This open access book explores the transnational variations of feminism as informed by the diverse historical, cultural, political and geographical conjunctures. The volume covers a diverse range of media and literary genres including poetry, fan fiction, print media such as newspapers and children's magazines, and various digital media including social media, video sharing platforms, and instant messengers. It foregrounds sites and contexts of transnational connectivity outside of the global political and economic centers of the Global West. It brings transnational feminist activism into dialogue with historical analysis of gender equality within diverse political and cultural domains, while offering conceptual tools for detecting and analyzing epistemological gaps, absences and silences. By bringing together these empirical, historical, and methodological viewpoints, the volume offers an up-to-date reflection of 'transnational feminism' as a category essential for contemporary scholarship on social movements and global media. It will be of interest to researchers and students in gender studies, the communication sciences, cultural and literary studies, history, and sociology, as well as media practitioners, NGO and policy makers, and other organizations dealing with gender equality.

This handbook is the first publication to offer a thorough overview of the fundamental principles of object-relations theory, the current mainstream approach to psychoanalysis worldwide. It offers a structured, easy-to-understand overview of modern psychoanalysis' central concepts. Each chapter is dedicated to an influential author who contributed to the development of object relations theory.

Starting with early pioneers such as Ian Suttie, Alfred Adler, and Otto Rank, it continues with psychoanalysts who established the object relations theory. These include Melanie Klein, Paula Heimann, Clare and Donald Winnicott. It also includes figures who built on object relations theory to create original contributions to clinical psychology. Examples are John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth's attachment theory, Peter Fonagy's concept of mentalization, and Otto Kernberg's transference-focused psychotherapy. The third part presents modern intersubjective approaches by Stephen Mitchell, Jessica Benjamin, and Donna Orange. These authors outline the direction in which object-relations psychology is set to develop. In these concepts, the other person is not merely an object that fulfills our wishes and desires but rather a subject with their own needs.

The Handbook of Object Relations theory is a comprehensive introductory text for those new to the field who wish to learn about the main currents in contemporary psychoanalysis. It is also useful for experienced practitioners who wish to revisit and deepen their understanding of certain aspects and for researchers and practitioners working with other approaches who wish to understand psychoanalytic concepts. This theory helps explain and transform a wide range of issues in contemporary clinical psychology.

"In the present volume, a comprehensive, clear, and fascinating description of the history of contemporary psychoanalytic object relations theory, the reader will find the discovery of the elements of this theory, the various theoretical and technical developments that these findings have originated." - From the Foreword by Otto F. Kernberg, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, Weill Medical College of Cornell University.

This is an English translation of a book that was originally published in German. The original manuscript was translated into English with the help of artificial intelligence. A subsequent human revision focused primarily on content.

Bringing together leading scholars in the field, this open access book presents novel theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches, ethical reflections and comparative frameworks to inform research on production, content, dissemination and use of alternative media. Over the last decade, falling levels of media and political trust and sweeping populist election victories have coincided with a wave of new alternative media. Seeking to challenge mainstream news media and established politics, these alternative media have attracted extensive political, media and scholarly attention.

Building on in-depth insights from different countries across Europe, it represents a key reference for alternative media research in Europe and beyond. This book demonstrates how we are now entering a third stage of alternative media research, characterized by more cross-theoretical fertilization, methodological innovation and focus on contextual conditions.

This book brings together scholars and practitioners to examine research, training, and clinical practice aimed at improving first responders' mental health. Police officers, firefighters, correctional personnel, emergency dispatchers, and crime scene investigators face mental health challenges at rates far exceeding those of the general population. Continuous exposure to trauma, high-stakes decision-making, and organizational stressors contribute to elevated risks of anxiety, depression, substance use, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The book is organized into three major sections: Mental Health Research, presenting recent studies on occupational stress, help-seeking behaviors, and innovative interventions such as Virtual Reality therapy and specialized assessment tools; First Responder Training, detailing evidence-based programs including Crisis Intervention Teams, Co-Responder models, and specialized curricula for responding to individuals with severe mental illness, dementia, or communication barriers; and Clinical Practice, offering guidance on culturally competent care, technology-enhanced wellness strategies, and ethical considerations in therapeutic work with first responders.

By integrating empirical findings with practical applications, Advances in First Responder Mental Health: Volume 1 will serve as an essential resource for psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, public safety administrators, and policy makers committed to safeguarding the mental health of those who protect our communities.

