This open access book examines the role of religion in the emerging academic and policy discourses on the polycrisis-also termed the metacrisis or permacrisis. Drawing on philosophy, economics, and the comparative study of religion, the book develops a conceptual map and shared vocabulary for engaging the interlocking challenges of our age, which threaten multiple simultaneous regional instabilities across the world system. As current political, economic, social, and ecological frameworks are stretched to their limits, Akhtar explores how the world's religious traditions can be accessed as sources of spiritual inspiration and moral imagination to chart new pathways beyond our collective paralysis. Advancing a covenantal pluralistic response, the volume offers scholars, students, and policymakers a generative framework for navigating overlapping crises through interreligious wisdom. Essential reading for those working at the intersection of religion, ethics, public policy, and the global polycrisis.

We are entering an era of population decline across the developed world (and beyond). Few have given serious thought to what this might mean economically. Will an ageing society and dwindling population be easily accommodated or strike at the very heart of our prosperity?

Paul Morland and Philip Pilkington argue that the consequences of the coming demographic upheaval will be economically devastating. All of the assumptions of economists - that a world of above-replacement birth rates and gentle annual population growth could be taken for granted - are being upended. Once economics drove population changes, but now demography is the most fundamental force shaping our economic future. Bust addresses everything from labour and capital markets to housing and the welfare state, showing the profoundly worrying consequences of a shrinking working age population and an ageing society. Unless we take radical action to bolster birth rates, we face a future of falling living standards, high inflation and low growth.

This book shines a penetrating light on one of the most ominous - and least understood - economic and social challenges of the twenty-first century. No-one who reads it will look upon public policy or the future of our society in the same way again.

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Virtual Reality promises immersion for all, yet it is built around assumptions of able-bodied users that leave many disabled people behind.

Drawing on original research with users, care providers and developers, this book examines how mainstream Virtual Reality design encodes a narrow idea of the 'normal' body - and the real costs of that choice. It shows how decisions made at the design stage, often invisible to non-disabled users, create barriers around vision, movement and sensory experience.

Moving beyond critique, it argues for a fundamental rethinking of VR design centring diverse bodies and minds. In doing so, it not only reframes accessibility, but expands what VR can be, and who it is truly for.

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Collaboration, critical thinking and cultural competency are essential skills that shape young people's futures. These key skills are often cultivated in the informal, creative spaces that society easily overlooks.

Drawing on the Australian Research Council and industry co-funded Vital Arts project, this book offers a bold and practical new vision: an inclusive, practice-based micro-credential system that recognises the competencies that young people build through creative cultural participation. Challenging prevailing policy narratives that pathologise young people, the book shows how partnerships between industry, cultural organisations and youth-led initiatives can reimagine education, diversify pathways into work and support genuine social mobility.

Offering fresh conceptual tools, compelling empirical insights and a transformative model for accrediting skills, this book repositions youth arts organisations and creative programmes as key actors in constructing more equitable and meaningful routes into employment.

Available open access digitally under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

How do older women use art and media to resist ageist and sexist norms that regulate their intimacy and sexuality?

This book brings the subversive aesthetic strategies of older women to the forefront, using the concept of 'unruliness', understood as a failure or unwillingness to conform.

Drawing on critical age studies, feminist theory and allied critical approaches, the book develops a new conceptual model that positions ageing women's aesthetic interventions as a source of insight and social change.

Combining theory with close readings of art and media, this book is a bold framework for rethinking ageing, sexuality and empowerment.

A rigorous philosophical examination of the ethical dimensions of art

The relationship between art and ethics remains one of the most contested areas in philosophical aesthetics. Art and Morality offers a sustained investigation of how artworks engage moral life-through the emotions they arouse, the beliefs they shape, and the evaluative frameworks we apply to them. Written by a leading philosopher of art, history, and ethics, the book presents arguments for and against the ethical significance of artistic experience with analytical precision.

Three chapters examine the ways art engenders emotions for both good and ill, analyzing competing positions on whether emotional responses carry genuine moral weight. A fourth chapter turns to cognition, investigating art's capacity to influence moral beliefs. The final two chapters engage directly with autonomism-the position that art should be appreciated solely for its own sake, independent of social practices including morality-presenting arguments both supporting and challenging this view.

Art and Morality serves undergraduate and graduate courses on the relation of art to morality and society. Written in an accessible style, it also addresses general readers drawn to philosophical questions raised by the arts, providing a structured framework for debates that have shaped aesthetics over two centuries.

