The volume engages scholars in a systematic, collective, and multi-disciplinary exercise in renaissance thinking that showcases the breadth, scope, theories, methods, and potentialities of positive communication. The volume creates new links between the field of positive communication and allied concepts/fields/agencies (e.g. John's Hopkins University's Center for a Livable Future). Contributions also connect the theory and practice of positive communication to the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Finally, the work showcases scholars' design-thinking connecting positive communication topic areas to the concept of "livable futures."

This open-access volume explores how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming STEM education and reshaping teaching and learning for today's world. AI is no longer a distant promise; it is actively redefining classrooms, challenging educators to rethink pedagogy, curriculum, and student engagement. Focusing on the powerful intersection of AI and STEM, the book showcases innovative learning strategies, future-ready curriculum models, and cutting-edge approaches to teacher professional development. It demonstrates how AI can strengthen critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and ethical awareness while offering practical solutions to real-world educational challenges. Combining advanced AI tools with evidence-based instructional design, the volume provides actionable insights that inspire educators, researchers, teachers, and learners. With its inclusive, forward-looking perspective, this book serves as an essential guide for educators, policymakers, and researchers seeking to modernize STEM education and prepare students for an AI-shaped future.

This book considers the specific features of forced migration research, which pose unique challenges when analysing data, and offers a range of analysis tools from discourse analysis. Drawing on real-world case studies from around the world, but particularly from the Global South, this book guides researchers from all disciplines on how to leverage on linguistic tools and approaches that can enhance their forced migration researchers. It provides researchers, students, and teachers with an overview of forced migration research approaches and methods. It then covers concepts from discourse analysis in combination with other disciplines to study complex migration experiences. It presents a unique focus on the peculiarities of analysing forced migration in the Global South, with practical guidance on using discourse analysis to examine forced migrant identities and representations in variety of social situations and text types. Each chapter features a specific discourse analytic approach that is used on a migration-related data set and includes a range of examples and guided activities. This book provides essential reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as migration researchers interested in expanding their data analysis repertoire.

A history of how decolonization shaped Jewish political identity in late-twentieth-century France.

In The Postcolonial Jewish Question, Mendel Kranz shows how France's colonial history fundamentally shaped contemporary debates among Jews in France about racism, discrimination, and minority politics during the late twentieth century. As the wider country confronted the legacies of the Holocaust and the decline of its colonial empire, Jewish thinkers questioned the boundaries of their own political identity and challenged prevailing paradigms of Western universalism. This book traces how prominent and lesser-known thinkers-including Albert Memmi, Emmanuel Levinas, Alain Finkielkraut, and Wladimir Rabi-as well as organizations like the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue francaise engaged with issues of oppression, nationhood, and communal identity, and the ways that colonialism and its afterlives shaped those discussions. Kranz reveals how the Jewish question itself changed shape through confrontations with postcolonial politics. In doing so, he calls for a reassessment of the parameters of the Jewish question amid colonialism's enduring legacies in the present.

This book reframes urban acupuncture- small, precisely targeted design interventions- as a catalyst for rebuilding place attachment and reinforcing social resilience in gentrifying historic neighborhoods by discovering a newly human-centered approach to heritage regeneration. This book bridges environmental psychology and tactical urbanism, introducing place attachment as the key metric of success. It pairs in-depth theory with hands-on case studies, showing how micro-interventions can restore identity, culture, and community agency.

Scope:

• Foundations of gentrification place attachment, and social resilience.
• Principles and methods of urban acupuncture in heritage settings.
• Rich case studies and cross-case analysis
• A practical framework and policy recommendations for architects, designers, planners and psychologists.

This book is of particular value to urban designers, architects, planners, psychologists, and heritage professionals who are seeking practical and innovative strategies. It is also suitable for graduate students and researchers in the fields of urban studies, architectural studies, and environmental psychology.

Ritual and the Body explores how people experience life's most profound transitions: birth, marriage, and death. Drawing on Ukrainian folk traditions, Maria Mayerchyk shows how rituals mark changes in social status by shaping how the body moves, speaks, eats, hears, and even feels itself to exist.

