Examines the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster

The 2011 Fukushima Dai'ichi nuclear disaster was the worst industrial nuclear catastrophe to hit Japan. It was a major event, rated at the highest severity, which released radioactive elements into the power plant's surrounding environment when back-up systems failed and could not sufficiently cool the nuclear reactors. At least 164,000 people were permanently or temporarily displaced.

Radioactive Governance offers an ethnographic look at how the disaster was handled by Japan. Unlike prior nuclear-related narratives, such as those surrounding Chernobyl or Hiroshima, which focused on themes of harm, trauma, and victimization, the Japanese government consistently put forward a discourse of minimal or no radiation-related dangers, a gradual bringing home of former evacuees, a restarting of nuclear power plants, and the promotion of a resilient mindset in the face of adversity. This narrative worked to counter other understandings of recovery, such as those of worried citizens unsuccessfully fighting for permanent evacuation because they were afraid to go back to their homes.

Providing a rich theorization of how both governments and citizens shape narratives about catastrophic events, Radioactive Governance not only displays how Fukushima became a story of hope and resilience rather than of victimization, but also how radioactive governance shifted from the nuclear secrecy that characterized the Cold War era to relying on international organizations and domestic citizens to co-manage the aftermath of disasters.

This is the first systematic theorization of digital modernity, arguing that the digital age cannot be understood apart from the long historical arc of modernity.

Bridging digital humanities, critical theory, sociology, philosophy, and global history, Digital Modernity demonstrates that contemporary digital systems are continuations rather than ruptures of the modern project. It offers a robust conceptual framework for examining how technological infrastructures intersect with democracy, governance, colonial legacies, and the public sphere. Across nine chapters, the book moves from conceptual foundations to future-facing proposals. Topics include the cultural logic of Silicon Valley, digital colonialism, digital infrastructure, and the epistemic crisis of the digital public sphere. It also engages philosophical questions about emergence, historicism, and artificial intelligence. Drawing on applied digital humanities, the book rejects technological determinism while offering accessible accounts of computing's technical and political histories. Readers benefit from a coherent theoretical lens that integrates history with socio-technical critique, enabling a clearer understanding of digital modernity's present and future stakes.

This book is intended for scholars and students across digital humanities, media and communication studies, science and technology studies, sociology, the philosophy of technology, and modern history. Its interdisciplinary scope also supports research and teaching in software studies, critical AI, infrastructure studies, and global modernities. Suitable for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses, it will be especially valuable for researchers seeking to historicize digital systems while advancing critiques grounded in cultural theory, political economy, and postcolonial perspectives. By placing the digital within a longer history of modernity, the book offers both a foundational text and a springboard for further research in critical digital studies.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International license.

Using the mid-twentieth-century microhistorical example of the so-called 'Mummy in the Cupboard Murder', Lizzie Seal examines the significance of the Gothic to understandings of crime.

In a case that hinged on forensic evidence, Sarah Jane Harvey, the owner of a boarding house in Rhyl, North Wales, was tried for the murder of Frances Knight whose naturally mummified corpse was discovered in a locked cupboard of the house in 1960. The book applies Gothic criminology to an empirical historical example, considers the interchange between fact and fiction, traces developments in mid twentieth-century forensic pathology, and contributes to historical criminology by extending this approach's conceptual base.

The Mummy in the Cupboard Murder is ideal for students and scholars of cultural criminology, crime and media, twentieth-century British history, and crime history, as well as those with an interest in the Gothic.

This book explores the sacralization of history with a focus on modern Eastern Europe where the erasure of Soviet traditions has triggered a search for specific "usable pasts". It discusses the importance of sacralization in memory and identity-building politics and the complex interplay between religion, history, and identity, particularly within the context of crises and conflict situations, by showing the historical roots of these processes.

