This book offers an in-depth analysis of how the rapid advancement of digitalization is influencing and transforming the landscape of the social work field. Through comprehensive exploration and insightful discussions, the book delves into the intricate ways technology shapes the delivery of social services, ethical considerations, and the overall role of social workers in an increasingly technology-driven world. This topic is particularly relevant now, as new technologies are increasingly being adopted across sectors, including social services, to improve efficiency and effectiveness. Social workers are increasingly engaging with these changes, navigating how technology can support better decision-making, streamline interventions, and enhance outcomes for service users.

The book's 14 chapters are organized in three parts. Part I examines how the profession has been adapting to Industry 4.0 and artificial intelligence (AI), exploring social transformations, digital vulnerabilities, and the transformative role of emerging technologies like AI in social work. This section sets the stage for understanding the intersection of technological change and social work practice. Part II addresses specific fields of intervention, exploring how digital technology is being applied in child protection, elderly care, rural mental health, and support for migrants and refugees, among others. This section highlights how technology can be leveraged to enhance social work interventions, focusing on improving care for vulnerable populations and addressing grand challenges in the field. The third and final part delves into emerging topics, discussing the ethical challenges, the role of interdisciplinarity in the digital age, the use of AI for data analysis in social interventions, professional training in a digitalized world, and pedagogical innovation in social work courses. This section points to future opportunities and challenges, emphasizing the importance of preparing social workers for a rapidly digitalizing world.

Social Work in the 21st Century: The Challenges of a Digital World is a timely and important resource for social work professionals, students, educators, and academics keen to deepen their understanding of how technology transforms the field. The book also appeals to those with existing knowledge who wish to explore the impact of the digital in social intervention.

The volume offers a pioneering intervention in global literary and cultural studies by tracing representations of disability across the entire twentieth century-from early modernist literature to late postcolonial and popular cultural forms. Unlike most existing works that focus primarily on twenty-first-century narratives, this volume provides rare historical depth and a globally inclusive perspective.

Bringing together literary, cinematic, regional, and mythic narratives from Western and non-Western contexts-including Indian literature and film-the book constructs a comparative framework that illuminates how disability is embedded in diverse historical, cultural, and political settings. Covering texts from Kafka and Faulkner to Odia fiction and Indian partition narratives, it spans early modernism, interwar poetics, post-World War II trauma narratives, and late-century cultural media such as cinema, comics, autobiography, and myth.

Balancing academic rigour with accessibility, this book is an essential resource for scholars, students, and educators interested in literature, culture, and critical disability studies.

This book offers a novel action-based pluralist analysis of Molyneux's question, which asks whether a subject born blind yet able to discriminate specific shapes by touch alone can immediately recognize, if their vision is suddenly restored, the same shapes placed before their eyes by sight alone. This text engages with the 300+ year long history of this question, the hard problems that prevent a final and unique answer, as well as some strong attempts to succeed in answering, and how failure to do so is due to partial interpretations of the question, which is more complex than usually considered. The authors suggest that only a pluralistic approach - one that tackles Molyneux's problem from multiple disciplinary perspectives - will succeed. Thus, they defend a pluralist strategy, taking into account the role of embodiment and the many relations between perception and action, to face Molyneux's problem in all its complexity. The book will suggest a variety of answers, depending on how the question is approached.

This book taps into an interdisciplinary readership of students and scholars, particularly within the fields of philosophy, psychology and the cognitive sciences. It is especially appealing to those working on perception, action, and the body, three motifs punctuating the body of the book.

Deradicalisation and Rehabilitation of Violent Extremist Offenders in the Global South: Lessons from Bangladesh offers a rigorous, evidence-based framework for understanding and responding to violent extremism in Bangladesh - with adaptable insights for other nations across the Global South. Structured around four interconnected outputs, the volume moves systematically from strategic diagnosis to operational implementation.

Part I presents a comprehensive needs-mapping study, drawing on comparative analyses of international case studies from Indonesia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Colombia. It profiles 103 violent extremist offenders spanning faith-based militants, left-wing extremists, and ethno-nationalists, identifying socio-demographic patterns, psychological vulnerabilities, and radicalisation pathways that underpin the need for tailored interventions.

Part II introduces the first operational training manual of its kind in South Asia, adopting a whole-of-society approach across four progressive stages: preparatory work, deradicalisation, rehabilitation, and policy reform. The manual outlines detailed counselling modules across religious, psychological, cultural, educational, and legal dimensions, with gender sensitivity and human rights compliance embedded throughout.

