Positioned at the intersection of indigenous knowledge systems and spatial practice, this volume explores how ritualised, place-based epistemologies can reframe design and planning responses to global ecological crises. Departing from reductive Cartesian abstractions, it interrogates the systemic erasure of sacred space and advances a generative turn toward relational ontologies and decolonial spatial imaginaries. Landscapes are approached not as static heritage artefacts, but as living, agentive systems that co-produce meaning, identity, and ethical responsibility. Drawing on global case studies and innovative methodological approaches, including VOICE, Spiritual Tectonics, and Afro-Cosmological Design, the contributions explore the temporal thickening of sacred sites, where ancestral continuities intersect with emergent technologies. By integrating traditional ecological knowledge with contemporary metrics of resilience and sustainability, the book outlines actionable pathways for spatial practitioners. It speaks to researchers and professionals across architecture, urban planning, religious studies, cultural geography, and the environmental humanities.

This volume offers a comprehensive exploration of how displacement and migration are shaped by the gendered politics of place, through the lens of critical feminist geopolitics. It brings together interdisciplinary contributions that connect historical legacies of colonialism with contemporary issues, such as statelessness, refugee crises, and urban precarity. Spanning themes from colonial-era upheavals to present-day refugee narratives and urban marginalization in urban spaces, the chapters demonstrate how gender, identity, and power intersect across diverse geographic contexts. By bridging feminist theory with empirical case studies, the volume provides fresh conceptual frameworks and comparative insights that deepen our understanding of forced migration, belonging and resistance. The book is a vital resource for researchers, scholars, and graduate students in gender studies, migration studies, human geography, and related fields.

Refusenik's Son is an extraordinary story of family, courage, and betrayal during the Cold War. Against the broader political history of the period, Alex Goldfarb weaves his personal story as one of the players in an intricate cat-and-mouse game of deception and survival. Goldfarb's was a fraught world populated by KGB and CIA agents, informers and traitors, foreign correspondents and politicians, artists and dissidents, some of whom risked their lives.

Refusenik's Son begins in the early 1970s, when Goldfarb, a young science student from a privileged Jewish family in Moscow, joins the dissident movement. His circle includes writers, avant-garde artists, Western journalists, and Soviet scientists. Some are loyal to the system, others secretly dream of emigration. Eventually, Goldfarb receives permission to leave, but the authorities continue to deny an exit visa for his father, a prominent microbiologist. Decades later, through a former KGB officer, Goldfarb discovers the identities of informers among colleagues and friends in the details of the case against his father whom the KGB had wrongly suspected of passing secrets of the Soviet germ warfare program to the CIA. The revelation includes the haunting tale of an anonymous Soviet scientist who provided invaluable data to the CIA and was never unmasked or caught.

Ultimately, Goldfarb's father was released in a complex spy swap that required high-level negotiations and the personal involvement of Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev. The reunion of father and son in New York City closes a saga that marks a symbolic chapter at the end of the Cold War.

The rise of Hollywood's data and algorithm specialists and their growing influence on creative decisions

In Hollywood today, thousands of data specialists work for streaming video platforms, playing a role not just in distribution and marketing but also in decisions about content and production. In Data-Driven Hollywood, Violaine Roussel examines the emergence of this new category of professionals at the heart of the Hollywood dream factory. Roussel shows how the rise of data and algorithm specialists has transformed organizations and rearranged power relationships within them. Drawing on extensive interviews and in situ observations, she describes the ways that technical "data work" carried out by professionals at streaming platforms including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ has had a significant effect on creative decisions.

Rather than fetishizing data and algorithmic models, Roussel explores the practices of the professionals who shape them, manipulate them, and give them power. She examines the relationships of these workers with traditional producers, describing legitimacy struggles and the eventual stabilization of new professional arrangements. Roussel's account of the ways that data specialists deploy algorithmic models to reinvent their industry's approach to content, artists, and the market-the first in-depth sociological study of the rise of this new profession-reveals the new forms of power and knowledge at play in today's Hollywood.