The contributors seek to identify the political, societal and religious actors promoting the sacralization of history. They consider which networks promote sacralized visions of history and who is excluded from the sacralized community of national belonging. They also explore which historical topics seem best suited for the sacralization of history and question what happens to the rituals, objects, or spaces, formerly regarded as sacral: are they profaned, neglected, or re-inscribed by new national histories, and is there a religious language of national history? These are the major questions of this book.

Captures the complex journey of how Dominican Americans mobilized to become key progressive players in American politics

Dominican Americans are one of the largest and fastest-growing Latinx groups in the United States, with a population that has quadrupled from 517,000 to a little over 2.3 million as of 2023. While New York City is home to the largest Dominican community in the country - and is where most Dominican American elected officials (DEOs) are from - Dominican Americans continue to increase their representation nationwide. In Politics in Our Veins, Yalidy Matos, Domingo Morel, and Michelle Bueno Vasquez chart the rise of Dominican American political power across the United States, exploring the myriad factors that have contributed to their political success as thoughtful citizens, activists, and elected officials.

Drawing on original surveys, in-depth interviews with elected officials, and archival data, Matos, Morel, and Vasquez trace the past, present, and future of Dominican American political power, demonstrating how one group fought from the margins for a seat at the table. They explore how community, civic, and cultural organizations have played an important role in helping newly immigrated Dominican Americans gain political power through influential national coalitions like "Dominicans on the Hill" and the Dominican National Roundtable. They also examine how identity politics, in particular race and gender, influence the political attitudes and behavior of DEOs.

Politics in Our Veins shines a light on how Dominicans have created avenues for political engagement, identifying where barriers to participation have been dismantled, where they remain, and where new obstacles are emerging.

Time is an essential dimension of our shared understandings of the historical significance or fairness of a particular event or situation. The ways time is constructed, however, are characterized by a plurality of diverse and sometimes inconsistent representations. This book examines the uses of different conceptualizations of time in explaining injustice and justice in society from an interdisciplinary perspective. It is the temporal representations that are the focus of this book here: How and by whom are they constructed, how do they weave together or fray in the process of working through temporary or permanent injustices, and what spaces are made or quashed for different understandings of time? The book gathers scholars from different backgrounds with expertise from law, history, politics and international relations, philosophy, and sociology to examine the temporality of (in)justice in society. The chapters of the book are integrated around a coherent central theme: The unavoidable intertwining of time and justice. As well as addressing the lived processes of collectively coming to terms with temporal experiences and justice, the book work also discusses the different disciplinary ways of making sense of such processes and the strengths and pitfalls of each approach. The collection will be of interest to researchers and students of legal theory, international relations, global history, memory studies, and political philosophy.

This book examines the convergence of Islamic legal principles and modern financial systems, covering the fundamental principles of Islamic finance and banking, and how they are practically applied within the banking sector.

Using real-world examples to discuss the operation of contracts, partnerships, and risk-sharing arrangements while adhering to Islamic law, the book details Shariah-compliant banking and finance in both theory and practice. With an international perspective, the book analyses Islamic banking law in countries such as the U.K., Malaysia, and India, covering their respective legal frameworks and regulations in detail. It also delves into the history of banking law in each country, alongside topics such as taxation, corporate governance, and regulatory practice.

The book will be of interest to students and scholars in the field of Islamic law, banking, and finance law.

A blueprint for rescuing our fragile democracy by harnessing AI

Democracy is in retreat at home and abroad. Our institutions and our politics are more broken than ever. At this delicate moment, artificial intelligence has burst onto the scene, a powerful technology that holds as much potential to bolster democracy as to harm it. But we have stopped treating democracy as a solvable problem. We have built extraordinary tools but are not yet using them where they are needed most: to forge institutions that work better for people.

Many warn that AI will accelerate authoritarianism. In Reboot, Beth Simone Noveck makes a different case. Drawing on decades of work building technology and working inside government, from the White House to 10 Downing Street, she shows how democratic institutions can deliberately design, govern, and invest in AI to strengthen democracy rather than undermine it.