Part III evaluates a pilot intervention conducted in Bangladesh between August and December 2023, assessing outcomes for 32 beneficiaries using a multidimensional framework that combines counsellor evaluations, self-assessments, and independent observations.

Part IV presents a standardised Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) toolkit aligned with OECD-DAC principles, designed for scalability across prison, community, and counterterrorism settings.

Collectively, the volume provides a transformative shift from fragmented, reactive approaches to a structured, rights-compliant, and institutionally sustainable architecture for deradicalisation and rehabilitation - offering a replicable model for Global South countries confronting the complex challenges of terrorism and violent extremism.

Die Arbeit widmet sich dem Insolvenzantrag aus allen Blickwinkeln. Ausgehend von einem grundlegenden Versaeumnis des Gesetzgebers zeigt der Autor auf, dass das geltende Recht die Interessen der Einziehungsbetroffenen und der Tatopfer nur unzureichend beruecksichtigt. Auf Grundlage der Untersuchungsergebnisse werden abschliessend Vorschlaege zur Reform der StPO und der RiStBV erarbeitet.

Through newly transcribed and translated lectures, Deleuze explores Spinoza's philosophy concerning questions of good and evil and humanity's potential for realizing a full life

Available for the first time in English, On Spinoza presents the annotated transcripts of Gilles Deleuze's fifteen seminars on the seventeenth-century philosopher's Ethics, delivered at the experimental University of Vincennes at the behest of Michel Foucault. Spinoza's ambitious treatise was central to Deleuze's thought, and his course provides an accessible framework for understanding the vitality of Spinoza's philosophy.

In an informal classroom setting, Deleuze addresses fundamental aspects of Spinoza's thought: How does one undo the negativity of harmful passions such as hate, resentment, and envy? How can a system of moral judgment based on good and evil be replaced by a more sophisticated ethics of the good and the bad? And since such questions commit Spinoza to a new theory of signs, Deleuze also delves into his thinking on how these signs should guide human existence and the differences between concepts of eternity, experienced in the here and now, and the immortality promised by philosophy and religion.

Building gradually from session to session, Deleuze shows how Spinoza rejects a hierarchical reality dominated by an authoritarian and impenetrable God, instead proposing a world ruled by light and reason in which all beings are equal. Annotated by David Lapoujade and including recorded exchanges with Deleuze's students, On Spinoza offers a rare window into Deleuze's teaching, offering readers a guide for linking Spinoza to other philosophers - including Deleuze himself.

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This book offers a critical realist analysis of police stop and search practices in England, examining the underlying mechanisms that drive both intended and unintended outcomes. Stop and search remain controversial: seen by many as necessary for preventing crime, yet criticised for perpetuating harm through racial discrimination and strained police-community relationships.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with police officers and stakeholders, and quantitative analysis of stop and search data, the book identifies the contextual factors and generative mechanisms that shape how stop and search is used and what outcomes it produces. It reveals how historical tensions between police and marginalised communities, inconsistent political messaging, and an emphasis on low-level drug enforcement contribute to disproportionate targeting of ethnic minorities and socio-economically disadvantaged areas.

The research uncovers several significant mechanisms. Officer identity plays a central role: for 'proactive' officers, stop and search is embedded in their professional self-conception. Neighbourhood bias drives operational decisions, leading to over-policing of stigmatised areas. A disconnect exists between officers' protective justifications and the reality that most stops target young men for minor cannabis possession rather than serious offending.

By examining how contextual factors and generative mechanisms interact, the book provides a comprehensive framework for understanding stop and search in England and internationally. It demonstrates why procedural reforms consistently fail and that meaningful change requires addressing the deep-rooted structures that generate harmful outcomes.

This seminal volume provides a rigorous doctrinal analysis of contemporary slavery through the lens of criminal law and legal dogmatics. It addresses the modern paradox of universal prohibition coexisting with thriving exploitation, offering a robust instrument for law interpretation in both domestic and international courts.

The treatise is organized into four sections. Section I establishes conceptual foundations, diagnosing slavery as an organic product of structural vulnerability within the global neoliberal model rather than a historical anomaly. It further provides a profound constitutionalist perspective on human dignity, a concept essential for a comprehensive understanding of slavery.

Section II maps international standards, tracing the evolution of Article 4 of the ECHR and ILO benchmarks. It elucidates the critical shift from legal ownership to the de facto exercise of powers attaching to ownership, maintaining the severity threshold required to distinguish human rights violations from mere labour malpractice.

A cornerstone of the work is the Anti-Slavery Model Legislation (The Guide to Domestic Legislation) in Section III. This template defines and provides penal frameworks for ten stand-alone forms of exploitation, including slavery, servitude, and forced labour. This section also offers comparative analyses of European and South American legal landscapes.

