The story of a pioneering cardinal who was a key architect of the Roman Catholic Church's ecumenical and interreligious commitment

Catholicism during the twentieth century was characterized by changing Church attitudes toward other religions. At the center of these changes was Johannes Willebrands, the pioneering Dutch cardinal.

Johannes Willebrands uncovers the life of this man who led the world's largest religion to embrace dialogue and religious liberty. Drawing on newly discovered archival sources, Karim Schelkens tells the story of how Willebrands, who lived through two world wars, was moved to launch under-the-radar initiatives that helped move European Catholics beyond an attitude of condemning Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, Jews, and Muslims in the postwar years. His diplomatic role became central once these initiatives were adopted during the Second Vatican Council, leading to a surge in interreligious dialogue and worldwide changes in the relationship of the Catholic world with those outside it. Through these initiatives, Willebrands also influenced the relationship between communities on either side of the Iron Curtain.

Previously published in Dutch, this English translation of Johannes Willebrands sheds new light on what drove the pivotal changes to the Catholic Church in the Cold War era. Readers interested in political-diplomatic history, interreligious dialogue, ecumenism, Church history, the Vatican, and Catholicism will gain a new perspective on the diplomatic efforts behind this shift.

This book critically analyses the state of Lebanon's education system in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, which, while not leading to the same level of upheaval as in other countries, nonetheless had profound implications for the region. It investigates three major events over the following decade - the influx of Syrian refugees, the Covid-19 Pandemic, and the Port of Bierut explosion - that have exacerbated existing political and sectarian divisions in Lebanon, resulting in a destabilized environment and a leadership vacuum that have significantly impacted Lebanon's educational landscape. At the same time, civil society movements were calling for urgent political and social reforms.

The book uses a humanistic sociological approach which focuses on understanding events from the perspective of those who lived through them, in this case, the families, the children and the young people affected by the decline in educational provision in Lebanon. The book's conclusions are aimed not only at understanding the crisis, but also at proposing actionable recommendations, emphasizing the role of non-profit organizations in supporting the educational infrastructure.

This book addresses universal themes such as the integration of refugees into national education systems, the impacts of political instability on access for all children to education, and the role of grassroots movements in advocating for systemic change. Framing Lebanon's situation within a broader international context offers valuable lessons for policymakers and educators facing similar challenges worldwide. Most importantly, it aims to highlight the urgent need for investment in education as a means of rebuilding Lebanon and fostering a more cohesive society.

Challenging racism, reshaping sexuality, and reimagining belonging across two centuriesFor generations, queer and trans Asian Americans have shaped the history of the United States-often in ways overlooked or erased from the historical record. Breathing Fire brings these lives and struggles into focus, offering a sweeping survey of queer Asian American history from the nineteenth century to the present. Through vivid stories of activists, artists, and ordinary individuals, Amy Sueyoshi reveals how queer Asian Americans forged communities, fought for LGBTQ rights, and challenged the boundaries of belonging.

Drawing on archival sources, oral histories, and a wide body of scholarship, Sueyoshi offers an introductory text that traces how queer Asians in America navigated shifting landscapes of immigration restriction, racial discrimination, and sexual regulation. Early immigrants from Asia arrived with cultural traditions that often accommodated diverse sexualities and gender expressions, yet they encountered increasingly rigid moral codes in the United States. Across the twentieth century, many lived quietly under the radar, while others helped spark transformative movements for civil rights and gay liberation. They navigated anti-Asian sentiment, homophobia, transphobia, and sex negativity to assert their freedom to be queer, some more defiantly than others.

By placing queer Asian Americans within significant signposts in LGBTQ, Asian American, and US history, Breathing Fire highlights their intimate lives and connections as well as their perseverance in pursuing queer desires.

How order, meaning, and knowledge emerge from noise across science, literature, and philosophy

Hermes IV: Distribution is the fourth and penultimate volume in Michel Serres's landmark series on knowledge and communication across disciplines. This collection of essays investigates how order emerges from noise, using thermodynamics and information theory as structural models applicable to science, literature, and culture alike. Moving beyond the themes of interference and translation developed in earlier volumes, Serres focuses on distribution: the processes by which systems take shape, endure, and eventually disperse.

