This book invites readers to see landscapes differently. It reconceptualises landscape as an active cultural force: something that remembers, resists, and transforms alongside the humans and non-humans that move through it. Across film, television, myth, and lived environments, landscapes emerge as sites where imagination, extraction, belief, and survival collide.

Organised around four interwoven lenses-liminal landscapes, landscapes as wonderland, mythical terrains, and toxic and extractive environments-the book moves fluidly across disciplines, drawing on film and television studies, cultural geography, environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and critical theory. Each chapter pairs conceptual clarity with richly textured case studies, ranging from ancient sacred groves and Indigenous conceptualisations of Country to digitally augmented worlds, industrial ruins, and post-extraction wastelands. These examples do more than illustrate ideas: they demonstrate how landscapes actively produce meaning, affect, and power, with tangible social and political consequences.

Grounded in contemporary debates in posthumanism, multispecies thinking, and critical ecological theory, the book offers a new vocabulary for understanding landscape as aesthetic form, ecological assemblage, and contested political terrain. It unsettles inherited binaries-nature and culture, human and non-human, sacred and profane-revealing instead dense networks of relation, care, violence, and memory. In doing so, it speaks directly to urgent questions about climate crisis, environmental justice, and the cultural work of screen media.

Bold, accessible, and theoretically ambitious, it makes a compelling case for why landscapes matter-not only as places we inhabit or represent, but as forces that shape how we imagine the past, negotiate the present, and confront the futures we are making.

This book provides a comprehensively understanding on urban water management's complexities and solutions. It addresses sustainable and resilient water management challenges amidst rapid urbanization and climate change. The book explores historical perspectives, current issues, and future trends, emphasizing integrating sustainable practices, technological innovations, and community engagement in urban planning. It guides urban planners, policymakers, environmentalists, and academicians, offering insights and strategies for developing healthier, more sustainable, and resilient cities. Designed as a pivotal resource, it highlights water's crucial role in urban ecosystems, balancing urban growth, environmental sustainability, and resilience. The book presents a multidisciplinary approach to urban water challenges, incorporating historical insights, technological innovations, and best practices in policy and community engagement. It fosters informed decision-making and strategic planning for sustainable, resilient, and healthy urban environments against climate change and urbanization.

This book argues that the future of resilient and liveable cities depends on making ecological systems not a supplement to design, but the scaffolding upon which urban life is built. As the final volume in this trilogy, this book advances the conversation from integrating nature into urbanism to embedding it as a primary design principle. The book explores how communities, engineers, planners, and architects can collaborate to regard streets as climate buffers, rooftops as pollinator habitats, and rivers as civic spaces, where each design choice benefits the ecosystem.

The book explores global case studies where the line between the built and natural environment is deliberately blurred. These examples demonstrate how design can be a tool for ecological recovery, from neighborhoods that use natural plants as a passive cooling system to cities that have completely remade districts around restored watersheds. It explores the technology tools that are allowing designers to forecast long-term ecological implications prior to construction.

Beyond infrastructure, the book explores the governance and cultural frameworks that enable these changes, demonstrating how community stewardship and innovative policymaking can lock in ecological gains over many years. It views nature as an active partner in forming urban futures rather than just an aesthetic effect or source of environmental services. The book presents a vision of urban settings in which every building, roadway, and public area is transformed into a location where nature can coexist peacefully with human activity.

Sociology of Religion, Fourth Edition introduces students to the nature and function of religious institutions and practices while asking sociological questions about the changing role of religion in today's "post-traditional" world. Broken into three parts, the book opens with the basics of religious history and a review of key theories for its study. Part II, "Religion and Social Differentiation," examines the intersections of ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality with spirituality today, and Part III, "Religion, Culture, and Change," explores religious inspirations for, or impediments to, social change. Throughout the text, boxes illuminate key concepts and suggestions for further reading allow for ongoing exploration of key themes and topics.

New to the Fourth Edition:
? Chapter 9, "Politicized Religion and Conflict," presents a comparative look at religious extremism and its global risks
? Updated and expanded content on ethnicity and religion aids students in better understanding increasingly diverse societies
? Greater focus on religion's significance in current debates over gender roles and sexuality offers a framework for exploring contemporary conflicts.
? Updated and expanded discussion of religion and the media explores the history of their relationship and how it is being reconfigured in a media-saturated age.

Talking Bodies IV: Rage and Care Against the Machine is a bold intervention against global antifeminism. In these open access contributions, scholars, artists and activists from around the world - with their specific embodied perspectives - expose systems of oppression they come up against with despair, fear, exhaustion and rage. Instead of fixing what's trying to break them, they call out violent norms in order to make them assailable and ultimately overcome them.

Emerging from a global community that first came together at Talking Bodies, an international, interdisciplinary project with a biennial conference, this new volume continues the ethos of this community, striving to improve equality and equity for different bodies, by exploring how we move through and negotiate with the world around us.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.

