This book summarizes three decades of research in Iberian and Latin American anthropometric history, employing the most up-to-date methodologies in the field. Through a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, it examines the evolution of biological living standards in several Iberian and Latin American populations during the contemporary era, drawing on anthropometric data and its key determinants. The volume comprises nine long-term country studies-Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, and Spain-alongside an introduction and a comparative analysis. Being recognized experts on this field of study, the authors collectively display the knowledge gained in Anthropometric History in last twenty years.

This edited collection highlights the value of anthropometric indicators for analyzing living standards and human well-being from a historical perspective and demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary research in understanding human growth and biological welfare. Its findings explore the determinants of human physical development through various historical transitions, including nation-state formation, economic growth, and the expansion of public goods, as well as the long-term evolution of inequality in biological living standards across Iberian and Latin American contexts.

This book covers the period from the approach of Allied and Soviet armies to the Reich frontiers in late summer 1944 right up to the final collapse in May 1945. With Nazi Germany facing invasion and eventual defeat, Nazi broadcasters now had the insoluble task of having to perform a tightrope act between holding on to 'normality', at odds with outside reality, and of running the risk of losing all trust among listeners. Access to the BBC Monitoring Reports enabled a detailed account of domestic broadcasting during the very last weeks, including the Flensburg spell. In this unprecedented situation facing the Reich, the principal focus lies in radio policy and tactics, as echoed in the conferences held in the Radio Department of the Propaganda Ministry, the programmes themselves, and the response of German listeners to the programmes. Detailed attention is paid to two insurmountable hurdles undermining the entire broadcasting effort: reception problems; and the illegal practice of tuning into enemy and neutral stations. In addition, there are detailed accounts of the controversy surrounding the broadcast of purported 'jazz', as well as Nazi radio's handling of the final wartime Christmas. Two surprising elements of the final months are also examined: the partial resumption of religious broadcasting; and the short-lived station, Radio Werewolf. In short, the period covered provides a fascinating case study in wartime broadcasting in a totalitarian state when all seemed lost and defeat only a matter of time.

This book provides a collection of the latest sustainable architecture and urban practices in arid and semi-arid cities and communities. It discusses the concept of resilience in architecture, discussing resilient socio-ecological systems in the Arab Region and using urban agriculture practices for designing resilient spaces. The book addresses sustainable building materials within the contexts of indoor spaces, climate change, and economic viability. It also addresses waste management and the concept of zero waste. The book highlights sustainable water management systems in buildings and cities, in addition to learned lessons from indigenous water management methods. It focuses on urban greening using haloculture for combating global warming effects and discusses the impact of green roofs as a type of urban greening in improving the thermal performance of buildings. The book delves into heat wave hazards and geospatial analysis in urban settings, using cyber-physical systems in smart cities and carbon-neutral urban developments. The book is useful to researchers, professionals, practitioners, post-graduates, and undergraduates who are interested in the field of environmental architecture engineering.

The rationale of this book is to provide carefully selected images from Google Earth, to discuss what they show, and to provide references to the heritage sites portrayed so that readers can go deeper if they wish. Taking examples from all over the world, this book aims to demonstrate their value for understanding heritage landscapes and for appreciating their aesthetics. It is organised around different types of landscape and the processes that created them, rather than regionally or on the basis of age. It includes a large number of archaeological sites that have been designated as UNESC0 World Heritage Sites. Google Earth has proved to be important for demonstrating some of the threats that major sites have been exposed to, including during recent wars in the Middle East. The landscapes discussed are those of Water Management, Agricultural Management, War, Burial, Mines, Quarries and Salterns, Cities and Settlements, Tells, Theatres, Amphitheatres, and Hippodromes, Churches, Temples, Pagodas, and Mosques, and Geoglyphs.

This edited collection is an essential resource for understanding contemporary Indigenous-settler relations across three major settler colonial contexts, bringing together First Nations and settler scholars, practitioners, artists and community organisations from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the USA. The book provides students and researchers with critical frameworks for analysing how colonial power relations shape contemporary injustices while exploring Indigenous-led pathways toward transformation.

Organised into three sections - Words of the Land, Unmaking Extraction, and Restoring Country, Restoring Justice - the collection demonstrates how relationships between people, place, and the more-than-human world are articulated through Indigenous water governance, cultural restoration projects, decolonial museum practices, traditional ecological knowledge, and community-controlled care systems. Chapters engage theoretical rigor with practical case studies, offering concrete examples of how Indigenous knowledge systems provide solutions to environmental and social challenges.