Based on an ethnographic study of the role and experiences of local businesses, institutions, and community-level actors in Logan Square and Pilsen, two longtime ethnic enclaves experiencing and resisting gentrification in Chicago, Storefront examines local businesses' contributions to communities, how businesses might promote or protest gentrification, and how streetscape transformations can threaten community members' sense of belonging in place. Steven Tuttle untangles issues of community and conflict, segregation and integration, alienation and place attachment, and small business social responsibility from the vantage point of local businesses themselves. In addition to insights about community development, local institutions, and social capital common in qualitative neighborhood studies and gentrification scholarship, Storefront also features a unique focus on local businesses and the racialization of space.

Environmental and occupational toxic exposures rarely leave a single, unmistakable mark on the brain. Instead, they quietly, cumulatively, and often invisibly alter cognition, emotion, and behavior. Neuropsychology of Toxic Exposure brings clarity to this complex terrain, offering a comprehensive framework for understanding how toxic agents disrupt brain-behavior relationships across the lifespan and how those effects can be assessed, treated, and prevented.

Bridging neurotoxicology, neuroscience, and clinical neuropsychology, this volume translates biological injury into functional meaning. It examines how metals, pesticides, solvents, gases, biological toxins, and extreme exposures affect attention, memory, executive functioning, and emotional regulation. The emphasis is on subtle neurocognitive change, longitudinal assessment, and the integration of neuropsychological data with neuroimaging, biomarkers, and exposure history.

Written for clinicians, researchers, and policy professionals, the book goes beyond mechanisms of injury to address rehabilitation, recovery, forensic evaluation, and public health implications. Case examples illustrate diagnostic challenges and differential considerations, and later chapters explore lifespan vulnerability, environmental justice, and the role of neuropsychology in litigation and policy development.

At its core, Neuropsychology of Toxic Exposure argues that brain health is a shared responsibility-one that requires scientific rigor, clinical precision, and informed policy. By integrating science, practice, and prevention, this book offers essential guidance for protecting cognitive function in an increasingly toxic world.

This book provides in-depth coverage of:
* Neuropsychological principles for assessing toxic exposure
* Brain-behavior effects of metals, pesticides, solvents, gases, and biological toxins
* Acute versus chronic exposure and cumulative neurotoxicity
* Developmental and lifespan vulnerability, from prenatal exposure to aging
* Neuroimaging and biomarker integration in exposure assessment
* Cognitive rehabilitation and recovery following toxic injury
* Occupational and environmental health considerations
* Forensic neuropsychology and toxic exposure litigation
* Environmental justice, prevention, and public policy implications

Neuropsychology of Toxic Exposure is an essential resource for professionals seeking to understand, assess, and respond to the cognitive and emotional consequences of toxic exposure in humans.

This book offers a fresh way of understanding Olympic ceremonies by presenting them as living systems shaped by people, technology, and shared emotion. It argues that these events act as future-making mechanisms, guided by "multitudes" of artists, policymakers, and soft activists who collectively shape what ceremonies can express and imagine.

Across its five chapters, the book shows how Olympic ceremonies operate as "relational machines" in which social groups interact with computational, technological, and audiovisual installations. This perspective reveals the limits placed on creative freedom, while also highlighting the non-utilitarian, atmospheric, and affective nature of ceremonial events. Through examples such as the Paris 2024 opening ceremony, it explores how designers balance official expectations with imaginative storytelling, exposing the tensions that define modern large-scale public gatherings.

The book will appeal to students and scholars of international events and Olympic culture, as well as professional bodies, organisers of major ceremonies, and sports journalists.

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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In a world where information moves faster than ever, how do we keep fact from fiction? This book explores today's urgent challenges with misinformation and the tools we need to stay informed and aware. From AI-generated deepfakes to viral fake news, the author unpacks the hidden forces behind digital deception, why false information spreads, why people believe it, and the serious impact it can have on society. But this isn't just a look at the problem; it's a guide to action. Through clear, practical strategies like expert-guided debunking, insights into deepfakes, and interviews with media specialists, readers will learn how to sharpen their critical thinking skills and build resilience against disinformation. Featuring Romania as a unique case study, key focus of the book is understanding how audiences position themselves against false information, why some fall for it while others don't, and what shapes these responses. Ideal for educators, students, policymakers, and concerned citizens, Disinformation Countermeasures provides the knowledge and practical skills needed to safeguard yourself and others in the digital age. With this book, gain the awareness and tools to navigate today's information landscape with confidence and clarity.

A sweeping history of how noncitizen students shaped U.S. universities

From colonial missionary schools to the globalized university of the twentieth century, U.S. higher education has long depended on students who were never meant to belong. Degrees of Empire tells the untold history of how noncitizen students - Indigenous youth, students from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, and others positioned outside the boundaries of citizenship - have been central to the making of American universities and the expansion of U.S. power.