Taking Robert O. Keohanes neoliberal institutionalism as its theoretical keynote, this book aims to delve deep into the theoretical, policy, and practical aspects of global climate governance over these thirty years, providing readers with a comprehensive and systematic overview from the perspective of sustainable human development. Climate change and its associated crises represent one of the most critical challenges facing the world today. Since the establishment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, the international community has dedicated three decades to relentless efforts in formulating and implementing climate policies and objectives.

By adopting the research methods of combining literature research and field research, combining quantitative research and qualitative research, combining case analysis and universal promotion, and by conducting in-depth interviews with experts and scholars in related fields, to conduct an in-depth analysis of the global climate governance process and representative cases over this time period, this book seeks to offer policymakers, scholars, and the public a clear picture to better understand the evolution and changes in global climate governance, and how to address this global challenge within the framework of sustainable development.

This anthology brings together a diverse array of perspectives and histories that weave together notions of Black-ness, British-ness, and dance. It offers a starting point for those interested in these topics, signposting readers to other sources while also providing an extensive overview of companies, artists, events, and artworks that compose a foundational account.

The chapters foreground Black-ness within the multicultural landscape of British dance, addressing gaps in narratives of dance history, development, and innovation from a British perspective. Engaging with Black-ness as diasporic multiplicities-expressed through the lived contexts of Caribbean British, African British, Black British, and Afro-Indigenous British lineages, alongside African American influences that have been lived and developed within Britain-the collection highlights artists whose work has profoundly shaped and continues to enrich the British dance landscape. More than a record of the past, this book reflects the living, evolving presence of Black-ness in British dance today.

Following the release of ChatGPT, public fascination with the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has drastically intensified, stimulating an unprecedented rise in the financing, development and deployment of AI technologies across society. However, the current hype around AI also presents uncomfortable questions about the role of human agency in culture, particularly in practices of art and communications where the arrival of convincing AI-generated media has raised the prospect that human authors and artists may be sidelined or replaced. "Art and Authorship in the AI Spring" takes a step back from the modern situation to, instead, focus on the decade preceding the release of ChatGPT when our current understanding of AI was only beginning to take form. During this brief period of rapid technological development, many artists were already experimenting with emerging AI technologies as a means of probing traditional notions of authorship from the production of AI-generated paintings, poetry and films to more experimental practices utilizing deepfake techniques, biometric recognition systems and large language models. By critically analysing various instances of AI-generated art and media during this period, "Art and Authorship in the AI Spring" explores this central question of authorship through the unique and often overlooked media philosophy of Vilem Flusser that looks beyond aesthetics to instead consider the technical conditions of AI technology itself. In reconsidering this recent history of AI-generated media from this perspective, this book aims to shed new light on significant ongoing debates around the societal impacts of AI technologies today.

"We urgently need more interventions like McIntyre's that remind us of the short yet already strangely forgotten history of generative AI amid today's relentless hype. This book recovers the past decade of developments that too often vanish from public debate, to understand where we are and how we got here. It resists narrowing the ethical frame of generative AI to solely legal terms, instead opening up its wider societal and philosophical implications. We can all learn from McIntyre's creative conceptualisations, such as "weird media", to better understand how generative AI reshapes authorship, creativity and our cultural consumption and production."

- Tobias Blanke, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Humanities, University of Amsterdam

This book critically assesses the potential and identifies the opportunities and challenges for local governments to embark on emerging geo-enabled practices. Advances in spatially enabled information and communication technologies (ICTs) have provided governments with the potential to enhance public participation and to collaborate with citizens.

A new typology for classifying geo-enabled practices related to public participation (termed here as geo-participation) was first proposed. The emerging opportunities presented by geo-participation to improve government-citizen collaboration and government operations were demonstrated through a set of cutting-edge examples. These case studies were examined and critically assessed to shed light on local governments' practices of soliciting citizen input and developing new ways of government-citizen interaction.

Both researchers and local government practitioners may find this book helpful as it lays the foundation for researching and implementing geo-participation practices.

This book examines how Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are designed and used to produce, organise, and circulate information, and why this matters for information integrity in contemporary digital societies. Written for scholars, designers, and practitioners, it introduces informative ICTs as a conceptual and analytical framework for understanding technologies that aim to serve the social good. Anwesha Chakraborty defines informative ICTs as systems that prioritise transparency, reliability, and equity in the information they generate and mediate. Through empirical case studies from India, the book demonstrates how ICTs can be intentionally designed to support trustworthy, accessible, and socially meaningful information. It also introduces the concept of social entropy to explain how uncertainty, diversity, and participation shape information ecosystems, and how these forces can be constructively harnessed through design. Overall, the book contributes a concrete framework for information integrity by design.

What have been the causes and consequences of poverty in society through the ages? How has poverty been portrayed and understood? And how has this understanding differed according to time and place?

In a work that spans 2,500 years these ambitious questions are addressed by 55 experts, each contributing their overview of a theme applied to a period in history. With the help of a broad range of case material they illustrate broad trends and nuances of the culture of poverty in world history from antiquity to the present. Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole, and to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six.

The six volumes cover: 1. Antiquity (500 BCE to 800 CE); 2. Medieval Age (800 to 1450); 3. Dawn of the World Economy (1450 to 1650); 4. Age of the Emerging Atlantic World (1650 to 1800); 5. Age of Empire (1800 to 1920); 6. Modern Age (1920 to the present).

