Do you find mastering research and statistical methods in the vast field of social sciences daunting? This book serves as an accessible introduction, guiding you through the core concepts needed to navigate data with confidence. From designing a study to presenting results, this text goes back to basics and provides a modern approach to understanding statistics.

This first edition also offers:

• Comprehensive Coverage: Explores essential statistical methods relevant to social sciences, from descriptive statistics to spatial and temporal pattern analysis.
• An Accessible Writing Style: Engages students with a science communication approach, simplifying complex concepts.
• Visual Learning: Utilises figures and graphics to enhance understanding, making data presentation a key focus.
• Global Relevance: Includes examples with broad global applicability.

With an array of online resources, this book is a must-have resource for building foundational skills in research and statistics as a beginner social scientist.

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

Knowledge is constantly on the move, yet it often resists travelling smoothly between disciplines, institutions and communities.

This book examines why the movement of knowledge can be so fragile, and what happens when different ways of knowing collide. Drawing on scholarship from the field of science and technology studies, the book explores the ways in which standards, alignment work, relationships and power shape how knowledge is taken up, transformed or rejected.

By focusing on the often invisible labour that supports knowledge transfer, the book offers a novel framework for understanding how meaning is negotiated across contexts, and why stable knowledge remains such a persistent challenge in contemporary societies.

"A gutsy, razor-sharp demystification of a powerful organization."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The first-ever history of the Anti-Defamation League and its determined, century-long alliance with Western empire.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is a major US political organization, yet its politics have gone largely unexamined. While the ADL is often portrayed as a defender against antisemitism and racism, its history shows that it is better understood as a proponent of the racial state and US empire. From "correcting" the embarrassing racial difference of immigrant Jews to policing the leftist politics of Black, Arab, and Jewish groups, the ADL pursued a conservative version of civil rights paired with aggressive anti-communism. Even as it became an authority on white nationalism in the 1970s, the ADL joined with the emerging anti-left, anti-Arab, and pro-Western neoconservative movement.

This history presaged the ADL's work, from the 1980s to the present, in developing the hate crimes framework as a pro-state policing project, which soon merged with the "War on Terror," the "antisemitism scare," and anti-Palestinian racism. The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State presents the ADL's history through its conflicts with social justice movements, illuminating the ADL's outsize role in shaping the ideas about race and rights that have underwritten US empire.

Much has been said about the concept of the 'left-behind' in modern Britain and the role that this played in Brexit, but why have the many problems facing coastal communities been overlooked by the media and national policy?

With evidence that coastal areas have generally borne the brunt of deprivation and may be the last to recover from the current economic downturn, the need for a sustainable model of coastal regeneration has never been greater. This book explains the factors behind the decline of coastal areas, provides new data on the ways this has manifested with respect to economic, social, health and education outcomes and suggests how policy reform can create dynamic, thriving coastal communities.

An invitation into doing reproductive justice queerly.

Queer theory and reproductive justice need each other-now more than ever. As liberals and leftists increasingly frame reproductive justice in terms of LGBTQ+ rights, often adopting the language of "queerness," it has become difficult to see that their political demands and strategies are often quite conservative. In Reproductive Justice, Queerly, Carly Thomsen examines typical reproductive justice issues-including abortion, surrogacy, crisis pregnancy centers, paid parental leave, and parenting-in queer ways. She shows what can happen when we bring queer theory and reproductive justice together: a queerer, more powerful articulation of what we are fighting for.

The first biography of one of Virginia's greatest social reformers

When Dr. Kate Waller Barrett died in 1925, the governor of Virginia ordered flags to be flown at half-staff, the first time in its four-century history that the commonwealth paid such a tribute to a woman. This is the first biography of Barrett, the ardent and remarkably successful Progressive Era social reformer. Barrett's life spanned a time of seismic change in the nation and in women's lives, particularly Southern women, as they forged new identities in the changing environment of the post-Civil War years and the Progressive era.

Barrett rebelled against the restrictions imposed on Southern women and established her reputation as a strong-willed advocate for what many people at the time considered to be society's "outcasts": unwed mothers and prostitutes. She successfully combined evangelism with a maternalist strategy that brought a uniquely feminine approach to bear on social issues affecting women and children, and her years of activism propelled her onto the national stage and earned her global recognition. President Theodore Roosevelt called her "one of the most useful women in the United States." The outcast and lonely women of Richmond's slums of Butchertown called her simply "Mother Barrett."

This volume forms part of the Critical Discourses in South Asia series, which deals with schools, movements, and discursive practices in major South Asian languages. It offers crucial insights into the making of Marathi literature and its critical tradition across a several centuries. The book presents one of a kind historiography of Marathi literature and of its critical discourse. It brings together English translations of major writings of influential figures dealing with the question of caste, gender and aesthetic in the novel, poetry, myth, folk-culture, philosophical discourse, bilingual literary practice and literary form. It also studies the role of Marathi criticism in the context of the social history of Maharashtra.