At the core of the book is a dynamic vision of knowledge as an unstable formation. Systems arise from chance encounters or deviations that, through repetition, harden into law. They resist entropy by remaining open to external inputs, forming temporary pockets of negentropy within a wider field of chaos. Space, time, energy, language, and meaning are all shown to emerge from such conditions of mixture and imbalance.

Serres develops his argument through a striking range of materials, including fables, myths, literary texts, philosophy, and the history of science. The result is an uncommon synthesis of hard science and the humanities that reveals shared structures across domains while affirming the irreducible plurality of their laws and methods.

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This book is a collection of contributions by researchers working in various fields of humanities and cultural studies with a focus on the most important contemporary terms needed to understand the Korean Wave (Hallyu) and Korean studies. In recent decades, Hallyu has evolved far beyond the export of Korean popular culture or the commercial success of individual media products. It has become a complex, multilayered cultural formation-one that no longer lends itself to simple explanations. As such, Hallyu persistently raises new questions, inviting scholars to rethink existing frameworks and stimulating fresh intellectual engagements around the world. Twenty-nine researchers across a diverse range of subject areas in the Humanities and Social Sciences have contributed their expertise. Their academic work, conducted across Korea, the United States, Italy, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and beyond, lends this volume its breadth and depth. The entries assembled here encompass both the core concepts that currently anchor Hallyu scholarship and the emerging keywords that offer promising avenues for future research.

This work was supported by the Fostering a New Wave of K-Academics Program of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service (KSPS) at the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2021-KDA-1250004).

Amid the rise of seductive, present-tense goods, the obsolete names what the present cannot assimilate: a forgotten one-hit-wonder, a now-unacceptable remark, or a teenage memory too awkward to reclaim. Yet it is precisely through these encounters with obsolete attachments that a different experience of time becomes possible. Discarded Selves shows that obsolescence is not only a condition imposed on objects and media but a temporal and affective logic internalized within the self. In cultures driven by disposability and the imperative to remain up-to-date, we continually shed former attachments, affects, and versions of ourselves. But these discarded selves persist: they return as intimate, time-stamped remnants that unsettle the fantasy of a seamless present.

Through close readings across literature, film, digital culture, and everyday practices - from decluttering and ragpicking to the disquieting experience of unexpectedly running into an ex or confronting long-forgotten diary entries - Discarded Selves shows how narratives grapple with past material that no longer fits yet refuses to disappear. These moments expose a discontinuity at the core of contemporary selfhood, where the obsolete becomes a site for thinking temporal rupture. When the past is either neglected or recycled into the present, encounters with the obsolete bring our temporal and material others into view in that intimate moment of "no longer."

This edited book brings together scholars of education, sociology, philosophy, migration and political theory to examine how citizenship is made, taught and disputed in contemporary Australia. Using 'contested citizenships' as an analytical frame, the chapters map the shifting boundaries of belonging across schooling and higher education, citizenship testing and language assessment, faith-based pedagogy, labour-market regulation for older workers, and debates about moral agency in liberal democracy. Throughout, the volume shows how formal legal status intersects with lived experience, cultural identity, mobility, and processes of inclusion and exclusion, and how education functions as a microcosm of wider struggles over rights and recognition. By combining conceptual discussion with empirical and practice-oriented analyses, the book offers a nuanced account of Australian citizenship in comparative perspective for scholars and students interest in citizenship studies, political sociology, sociology of education, migration studies and public policy.

At the turn of the twentieth century, confrontations between rival French, Italian, and Ottoman empires solidified national, colonial, and racial boundaries throughout the Mediterranean basin. Yet, even in the face of an emergent ethno-nationalist world order, these decades saw various North African transnational political movements thrive. Sea Changes examines how North Africans of diverse social and religious backgrounds forged new spaces and networks in which to envision border-crossing political alternatives, such as pan-Islamism, pan-Arabism, Zionism, and international leftism.

