This book presents selected contributions of the 5th International Scientific-Practical Conference (ISCP 2025) held in New York on September 25-26, 2025. This conference is organized by IU International University, East European University, Adelphi University and ECommerce Institute with contributions from Asia, Africa, Europe, and USA.

It discusses the challenges and chances of digital transformation for a fast-changing world in different industries and introduces advanced research and solutions from both academic and professional's aspects. The topics covered include artificial intelligence, digitalization in health care, in legal systems, corporate responsibility, e-commerce, digital entrepreneurship, and digital transformation in education. An important topic is social commerce, including live shopping, as a combination of social media and e-commerce. The interaction between digitalization and sustainability is also examined and described in an article. The growing influence of artificial intelligence in the financial sector will also be discussed. Furthermore, investigations into the influence of digitalization on the education sector and the labor market are carried out.

All studies focus on the special opportunities offered by digitalization and describe how the resulting new potential can be translated into concrete benefits. The book is an interesting read for researchers and professionals interested in digital management as of the most important developments of recent times.

Approaches the history of the Mughal Empire at the level of human experience, through a diverse group of autobiographical narratives.

Starting from 1526, the Mughals ruled over much of India for three centuries, perhaps the most important Islamic empire in the early modern world. This period saw the production of a fascinating variety of memoirs and autobiographies in which residents of the empire reflected on their own lives, on Islam in a Hindu context, and on the relationship of individual subjects to their new rulers. Those written by Mughal royalty-especially Babur and Jahangir-are well known. This book considers the less well-known writings of diverse others, from the poet laureate Faizi to those who were not part of elite society but a few notches below it, such as the lowly envoy Asad Beg and characters like Mirza Nathan and Abdul Latif, who lived dangerously on the Bengal frontier. Also considered are prolific Hindu writers, such as Bhimsen Saksena and the witty Anand Ram Mukhlis, who lived in Delhi through the turbulent 1730s and 1740s. Together, they offer an original and differently critical perspective on the empire-its religious, social, and political tensions, as well as its strategies for overcoming them.

Covering over two centuries of such materials, Mirrors of Empire is a work of cultural history that is also firmly rooted in social history. It incorporates extensive translations from Persian, including materials that are little-known even to historians and specialists, and shows the transformation of the empire from its difficult emergence, to its expansive height, to its phase of disintegration in the middle of the eighteenth century. Gracefully written, the book approaches the Mughal Empire at the level of human experience, rendering it accessible and not a mere abstraction.

Applying various disciplinary perspectives with overlapping themes, contributors to this volume analyze the intersections of Disney studies and animal studies, demonstrating how common themes and issues transcend the context of Disney culture.

Through detailed analyses, contributors examine the roles played by animals in Disney culture, identifying recurring themes - like animal rights advocacy, the animal as Other, and the bond between humans and their dogs - that speak to the complex saga of human-animal relationships across time and cultural contexts.

Ranging from Disney's early-career projects like Silly Symphonies and World War II propaganda to both animated and live-action features including Alice in Wonderland (1951), Luca (2021), and Home on the Range (2004), and even representations of animals found at the theme parks, this volume offers a comprehensive study of the menagerie from insects and mice all the way up to lions and elephants.

This book outlines ways for universities to become more placeful, fostering an atmosphere of diversity, inclusion, dissensus, and creativity within the university. It argues that only by becoming more placeful can universities establish genuine connections with surrounding environments, communities, and ecologies.

The book addresses the spatial context within which contemporary universities find themselves. The chapters include various methodological approaches, including case studies, autoethnography, philosophical essays, participant observation, poetic narration, and in-depth interviews, reflecting the variety of spatial configurations in which contemporary universities find themselves, and conceptually linked to the normative dimension implied in the notion of a "placeful university".

This book captures the breadth and depth of spatial perspectives on the contemporary university within an interdisciplinary context. It shows that spatial perspectives might be approached through various methodological instruments, promising interesting insights. Readers with different disciplinary backgrounds and those interested in different issues will gain a deeper understanding of the spatial background of respective perspectives and issues.

Using translated Indian newspapers and reports on the Indian press created by British civil servants, this book investigates why World War One was a watershed moment in the history of British colonial rule in India, and South Asia more generally.