Featuring majority Indigenous authorship and innovative cross-cultural collaborations, this collection models meaningful scholarly engagement while centring Indigenous perspectives. Essential for scholarships in Indigenous studies, environmental justice, colonialism, and social justice, this volume contains critical insights in envisioning more just futures grounded in relationality and care.

This book explores activities in the global landscape of second-hand cultures and economies of reuse, repair, sharing and care. Individual chapters provide ethnographic studies of how ordinary people live, revive, create, and refine practices of reuse, repair, sharing and care as they seek to prolong the lifespan of goods, contribute to planetary health, make a living, and create communities. The authors introduce practices like children's clothes swapping, repair of appliances, or reuse of domestic fabrics, and analyze how people exchange and share goods (farmers' market), buy used items in different venues, reuse or recycle materials (tires), repair items for resale (TVs), or avoid purchasing new goods (free stores). The volume examines activities in different settings across North America, the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and Asia, and analyzes specific economic, gendered, social and cultural contexts, material conditions, and motivations. The authors theorize global second-hand circuits and economies and the potential of ordinary people and small projects in the making of a more sustainable and equitable world. This book will be of interest to readers in environmental anthropology or sociology, environmental studies, sustainability studies, consumer studies, and material and popular culture studies.

The need for green metrics, or environmental metrics, stems from the growing awareness and urgency to address environmental issues. Green metrics help in quantifying the impact of human activities on the environment. This includes measuring carbon footprints, water usage, waste generation, and pollution levels. By providing tangible data, these metrics guide individuals, businesses, and governments in making more sustainable decisions. They highlight areas where environmental impact can be reduced. Also, green metrics are crucial for tracking progress towards environmental goals, such as those set by the Paris Agreement or the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Against this backdrop and in order to facilitate a broad discussion on the contribution of universities towards sustainability, this book is being produced.

The book gathers inputs from universities and research organisations working on matters related to sustainable development and green metrics, in a variety of contexts. It also provides a platform for the dissemination of information on the latest initiatives.Furthermore, the book intends to provide a fertile basis upon which universities may cooperate more closely in this key area. Last but not least, a further aim of the book is to present methodological approaches and experiences deriving from case studies and projects, which aim to show how green metrics may be incorporated as part of university programmes.

This book charts the representation of East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) people in popular performance and media in the US and UK from 1848 to the present day. It offers a comprehensive guide to understanding the major stereotypes, their historical evolution, and their persistence in contemporary comedy and performance. By delving into this rich history, readers are encouraged to critically examine the representations they encounter and create. The chapters cover pivotal topics such as the impact of large-scale ESEA immigration, international relations through major wars, and the role of comedy in perpetuating stereotypes. Through detailed case studies-from Vaudeville scripts to modern stand-up comedians-this book reveals how these stereotypes have been reinforced, subverted, or transformed over time. Readers discover how historical events shaped Western perceptions of ESEA cultures and how these perceptions continue to influence media today. This book is an essential resource for scholars, students, and anyone interested in media studies, cultural history, or racial representation. It provides valuable insights into the power structures that have shaped societal norms and offers a critical lens for analysing racial stereotypes in performance. Whether you're a researcher or an interested lay reader, this book invites you to explore the complex interplay between history, comedy, and cultural representation.

Harnessing the Potential of Artificial Intelligence to Promote Environmental Sustainability provides a comprehensive examination of how AI is transforming environmental conservation and sustainability efforts. This scholarly work delves into cutting-edge AI technologies-such as automation, data analytics, and machine learning-and explores their potential to address pressing environmental challenges. Through in-depth analysis and practical case studies, the book demonstrates how AI can enhance resource management, support sustainable practices, and improve environmental monitoring.

Beyond technical solutions, the authors engage with the ethical considerations and potential risks of deploying AI in environmental contexts. Issues such as fairness, transparency, and accountability in AI systems are explored, along with the need for regulatory frameworks to mitigate negative impacts. An essential resource for researchers, professionals, policymakers, and anyone interested in the intersection of technology and environmental stewardship, this contributed work offers a roadmap for leveraging AI to foster a sustainable future, emphasising the crucial role of advanced technologies in addressing global environmental challenges.

This 3-volume set examines how suburban spaces shape and reflect human experiences in North America, Europe, and Asia, bringing together works by an international group of scholars who explore suburbia through critical analyses of literature, culture, sociology, history, politics, and urban planning. The multidisciplinary and international scope of each volume offers readers a wide breadth of perspectives. Suburbia Reconsidered thus contributes significantly to the expanding field of suburban studies by offering novel insights into the representation of suburbs in literature, the cultural significance of suburban environments, and the socio-economic challenges confronting suburban communities across the globe.

