economy and of reducing carbon intensity throughout the world. Featuring select contributions presented at the 2nd International Scientific Conference "Green Taxonomy for Sustainable Development" (CONGREENTAX) held in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, this book demonstrates modern achievement in green taxonomy focusing on scientific developments for real-world applications. It emphasizes the importance of a green taxonomy for achieving sustainable development goals by considering both fundamental methods and practical aspects of sustainable development-oriented processes. This book is useful for researchers, scholars, academics, practitioners, and policy makers interested in green taxonomy and sustainable development.

Visual Vestiges explains how information design evolved over the centuries to make practical information clear, credible, and emotionally engaging.

In Visual Vestiges Charles Kostelnick analyzes the role of the past in understanding, studying, deploying, and teaching visual language in business, technical, and professional communication. He explores how information designs-text, pictures, icons, charts, and graphs-evolved to develop their rhetorical power and the many ways in which their vestigial forms permeate contemporary design. To explain these temporal dynamics, he examines the forces that underpin them: cultural shifts in aesthetics, taste, and values; social changes that redefine how we relate to one another rhetorically; and innovations in technology that transform the tools and channels we use to visualize and interpret information. Drawing on rhetorical theory, design studies, art history, and historical and contemporary examples, Kostelnick explores the rhetorical role of time in bridging past and present design forms-by constantly regenerating them through visual conventions, by heightening pathos appeals through sentiment and nostalgia, and by bolstering ethos, amplifying epideictic displays, and narrating stories with text, pictures, and charts.