To unveil these alternative networks and political possibilities, Chris Rominger follows the trajectory of Jewish Tunisian photographer Albert Samama-Chikly (1872-1934) and his contacts from the 1870s to the 1920s. Not an overtly political man in any traditional sense, the highly-mobile Samama nonetheless found himself an intimate witness to some of the early twentieth century's most violent political dramas, including France's colonization of Tunisia, Italy's conquest of neighboring Libya, the forced conscription of North Africans during World War I, and the postwar birth of transnational and radical movements across North Africa. Emphasizing the border-crossing experiences of those who lived on the Mediterranean's southern shores, Sea Changes locates North Africa at the very heart of key transformations and imperial conflicts where diverse and fluid transimperial affinities clashed with emergent ethno-nationalist imperatives.

New Mexico's long-standing Mexican American population, known as "Nuevomexicanos," often see themselves as distinctive from other Mexican-origin people across the Southwestern United States. In this book, Casandra Salgado theorizes this distinction as "Mexican American exceptionalism," and interrogates how present-day Nuevomexicanos residing in Albuquerque make sense of race and racism within this context.

Nuevomexicanos' view their long history and numerical dominance in New Mexico buffers them from racism. Yet Salgado finds they still confront anti-Mexican racism and are seen as foreign. While Nuevomexicanos' racial frames are rooted in their colonial history to elevate their racial status, Salgado argues this strategy no longer serves contemporary Nuevomexicanos as such frames are imbued with colorblind racism - ignoring white supremacy and perpetuating intra-group discrimination.

As multi-generational Latinos are predicted to become a larger proportion of the Latino population in the United States, Salgado's findings are suggestive of larger trends in the country's evolving ethnoracial landscape - trends toward region-specific identities that buck against common binaries.

This book explores the world of "meeting etiquette" in the Middle East, from ancient Mesopotamia to the Ottoman period. It looks at the shared rules and expectations that shaped how people came together, whether meeting equals, addressing authority figures, or encountering the divine.

This volume focuses on how meeting etiquette has been understood, defined, and organized across time. Drawing on rich examples from different regions and periods, this book examines practices such as gestures, posture, gaze, physical contact, hygiene, clothing, polite speech, and hospitality. It also stands out for its collaborative approach, bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines and fields of expertise in ancient cultures. By tracing these practices over time, the book highlights both enduring traditions and significant changes, from antiquity to the early twentieth century.

Interdisciplinary in scope, the volume offers fresh perspectives by engaging with art history, archaeology, philology, anthropology, and sociology. It invites readers to rethink how meetings were not only conducted, but also experienced, in antiquity.

This deeply researched volume uncovers the untold story of the North American men and women who joined Israel's 1948 fight for independence. Known as Mahal (Volunteers from Abroad), these individuals risked their lives, citizenships, and futures to serve in Aliyah Bet and what became the Israel Defense Forces-the army, navy, and air force. Drawing from a 1992 questionnaire, as well as supplementary documents and research reports, this study uses a sociological lens to explicate the volunteers' motives, backgrounds, and lasting impressions which for many was a transformative experience. From covert operations in the Mediterranean to makeshift airfields around Tel Aviv, these volunteers defied U.S. embargoes, navigated the tensions of dual loyalties, and helped shape a nation in its most vulnerable hour. It is a perfect read for historians, scholars, and students of Jewish studies and diaspora identities.

This book delves into the dynamic relationship between open education and artificial intelligence (AI), providing a comprehensive and interdisciplinary exploration of how AI transforms educational models and practices. The book brings together scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in the fields of open education, AI, and pedagogy to present research, case studies, and theoretical discussions on applying AI-driven technologies within Open Educational Practices (OEPs). It enables readers to obtain a well-rounded understanding of how AI shapes open education and its potential for transforming learning experiences. Educators and instructional designers will gain insights into integrating AI with open pedagogical practices, while researchers will find new theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence to build upon. Policymakers and administrators will benefit from strategic recommendations on leveraging AI to promote inclusive and sustainable open education initiatives. By offering a holistic view of AI's role in OEPs, this book serves as a foundational reference for readers seeking to harness the power of AI to create more accessible, equitable, and engaging learning environments in the digital age.