Comprehensive and authoritative, this volume offers an overview of the history of critical thought in Marathi literature in South Asia. It will be essential for scholars and researchers of Marathi language and literature, literary criticism, literary theory, comparative literature, Indian literature, cultural studies, art and aesthetics, performance studies, history, sociology, regional studies, and South Asian studies. It will also interest the Marathi-speaking diaspora and those working on the intellectual history of Maharashtra and Western India and conservation of the language and their culture.

The classic study of witchcraft and popular belief, newly revisited.

A landmark of microhistory, The Night Battles remains one of the most daring and influential investigations of witchcraft and popular belief in early modern Europe. Through meticulous research in the inquisitorial archives of northern Italy, Carlo Ginzburg reconstructs the story of the benandanti-the "good walkers"-peasants of the Friuli region who claimed that, while their bodies slept, their spirits journeyed into the night to battle witches and warlocks in defense of their crops and communities.

Armed with fennel stalks, these benandanti fought for fertility and abundance. To the inquisitors who interrogated them, however, such nocturnal visions could only signify diabolical witchcraft. Over decades of questioning and reinterpretation, a profound cultural clash unfolded, and the benandanti were gradually transformed from defenders of the harvest into supposed participants in the witches' sabbat. From this richly documented case, Ginzburg advances a bold hypothesis: that across Europe, elements of agrarian and ecstatic traditions were recast under pressure from ecclesiastical authorities into the stereotype of satanic conspiracy. The Friulian trials, exceptional in their detail, offered what he would later call an "exemplary case"-a fragment of testimony that illuminates broader historical processes.

In a substantial new afterword, Ginzburg reflects on the role of chance discovery in archival research, the dialogue between history and anthropology, and the personal and intellectual forces that shaped his inquiry. Revisiting his own encounter with the voices of the accused, he offers a rare meditation on historical method, perspective, and the moral ambiguities of studying persecution.

The incredible true story of Lord Gordon Gordon, the nineteenth century's most audacious fraudster

Throughout the nineteenth century, a legendary con artist made headlines for perpetrating a series of brazen scams across Europe, the United States, and Canada. He adopted the grand title of "Lord Gordon Gordon." In reality, he was a self-assured and slippery fraudster straight from the pages of a novel by Herman Melville or Mark Twain.

In The Lord of the Lies, Shawn Francis Peters traces Gordon across continents as he swindled shopkeepers, bankers, attorneys, and railroad executives alike. Gordon even managed to fool the legendary robber-baron Jay Gould into handing over cash and securities by convincing the canny financier that he was a major stockholder in the Erie Railroad. These audacious efforts earned him a reputation as the "prince of lies" and "king of charlatans," a man whose real life was as interesting as the fantastical lies he told.

No previous account has pieced together the entirety of Gordon's complicated story, from his shadowy origins in England through his much-debated death in Canada. Providing the first comprehensive portrait of one of the greatest rogues of the Gilded Age, The Lord of the Lies offers a gripping narrative account of this renowned con man's life.

This collection brings together a range of perspectives on translation and censorship in significant periods of 20th-century history, from World War I through to the end of the Cold War.

Each chapter charts the historical, political, and sociocultural landscape for each study for further background to different types of censorship pervasive in 20th-century Europe, from external or official censorship to self-censorship to retranslation. Organized chronologically, from the start of World War I to the dictatorships in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, including Charles de Gaulle's presidency in France at the height of the Cold War, the volume highlights the similarities and differences that characterized censorship practices across the continent and how these developed over time, exploring issues around gender, sexuality, political and religious references, and offensive or taboo language across a range of media and genres. In bringing together diverse perspectives on these issues, the volume aims to build a holistic understanding of translation and censorship situated in a historical perspective toward opening up directions for future research.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars in translation studies and 20th-century European history.

Redrawing the map and resetting the clock of the Age of Revolutions

In 2015, Bryan Banks and Cindy Ermus launched AgeofRevolutions.com, a site offering critical reconsideration of the foundational concept of revolution and centered on three key questions: What was the Age of Revolutions? Where was the Age of Revolutions? And are we still living in an Age of Revolutions? This collection represents the best of scholars' answers to these expansive, urgent questions. Throughout, contributors place the revolutionary era within a larger and more fluid context of global interconnections, situating it within multiple overlapping narratives of resistance and transformation and encouraging a more nuanced and expansive conception of revolution across time and space. They challenge traditional understandings that placed the Age of Revolutions between the years 1775 and 1848 and that confined it to Europe and the Atlantic world. Instead, this volume demonstrates that the Age of Revolutions began much earlier in the eighteenth century and continues through the present day and across the globe-from Haiti to Hong Kong. Collectively, these field-defining essays explore the implications of this new understanding of the concept, offering snapshots of the diverse nature of revolutionary change across all continents.