Volume 3 of this 3-volume set addresses multiple dimensions of suburban social and political life, as well as planning and history. Contributors explore such themes as race and class exclusion, the relationship of eugenics to suburban planning, environmental impacts and activism in suburbia, and the influence of Cold War geopolitics on suburban planning. Some essays use history to explore implications for future suburban development, around such themes as environmental policy and multiracial suburban community building. These works use case studies to illustrate opportunities for creating more inclusive, sustainable, and culturally vibrant suburban spaces.

By integrating insights from literature, cultural studies, sociology, history, and urban planning, Suburbia Reconsidered enhances our understanding of suburban spaces and their potential for positive transformation, and encourages scholars to explore new methodologies and perspectives.

Building and expanding on the literature of case studies of urban commons that have emerged which question the development of urban commons theories and concepts and identify results and contradictions, this edited collection progresses our understanding of the different aspects, characteristics, challenges, contradictions and potential of the urban commons in Italy.

Presenting different case studies of urban commons and socially innovative and democratic practices in Italian cities, the chapters analyse the different contexts and specific political and socio-economic needs that are being addressed. Uncovering the motivations, discourse and actions of the different actors involved as well as the dynamics among them, the authors investigate negotiating with commons actors and the state involving conflict, negotiation and collaboration, as well as the relationship with the surrounding urban environment and local institutions and how they intertwine. In which ways do the urban commons and their socially innovative governance challenge the urban development model? In which manners do urban commons initiatives advance the right to the city? How do territorial and local communities contribute to the creation and diffusion of social innovation, recognising its structuring effect?

With chapters written by scholars with expertise in urban studies, sociology and political science, this collection is a multidisciplinary effort needed to fully understand an evolving phenomenon in social sciences. It is an important contribution to theoretic debates on the urban commons in Italy, wider Europe, and beyond.

This book presents a particular kind of environmental psychology that has emerged in Latin America: community environmental psychology. Different grom mainstream environmental psychology developed in the Global Norh - which usually focuses on individual differences, often disconnected from historical, social and political contexts - community environmental psychology is a situated approach aimed at social change and in articulation with community psychology, developed to study interactions between people and communities in relation to the natural and/or built space.

This contributed volume is organized into two complementary parts. Chapters in the first part articulate conceptual frameworks that nourish community environmental psychology and methodological approaches that help to understand, analyze and transform dynamics between communities and their environments from a situated, critical perspective committed to socio-environmental justice. Chapters of the second part present studies of community resilience in environmental psychology based on case studies carried out in six Latin American countries. These works reveal the applicability of diverse conceptual and methodological frameworks for an empirical approach to community resilience in specific psycho-environmental contexts. Situated in territories marked by socio-natural disasters, unequal urbanization, extractive economies and environmental conflicts, the studies show how communities develop and deploy response, resistance and territorial transformation capacities when faced with contexts marked by social injustice and persistent exclusion.

Community Environmental Psychology and Community Resilience aims to position community environmental psychology as a field of scientific and applied development committed to social transformation. Based on the theoretical and methodological approaches presented in the first part and the empirical studies included in the second, the book proposes an approach that situates community as the central axis of the analysis and allows expanding the traditional frameworks of environmental psychology by integrating structural vulnerability, collective agency and power, understood as procedural and contextual dynamics that configure our communal lives as constitutive dimensions of the person-environment relationship.

This book offers a comprehensive review of concepts from general Structuralist Semiotics, and their application to the study of fashion systems and the objects they originate. It goes beyond the visual aspect of images and material culture, exploring the relations of narrative and meaning that crystallize the "mechanism of change" that governs fashion systems. Furthermore, the author argues that the system of dress, accessories, and self-presentation are not the only manifestations of a fashion system, interrogating the pertinence of the model developed throughout its sections to the study of knowledge. The book presents three case studies. The first focuses on the construction of body and dress as agents, and their dynamic interaction as the core of fashion changes. In the second case study, the foundations of cultural opposition between Western practices and the "Islamic Other" are challenged, utilizing the semiotic analysis to test the semantic pertinence of this "false contrariety". The book closes with the reassessment of the assumption that fashion occurs only in dress and, perhaps, other objects and forms of life belonging to consumable culture.
Through these case studies the book makes a statement about the value of cross-discipline and cross-paradigm explorations. As the three sections of this work present the results of a search for a "theory of everything", this manuscript demonstrates the comprehensiveness and urgency of semiotic studies that cross areas and push the limits of the theory.