From christenings and weddings to funerals, the book follows key figures and moments of ritual life-the newborn child, parents, newlyweds, and the deceased-and reveals how bodily states, clothing, sound, food, light and darkness, joy and grief all carry meaning. With clarity and insight, Mayerchyk invites readers to see the human body as a powerful cultural language, one through which communities make sense of loss, transformation, and belonging.

An African Approach to Population Ethics offers an important and long-overdue shift away from Western, individualistic models of population ethics, grounding its analysis in Indigenous African communal ethics. The contributors explore a wide range of historical and contemporary issues affecting African population dynamics. They critically examine urgent questions of procreation, resource allocation, and environmental sustainability, from the ethics of climate change to the reinterpretation of traditional fertility proverbs. By prioritizing African voices and experiences, the book establishes a unique and much-needed framework for addressing population challenges with respect for African needs and priorities. It is an essential resource for scholars, policymakers, and all readers focused on Africa's future.

This is the first international Companion volume to humane education with contributors from many countries, including South Africa, Israel, Singapore, Croatia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada and the United States. It draws together multi-disciplinary perspectives on the history of humane thought, humane education practices, and offers appraisals of what is effective. Humane education is a broad field that aims to cultivate compassion, respect, and understanding for all living beings and the environment. The desirability of cultivating empathy as an educational goal is now widely accepted, but in many countries humane education has yet to establish a foothold among all the competing claims on the modern curriculum. However, it remains a key tool that can be used to lessen violence and insensitivity to humans and animals alike. The purpose of this Companion volume is to inspire and facilitate the teaching of humane education, which the authors believe should be on the agenda of every school and college in the world.

This Companion volume is a project of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, which pioneers ethical perspectives on animals through academic research, teaching, and publication.

Rooted in scholarship on intersectional feminism and drawing on the lived experiences of women of color, this edited volume explores the formation and practice of intersectional community, across varied contexts, as a powerful agent of social change. Chapters focus on conceptualizing women of color sisterhoods as disruptive to dominant white, male narratives of success; re-imagining self-care as acts of collective care; analyzing the dynamic, reciprocal relationships between women of color and their larger communities in terms of space and place; and experiencing sisterhood across and within generations. Incorporating both autoethnography and traditional ethnography, this volume offers unique insights on the practice of intersectional community among women of color.

This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and academics studying the social sciences, gender studies, and particularly intersectional feminism.

This book explores the emergence of earthly methodologies in early childhood education approaches for thinking, creating, and acting in generative ways. Beginning with a 'wool-ing' encounter on a small beach in Oslofjord, a collective of women gather without predetermined aims, opening space for listening, care, and relational attention to bodies, materials, and place. Through diffractive inquiries, the chapters ask how attunement to Earth reshapes education. Drawing on ecofeminist, Indigenous, and posthuman perspectives, the book reimagines childhood as of the Earth - entangled, relational, and inseparable from planetary futures.

"Moving beyond anthropocentricism and human centered worlds is an urgent task and responsibility for today's scholars and educators. This creative, aesthetically engaging, and intellectually stimulating collection of examples and methodological invitations not only offers ways of knowing and doing 'otherwise', but it also foregrounds multitudes of ecological and earthly (wool) becomings. Entangled multispecies care in action!"

----Mirka Koro, PhD, Professor of Qualitative research, Arizona State University

"This book is a powerful and imaginative exploration of earthly methodologies and unfolding childhoods in the Anthropocene. It foregrounds skillfully crafted research-creation encounters, wool-ing, sensing, drawing, making-with, that trace more-than-human relations across times, places, and material histories. Drawing on ecofeminism, critical posthumanism, and Indigenous knowledges, it opens vibrant alternatives to human-centered pedagogies. A compelling, multifaceted read that lingers as an invitation to think, feel, and practice otherwise."