This edited volume explores how global issues such as urbanisation, globalisation, digital practice, and global warming are experienced and interpreted by young people in their local contexts. Drawing on research from 13 countries and 20 study sites, this volume examines how adolescents perceive urban space and how their environments shape their daily lives. The broader research in this volume builds upon participatory action research practices and principles that aim to empower young people by giving them a voice and supporting their agency in decision making. These approaches are used to advocate for youth health and wellbeing in contemporary urban contexts across Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Germany, Lebanon, Nepal, the Netherlands, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Nigeria, the Philippines and the United States of America. The research project focuses on low-income communities undergoing rapid change, examining ways to engage minority and youth populations in informal settlements who are particularly reliant on the resources of their immediate environments and whose circumstances hold significant implications for urban policy. Providing a broad-ranging and comparative perspective on young people's experience of urban life, this volume offers valuable insights for students, researchers, social workers and policymakers concerned with youth wellbeing, urban and community development and related fields.

This book offers a clear and authoritative analysis of Chinese television's evolution through global integration. Drawing on classical and contemporary globalization theories, it reveals how state strategy, market reform and transnational forces have negotiated China's distinctive media transformation. Essential reading for media scholars, policymakers and professionals engaged with China's reform and opening-up trajectory.

By placing these developments within broader debates on Globalization 2.0 and the growing influence of the Global South, the book offers a timely and sophisticated analysis of Chinese television. A major contribution to global media studies, Chinese communication research, and political economy.

Terhi Rantanen, Professor of Global Media and Communications, LSE

Rigorous in its analysis of the evolution of China's television, with detailed case studies encompassing the local, national and international channels, Hong Zhang's excellent book demonstrates the central role that the Chinese government has played in the growing globalization of Chinese television. Highly commendable.

Daya Thussu, Professor of International Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University

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.

This open access book addresses issues related to viewing education as a business endeavor. It introduces the readers to central conceptual issues and relates them to the pedagogical, educational and social issues at various levels and sectors of education. The book offers paradigmatic approaches and theories used to model and examine education as a business endeavor. Business of Education is a global phenomenon that has experienced an exponential growth during the past decades; it goes well beyond the influence of private interests in shaping policymaking or the expansion of private schooling and encompasses policy, practice, and research in the field of education.

The work includes both classical positions and newer viewpoints challenging mainstream debates to approach the diverse manifestations of the business of education and the varying responses across the globe. The volume assesses the impact of business activities at various levels/sectors of education - lifelong learning, vocational education, supplementary education, higher education, teacher education and focuses on different issues and challenges, from financing to sustainability, from geopolitics to reform and on different geographical areas, such as Australia, Brazil, Chile, and Germany. The analyses draw on different frameworks - philanthropy, racial capitalism, transhumanism, neoliberalism - and go well beyond a materialist perspective of the topic at hand to include other important dimensions since controversies abound as to the impact and/or side-effects of these developments beyond their purely economic import. The book also critically discusses the future of the field by showcasing research that deliberate on different directions and that reflect on possible futures for (the business of) education. The research presented has strong global perspective and integrates in-depth conceptual analyses with real-world examples and case studies that aim at contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of the business of education across different contexts and regions.

This book, Navigating Diaspora: Migrants' Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Identity, examines how migration and displacement shape identity narratives through the unique lens of lived experiences. It serves as an essential resource for migration studies across all disciplinary courses, exploring how transnationalism, social dynamics, and racial and ethnic identities intertwine in the lives of displaced individuals. Across 12 chapters, the text covers a wide geographic breadth, including Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and Australia, to highlight the fluid nature of identity. By utilizing phenomenological accounts, historical methods, and extensive research, the volume bridges academic debate with the personal stories of migrant scholars, many of whom are migrants themselves. The chapters progress from theoretical foundations to vibrant storytelling, illustrating how the diasporic space acts as a platform for self-reinvention. This "one-stop shop" provides a critical platform for understanding the evolving global social landscape.

In an era marked by national truth-telling initiatives, from the Uluru Statement from the Heart in Australia to Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, education systems remain slow to respond. As educators face mounting pressure to "teach the truth," they are often left without the frameworks, resources, or institutional support to do so.