This book makes a consciously positive case for the civic value of the humanities in higher education. The author seeks to show the ways in which humanities subjects are not just about teaching and learning to master technical content, but are also concerned with the transmission of ethical humanistic values. By embedding values from humanities subjects more deeply within universities, she argues that we can bring heart and soul, and indeed humanity, to higher education settings which have a far reaching, positive impact within and beyond these settings. The book will appeal to academics and students in higher education studies and humanities subjects, as well as institutional administrators and leaders.

This is the first book to map and celebrate the overlooked history of producers, promoters and DJs from Islington that contributed to the acid house and rave scene as it developed in derelict spaces in the borough in the late 1980s, and how this paved the way for the house and jungle scenes that dominated Islington clubs during the 1990s. Blending oral history interviews with contemporaneous reports in the style press, the music press, local and national newspapers, and archival documents stored at the Islington Local History Centre, this book sheds new light upon key clubs, the music, cultural identities, and fashions. The book presents unpublished eyewitness accounts by people from Islington's council estates that contributed to these scenes to unravel the complex and hitherto poorly understood interrelationship between gang culture, subculture and localised club culture. It argues that the backlash to the perceived unsavoury nature of clubbers and promoters, combined with the onslaught of gentrification in the borough in the late 1990s, led to the venues being closed down, and to this vital moment in the history of UK popular culture being brought to an end.

In a humane world, cruelty should not exist, and yet it has been a feature of our societies since time immemorial. From individual acts of cruelty to systematic torture and mass murder, cruelty has been humanity's constant companion, attesting to a darker side of human nature. Cruelty involves the use of violence but it is more than this, since it is organized and calculated; its intention is to inflict pain and suffering on others, even to destroy the other. Cruelty is perhaps the ultimate form of violence in which the extermination of the other is staged as a threat in order to make others compliant or instil in them the fear of death.

In this wide-ranging cultural history, Wolfgang Mueller-Funk examines the ways in which different thinkers and authors - from Herodotus to Nietzsche, from Seneca to Musil and Koestler - have conceptualized and tried to make sense of a phenomenon we would prefer to ignore. He seeks to unveil the conditions under which an economy of cruelty emerges, in which violence is calculated and becomes a quasi-natural matter of course. The economy of cruelty involves the efficient use of means to pursue irrational goals. It also involves discourses and narrative patterns that legitimize organized violence and neutralize emotions, such as empathy and compassion, that would restrain or obstruct the pursuit of cruelty.

This disturbing inquiry into the nature of cruelty and its role in human culture will be of interest to students and scholars throughout the humanities and to a wide general readership.

This book explores the representation and application of music and new media in the archive. Its case studies interrogate twentieth and twenty-first-century musical engagements with new media, ranging from notation, recording, and broadcast technologies to new analogue and electronic instruments, exploratory sound making techniques, and experimental compositional practice. The chapters each consider how these developments are reflected or preserved in documentary sources, or conversely, how archived materials relating to music and sound might be effectively combined with innovations in practice today. A timely investigation, as music archives globally are challenged by researching, conserving, and creatively engaging with the new media of their collections, this book provides opportunities to assess the impact of the archive on our understanding of music and new media through both historical and contemporary approaches.

Sex and sexuality are prominent features within families. Given the many issues associated with sex and sexuality there is a need for a more comprehensive understanding of sex and sexuality within the family context.

This compelling collection offers a deep dive into the diverse and complex issues surrounding sex, sexuality, and family dynamics across different cultures and societies. From the marital aspirations of sexual minority transgender young adults to the evolving intimacies of Indian women, each chapter provides a unique perspective on how personal and societal factors shape sexual identities and relationships. The book also examines the intersection of religion, politics, and sexuality, exploring topics such as the views of religiously conservative Christians on adolescent sex, toxic masculinity among Generation Z undergraduates, and the impact of dominant conservative socializing agents on attitudes toward same-sex adoption. Other chapters delve into the long-term effects of adverse childhood experiences on sexual health, survival mechanisms for identity management in Zimbabwe, and the challenges faced by gay and lesbian parents in Ireland. Additionally, the collection addresses cultural taboos in Turkey, the role of social media in sex education, and the support needs of parents in Italy.

By breaking the silence on these critical issues, Sex and Sexuality within the Family Context provides valuable insights for scholars interested in understanding the intricate connections between sex, sexuality, and family life.