----Camilla Eline Andersen, PhD, Professor of Early Childhood Education, University of Inland Norway

The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne marked a decisive moment in international diplomacy, laying the foundations for stability and peaceful coexistence in Southeast Europe and the Middle East. By completing the transition from empire to nation-state, the treaty established internationally recognized borders, restored sovereignty, and replaced prolonged conflict with a durable legal framework that continues to underpin regional peace a century later.

This volume brings together leading scholars to examine the negotiations, legal innovations, and long-term significance of the Treaty of Lausanne. It highlights the role of the major powers-namely Britain, France, Italy, and Japan-alongside regional actors such as Greece, Romania, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and the newly established Republic of Turkey. The book also explores the Treaty's broader international resonance, including its implications for Asian countries such as India and China. Particular attention is devoted to the development of minority protections under international law, and the safeguarding of the Ecumenical Patriarchate as a vital spiritual and institutional presence.

One hundred years on, the Treaty of Lausanne remains one of the principal peace instruments shaping political order, legal continuity, and interstate relations in the region. By combining legal analysis with diplomatic history, this volume offers a constructive reassessment of Lausanne's enduring contribution to international stability and the foundations of the modern international order.

The remarkable story of how Frederick Douglass went from condemning the Constitution as a proslavery pact to celebrating it as a "glorious liberty document" that promises freedom to everyone

The speeches and writings of Frederick Douglass contain some of the most probing examinations ever of the role that slavery played in America's founding. In Frederick Douglass's American Founding, Dennis Rasmussen traces the great abolitionist's intellectual journey from denouncing the founders as hypocrites and the Constitution as evil to embracing them both.

Throughout the 1840s, Douglass described the founders as "little better than a band of pirates" and the Constitution as "a most cunningly-devised and wicked compact." Beginning in 1849, however, he undertook a long period of study and reflection that produced a dramatic change of mind. From 1851 on, Douglass contended that the founders were resolutely opposed to slavery and that the Constitution was a "glorious liberty document" that mandated immediate emancipation, despite several clauses that appeared to suggest otherwise. Even after embracing the Constitution and the founders, Douglass remained second to none in castigating America for the evils of slavery. Indeed, as he argued in his greatest speech, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" (1852), the glory of the nation's founding ideals only put their persistent betrayal into starker relief. Douglass also came to regard the founders as radicals in their fight against tyranny. That was why he insisted that he and his fellow abolitionists, rather than moderates like Abraham Lincoln, were the founders' true heirs.

Whatever you think about the founding, Douglass's arguments will challenge-and perhaps even change-your views. After seeing the Constitution through Douglass's eyes, it is difficult to look at it in the same way again.

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.

The story of the scandal in the LBJ administration that first brought queer life into the national political conversation in the 1960s.

In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson's longest-serving and most trusted advisor, Walter Jenkins, was arrested for soliciting sex in a YMCA bathroom near the White House. The scandal blasted across the front pages of major US newspapers, was dissected and analyzed by the FBI, and became a watershed in making straight America aware of queer life. In Outed, historian Timothy Stewart-Winter reveals that the effects of antigay policing were felt not only by the men but by their colleagues, families, and, in this case, the First Family.

Walter Jenkins's political banishment had long-ranging effects, from how Johnson conducted the remainder of his presidency to how media coverage of political and sexual scandals became more explicit and salacious. Stewart-Winter reveals Jenkins's influence and legacy, encompassing but also looking beyond the scandal. Jenkins had a significant impact on Johnson's career and how it is remembered, including both his signal accomplishment-the programs and laws that constituted the Great Society-and his signal failure: his catastrophic judgment, after Jenkins's exile, regarding the Vietnam War.

Drawing on Jenkins's previously unexamined personal papers, including hundreds of letters he received in the aftermath from ordinary Americans and government officials alike, Stewart-Winter shows how antigay policies and the revelations around them continue to reverberate today.

A cultural and legal history intertwined with a deeply emotional meditation on the course of life, memory, and the documents that define us.