Pentecostalism is often characterized as an ecstatic movement-centrally involving spirited worship, speaking in tongues, prophecy, and healing-as well as an exclusivist one, primarily aligned with North American white evangelicalism. Yet there is a vibrant Black Pentecostal tradition stretching back more than a century that is both theologically complex and deeply grounded in an ethics of social justice.

In More Than Tongues Can Tell, Eric Lewis Williams dismantles prevailing notions of Pentecostalism's anti-intellectualism and explores how social contexts shape theologies produced by marginalized groups in America. Through close readings of the work of four pioneering Black Pentecostal theologians-Bishop Ozro Thurston Jones Jr., Bishop Ithiel Conrad Clemmons, Dr. James Alexander Forbes Jr., and Dr. William Clair Turner Jr.-Williams uncovers a theological vision marked by openness to diverse Christian and philosophical traditions alongside a deep commitment to liberation and egalitarianism. Situating these thinkers within African American religious history and the wider landscape of Pentecostal theology, the book reconstructs Black Pentecostalism's coming of age in the twentieth century.

Foregrounding pneumatology as a site of theological creativity, More Than Tongues Can Tell challenges glossocentric frameworks that reduce the Spirit to ecstatic speech and demonstrates how Black Pentecostal theologians articulate a more expansive and socially engaged vision. The book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of theology and African American and Africana religions, as well as practitioners within Pentecostal communities.

Medieval monuments and memorials are never simply remnants of the past. Across the world, they are continually destroyed, restored, reinvented, and mobilized in the service of contemporary politics. Inventing Heritage stages a debate about medievalism and Byzantinism as global political phenomena, examining how cultural heritage becomes a site of conflict, political domination, and public memory.

The essays in this volume critically assess the management, mismanagement, and appropriation of heritage through case studies from the Balkans, Turkey, Spain, the United States, Peru, and Japan. Contributors explore how medieval monuments-old and new, material and narrative, real and (re)imagined-are mobilized to convey political meaning in modern contexts. The essays examine the destruction, protection, and reinvention of a range of cultural sites as well as the ways in which education, historiography, media, and storytelling shape competing claims to the past. Particular attention is given to the Balkans, where the destruction of monuments during the wars of the 1990s and ongoing struggles over cultural landscapes reveal how heritage becomes entangled with economic policies, anti-colonial and national discourses, and global heritage institutions.

Bringing together scholars from multiple disciplines and regions, Inventing Heritage offers a framework for understanding the politics of medieval heritage and the contested meanings of public space. It will appeal to specialists in medieval and Byzantine studies, as well as readers concerned with the global politics of heritage and memory.

In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Natsuko Akagawa, Jovana Andelkovic, Gueldem Baykal Bueyueksarac, Roland Betancourt, Neven Budak, Koray Durak, Filip Ejdus, Helen Fortescue-Poole, Rachel Goshgarian, Visnja Kisic, Milena Methodieva, Luis Muro Ynonan, Elena Paulino Montero, Ana Radakovic, Milena Repajic, Marko Suica, Hakan Tarhan, and Gustav Wollentz.

Fragments are central to the work of medievalists. Whether caused by destruction, decay, or the loss of context, fragmentation shapes how scholars reconstruct and interpret the Middle Ages. In the study of medieval visual culture especially, fragments evoke lost monuments, damaged manuscripts, and vanished rituals-yet their evidentiary role is often overlooked or assumed rather than critically examined.

This volume brings together seven essays that examine the risks and rewards of working with fragments in the study of medieval culture. Developed from a scholarly conference at the Index of Medieval Art, the chapters examine how incomplete material, pictorial, textual, ritual, and conceptual objects have been interpreted, reconstructed, or newly understood over time. Topics include the medieval reframing of earlier fragments, the politically motivated interpretation of fragments to rewrite a lost past or fabricate a new future, market-driven deceptions of the consumer, and the challenges of decoding how fragments of all kinds speak to those who view and study them today.

A valuable resource for scholars of medieval art, history, and material culture, this collection addresses the fundamental methodological challenges of studying the Middle Ages through incomplete evidence. Offering fresh insights into how fragments are perceived and repurposed across time, it encourages critical reflection on the fragment as both obstacle and opportunity in reconstructing medieval worlds.

In addition to the editors, the contributors include Patricia Blessing, William Diebold, Shirin Fozi, Silvia Gianolio, Gregor Kalas, Henry David Schilb, and Susanne Wittekind.