This text is an original and unique introduction to musical semiotics through the use of popular music acts and repertoires of global cultural impact. The basic idea of this is that the songs of The Beatles, Queen, ABBA, Madonna, Michael Jackson and others have become a lingua franca in nearly all cultures, thus making for excellent examples to illustrate musical semiotic theories. "'Heroes'" can perfectly explain Eero Tarasti's Actantial Model, "Bohemian Rhapsody" is ideal to describe Tzvetan Todorov's Equilibrium Theory, and so forth. Through case studies, in-depth analysis, original theoretical contributions from the author, but also a comprehensible and enjoyable writing style, this volume will be an engaging reading for students and at the same time an aid for instructors in semiotics, musicology and popular music studies.

Social studies, perhaps more so than any other content area, also serves as the catalyst of change when we, the people, use our experiences to our own and others' advancements. At its core, social studies has been both a concurrent limiting and freeing pursuit of knowledge, a pursuit that discourages and encourages us to learn from and about our experiences and associations, to learn of ourselves and others. In Social Studies Instruction, Learning, and Assessment in the Contemporary World: Leveraging the Past to Form a New Future, Epps and Harper reimagine social studies moving from the limitations it imposes and towards the freedom that it envisions for each one of us. In place of the previously adopted one-size-fits-all majority-controlled education in which most American learners were forced to comply, practices that are identifiable and relatable to all students are proposed. The book reflects that social studies teaching should be recursive and fluid, allowing for movement forward, backward, inward, and outward, thus creating opportunities for students to examine events, not just through the rote memorization of dominant facts and figures, but through critical inquiry and reflection.

Rather than a list of events and names to be memorized, the book adopts the idea that history is a 'mode of thinking' and the book is laid out as such. Topics are addressed and explored by theme and overarching ideas in each chapter to enable meaningful social studies learning, which occurs when students see the interconnectedness of multiple social studies concepts, ideas, and the interconnectedness of life.

This edited volume investigates the complexities of child refugees and migrants from a global perspective. With millions of young migrants and refugees worldwide, there is a need for novel understandings and conceptualizations of the impact of national policies affecting these children, as well as a thorough investigation of possible methodological dilemmas within research on and with migrant children and youth. This book addresses these in three parts. Part one examines the life experiences of child migrants and refugees with emphasis on how different forms of mobility shape them. Part two explores different contexts of education: How education directed at child migrants becomes organized, the specific educational needs that migrant children have, and the inclusion and possible exclusion of migrant children. Part three discusses and problematizes ethical dilemmas that research on and with migrant children and young people awakens. Foregrounding nuanced perspectives from the "Global South"-or the "world majority"-often ignored in traditional migration research, this book fills a crucial gap in childhood and youth studies as well as migration research.

Post-Qualitative Inquiry in Sport, Health and Physical Education provides emerging insights on post-qualitative research in Sport, Health, and Physical Education and introduces new ways of engaging with multiple forms of inquiry in this broad field. By acknowledging that post-qualitative inquiry is metaphysical, speculative and empirical, the volume questions the privileging of knowledge in Sport, Health, and Physical Education through totalizing research paradigms. The volume embraces knowing as an assemblage, knowing as embodiment, knowing as limitless and not yet actualized, knowing as becoming through deliberate imprecision, and knowing as affective enquiry.

This volume constitutes a significant and exciting advance in Sport, Health, and Physical Education research- highlighting how the considerable promise of post-qualitative and innovative approaches to inquiry can enhance new conceptual openings and reorient established forms of thinking in this broad field.

This book investigates the role of the Qur'an in the everyday lives of young Shia Muslims in Finland. Adopting a cultural psychological perspective on Islamic scripture, the book approaches the Qur'an as a symbolic resource that young Muslims can draw on to find guidance and support, to reflect on the meaning and purpose in their lives, or to experience community with other believers. The book emphasizes the variety of ways in which young Shia Muslims relate to the scripture, bringing to life the various ways in which young Shia Muslims grapple with a text that is difficult to understand and try to construct a meaning that makes it relevant in the context of contemporary Finland. This book provides a novel approach to the religious lives of a little-known religious minority. In addition, it brings together fields that have so far been largely separate, in particular cultural psychology and Islamic studies. As such, the book provides a valuable resource to scholars interested in lived religion, religious minorities, Islam in Europe, sacred texts, as well as culture and human mind.