This Open Access book explores the concept of the open city, examining its theoretical foundations, normative implications, and real-world practices in contemporary urban planning.

The chapters move from conceptual debates on openness and empirical cases, investigating how cities address key challenges such as democracy, freedom, inclusion, creativity, learning, governance, and urban change. Contributors examine tensions between order and disorder, openness and closure, and ask who benefits from urban transformation and under what conditions. By connecting urban theory with planning practice, the volume offers a critical yet accessible reflection on the future of cities.

Developed through the work of the Thematic Group "Ethics, Values and Planning" of the Association of European Schools of Planning, this book provides an essential resource for scholars, practitioners, and students interested in open cities, urban governance, democratic planning, and institutional design.

A survey of the contemporary intersection between religion and violence

In this second edition, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence assembles an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars to map the complex relationships between religion and violence. This book explains how religious traditions intersect with political conflict, collective violence, and social upheaval in a wide range of contexts that reflect academic, social, and political developments since the publication of the first edition.

New and updated chapters address political theology, White Christian Nationalism in the United States, Hindu nationalism in India, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, religion and mass atrocities, sexual orientation and gender identity, nationalism and political Islam in Turkey, Shia Islam and Hezbollah, and religion, violence, and Latin American drug trafficking. A new introduction frames these developments within broader analytical contexts.

Readers will also find:

• Updated case studies covering Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023 and the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine
• Interdisciplinary perspectives from historians, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, theologians, and scholars of gender studies and communication
• Focused analysis of Christian nationalism, Hindu nationalism, and political Islam as distinct contemporary phenomena
• Coverage of religion's role in mass atrocities, drug trafficking violence, and politically-motivated conflicts across multiple global regions

Designed for scholars, advanced students, and research libraries in religious studies, political science, and related disciplines, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence delivers a rigorous, up-to-date reference that connects theoretical analysis with pressing contemporary developments at the intersection of religion and violence.

This open access book is a biography of Tameyuki Amano (1861-1938), who was the first Japanese economist. He was also an educator, one of the first elected Diet members, and one of the founders of the Tokyo Senmon College (now Waseda University). Moreover, as editor of the Oriental Economist (Toyo Keizai Shimpo), he was at the center of economic information and communication through his work that involved collecting economic and financial data and connecting Japanese economists and businesspeople. Amano wrote notable byline editorials on taxation, international relations and trade, monetary standards, banking, and stock exchange for almost every issue in the period 1895-1907.

Amano spent his boyhood in Karatsu, on the northern shore of Kyushu, where the daimyos (lords) were associated with the Nagasaki surveillance mission. During the period of National Seclusion, Dejima in Nagasaki was uniquely permitted to maintain diplomatic relations with the Dutch; it functioned as a tightly controlled foreign trading post as well as a surveillance and intelligence system for the Tokugawa government. At Tokyo University, Amano attended lectures by Ernest Fenollosa on political economy, based on John Stuart Mill, and on the history of Western philosophy, based on Albert Schwegler. Amano later translated J. Laurence Laughlin's 1884 abridged edition of Mill's Principles of Political Economy and John Neville Keynes's Scope and Method of Political Economy (1891).

This open access book examines deliberative and anti-deliberative practices in post-conflict contexts marked by democratic backsliding. It compares how deliberative ideals are upheld and violated across different deliberative domains, including parliaments, citizens' assemblies, social media and interactions between local and international actors. The authors identify anti-deliberation as the active violation of deliberative norms through exclusion, manipulation and domination, along with weaponisation of difference. The expansion of anti-deliberation restricts the space for good-quality deliberation and accelerates democratic backsliding.

This edited collection is useful to scholars of democracy, deliberation and communication with its novel comparative perspective on the quality of deliberation, to policy-makers and civil society with its lessons for supporting deliberation, and to international peace-builders working on democratisation and reversing democratic backsliding.

A unified integrative model for counselling children and young people

Practitioners working with children and young people often draw from multiple therapeutic modalities without a coherent framework for integration. Ecosystemic Counselling with Children and Young People presents a single model that synthesises systemic, person-centred, cognitive-behavioural, and psychodynamic theories into one unified approach. Each chapter applies ecosystemic theory to practice through case vignettes and practical examples.

The book addresses specific presenting issues including anxiety, depression, trauma, self-harm, suicidality, anger, and behaviour difficulties. It examines how family dynamics, school environments, and social identity shape mental health outcomes, offering strategies for working with these factors. Coverage extends to neurodiversity, collaboration with partner agencies, and counsellor self-awareness within the ecosystemic framework.

