The history and meaning of one of the most controversial words in American English

Few words in English are as charged as "nigga" and "n*gger." While the slur "n*gger" is universally recognized as offensive, fierce debates continue over the use of "nigga"-who can say it, what it means, and whether it has been reclaimed as a term of endearment among Black people. Are these two words or one word with two pronunciations, and do they have different meanings?

Wassup, My Nigga is the first book written by an African American linguist to explore the word's origin, history, and usage. Drawing on sources across time, from nineteenth-century slave narratives and ex-slave recordings to contemporary conversations on social media, the book reveals how the word's meanings vary according to context and across racial groups. It challenges myths about reclamation, explains why multiple pronunciations exist, and examines what the evidence really shows about how-and whether-meanings have changed over time.

By presenting the discussion within the context of African American English, Wassup, My Nigga sheds new light on one of the most controversial words in American English and what it reveals about language, race, and identity.

This open access book opens up a new pathway in revisiting and optimising the European Film Industry's (EFI) competitiveness. Through a multilevel governance lens of research and analysis, the chapters dissect film competitiveness across the domains of culture, professionals' views, policy frameworks and current and future audiences. This volume diagnoses persistent limitations in understanding and optimising the multifaceted value of the sector. It identifies key issues essential for supporting the EFI's future as both a market actor and a cultural and civic player in European integration. The chapters explore critical topics, such as the governance of film policy, the cultural and economic dimensions of competitiveness, and the role of film in fostering European social cohesion. Analyses challenge traditional frameworks, offering fresh perspectives on how to enhance the EFI's role in cultural and creative sectors. Readers will discover diverse perspectives from scholars and practitioners who explore innovative strategies for positioning the EFI as a leader in global cinema. The book is an invaluable resource for researchers, scholars, and policymakers interested in the film industry, cultural policy, and European integration.

Stacey Copeland's Lavender Sounds explores lesbian radio history and its evolution into queer feminist podcasting today, exploring the politics, aesthetics, and cultural activism embedded in queer feminist soundwork. Through deeply personal and archival explorations, Stacey Copeland traces the emergence of queer feminist soundwork-a unique blend of community-led storytelling, political resistance, and creative expression rooted in feminist and LGBTQ+ activism. At the heart of the book lies a powerful idea: sound is not just heard but felt, connecting generations through shared voices and struggles. In conversation with award-winning and cutting-edge queer and feminist podcast producers from across Canada and the U.S., Lavender Sounds invites us to turn a feminist-embodied ear to the past to uncover the ways gender, race, and sexual orientations are embedded in our everyday media listening practices. From pioneering Canadian radio shows like Vancouver's The Lesbian Show and Montreal's Dykes on Mykes to today's queer chumcasts and audio documentary, Lavender Sounds is a journey through auditory landscapes where joy, protest, intimacy, and identity intersect. This book opens a vibrant conversation about how radio and podcasting are vital tools for marginalized communities to connect, create, and claim space in the media world.

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.

This open access book shows how the history of experience can be studied. Starting with the question of how past experiences can be traced, the volume explores how historical sources-from egodocuments to statistics and fiction-can reveal past realities in new ways. Accessible yet methodologically advanced, it offers historians and students alike a fresh toolkit for exploring human experience and expanding their research methods.

From cannery to construction site, workers forged solidarity in shared strugglesAcross the Pacific Northwest in the late twentieth century, Black construction workers, Filipino cannery workers, and a wide network of community activists built a bold experiment in multiracial labor organizing. No Separate Peace tells the story of this movement and the political vision that sustained it: solidarity forged in struggle against racial capitalism, imperial power, and workplace exploitation.

Beginning in the early 1970s, activists in Seattle and Alaska created a worker-governed legal office, organized campaigns against discrimination and corruption, and built grassroots alliances linking labor struggles to global movements for liberation. These organizers insisted that solidarity was not a slogan or aspiration but a demanding political practice-one that required sustained collaboration across racial, national, and organizational boundaries.

Drawing on oral histories, activist archives, and movement newspapers, Michael Schulze-Oechtering Castaneda traces how Black and Filipino workers developed shared strategies of organizing while confronting the pressures of neoliberal economic restructuring, state repression, and internal debates within labor movements. Their collaborations produced new infrastructures of solidarity, connecting local organizing in the Pacific Northwest to decolonial struggles across the world.