The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu has become one of the most influential theories in music education and sociology of music. Generations of scholars in both fields have applied, criticized and advanced the concepts and methods invented by Bourdieu and his school. The volume presents new contributions on the relevance, actuality and perspectives of Bourdieu's theory in the field of music production and music reception. The volume advances the interdisciplinary evaluation of Bourdieu's approach and contributes to a new evaluation of the Bourdieusian approach in the field of music research.

This book explores the emergence of the religious use of ayahuasca as a subject of public interest and state intervention in Brazil, the United States, and France. In Brazil, since the 1980s, ayahuasca use has been permitted by the National Council on Drug Policies exclusively for religious purposes. In the late 2000s, public policies shifted from drug control to cultural heritage, following demands by groups from Acre for recognition of their practices as intangible heritage.

In the United States, two Brazilian religions - Uniao do Vegetal (UDV) and Santo Daime - as well as two non-Christian churches - the Church of the Eagle and the Condor and the Church of the Celestial Heart - secured the legal right to use ayahuasca. Through legal battles and settlements, they obtained exemptions from the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).

In France, ayahuasca was banned in 2005, just three months after a Santo Daime group successfully appealed drug charges. Today, ayahuasca remains illegal; groups are often labeled as dangerous cults and seen as threats to French republican ideals.

Inspired by the anthropology of secularism and the sociology of public problems, the book examines how terms like religion, cult, drug, hallucinogen, and cultural heritage are mobilized by various actors in public disputes to shape perceptions and influence policy. It draws on legal cases, public policies, legislation, academic literature, social media, institutional documents, and interviews with key figures involved in regulatory debates.

The central thesis - ayahuasca as a lens to understand how states define religion and determine legitimate religious practice - offers fresh perspectives on the intersections of religious freedom, drug policy, and state authority. Bridging multiple disciplines, the book contributes to debates on law and religion, and to a deeper understanding of how democracies manage minority faiths, cultural rights, and the boundaries of state intervention.

This book is an informative and how-to guide for writing about the environment. Part One focuses on issues of environmental writing that writers must be aware of before they begin writing, such as environmental ideologies, affordances and constraints of various genres, considerations for audience, and social and political issues that influence environmental communication. Part Two is the how-to part of the guide with eight chapters that introduce readers to various writing strategies like how to write in narrative form, sensory writing, incorporating research, the use of visuals, and more.

Interweaving Tapestries of Culture and Sexuality, Volume 2 looks at Caribbean sexuality from around the region and through different disciplines. These include sociology, gender, cultural studies, linguistics, and psychology with topics ranging from masculinity, sexuality, courtship and conflict in relationships, cultural expressions of sexuality, women's role in crime, and violence. The Caribbean has at times been difficult to define culturally and geographically. This book makes a bold attempt at including various language, cultural and geographic groups that include Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Haiti and Caribbean retentions from Ghana. It moves beyond the tapestry of Volume One by weaving in new scholarship thereby creating a more diverse view of the Caribbean and its origins. The contents are research-driven, original works that provide empirical data, theoretical perspectives, and accounts of lived experiences. It will be of interest to the reader exploring a wide range of perspectives on Caribbean sexuality.

This book contrasts Puerto Rico's eco-political history with its narrative and symbolic routes of disaster, trauma, and resilience, noting points of convergence and divergence. Since hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017 there has been an explosion of creative and critical works that depict and analyze the aftermath of disaster, and this book systematically documents the continuities and discontinuities of how disasters are represented and underrepresented from earlier eras to the present. This book offers a politically-challenging cultural analysis that goes beyond orthodox Puerto Rican cultural thinking.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), an umbrella term that includes any device capable of emulating or even exceeding human capabilities, emerged as computer technologies became more sophisticated and complex. Recent rapid developments in AI have utilized the pattern-matching capacity to create words, images, and sounds, often referred to as Generative AI. In 2022, Open-AI unveiled ChatGPT, a computer program designed to simulate conversation with users. After receiving input from users, ChatGPT displayed the capacity to provide lifelike answers, that appeared filled with human insight.

Given the rapid advancement of AI in transforming social life, authors in this volume explore the implications of the emergent interaction between humans and AI technologies. They each provide a fine-grain view of the social forms associated with the use of AI technologies, using symbolic interactionist concepts such as identity, reflexivity, the self, the generalized other, time, place, and more as pivots of analysis.

Symbolic Interaction and AI demonstrates the utilities of symbolic interactionist theorizing in understanding the consequences of AI use in social life, as well as how the research of AI technologies could enhance the development of symbolic interactionist theories.