Tracing the intertwined development of higher education, immigration law, and imperial governance from the seventeenth century through the mid-twentieth, Abigail Boggs shows how universities functioned as fundamental instruments of empire. Noncitizen students were recruited and educated under conditions of surveillance, restriction, and impermanence, trained to circulate knowledge, labor, and political ideals on behalf of the United States even as they were denied full political membership and exposed to constant threat of exclusion or deportation.

Drawing on archival records, immigration policy, institutional documents, and the writings of students themselves, Degrees of Empire demonstrates how universities helped produce racial hierarchies, manage populations, and naturalize liberal ideals of merit and mobility. By examining the figure of the noncitizen student genealogically across time, Boggs reveals a fundamental contradiction at the heart of U.S. higher education: institutions that present themselves as open and universal have long relied on selective inclusion structured by race, citizenship, and capital.

At a moment when immigration and higher education are once again sites of intense political struggle, this book offers a powerful rethinking of the American university-not as a neutral engine of opportunity, but as a central technology of empire and a contested space in which alternative futures may yet be imagined.

How media production and fan play interact to shape the aesthetics of a global anime franchise

Since its debut in 1984, Dragon Ball has become one of the most popular, influential, and lucrative global media franchises in the world. In Next Time on Dragon Ball, Vincent Haddad investigates how the franchise has maintained huge global demand despite its formulaic plotlines. Examining its exhaustive repetition of storytelling forms across comics, TV series, games, and merchandise, Haddad argues that the convergence of play, fandom, and narrative made Dragon Ball an unlikely success-and a harbinger of broader shifts in the media landscape of franchises from the 1980s to the present.

Haddad conceives of Dragon Ball as a "franchise toy," a corporate media property that is constantly remixed by its fans in ways that its owners resist but also ultimately embrace: appropriation is essential to the franchise's popularity. Over the past forty years, Haddad argues, Dragon Ball's deployment of familiar tropes, cultural references, and narrative forms-from classical Chinese stories and the films of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan to American franchises like Superman and Star Wars-has invited unique transcultural play. Through diverse examples of how fans use its characters as "playthings," Haddad shows how Dragon Ball travels across international networked fandoms, highlighting the queer, gendered, and racialized dimensions of this play.

Parsing the dynamics of "sites of conflict" between authorized media and fan content, Next Time on Dragon Ball illuminates how fan engagement across the Americas changes the parameters of what a manga and anime franchise is and can be.

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This book examines how the media construct and develops the image of the ethnic Other, considering the Roma in Bulgaria, and the Gypsies, Roma and Travellers (GRT) in the UK. In comparing the discourses of the national media in these two different countries, it focuses on concepts such as ethnic identity, othering, and anti-Gypsyism, which are used as the basis for all the devices used in the media discourses of Bulgaria and the UK.

The book draws from analysis done on a comparative basis, outlining the similarities as well as the differences in the perceptions of the two media discourses on these communities. Furthermore, the book provides a diachronic perspective in comparing the media presentations on RGT communities from during the Covid-19 period to those featured at the beginning of the century (2001-2005). It is relevant to scholars and students in media and discourse studies, ethnic studies, sociology, and European cultural studies.

In Music at the Margins of Sense, Jessica A. Holmes contests prevailing misconceptions associated with deafness and hearing in Western music by turning to the musical experiences of deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing disabled musicians in order to impart a multisensory, multimodal conception of music and musicianship. Through a range of examples drawn from music history, popular music, recent film, and popular science, Holmes reveals that "deafness" is mistakenly understood as a state of total silence and heightened tactile sensation, a stigmatizing trope she calls the "figure of deafness."

Holmes explores music-making spanning auditory, visual-spatial, vibrotactile, and non-sonorous modalities, including the creative practice of Christine Sun Kim, all-deaf electronic dance music raves, the musical experiences of hearing aid users, and music and musical instruments devised to mitigate tinnitus and hyperacusis. By examining the cultural production of "natural" hearing in the design, branding, and musical programming of digital hearing aids, Holmes offers a reappraisal of hearing that defies naturalized perceptual processes and auditory thresholds, the idealization of sonic fidelity, and biologically driven conceptions of musicality. Music at the Margins of Sense champions an understanding of musicianship that embraces the lived experience of disability as a vital locus of musical creativity and expertise.

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 traces the modern history of ineffability, the idea that mystical experience lies beyond the reach of language, across twentieth-century scholarship on mysticism. Moving from William James to W.T. Stace and beyond, it examines how theories of ineffability were shaped not only by philosophical commitments but also by rhetorical strategies and disciplinary politics within the academic study of religion. Through close readings of major figures including James, Underhill, Otto, Zaehner, Stace, Smith, Hick, Forman, d'Aquili, and Sells, the book uncovers a crucial historical shift: from early understandings of ineffability as relative, what cannot be fully but can still be partially expressed, to later claims that mystical experience or its source is absolutely ineffable, wholly beyond conceptual mediation. This "absolutization" of ineffability, the book argues, served to defend a perennialist vision of religion's universal core and to shield it from contextual critique. Concluding with a semiotic "meta-argument" against absolute ineffability, the study proposes that a theory of relative ineffability better accounts for both mystical discourse and ordinary experiences of the unsayable. In doing so, it reorients the study of mysticism toward a more nuanced understanding of how language, experience, and meaning continually shape one another. It is an important read in the study of mysticism.