Section IV addresses institutions of heightened criminal relevance, including the non-punishment provision for victims, complexities in global supply chains, and the challenges of "borderless" criminal jurisdiction. It tackles corporate "ubiquity" and "forum shopping," proposing models to ensure accountability in fragmented productive networks.

By assembling preeminent legal scholars and practitioners, this book transcends sociological description to provide the dogmatic precision required to narrow the space of impunity. It serves as an indispensable resource for understanding how diverse jurisdictions regulate the most heinous affronts to human freedom and legal personality.

This book provides a groundbreaking analytical framework to decode the paradoxes at the heart of China's financial system. It investigates why heavy-handed government intervention persisted alongside stellar economic growth, and why the very policies that fueled the "China miracle" are now generating significant financial risks and inefficiencies.

Moving beyond mere description, the analysis adopts a historic perspective to answer four pivotal questions: Why did China maintain repressive financial policies? Why didn't these policies stifle growth? What caused the recent surge in financial risks? And what are the essential next steps for reform? The book uniquely characterizes China's reform path as one of "asymmetric market reform," driven by pragmatism rather than theoretical ideals.

The scope spans from the foundational reforms of the state-owned banks and markets to the latest revolution in digital finance. It demystifies how technologies like mobile payments and Big-Tech lending are promoting inclusion while creating new regulatory challenges. The book is tailored for academics, policymakers, financial professionals, and students seeking a sophisticated understanding of China's financial trajectory.

This book offers an accessible introduction to financial stability and macroprudential policy with a particular focus on Europe. Covering economic, institutional and regulatory aspects, it is an essential read for professionals and scholars alike.

The first part explores the macroprudential mandate, emphasising the importance of monitoring the entire financial system. The second part introduces the fundamentals of macroprudential supervision and addresses various risk types and their assessment. The third part examines macroprudential policy in detail, covering the key players, institutions and tools used to enhance financial stability.

Ideal for professionals working in supervisory authorities, commercial banks and central banks, as well as for students of economics and supervisory studies, this book provides a solid foundation for understanding financial system stability and macroprudential policy.

This brief reconceptualizes the immigration-crime relationship by examining how immigration reshapes low-skill labor markets in ways that may disproportionately disadvantage economically marginalized Black workers. Challenging the prevailing consensus that immigration either reduces crime or has no effect, it shifts attention away from immigrant offending and toward the structural conditions under which immigration may indirectly elevate crime among Black populations. Rather than treating immigration as uniformly beneficial or criminogenic, the brief argues that its social consequences are unevenly distributed across racial and economic groups.

Results from longitudinal analyses of city-level data drawn from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and the U.S. Census show that higher levels of immigration are associated with increased weekday and weeknight/weekend crime levels among Black but not White offenders. These findings suggest that competition within low-skill labor markets may weaken legitimate employment opportunities for some economically vulnerable Black workers, thereby increasing exposure to criminogenic pressures.

Integrating perspectives on labor market segmentation, strain, routine activity, and race-specific opportunity, the brief develops a theoretical framework linking immigration, racial inequality, and urban crime. By reframing the immigration-crime debate through the lens of economic displacement and racial inequality, this work offers a provocative, policy-relevant account of how immigration and racial justice agendas intersect in contemporary urban America.

This book brings together scholars working in eleven different classical traditions - Greek, Chinese, Latin, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Arabic, Pali, Hittite, Egyptian, Japanese and Sumerian - to investigate how major texts in these traditions conceptualized, mapped and categorized the sentiments, attitudes and states we think of as emotion. This volume is distinctive in its focus on foundational questions concerning the categorization and conceptualization of emotion. It is also unique in its degree of collaboration among scholars working in different disciplines and in a vast range of ancient traditions. This book aims to build on the resources of these traditions to make an intervention in how we might think about emotions today.

This book takes the reader on a philosophical journey into the core of modern finance, bringing to light the ideas, values, and contradictions that shape Wall Street and, through it, the global economy. It shows how markets have moved beyond their original role as instruments of exchange to become autonomous systems of power and meaning-systems that do not merely mirror economic and social realities, but actively participate in producing them.

Bringing together philosophy, economics, and history, A Philosophical Walk Down Wall Street explores how financial markets generate knowledge, how mathematical models come to possess authority, and why crises continue to recur in spite of increasing technological sophistication. Through rich case studies, ranging from the 2008 financial crisis to algorithmic trading, the book argues that concepts such as efficiency, risk, and value are not simply neutral analytical tools, but embody substantive philosophical claims about the nature of the world.