Against the backdrop of post-truth politics and curriculum resistance, Truth-Telling Pedagogies makes a compelling case for critical, ethical engagement with history. This collection of international voices shifts the focus from policy reform to the pedagogy of truth-telling. It highlights Indigenous-led educational approaches that centre sovereignty, relationality, and local knowledges, moving beyond tokenistic inclusion toward deeper critiques of colonial structures.

Truth-Telling Pedagogies stands as one of the first volumes to place the pedagogy of truth-telling at its core, moving beyond conventional emphases on policy or curriculum reform. Designed with practitioners in mind, it highlights grounded theory and community-based approaches.

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.

An illuminating investigation of the complex work of social media content creators-their lives, conflicts, and controversies.

In this eye-opening book, digital studies scholar Angele Christin demystifies the content creator economy, explaining its long history and the pitfalls of its professionalization. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork with digital creators as varied as vegan YouTubers, dads of Instagram, and self-described drama commentators, Christin shows how individuals enter social media creation, how they make money, and how their online environments shape their content.

Aspiring creators often dream of a better life in social media careers. Yet these dreams soon turn into exhaustion as influencers try to meet the contradictory demands of platforms, brands, and audiences. Over time, Christin shows, creators cluster into three types: hucksters, who work on behalf of brands; entertainers, who chase virality and platform payments; and gurus, who monetize the loyalty of their fans. Platform dynamics push entertainers and gurus to create extreme and incendiary content to maintain audience engagement, while brands and marketers nudge hucksters toward repetitive, staid commercial performances. Concerns about algorithmic manipulation and conflicts between creators further lead to reputation-damaging, harassment-laden scandals. Christin reveals how platform labor repeatedly-and structurally-fosters precarity and inequality, destructive drama, and inflammatory content online.

This book examines American cultural values and their expressions in everyday speech, particularly an American discourse strategy which the author coins as a metaphoric comparison'. The book argues that culture not only conditions perceptions of reality but also shapes language patterns. Through comparisons with Polish, it shows how idiosyncratic and culture-bound American English is and how, in view of its global popularity, adopting it as mode of communication can alter the lens through which we see the world in both clearly discernible and subtle ways. This book will be of interest to a broad audience including linguists, American Studies scholars, non-native speakers of English, and Slavists.

The Empirical Middle Ages explores the characteristics of people's attention to everyday objects and areas: wooden carvings, towns, coastal regions, and other built and natural phenomena. What draws people toward their items? What methods do they use in gathering information about them? How do they present their findings?

To answer these questions, Matthew Boyd Goldie explores how people in the Middle Ages attended to familiar phenomena with great precision, correlating and measuring to such an exhaustive degree that the recording took over as their predominant activity. Focusing on the history of empiricism in particular, Goldie reveals that the Middle Ages were not empirical in the sense of academic experimentation or scientific observation. Rather, the cases described in The Empirical Middle Ages enable readers to look outside scholastic discussions about factuality and toward administrative, practical, and legal contexts. The results comprise a historically shaped phenomenology usually denied to the medieval: objectivity, forensics, realism, empiricism.

Ceausescu's Children examines the remembered experiences, institutional structures, and ambivalent ideologies of childhood under Nicolae Ceauescu (1965-1989), reconsidering dominant narratives of state socialism in Eastern Europe and histories of childhood in contemporary Europe through the lens of Romania's last socialist generation. Juxtaposing previously unexplored archives against personal recollections, Diana Georgescu argues that children and teens led normal lives in extraordinary times. They attended schools and afterschool clubs, cultivating ideological skills alongside cultured behaviors, playing expert roles of historians and ethnographers of their motherland on scientific expeditions, or serving as cultural ambassadors in international camps in the Soviet bloc and Western Europe.

Georgescu investigates how children performed daily practices of socialist patriotism and internationalism under the guidance of teachers, youth activists, and parents, emerging as socialist-cum-national subjects. Ceauescu's Children challenges the notion that late socialist education and state children's organizations were exclusively collectivist and homogenizing. Moving beyond binary representations of complicity or resistance, Georgescu argues that children, parents, and educators often met the socialist regime halfway, adapting its policies and ideologies to their interests, needs, and aspirations.