During the 1940s and 1950s, an untold number of American children suffered devastating injuries when the fur-like fabric on the chaps of their Gene Autry-branded cowboy playsuits exploded into flame. Barbara Young Welke was researching this history when her teenage daughter unexpectedly died.

The shock of Welke's loss transformed her understanding of the children and their families. Her experience also led her to question the norms of scholarship and of writing. Historians are trained to separate the personal from the intellectual, to be suspicious of emotion. These and other norms are embedded in and reinforced by the calling card of academics, the curriculum vitae. Welke wondered how that cold document-with its literal meaning, "the course of life"-had become a form that excludes so much of what gives life meaning. What impact did that have on what we know, how we know it, and how we understand ourselves? Similarly, Welke wondered, what might we see if we looked at the history of the cowboy suit tragedy as more than a matter of lawsuits brought by grieving families? Here, Welke traces the making, marketing, and selling of the cowboy suits; the lengths the defendants went to avoid and limit liability; and the meaning of the injuries, deaths, and legal settlements in the course of these children's and families' lives.

Writing with Fire interweaves the histories of the cowboy suit tragedy and the curriculum vitae. Grounded in archival and legal research, oral histories, and letters Welke wrote her daughter following her death, Welke offers an inimitable examination of trauma, law, autobiography, and identity. The result is revelatory and unforgettable: a provocative historical reflection on life and death, depression and war, markets and families, law, power, and precarity in modern America.

Amid nineteenth-century America's fierce battles over slavery and freedom, few proslavery partisans argued more vehemently for the supremacy of the white race than John Van Evrie (1814-96). A New York-based propagandist, writer, book publisher, and editor of the New York Day Book, Van Evrie leveraged the era's rapidly expanding media and communications landscape to advance his cause. Throughout his career, he promoted pseudoscientific justifications for racism, proclaimed slavery as beneficial to society, and created a media network criticizing abolitionists, Republicans, and Democrats alike. Despite the Civil War's defeat of Van Evrie's cause, his success in cultivating an audience and market for his views allowed him to continue publishing during Reconstruction, rallying support among white readers for policies and practices that would continue to subordinate Black Americans.

Tracing Van Evrie's failures and chilling successes over a career of some forty years, Michael E. Woods reveals the stunning resilience of racist ideology before and after the Civil War. In doing so, Woods demonstrates how the era's print media, business systems, and political alliances allowed ideas like Van Evrie's to flourish, even as Reconstruction promised a new birth of freedom for Americans of all races.

How the police in Minneapolis used electoral politics to accrue power and avoid accountability.

The 2020 murder of George Floyd made Minneapolis synonymous with unjust policing and the pain and outrage left in its wake. The city became ground zero for police reform in the United States-even though liberal politicians in Minnesota had promised, and delivered, police reforms for decades. Centered on professionalization, these changes inadvertently exacerbated injustice. Better training and higher standards broadened the influence of the police, who then claimed expertise in public safety. They deployed it to bargain for governmental support, even when they treated residents unfairly. Though Black, Indigenous, and gay residents resisted, the political power amassed by the police rendered real change almost impossible.

In A Police State, historian and fourth-generation Minneapolis resident Michael J. Lansing chronicles how the police became a political force in one of the nation's most liberal cities. Lansing shows how, in the years after World War II, public safety policies that appealed to voters in the overwhelmingly white city protected and expanded police discretion. As union members, administrators, and citizens, officers shaped these policies to shield themselves and their violent actions from scrutiny. They campaigned for better wages, secured legal safeguards, resisted race-neutral policing, and elected one of their own to the mayor's office. Ultimately, they used democratic institutions to cultivate and sustain a police state that protected white people and harmed people of color. Lansing uncovers this dysfunctional relationship between a city and its cops while illuminating a larger American story about reform, resistance, and democracy.

A significant exploration of policing politics, this book helps us understand the history that led to George Floyd's murder-and insists that the future of community safety depends on reenvisioning the role of police in our society.