By placing workers of color at the center of a global history of activism, No Separate Peace offers a powerful account of how solidarity is collectively built through the labor of shared struggle.

This volume is a build up to the success of Volume 1 (Redefining Education and Development Innovative Approaches in the Era of the Sustainable Development Goals) which was published in 2024. The book aims to demonstrate how higher education institutions are integrating Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into various aspects of education such as teaching, research and institutional practices. Through a series of chapters, the book highlights theoretical frameworks and real-world applications providing evidence-based discussions on how efforts on SDGs impact student engagement, curriculum design, community engagement and future employability. The book is distinct in the sense that it moves beyond general discussions and focusses on practical implementation. The contributors to the book examine case studies, pilot initiatives, culturally rooted methods and technologically driven innovations which offer pathways for rethinking pedagogy and student support. This second volume caters for academics, policy makers, who might be looking for scalable strategies for achieving SDGs in higher education.

Divided into six main sections which opens up with an introductory section. Following the introductory section is a segment that takes a holistic view of SDGs in Higher Education. This section details how sustainability principles shape everything in class pedagogies to broader student support systems, ensuring an integrated approach rather than fragmented once off interventions. The third section delves on cultural context and inclusivity where an exploration of cultural values such as Ubuntu and Hip-Hop Pedagogy. Such approaches examine how responsive teaching and learning methods can break down barriers and enhance inclusivity for diverse student populations. The fourth section of the book looks at Innovative, Practice - Oriented pedagogies which covers the incorporation of digital platforms, camera obscura photography, or entrepreneurship curricula and other creative approaches can result in increased student engagement and better learning outcomes. The fifth section deals with long term impacts and alumni perspectives focussing on employability and entrepreneurial mindsets all which speaks to quality education SDG 4 a critical component of SDG 4. The last section touches on evidence-based Recommendations and Models which touches on delivering quality education.

This textbook is an effort to bring together the current practices, values, attitudes and beliefs about counselling and therapeutic interventions in multicultural populations in Western countries. Although there has been an increased effort to understand the role of culture in counselling practice and therapeutic interventions, there is a dearth of research/ literature on multicultural populations outside the United States. To redress this, this book compares counselling and therapeutic models and practice with multicultural populations across different
Western countries, highlighting the issues and challenges of therapeutic approaches and counselling theory and practice with minorities and sometimes governmental/political considerations in these countries. It explores the way forward regarding service delivery for the mental health of minorities in Western countries and the counselling and therapy they receive. The book is unique as it serves to share knowledge so that insights drawn from one country can be shared across all Western countries, as well as across the globe.

If a creative individual identifies as queer or trans, does that fact belong solely to the realm of biography, or does it pertain to their artistic achievement? In Queer and Trans Aesthetics, Lloyd Whitesell discusses literature, visual culture, audio-visual media, music, and performance from the 19th to the 21st century. Through this analysis, Whitesell develops a systematic framework to enrich our understanding of LGBTQ aesthetics and cultural production. He traces the history of queer aesthetic inquiry, develops a justification for a synthetic approach, identifies a fund of expressive strategies motivated by queer subjectivity, and highlights how such strategies create affinity across differences of gender, race, local context, and artistic media.

Rooted in a gender-inclusive theory of queer/trans subjectivity, the book draws on testimony from people of diverse backgrounds, genders, and races. Whitesell engages with debates in the existing scholarly literature while making connections between a wide range of artists: some from mainstream canons, some established subcultural figures, and others only now emerging as notable contributors to queer culture. The book explores five expressive archetypes or poses which have had profound significance in queer art traditions: the Monster, the Victim, the Trickster, the Dandy, and the Dreamer. Each offers a repertoire of creative responses to social oppression and configures queer subjective experience in a unique way. With its unique systematic approach, Queer and Trans Aesthetics enhances our knowledge of queer aesthetic traditions across genres and time.

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.

Why does the American federal government seem to prioritize elite capitalist interests over those of other groups? Class Politics and the Creation of the American State draws on a wide range of sources-personal letters, official government documents, private notes, and newspaper articles-to reveal that the federal government was built to give the emerging capitalist elite a way to consolidate and institutionalize their power. Challenging both liberal and conservative interpretations about what the US Constitution means, this book tells a new story about how the American state took shape.