Themes (and chapter titles) are: defining poverty; poverty, charity, and spirituality; representations of need and want; poverty, race, and ethnicity; poverty and gender; community and exclusion; poverty and economic thought; and poverty and the body politic.

The page extent for the pack is approximately 1728pp. Each volume opens with notes on contributors and an introduction, and concludes with notes, bibliography, and an index.

Special introductory offer (valid up to 3 months after publication): GBP395 / $550 (full price: GBP440 / $610)

The Cultural Histories Series
A Cultural History of Poverty is part of The Cultural Histories Series. Titles are available both as printed hardcover sets for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a one-off purchase and tangible reference for their shelves, or as part of a fully-searchable digital library available to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access (see www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com).

This volume examines the intersection of gender, race, and other issues of identity in American college sports, with a special focus on Title IX, women's sports, and the NCAA Name Image License (NIL) rules. Using case studies, surveys, and textual examinations, authors contributing to this anthology seek to understand how intersectionality plays out in college athletics. Contributors focus on specific athletes (such as Lia Thomas, Alissa Pili, and Caitlin Clark), groups of athletes (including international recruits and cheer squads), and fans. The last few chapters are devoted to the newer developments in college sport with the transfer portal and NIL demonstrating how they coalesce with athlete intersectionality.

Sustainable development is now considered one of the major narratives shaping society's future. At the same time, it is proving to be an area of conflict where expectations, morals, politics, and ideas of scientific evidence collide. This book shows why current discourses on sustainability are reaching their limits. But it also shows how a new, openly conceived approach to sustainable development can emerge. Based on Richard Rorty's neopragmatism and Ralf Dahrendorf's concept of life chances, Olaf Kuehne, Karsten Berr, and Irina Silina develop an innovative perspective: sustainable development is not understood as a teleologically defined goal but as a contingent, dialogical process that must be constantly reshaped, in which people generate life chances. The focus is on questions such as how people create meaning, how conflicts can become productive, and how individual freedom can be linked to collective responsibility. The book combines theoretical foundations, from vocabulary analyses to various forms of criticism of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with a comprehensive redescription of sustainable development. Following the guiding principle of liberal ironist Richard Rorty, an approach is developed that understands freedom from humiliation, compassion, processes of understanding, and the expansion of the "we" as prerequisites for a resonant culture of sustainability.

The book is a committed and reflective plea for sustainability research that does not cover up conflicts but takes them seriously-and thinks of the future as a shared, open possibility, giving high priority to individual life chances.

This book argues that the field of Intercultural Communication Education and Research (ICER) has often been compromised by uncritical, market-driven approaches that create an illusion of progress. The author demonstrates how hollow buzzwords, superficial models and a focus on harmony often mask power imbalances and prevent meaningful change. To counter this, the book proposes a practice of intercultural acrobatics - the creation and strategic use of new, provisional terms. These concepts act as deliberate disruptions to challenge stagnant thinking, expose contradictions and reclaim interculturality as a site for critical, justice-oriented work. The book provides a practical toolkit for scholars, educators and students to move beyond comfortable consensus and engage more honestly with the complex realities of difference.

This comprehensive Handbook will change the current mindset about sibling relationships-from a relationship of secondary importance to parent-child relationships-to one that reflects the many ways siblings contribute to individual development and family functioning throughout the life course and across diverse cultural contexts. As it presents the growing body of research on sibling relationships, it offers a new sibling-informed theoretical framework that challenges traditional notions of the sibling bond as one based on hostility, rivalry, and conflict. New directions are offered for research and practice that will address the real needs of families. This Handbook is relevant to all researchers and mental health practitioners.

An essential and timely exploration of Boko Haram, a terror group whose violence has surpassed every other modern terror group including that of Daesh, al Qaeda and Al-Shabaab.

This key volume constitutes a vital resource on Boko Haram's ideology, history, leadership, and pivot towards violence. With particular emphasis on the events, personalities, radical histories and Islamic discourses that shaped Boko Haram's rise, the volume examines the movement's formative years under Muhammad Yusuf and its evolution into one of the world's most violent terror groups. Delving into the traditions, institutional structures and politicisation of shari'a (Islamic law) in Northern Nigeria, this ground-breaking volume offers crucial insights into Boko Haram as a social movement that exploits political Islam towards deadly ends.

Technofeminist Resistance unveils how feminist resistance is evolving in the digital age, transforming from street protests to viral online movements.

It focuses on how feminist 'artivists' are reshaping technology to challenge gender inequalities, and how feminist groups, especially in Greece and the Global South, are creatively using technology not just as a tool, but as a weapon against the systemic oppressions of the technocolonial world. Moreover, it provides an insight into how technofeminist movements are intertwined globally through shared aesthetics and strategies.

The book illuminates the complex relationship between gender and technology, bringing to light the innovative ways in which feminist principles are being integrated into technological advancements, in the context of activist and artistic practices. With its focus on both local and global views, the book aims to be an essential guide into the ways in which technology, gender, and society are being co-mediated and co-produced.