This rich and under-utilised archive of newspapers demonstrates that India was awash with commentary about World War One from the moment Britain declared war with Germany in 1914, and charts the gradual change in attitude towards the conflict itself, as well as India's future relationship with Britain, amongst contemporary readers and writers. While established scholarship considers the fact that World War One spelt the end for the British Empire and India's position within it as an established truth, this book uses newspapers and civil servant reports to ask why, and how this came to be.
Offering a detailed reading of archival sources, this book links India's path to independence with reports of heavy Indian casualties in the Middle East, stalemate on the Western Front, and demands for increased autonomy in Britain's other colonies. It also answers important questions; what was it like trying to follow the war's events in wartime India? What developments mattered to Indian newspaper editors and their readers? What debates did the war engender? What did people in India do with the news they consumed? In doing so, it recovers marginalised voices within histories of World War One, helping to decentre a euro-centric approach and build a clearer picture of experiences of this conflict across the Empire.

Shows how communities across the Americas transform their grief over murdered and missing trans and non-trans women, girls, and two-spirit people into powerful social movements that challenge state violence and demand justice.

A groundbreaking and transnational examination of gender-based violence, Mourning and Mobilization in the Americas reimagines how we understand the relationship between grief and political action. Lydia Huerta Moreno brings together the work of activists, scholars, artists, writers, and influencers from 1994 to 2023 to chronicle the intersection of activism with the rise of social media and the eventual implementation of legislation codifying woman killing as a crime. Expanding the concept of feminicide to encompass trans women, two-spirit people, and missing and murdered women and girls across the Americas, Huerta Moreno illuminates the deep connections between different forms of gender-based violence across the Americas and weaves together questions of race, class, gender, and immigration status. Through innovative and sensitive analysis of postmortem politics, the book reveals how communities transform profound loss into powerful social movements, from Mexico to Brazil to the United States and Canada and beyond. With a foreword by Sayak Valencia, Mourning and Mobilization in the Americas is a must-read for activists, scholars, and anyone concerned with human rights, revealing how grief can spark resistance against systemic violence and government inaction.

Draws on the work of the Renaissance theologian and mystic Nicolas of Cusa to offer an alternative to Cartesian subjectivity.

The normative history of modernity begins with the Renaissance and the invention of linear perspective, which places man, instead of God, at the center of the world. The vanishing point of linear perspective portrays the world from the perspective of the single right eye of a singular subject, and it is this perspective that inspired Descartes's optics and his isolated cogito as the prime example of modern subjectivity. This book returns to the invention of linear perspective to seek another interpretation, offering an alternative to the Cartesian subject. Using the work of Renaissance theologian and mystic Nicolas of Cusa, Arianne Conty traces an alternative genealogy of the modern subject, one that allows the world, and the painting, to return our gaze. In elucidating the critique of the Cartesian subject by twentieth-century philosophers Benjamin, Heidegger, Lacan, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Marion, she asks how modernity could be reconceived if philosophers were to take into account the geometric vision of Nicolas of Cusa and how his alternative vision might enable us to escape narcissism and share our world with the absolute other.

Examines the origins and development of US Supreme Court policymaking in the area of race between 1801 and 2024.

Supreme Court Policymaking and Race presents a comprehensive and systematic account of the exercise of power by the US Supreme Court in deciding racial policy conflicts beginning with the Marshall Court and ending with the Roberts Court. Author Barbara L. Graham draws upon three related analytic frameworks to evaluate the extent to which the Court's decisions have protected the constitutional and statutory rights of people of color: institutional racial orders, partisan regimes, and jurisprudential regimes. Based on an empirical analysis of the outcomes in 441 race cases decided over fourteen chief justice tenures, Graham provides strong evidence for the claim that with the exception of a fifty-six-year period (1930 until 1986), the Supreme Court has acted as a foe, not a friend, to the rights of people of color. The findings show that when egalitarian political coalitions are in control at the national level, the Court is more likely to further their racial policy goals to protect the legal rights of people of color.

Examines feminist strategies of persistence and adaptation in Central America from the 1980s to 2020.