Readers will also find:

• A unified theory of change that combines humanistic, cognitive, phenomenological, and psychodynamic principles into one integrative clinical framework
• Practical strategies for working with the interconnectedness of a child's psychological health and their wider social and environmental context
• Guidance on adapting ecosystemic interventions for neurodiverse clients, accounting for individual developmental profiles and cognitive processing differences
• Approaches for multi-agency collaboration that support holistic wellbeing across therapeutic, educational, and community settings for young clients
• Content grounded in three master's-level modules in children and young people's counselling, connecting academic rigour directly to clinical application

Designed for qualified therapists, mental health professionals, and trainee counsellors and psychotherapists, this book provides a structured integrative model applicable directly in clinical settings. By unifying established counselling modalities into a single ecosystemic framework, it equips practitioners to deliver holistic, theoretically grounded support to children and young people.

Contemporary clinical approaches for AAPI youth mental health across diverse populations

For the Next Generation: Mental Health in Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Youth addresses the urgent need for updated clinical resources focused on the fastest-growing racial and ethnic group in the United States. Nancy H. Liu, PhD, a Fulbright Scholar and former WHO consultant specializing in cultural adaptations of evidence-based treatment, contextualizes current research within contemporary societal discourse while providing practical solutions for clinicians working with AANHPI adolescents and emerging adults.

This resource examines contemporary issues previously unaddressed in clinical literature, including anti-Asian hate, intersectionality within AANHPI communities, religion and spirituality, bullying, and neurodiversity. Each chapter concludes with case studies, practical illustrations, and take-home points designed for immediate clinical application. The text reviews advances in acculturation, racial and ethnic identity development, and mental health stigma.

Readers will also find:

• Clinical frameworks for addressing mental health stigma specific to diverse AANHPI subpopulations and their unique cultural contexts
• Practical strategies for working with minoritized groups within AAPI communities
• Evidence-based approaches adapted for cultural relevance with Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander populations
• Case conceptualizations demonstrating application of contemporary research to clinical practice with AANHPI youth
• Assessment and intervention considerations reflecting the changing demographics of the broader U.S. society

For the Next Generation serves mental health professionals, clinical trainees across bachelor's through doctoral programs, educators, community leaders, and peer support providers seeking culturally informed approaches for AANHPI adolescents and emerging adults. Its interdisciplinary scope makes it relevant for courses in public health, education, anthropology, and ethnic studies.

Use generative AI to reduce your workweek from 40 hours to 15

The AI Workweek: How to Cut Hours, Automate the Busywork, and Focus on What's Really Important delivers a practical playbook for implementing generative AI tools like ChatGPT to eliminate repetitive tasks and reclaim productive time. Ashley Gross, an AI consultant who has led workshops for multiple global corporations and industry leaders, provides step-by-step strategies she used to cut her own workweek from 40 hours to 15.

The book translates enterprise-level AI implementation tactics into actionable guidance for individual professionals and business leaders. Drawing from years of experience leading enterprise-level consulting engagements, Gross shows how to identify automation opportunities, build effective AI workflows, and measure time savings. Each technique addresses specific workplace scenarios where AI can replace manual processes without sacrificing quality or requiring technical expertise.

You'll also discover:

• Specific prompting strategies and workflow templates for automating email, reporting, scheduling, and administrative tasks that consume hours weekly
• Methods for identifying which tasks in your role are candidates for AI automation and which require human judgment
• Real-world case studies from enterprise implementations showing measurable time and revenue gains from AI adoption
• Techniques for scaling personal AI productivity wins into team-wide and department-level automation strategies
• Frameworks for evaluating AI tools and building sustainable workflows that adapt as generative AI capabilities evolve

Whether you're a C-suite executive evaluating AI adoption strategies, a department head seeking efficiency gains, or an individual contributor looking to reclaim hours from busywork, this book provides tested methods for implementing generative AI in ways that deliver measurable time savings and productivity improvements.

Apply evidence-based positive psychology to strengthen organizational performance and well-being

Now in its Second Edition, Positive Organizational Psychology: Evidence-Informed Applications delivers a rigorous examination of how positive psychology principles translate into measurable workplace outcomes. Organizations continue to struggle with sustaining employee engagement, fostering resilience, and aligning human capital strategies with performance objectives. This updated volume addresses those challenges by presenting research-grounded frameworks that connect individual well-being with organizational effectiveness, offering a structured empirical foundation for intervention design and implementation.