Today, half of Texas's expanding population, including the cities of Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, depends on the Trinity River, a river that has shaped the state's politics, economy, and environment for centuries. From the prairies of North Texas to the Gulf of Mexico, the Trinity established Native nations, foiled Spanish and French imperialism, stood at the center of the Texas plantation system, and fueled the growth of the state's largest cities.

In the first history of this vital river, historian Scot McFarlane illuminates how the Trinity has defined Texas history. Its floods enriched the soil and destroyed crops, its channel served as both a route and barrier to freedom, and its once-polluted waters now sustain a significant portion of the state. McFarlane's captivating narrative brims with stories of the people who called the Trinity home over the centuries: the Comanche, steamboat pilots, enslaved and freed people, sharecroppers, inmates, and millions of urban residents. The result is a fresh perspective on economic development, slavery, and the environment-revealing the Trinity not as a backdrop to Texas history but as a force that shaped it.

This book explores the potential of relational research as a creative and participatory endeavor to produce knowledge. Bringing together insights from social construction, intersectional feminist frameworks, decolonial practices, queer theories, and queer worldmaking, it prompts researchers to reimagine the theoretical underpinnings and methodological choices that shape their work. In doing so, it cultivates a community of practice in which scholars engage the complex terrain of research to advance plural and inclusive forms of knowing.

This edited collection offers a global perspective on what knowledge is and how it is created, situating research practices within diverse cultural, disciplinary, and relational contexts through contributions from authors from different corners of the world. It illustrates methods that support navigating pressing global challenges, such as sustainability transitions, the surge of populism, and the enduring legacies of colonialism, racial, gendered, and sexual marginalization. An ideal resource for those interested in applying decolonial, inclusive, and interdisciplinary relational research methods, it offers students and researchers concrete ways to engage with inquiry as a situated and relational practice.

An unparalleled portrait of nineteenth-century social reform and the magnetic oratory that gave it force, told through the career of temperance advocate John B. Gough

John B. Gough was perhaps nineteenth-century America's most famous ex-drunkard-a man who had hit rock bottom but then found the determination to recover and preach sobriety with unusual scope and impact. Through an exploration of Gough's life, Thomas Augst investigates a world in which a public speaker could achieve immense fame by delivering a remarkable 12,000 popular lectures over his lifetime across the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Gough kept a voluminous archive of his comings and goings, day after day, speech after speech. Augst is among the first scholars to fully mine these materials, and he uses them to illuminate the redemptive power of storytelling in the lives of citizens. In the process, A Drunkard's Story follows an itinerant journey through the cultural history of social reform.

John Gough's life was fascinating in its own right, but Augst's exploration of it also opens a window onto a rich interplay among performance, autobiography, and celebrity. The ways that people flocked to hear Gough tell his tale, and the contagious enthusiasm with which he was greeted far and wide, might seem from another time-but also surprisingly contemporary in the age of the influencer.

This open access book takes readers inside the minds and hearts of twenty urban visionaries transforming urban and rural environments across six continents. Rather than focusing on technical solutions or policy frameworks, Cathy Oke and Jorn Verbeeck reveal the deeply personal journeys of former mayors, Indigenous leaders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, activists and academics who have used cities and towns as living laboratories for humanity's future. From Durban to Paris, Melbourne to Bangalore, these boundary spanners share intimate stories of what drives their work: childhood memories of fishing with grandparents, moments of recognition on Arctic mountains, encounters with traditional knowledge systems that challenge Western assumptions about development. Rather than celebrating lone heroes, the book reveals cities and their communities as "kaleidoscopes of possibility" requiring ensemble casts who translate between disciplines, sectors, and communities.

Each story weaves personal odyssey with professional transformation, capturing how individual experiences of displacement, discovery, and belonging shape approaches to collective challenges like climate change, inequality, and urban resilience. This is a syllabus for sustainable city leadership: accumulated wisdom that integrates multiple knowledge systems, honours ancient wisdom alongside contemporary innovation, and fosters collaborative intelligence through the stories we share. Essential reading for anyone navigating the messy, vital work of making cities thrive.

Illustrations by Chris Cane.