A Praxis of Persistence establishes persistence as a framework for understanding methods of feminist activism in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Blending literary and ethnographic approaches, Kenna Neitch analyzes texts produced by activist movements from the 1980s to 2020-from collective testimonio to institutional publications (encuentros) to social media-and connects them to the movements' cultural impact and organizing practices, such as generative conflict, horizontal cross-border networks, and what she terms strategic adaptability. What these texts and practices have in common, Neitch argues, is feminist persistence-a balance of action, preservation, and creation adaptable across contexts. A Praxis of Persistence provides one of the first scholarly accounts of #MeToo in Central America while remaining grounded in the region's lineage of activism against sexual violence. Through the framework of persistence, this book highlights the vitality of Central American women's activism and offers a repertoire of methods for reckoning with the realities of uneven progress in feminist struggle.

This book examines the justification for taxation and identifies the ethical tax issues. It also provides a blueprint for tax reform and advises on tax policy. At one end of the spectrum, any tax legislation is legitimate if the country has a democratic system of government because the peoples' representatives have voted for it. At the other end of the spectrum, no tax can be justified on philosophical grounds because all governments are bands of thieves. A middle position is that taxation can generally be justified, but that some taxes are better than others, either from a utilitarian or deontological perspective. If a tax that is transparent and visible is better than a tax that is obscure or hidden, why are so many taxes obscure or hidden? There is a general belief that everyone must pay their "fair share" of taxes, but the term "fair share" is conveniently undefinable. Is a graduated income tax morally justifiable, or would some other approach be better? Could/should the income tax be replaced with a consumption tax, or should a consumption tax be viewed as a supplement to an income tax? Should the purpose of taxation be to raise revenue, or should the tax system also be used to alter behavior by taxing "bad" things like alcohol and tobacco products or subsidizing green energy initiatives? This book explores some of these questions.

Turn foresight into action with practical tools for strategic decision-making in uncertainty

In a world where the future arrives faster than planning cycles, leaders face a critical 'Decision Gap' between knowing what might happen and making confident choices today. From Foresight to Action by Joana Lenkova solves this problem by transforming futures intelligence into concrete strategic action.

From Foresight to Action provides five Strategic Future Labs that function as flight simulators for decision-making under uncertainty. Each Lab addresses critical strategic questions through plausible scenarios, dilemmas, and practical tools. Readers will build a complete Futures Strategy Canvas, where choices across customer, product, risk, innovation and strategy are brought together into a coherent, outside-in view.

In the book, you'll find:

• Five standalone Strategic Future Labs with practical tools including The Future Relevance Assessment (framing decisions on product relevance under future conditions), The Strategic Decision Tree (helping leadership teams turn important external forces into explicit choices), and The Future Opportunity Mapping (translating future pressure into opportunity spaces)
• A complete outside-in strategy model connecting future customers to products, opportunities, strategies, and organisational capabilities
• Actionable checklists and 'Next moves' guidance applicable immediately to your own strategic challenges
• Frameworks for understanding decision patterns, cognitive biases, and risk posture in strategic choices
• Practical methods for embedding foresight into culture, leadership, governance, and planning processes to build continuous strategic adaptation

Ideal for executives, managers, strategists, leaders, and decision-makers across organisations, From Foresight to Action transforms the way you approach strategy by treating the future as something you shape, not something that happens to you, providing the practical tools to make better decisions in an uncertain world.

"One of the most thoughtful books on foresight I've read in a long time, connecting futures thinking directly to real decisions."
-Lia Arvidsson, Futurist, H&M Group

"Not theory dressed up as strategy - this is a playbook for leaders making decisions without perfect information."
-John Sanei, Futurist and Global Keynote Speaker

This proceedings volume contains selected papers from the 34th International Association for Management of Technology (IAMOT) Conference, held from June 16-19, 2025, in Montreal, Canada. It is the second volume of a two-volume set of conference proceedings focused on technologies for a sustainable future. This book fosters a critical dialogue on technology management as a catalyst for intelligent, open, and responsible organizations and ecosystems. In an era of complexity and rapid technological change, organizations cannot be understood in isolation. Building on the theme of this year's IAMOT conference, the proceedings present innovative ideas rooted in Industry 5.0 and ecosystem thinking. Contributors examine how human, artificial, and organizational intelligence can advance transparency, shared value creation, and systemic responsibility across networks. Covering topics from circular economy and inclusive innovation to data stewardship and collaborative foresight, the book offers technology managers practical insights for adaptive, ethical, and socially attuned interventions. It invites readers to rethink governance and embrace creativity, care, and collective intelligence in navigating complexity.