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.

A wide-ranging history of American land ownership, from westward expansion to the suburban housing crisis

From its very beginnings, the United States has defined itself by its relationship to land. Settlers saw the continent as the raw material for building a prosperous life while their leaders viewed it as a means for building a people. In the 1950s, the suburban home became a place for Americans to create a personal utopia of lawns and living rooms, of washing machines and dishwashers. Property Values traces how land and its ownership became inextricably tied to the American ideal of independence-and demonstrates why the Homestead Act and a thirty-year mortgage have far more in common than you think.

In this engaging book, Joshua Specht uncovers the history behind the American conviction that widespread land ownership is a fundamental requirement for a flourishing democratic society. We meet the nineteenth-century settler farmers whose dreams of new social and political forms were built on vast quantities of land taken from native peoples, and the European immigrants who came seeking a better life as land-owning citizens. For FDR, homeownership offered a path out of the depths of the Great Depression. For George W. Bush, it gave people a permanent stake in the American dream. Specht charts how the vision of plenty that first drew homesteaders westward gave way to one of scarcity and exclusion as new neighbors came to be seen as a threat to property values and a system meant to promote ownership put it squarely out of reach for many.

Taking readers from the rent wars of the early 1840s through the financial crisis of the late 2000s, Property Values reveals why housing affordability has posed significant challenges to the nation's politics and promise since the founding, and why the American story has always been one about land.

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.

This book contains an Open Access Chapter.

Innovative Learning Environments offers a comprehensive conceptual and theoretical toolkit to support thorough investigations of transformative, innovative, and non-traditional learning spaces in schools. In these spaces, innovative design and pedagogy are at the nexus of new school constructions and the redevelopment of existing schools.

Addressing a gap in existing research, contributions from leading scholars in Learning Environments research present clear entries elucidating concepts and theories that are relevant to the study of Innovative Learning Environments. Readers will find these entries valuable for practical application as they illustrate how these concepts and theories enhance practice within non-traditional schooling spaces.

This concise yet comprehensive volume is invaluable for both newcomers and experienced practitioners, scholars, or designers in the field of Innovative Learning Environments. By focusing on pedagogy and design, Innovative Learning Environments elucidates the origins and purposes of the spatial turn and its impact on learning.

Cultural Psychology in Clinical Research and Practices brings together international scholars and practitioners to examine why cultural psychology is essential for contemporary clinical practice. Building on Shweder's (1990) understanding of culture as the set of traditions and social practices that shape how people think, feel, and act, the book argues that clinical psychology must move beyond universalised Western models if it hopes to understand distress as it is actually lived. Culture is not treated here as a peripheral attribute but as a constitutive element of mind, identity, and meaning-making, central to how suffering is expressed and how healing becomes possible.

Although the chapters are not organised into formal sections, they can be read as contributing to four interrelated themes: Reframing Theory and Foundations; Politics, Justice, and Intercultural Practice; Identity, Language, and the Therapeutic Encounter; and Embodiment, Culture, and Lived Experience. These themes offer readers a guide to how the contributions, taken together, show culture at work in clinical research and practice. Viewed through these lenses, the contributions demonstrate how culture shapes clinical work in psychotherapy and health-related settings, and offer insights relevant to wider applied practice. Chapters draw on semiotic, phenomenological, decolonial, and interdisciplinary approaches to explore topics such as the colonial roots of diagnostic concepts, the politics of therapeutic practice, linguistic identity in bilingual counselling, intersectionality in self-disclosure, intercultural encounters with Indigenous communities, and cultural idioms of suffering.

By foregrounding cultural psychology, Cultural Psychology in Clinical Research and Practices offers a critical and forward-looking agenda for clinical psychology research and practice. It invites readers to reconsider long-held assumptions about neutrality, objectivity, and universality in mental health, and instead to embrace culturally grounded, ethically engaged approaches that recognise power, history, and context. The result is a timely contribution for researchers, practitioners, and students seeking a clinical psychology that is globally relevant, locally meaningful, and responsive to the plurality of human experience.

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.