How manga and comics reshape storytelling across cultures

Text and Image is a groundbreaking exploration of how Japanese manga and comics from the United States and United Kingdom craft meaning through the combination of words and pictures. Current scholarship often isolates manga in niche genre studies or prioritizes anime instead; in response, Deborah Shamoon proposes a unified framework for understanding paneled visual storytelling across cultures. She reframes comics not as kids' stuff but as a sophisticated narrative art with its own grammar, rhythm, and visual poetics.

Drawing on narratology, art history, film studies, and media theory, Text and Image examines a vast array of material, from four-panel comic strips to different manga genres, including shojo (girls' romance comics), shonen (teen action), seinen (adult drama), and gekiga (mature realism). Through close visual analysis, Shamoon demonstrates how creators use panel layout, pacing, and the choreography of text and image to shape emotional impact and narrative momentum. She reveals the shared techniques that link works as disparate as Fun Home and Spider-Man while also showing where cultural conventions diverge. Beyond the traditional print realm, Shamoon discusses digital platforms, such as webtoons and vertically scrolling comics, to show how new technologies merge manga's cinematic sensibility with global innovation.

Making a bold case for a more expansive, inclusive theory of visual narrative that bridges long-standing divides between manga studies and Anglophone comics scholarship, Text and Image is an indispensable guide to understanding how contemporary stories work and why they resonate across borders.

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This book engages with a contemporary phenomenon of newsfluencers - individuals who use social media platforms to present news using innovative formats such as image and video to engage with their audience, analyzing news stories according to certain topics that resemble their personal interests. Such a role - integrated within the periphery of journalism - has been noted by scholars and major international outlets and has been evolving. It brings professional journalists and peripheral actors together in an individual effort to bring innovation in how information is produced and distributed to digital audiences, particularly young people who are distant from traditional media and who look for an inspiring role model figure through which they can learn about topics that they are most interested in. To explain this phenomenon, the book looks at the topic from two dimensions - production (including those who produce news for young people, working within journalism organizations but increasingly also acting upon their individualization on social media platforms to disruptively contribute to the field) and reception (including adolescents who frequently use social media platforms to know about current events).

This book provides a thorough analysis of the notion of social wrong and the idea of social pathology. It addresses questions such as: What does it mean for something to be socially wrong? Why do social philosophers keep "diagnosing" wrongs as "social pathologies"? And is something a pathology because it is wrong, or is it rather a wrong because it is pathological? By constructing an analytical framework of social wrongs and developing the idea of wrongness-with, the book seeks to support critical social thought. While taking societal and structural injustices seriously as paradigm cases of social wrongs, it also offers a comprehensive elaboration of social pathologies as social wrongs. It provides a map of four conceptions of social pathology and contends that only one of them, organicism, must be completely rejected, while the other views may contribute to a critical understanding of social reality. It further elaborates a "natural-historical" view according to which social pathologies as well as their diagnosis and cure are part and parcel of social life. It tests the usefulness of this conception by examining diagnoses of contemporary capitalism in terms of metabolic rift, economic compulsion, and capitalist cannibalization. These diagnoses exemplify three types of pathologies of social life: pathologies of reproduction, pathologies of transformation, and pathologies of mediating the reproductive and transformative pressures of social life.

Hard Women, Hard War establishes a new interpretation of Southern women's wartime behavior by examining their interactions with the Federal army. From the very beginning of the war to the bitter end of the conflict, women negotiated military policy toward civilians, motivated by their political loyalties, which were grounded in their ideas of home. Free and enslaved Black women encouraged Federals to destroy the plantation household to make way for homes built in freedom, pushing the military to make hard war on unrepentant rebels. White Unionist enslavers' loyalty to the United States was predicated on protection of their homes and human property, and when the army moved toward harsher war policies, these women emulated the defiance of elite Confederate ladies. White women's treason spurred the army to collaborate with loyal Black women while visiting destruction on disloyal enslaving women. Even as the war became more destructive, Southern women refused to stay on the sidelines, insisting that war compelled them to move outside their homes to defend their homes. Women's very existence-as wealthy enslavers or someone else's property-hung in the balance, and these hard women waged a hard war to secure future privilege or future freedom.