This book systematically reviews various syntactic and semantic issues in the study of Chinese "Ba" sentences. The book is divided into two parts: the first section summarizes the composition and syntactic structure of "Ba" sentences; the second part to brings together the semantic and pragmatic issues of "Ba" sentences. This scholarly volume discusses the characteristics of each component of "Ba" sentences, the restrictive relationship between components, the syntactic transformation of "Ba" sentences, and the generation method of "Ba" sentences. This book also empathizes the volition of the subject, the definiteness of the object, the result of the action, the dispositional meaning of the sentence pattern, and the pragmatic characteristics of "Ba" sentences. It will be served as a valuable resource for scholars in the field of Mandarin Chinese.

While social oppression is typically framed in terms of prejudice and hate, D. Travers Scott contends that discrimination against marginalized groups is often rooted in a shockingly banal perspective: they simply get in the way.

Focusing primarily on disabled persons and queer persons in addition to other marginalized demographics including non-Christians and the aged, this book draws on histories and discourses of industrialization, technology, and modernist ideals of efficiency to propose a theory of discriminatory convenience.

Convenient Discrimination places representations of queerness and disability in media texts ranging from Appalachian folk songs to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) within the context of both historic and contemporary discussions surrounding health, media, technology, and social movements to form a variety of compelling case studies. These analyses are further bolstered by Scott's own autoethnographic accounts as a queer, formerly disabled activist-scholar.

This book skillfully combines media studies and archival research to articulate a nuanced cultural politics of convenient discrimination, ultimately demonstrating the utility of inconvenience as an analytic.

This second edition handbook identifies critical perspectives in studying and practicing leadership for social justice. The co-editors have brought together over one hundred scholars, over sixty percent from outside of North America. Thus, the topics and methods vary greatly, critically expanding theoretical and methodological ways of knowing the constructs embedded in diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice. The handbook troubles the taken-for-grant ideas and norms that often act as barriers to realizing socially just practices within schools, universities, and societies around the world.

????Since the publication of the first edition in 2014, our world has seen a dramatic rise in populist authoritarian governments whose educational policies have exacerbated social injustices, such as criminalizing immigration and migration, banning books, increasing racism, including antisemitism, and excluding LGBTQ+ teachers and students, among many other social injustices. What will clearly distinguish this second edition of Educational Leadership and Social (In)justice is how we bring together fourth-generation international research knowledge of educational leadership for social justice.

Modern-day curriculum leaders too often receive shallow trainings that promise to "fix" schools, yet ready-made solutions to the complex social and moral challenges that face schools do not exist. Curriculum Leadership provides those who lead curriculum discussions with a humanistic foundation that embraces the moral aspect of curriculum.
Null focuses on ten virtues essential for good curriculum making: humility, courage, compassion, justice, wisdom, practical wisdom, perseverance, faith, hope, and love. Each chapter begins with a broad discussion of that virtue before turning to two role models who exemplify that virtue. Readers will gain a richer understanding of how these virtues improve our lives individually and collectively. Only through the formation of people who possess these virtues can our institutions weather the storm that is upon us.

The concept of the European City of Science intersects with public marketing in multiple dimensions. This initiative highlights the presence and essential role of scientific institutions within the designated city and emphasizes social initiatives that leverage science to address everyday challenges. The XXIV International Congress on Public and Non-Profit Marketing held in Katowice, Poland focused primarily on the region of Metropolis GZM, which has been undergoing socioeconomic and technological transformation since the 1990s. The enclosed papers presented at the conference discuss the marketing aspects of the post-industrial transformations that are occurring in the region to address the challenges of the 21st Century. It covers marketing perspectives on topics such as health promotion, sustainable development, citizen-friendly public spaces, and citizen science, to name a few. It also addresses the need of rebranding and repositioning of areas within the region that carry past negative perceptions. Collectively, the papers in this book explore how the region can build a new, forward-thinking identity, while also honoring its industrial heritage.