Positive Organizational Psychology provides updated evidence-informed tools and methodologies for diagnosing organizational strengths, designing targeted interventions, and evaluating their impact. This Second Edition reflects advances in the field since the prior edition, incorporating recent research findings and expanded coverage of applied strategies. Readers gain access to frameworks for building thriving work environments where psychological capital, engagement, and sustained performance reinforce one another through carefully designed, research-supported organizational development practices.

Written for organizational psychologists, human resources professionals, managers, executives, and organizational development practitioners, this volume equips readers with evidence-based tools needed to create workplaces where people and performance thrive together. Advanced graduate students studying organizational behavior and psychology will also find it a valuable scholarly resource grounded in applied research.

This open access book offers an interdisciplinary examination of Green Human Resource Management (GHRM), presenting a psychologically informed framework for aligning people management with environmental, economic, and social sustainability. Bringing together insights from work and organizational psychology, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and environmental management (EM), it explains how organizations can embed sustainability into everyday work practices by leveraging employee motivation, leadership, culture, and social dynamics.Psychosocial mechanisms make GHRM effective, shaping employees' pro environmental attitudes, voluntary green behaviours, and long-term commitment to organizational sustainability goals.

Drawing on meta-analytic evidence from 57 studies, the book shows the strong impact of GHRM on sustainable performance and financial outcomes and addresses persistent implementation challenges, such as the generalizability gap across sectors, lack of standardized metrics, post-pandemic work transformations, and the risk of greenwashing when cultural alignment is weak. Featuring theoretical insights, empirical evidence, case studies, and a practical diagnostic toolkit, the book provides actionable guidance on green recruitment, training, performance management, and employee engagement. An essential read for scholars and practitioners in HRM, organizational psychology, sustainability, environmental management, and leaders, this book positions GHRM as a critical lever for integrating people, planet, and performance.

This book examines the various roles women played in royal succession from ancient Western Asia to the modern United Kingdom. It argues that royal succession, from antiquity to modernity, has rarely, if ever, been self-evident. In many ways, a period of succession is a time of crisis, one in which royal women often play important roles. Regardless of whether the monarch has died after a period of illness, been killed in war or in a plot, succumbed to an accident when jousting, or been deposed, imprisoned, or forced into exile, a power vacuum ensues. Successions, whether anticipated or unforeseen, thus pose problems that call for various considerations; a wide array of stakeholders, including powerful women, are affected by the consequences and seek to influence succession.

This book offers a major rethinking of secularisation and a defining sociological account of religion in the digital age. Based on the author's ESRC-funded PhD and developed over two decades of research and theoretical refinement, the book argues that modernity does not eliminate religion but reorganises it. Rather than treating spirituality as a residue of tradition or a symptom of fragmentation, it demonstrates how religious meaning is reflexively reconstructed under conditions of globalisation, market rationality, institutional uncertainty, and digital mediation.

Advancing a new framework of reflexive realism, the book provides a flagship theoretical intervention in the sociology of religion. It introduces an original "origins-orientations" typology for analysing the diversity of New Religious and Spiritual Movements and integrates classical theory with contemporary social analysis. Drawing on extensive qualitative fieldwork, interviews, participant observation, and digital ethnography conducted across Britain, the United States, and online communities, it offers a sustained empirical foundation for its theoretical claims.

Through detailed case studies of ISKCON, Falun Gong, Scientology, UFO religions, therapeutic spiritualities, and platform-native digital movements, the book addresses key themes including digital religion, algorithmic authority, commodified spirituality, post-secular mythologies, and AI-mediated faith. It shows how platforms, metrics, and data infrastructures are reshaping charisma, authority, and spiritual experience, positioning NRSMs as reflexive mediators through which individuals reconstruct meaning, embodiment, and transcendence in late modern society.

By reinterpreting secularisation as transformation rather than decline, this book provides a comprehensive and conceptually ambitious account of religious change in the twenty-first century. It will be essential reading for scholars and advanced students in sociology of religion, religious studies, cultural sociology, anthropology, and media and communication studies.

Violence against women is conventionally framed as interpersonal violence perpetrated by men. While intimate partner violence and sexual assault are significant social problems, such a narrow framing obscures the diversity of women's experiences, fails to illuminate the role social structures play, and excludes discussions of workplace, state, institutional, and symbolic violence. By drawing on a range of theoretical traditions emerging from feminism, criminology, and sociology, Women and Gendered Violence in Canada significantly broadens the conversation on violence against women.