Noveck takes readers inside real-world efforts already under way, from European cities engaging residents in policymaking to Latin American legislatures drafting stronger laws and U.S. states transforming how they deliver public services, revealing what democratic AI looks like in practice and what it takes to make it work at scale.

We stand at an inflection point. Will governments and companies use AI to tighten their grip on power, or to help institutions listen more closely, decide more wisely, and act more effectively? Noveck offers a bold and practical playbook for tipping the balance in favor of democracy.

Bayesianism is the view that rational degrees of belief should follow probability theory. In this book, philosopher Kenny Easwaran defends Bayesianism as an effective normative framework when applied to all "doxastic subjects": humans, animals, artificial intelligences, groups, and even hypothetical aliens or angels.

The book addresses major challenges: concerns about numerical precision and computational tractability, problems with infinitesimals and regularity, difficulties with act-state dependence, and debates over evidence. Easwaran employs measurement theory to show probabilistic representation is analogous to representing temperature - different scales (Fahrenheit/Celsius, probability/odds) can represent the same underlying non-numerical reality.

Later chapters examine how beliefs should update through conditionalization, while distinguishing different sources of rational norms. Easwaran defends a notably permissive view: any probability function is internally rational, as reason alone cannot dictate privileged priors. However, "ecological rationality" explains why certain belief systems perform better in specific environments, acknowledging both Bayesianism's abstract permissiveness and practical constraints making certain credal states more successful.

The book brings into relief Kojeve's original contributions as a legal thinker through a series of critical dialogues and debates about law and right between Kojeve and other influential contributors to legal scholarship across the humanities and social sciences.

These critical dialogues and debates are comparative in character and range from factual ones-such as Kojeve's dialogues and debates with Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt-to hypothetical ones-such as Kojeve's dialogues and debates with Plato, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Vladimir Solovyov, Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, Ivan Ilyin, Evgeny Pashukanis, Ernst Bloch, Edmund Husserl, and Hannah Arendt. Spotlighting Kojeve's distinct contributions to legal scholarship, while also showcasing his broader influence across a range of disciplines-including philosophy, political theory, sociology, law, and transnational studies-the book includes original contributions from eminent editors, translators, and biographers of Kojeve, as well as from historians of legal and political thought, specialists on global trade and private international law, statelessness, and public international law.

Kojeve and Law will appeal to legal historians, legal theorists, political philosophers, sociologists of law, as well as historians of philosophy and political thought, and to graduate students in philosophy, law, and the history of political thought.

The use of traffic and location data in criminal justice is now a common prac-tice in the EU and beyond. Although metadata do not reveal the contents of communications, they allow to draw precise conclusions on the private lives of users, like their everyday habits, places of residence, daily movements and ac-tivities, social relationships, and frequented environments. For this reason, they are largely used by law enforcement to identify promising targets of investiga-tion or as evidence in criminal trials. In the EU, national legislation often pro-vides for the indiscriminate retention of such data, but the compatibility of these mass surveillance regimes with the European human rights framework has been questioned in the case law of the European Court on Human Rights (ECtHR) and the European Court of Justice (CJEU), as well as legal scholar-ship. Nevertheless, the use of unlawfully retained data in criminal proceedings is not usually sanctioned in national criminal procedural systems. This book addresses this problem by inquiring about how communications metadata can be used in criminal proceedings, having regard to the principles of legality and fairness. In particular, through the lens of fairness, the analysis seeks to find some common ground between privacy and data protection regimes on the one hand and criminal procedural rules on the other. To this end, it employs both an interdisciplinary doctrinal research method and a comparative analysis be-tween a limited number of EU Member States. By identifying different stand-ards of fairness for the preventive context, the investigation, and the trial phase, the book highlights gaps in protection and attempts to reconcile these two separate, yet closely related, regimes.