The framers of the Constitution constructed an image of the state, enshrined in the Constitution, that presented their power as universal: a system meant to serve all Americans equally. This image helped legitimize the new order, even if the rising capitalist class stood to benefit most of all. Since the United States of the late 1780s was not yet a fully capitalist society, the state that was built opened space for less capitalistically incorporated social classes, including some artisans and yeoman farmers, to have limited representation. Class Politics and the Creation of the American State shows how the structure of the early American state worked primarily to advance capitalist interests, while incorporating other groups enough to maintain a sense of broad representation and inclusion.

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 open access handbook redefines science diplomacy in an era of geopolitical rivalry, rapid technological change, and fragmented global governance. Moving beyond state-centric models, it advances a polycentric framework where authority and expertise are distributed across diverse actors. Combining conceptual insights with empirical case studies, it examines securitization, emerging diplomatic players, and technology as a site of power-offering a rigorous guide for navigating cooperation under conditions of uncertainty, asymmetry, and disruption.

Out for Glamour in Africa critically reflects on how Black women utilized Drum magazine, a leading publication in Africa during the era of independence, for political empowerment and constructing notions of Black femininity. Wanjiru G. Mbure terms the concept of femme urbAfricana, a model of Black femininity depicted as urban, political, fashionable, paradoxically Afrocentric, heteronormative, and transnational. Foregrounding stories of the women who embodied these traits and the social, political, and economic forces that shaped their presence in Drum, Mbure argues that these representations of Black women from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States produced a novel form of Black urban femininity. Utilizing a breadth of archival materials from cover girl photographs, advertisements, and columns, to readers' comments, Mbure reveals the complex relationship between the Black urban woman and the era's contested ideals within a transnational matrix.

For over a century, construction has been at the heart of the struggle over Palestine/Israel. The ability to build on the land, the capacity to extract materials from it, and the development of economic and technological dominance in the construction industry were all central to Palestinian and Zionist ambitions to establish modern national communities. Construction also contributed to cementing a colonial social hierarchy among Jews and Palestinians, as racialized notions of skill, ability, and human needs shaped divisions of labor within the industry and the built environments.

From the vantage points of the construction site, cement factory, workers' encampment, self-built home, and boardroom, Colonial Constructs provides a new perspective on the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. Here, the materiality of the land itself - the rocks that underlie it and the buildings and infrastructure that construct it - take center stage. Following the experiences and aspirations of those who labored to excavate, manufacture, and build, Nimrod Ben Zeev tracks the interplay between construction work, the construction industry, and metaphorical constructions of nation- and state-building, the building and rebuilding of communities, and the construction of social difference. In so doing, this book reveals the material underpinnings of a colonial structure of domination, but also the long Palestinian history of rebuilding in the shadow of ongoing catastrophe.

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.

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 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).

This book offers a contemporary perspective on the clinical, dynamic, socio-psychological, and adaptive characteristics of paranoid schizophrenia when it co-occurs with synthetic cannabinoid dependence, based on a large-scale study. It also outlines targeted treatment and rehabilitation programs designed to help patients reintegrate into socially accepted, recovery-focused communities.

The study found that the coexistence of these two disorders leads to significant clinical and dynamic changes in both conditions. These include a polymorphism of clinical symptoms during schizophrenia exacerbations, compounded by the addition of synthetic cannabinoid withdrawal syndrome. By the third year, the schizophrenic process often becomes continuously progressive, accompanied by a slow increase in negative psychopathological symptoms and a notable "distortion" of these symptoms.

For the first time, six clinical variants of synthetic cannabinoid withdrawal syndrome are described. The book demonstrates the dominance of destructive psychological defenses, unfavorable adaptation patterns, and specific types of compensatory adaptive mechanisms.

This open access book develops a Marxist account of artificial labour. Using Marx's definition of labour from Capital, Kelly proposes three possibilities for the future. The Standard Marxian Line denies that artificial labour is possible and instead predicts that AI will lead to overproduction, unemployment, and the need for capitalism to expand. Artificial Feudalism predicts that AI will generate artificial labour, but that it will remain enmeshed within existing platforms and property relations. Double Freedom for Robots proposes that capitalism will drive the development of bona fide artificial labourers: robots that are legally emancipated but practically dependent on capital.

Free Robot Labour uses Marxist theory to argue for a radical conclusion: AI won't just increase the productivity of human labour, it will lead to the creation of machines capable of labouring.