Exploring gender and sexuality in the Gilded Age through one sensationalized life

Addie Liona Walker. Leon A. Belmont. Nova McClure Carr. Romantic Sensation tells the full story of this one ordinary person's singular life. Assigned a female sex at birth, Addie was born in Massachusetts in 1853 and lived as a woman for twenty-five years. After transitioning in 1878, Addie became Leon and lived as a man for twenty-four years before making a second gender transition and living as a woman, Nova, for the rest of her life. Placing these milestones within the historical context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lizzie Ehrenhalt traces Belmont's life, from child laborer to husband, from outlaw to heartthrob, and from stepfather to single mother.

Belmont was a Gilded Age celebrity: he made national news for breaking an ordinance against dressing as the "opposite" sex in Minneapolis, and he inspired a media frenzy when one of his girlfriends told police that he was a woman. While newspapers labeled Belmont a "curious and romantic sensation," Ehrenhalt shows that he was not much of a sensation after all. Illuminating what his story can tell us about Americans' developing understandings of sexuality and gender in the 1850s through the 1920s, she reveals how Belmont's run-ins with police, doctors, courts, and reporters resonate in the evolution of the LGBTQIA+ identities we recognize today.

An empathetic case study of a figure often denied respect in the telling of his story, Romantic Sensation presents Belmont's gender transitions not as puzzles in need of solving but as acts grounded in the cultural milieu of the Gilded Age. Traversing the dramatic economic upheavals of the second industrial revolution, the Era of Good Stealings, and the Great Railroad Strike of 1922, and spanning the Cult of Domesticity, the invention of sexology, and the rise of New Womanhood, Ehrenhalt uses Belmont's example to demonstrate how trans, queer, and intersex histories are inseparable from American history.

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This book is a comparative study of the rap scenes in Greece and America, and provides one of the first English-language studies of Greek hip hop culture. Focusing mainly on the analysis of lyrics, the book addresses issues of gender, class and race. Putting these lyrics in the broader context of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the book situates Greek and American hip hop scenes in the context of phenomena such as the prison-industrial complex, police violence, and Black Lives Matter. The book also provides a history of hip hop in Greece.

Against the emergence of "the Internet of Bodies," Christopher O'Neill presents an incisive long history of biosensing technologies from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. As O'Neill shows, sensor technologies work by failing-if their mode of measure never quite captures the body, this is a feature and not a bug. Nobody and no body really fits into the Internet of Bodies, but the endless correction of biosensor errors works to endlessly extend the reach of the sensor society.

O'Neill's book traces the emergence and transformation of the cultural techniques of biosensing which "work through" these errors, examining how the early pulse-writing sensors of the sphygmograph produced a newly educated touch in the medical clinic; the way work measurement technologies not only optimized but introduced a new intimacy into the post-Fordist workplace; and how the sensors in nineteenth-century burglar alarms enabled a new choreography of servants' movements in the American home. These histories, as O'Neill demonstrates, presage contemporary anxieties surrounding the Quantified Self movement, the management of affective intensities in digitally surveilled workplaces, and the integration of the gig economy within the smart home.

Just as O'Neill demonstrates that technologists' claims to objectivity, transcendence, and omniscience remain frustrated by the messy reality of the body, the book also shows that we must go beyond the typical critical gesture of pointing out errors, biases, and false assumptions about the body, and instead show what precisely these errors do.

This edited collection aims to identify memories and perceptions of African subjects who lived the process of struggle for independence and the experience of colonial wars, shaping their identity on the negotiation between personal memory and the narrative proposed by official history. It also includes memories of those who have experienced these periods in the colonial metropolis, which allow the contributors to compare the narratives centered on European memories of Africa and what was experienced in the African continent. The book explores how oral culture can become the domestic space of people who had to leave the African continent and had to recreate their identities inside a different society, quite often the colonizers' one, and how their life abroad has been shaped by the recreation of their linguistic social and culture paradigm through the memory of their oral culture.