Social scientists Chris Bruckert and Tuulia Law begin by developing the conceptual and contextual framework underpinning gendered violence followed by an examination of its various manifestations: interpersonal, workplace, and structural. Each chapter puts historical context in conversation with current social issues, attends to the diversity of women's experiences, and critically considers normative social and carceral "solutions," while highlighting women's resistance. First person narratives are integrated throughout to personalize the material and issues being examined, and each chapter ends with a suggested activity to facilitate further engagement.

This thoroughly updated second edition of Women and Gendered Violence in Canada considers recent shifts and changes in Canadian society, discourses, and laws.

Sexual consent is often framed as the boundary between sex and sexual violence, frequently upheld as the key to transforming unethical sexual cultures. But what of the factors shaping people's positive experiences of negotiating sex, beyond the minimal threshold of avoiding sexual violence?

This book centres the experiences of bi+ individuals, introducing a new framework for understanding how gender, sexuality and bodily norms shape people's negotiation of positive sexual experiences. By demonstrating how queer bodies can challenge restrictive norms, the book shifts the focus away from risk reduction and highlights the need for a strengths-based approach that celebrates queer gender and sexuality. It provides fresh insights for scholars, educators and policy makers seeking more inclusive, effective strategies for sexuality education and sexual violence prevention.

This book examines the ways in which European queens engaged with De institutione foeminae Christianae (1524), the most popular instructional manual for women in sixteenth-century Europe. Vives (c. 1493-1540) dedicated the volume to Catherine of Aragon, queen of England as the wife of Henry VIII. Richard Hyrde did the same with his English translation. Juan Justiniano dedicated his Spanish translation to Germaine de Foix, dowager queen of Aragon as the wife of Ferdinand II. Catherine's support for De institutione and the association of its translations with a royal household, printer, or event became an important feature of its production and longevity. This book restores women to the history of De institutione and recovers a cultural understanding of its vernacular editions in England and Spain, especially with regard to queenship and public authority.

Comprehensive scholarship on fatherhood from evolutionary, physiological, and psychological perspectives

Now in its Sixth Edition, The Role of the Father in Child Development remains the authoritative reference on paternal influences across cultures and contexts. Edited by Michael E. Lamb, whose research has shaped family law and policy internationally, this volume synthesizes recent scholarship from evolutionary biology, physiology, psychology, and sociology to provide a rounded understanding of contemporary fatherhood worldwide.

This edition presents up-to-date summaries of fatherhood research, including a chapter from leading psychologist James Rilling, whose specialized work on evolutionary and neurological bases of paternal behavior reaches a broader audience here. The volume examines father-child relationships across diverse family structures, including post-divorce arrangements, foster care, adoption, and LGBTQ+ parenting contexts.

The book also covers:

• Cross-cultural perspectives on father involvement and paternal roles across diverse societies and family structures around the world
• Evolutionary and physiological foundations of fathering behavior drawn from current biological anthropology and neuroscience research findings
• Research-based guidance for legal practitioners working on custody evaluations, divorce proceedings, and family court matters
• Evidence informing policy decisions on fostering, adoption, and diverse family arrangements including same-sex and LGBTQ+ parenting
• Multidisciplinary frameworks integrating psychology, sociology, and family social science perspectives on contemporary paternal engagement

Essential for scholars, researchers, and advanced students in developmental psychology and family studies, The Role of the Father in Child Development also serves practitioners in psychology, social work, and criminology. Legal professionals handling family and custody matters, custody evaluators, and policy makers will find authoritative evidence to inform their work with fathers and families.

This book brings together contributions from female authors on feminicide and violence against women. Steilneset Memorial in Finnmark, Norway was built by Norwegian Scenic Routes to commemorate the victims of the Finnmark witchcraft trials in the seventeenth century. The memorial was opened in 2011, and is based on three components: art, architecture, and history. The artist is Louise Bourgeois, who created an art installation. The architect is Peter Zumthor, who designed the memorial's two buildings. The historian is Liv Helene Willumsen, who wrote one commemoratory text for each of the victims. The majority were women: of the 91 persons who were executed, 77 were women and only 14 were men. This book therefore uses Steilneset Memorial as a starting point to explore contemporary feminicide and violence against women, as the misogyny which was fundamental to the persecution of alleged witches in the 1600s is still seen today throughout the world.