This book examines Chinese a contemporary art through the lens of cultural political economy, with a focus on affect, geography, and artistic practice. This book develops a new approach, affective creative geography, to show how emotion, place, and lived experience shape artistic production in China and across global contexts.

Through nine case studies of Chinese contemporary artists, the chapters explore how regional environments, mobility, and social conditions influence creative methods and visual language. By foregrounding artists' lived experiences, the book offers a new framework for understanding Chinese contemporary art beyond dominant Western interpretive models. It repositions Chinese art within its own cultural and intellectual contexts while contributing to broader debates in art history, cultural theory, and global contemporary art. This study will be of interest to scholars and readers working in Chinese art, affect theory, cultural political econonmy, creative geography, and visual studies.

In Zeiten tiefgreifender sozialer Umbrueche und manifester Krisen schlaegt die Stunde grundsaetzlicher Analysen, welche die gegenwaertige Gesellschaft als ganze in den Blick nehmen, ihre Strukturmerkmale und Dynamiken untersuchen und vielleicht sogar Wege aus der krisenhaften Entwicklung aufzeigen. Andreas Reckwitz und Hartmut Rosa haben grossangelegte, jedoch ganz unterschiedlich akzentuierte Gesellschaftstheorien vorgelegt, welche die gegenwaertigen Debatten bestimmen. In diesem Buch treten sie nun in einen kritischen Dialog. Ausgehend von dem geteilten Anliegen, dass die Analyse der Moderne als Sozialformation ins Zentrum einer Soziologie gehoert, entfalten sie ihre je eigene gesellschaftstheoretische Perspektive.

This book introduces a critical way of thinking about the narratives around which the human species has shaped itself. It considers the way in which prevailing social mindsets preclude a full understanding of our fundamental interdependency as a species. It offers not a manifesto, but a methodology framed with reference to our human 'species being' - to the Nature-bound, self-consciously active, socially interdependent character of a global people.

Drawing from anthropological, historical and critical social science accounts, the book examines the shaping of human consciousness, our interactions with Nature, the origins of social domination and the constraints on human sociality.

Presenting a fundamental challenge to current policy, practice and thinking in the fields of social policy, social development and beyond, this book proposes a strikingly new narrative characterisation of the human subject.

BANKING EVERYWHERE, BEYOND HUMAN LIMITS

A new financial system is emerging?one where humans aren’t the primary customer.

AI agents will buy goods, manage portfolios, negotiate loans, and trade with each other at a speed and scale no human organization can match. By the 2030s, billions of agents will participate in the global economy, outnumbering humanity itself.

Those agents will need banks engineered for them. Not for us.

BANK 5.0 takes you inside the era of Agentic Banking: where programmable money moves autonomously, regulation becomes economic infrastructure, and financial institutions evolve into intelligent systems that never close.

Brett King?the #1 global bestselling author who forecasted the decline of the branch, the rise of mobile, and the emergence of embedded finance?now turns to the most profound rethink of banking since Cosimo de’ Medici.

The question is no longer whether banking will change. It’s whether any of today’s banks will make it to BANK 5.0 .

“Once more, Brett King predicts the future of banking and financial services: enabling the economies of fully autonomous societies in the age of agentic intelligence. More than insights, he has charted a roadmap to successfully navigate a transition that is already underway. Bank 5.0 lays out the urgent questions, strategic choices, and pitfalls every leader needs to act on today to remain relevant for tomorrow.”
Michael Miebach, CEO, Mastercard

“AI will be the most transformational technology for banking. While the smartphone democratized access, AI will democratize intelligence. The book offers an exciting vision of financial services that is simpler, more human, and more useful, where technology amplifies judgment, strengthens trust, and helps customers around the world achieve better outcomes.”
David Velez, CEO and Founder, Nubank

This book?offers a?comprehensive?and meticulous?collation?of the?early archaeological discoveries of Sanxingdui, archaeological diaries, documentary archives, and image materials collected by the Sichuan University Museum, and it restores the “origin” of Sanxingdui's scientific archaeological discoveries by “cultural relics and documentary emersion” dual evidence. Through the “cultural relics and documentary emersion” dual evidence to restore the scientific archaeology of Sanxingdui's “origin,” the “full-color archaeological drawings and test analysis description” of the Sanxingdui early archaeological discoveries that carries out a complete presentation for today's research on Sanxingdui and ancient Shu civilization to explore the source to provide valuable first-hand information. This book could also serve as a useful reference to archaeologists and cultural relics researchers, historians and researchers of ancient Shu civilization, as well as postgraduate students and professional readers who are interested in Sanxingdui culture.

This is the second volume of the new online-first series CHAPTERS in Education. CHAPTERS in Education is a new, innovative series designed to provide a dedicated outlet for single-chapter submissions across the broad field of education research. Unlike traditional journal articles that focus on primary research and specific research questions, the scope of CHAPTERS in Education is on secondary and reflective scholarship.

Our state-of-the-art self-service portal ensures a streamlined process for submission, peer review, decision-making, and publication. Each accepted chapter is published Online First, assigned a DOI, and fully citable?providing authors with rapid visibility and impact. Chapters are later compiled into volumes on a first-in, first-out basis.

Supported by an international Editorial Board, CHAPTERS in Education upholds the highest editorial and ethical standards. We are committed to delivering responsive service, efficient publication, and a respected platform for advancing educational scholarship.

We welcome both Open Access (OA) and non-OA contributions of up to 40 pages from all areas of education research.

The chapters “Looking for Trouble: AI, Writing, and the Labor of Thought” and “Teaching Within the Assemblage: A Reflexive Inquiry into Posthuman Cybersecurity Pedagogy” are available open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book examines how the relationship between borders and the movement of people within and towards the European Union (re)defines and challenges key political concepts such as sovereignty, territory, rights, and identity in the EU, particularly in a period marked by geopolitical shifts and heightened perceptions of vulnerability. Organised into thematic sections, this edited volume is structured around three main themes: Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the reintroduction and persistence of internal border controls within the Union, and the Pact on Migration and Asylum. Drawing on diverse disciplinary perspectives, some chapters explore the EU’s unresolved tension between internal and external borders in an era increasingly shaped by inward-looking tendencies among member states. Other chapters analyse the constitution and contestation of liminal borders amid the ongoing reconfiguration of relationships between the EU’s core and its peripheries. Additional contributions investigate emerging geographies and legal spaces associated with borders, challenging the fixed cartographies that the current geopolitical moment appears to reassert, and addressing both tangible and intangible borders. The final chapters offer broader reflections on the EU’s cognitive borders and the Union’s constitutive grammar of rights, democracy, and equality as affected by reactions to the movement of people. Thanks to the wide range of perspectives it brings together, this book will be of interest to scholars in International Relations, European studies, migration studies, and border studies.

As the controversy over immigration control continues to unfold on a global level, this timely book explores the widespread involvement of private companies in UK detention and removal policies.

Based on original empirical data, the book pulls back the curtain on the day-to-day practices of the UK Home Office and private service providers, providing critical insights about the inner workings and failings of their processes.

Offering a unique analysis of the enactment of power and state sovereignty, this organizational ethnography will inform scholarly, policy and society debates.

As migration studies are increasingly challenged to confront the inequalities embedded in knowledge production, feminist, intersectional and post/decolonial perspectives offer new ways of researching and teaching migration.

Bringing together contributors from sociology, political science, geography and anthropology, this interdisciplinary volume explores how these approaches can be combined to develop more critical and emancipatory scholarship.

Combining theoretical debate with methodological reflection and empirical case studies, the book examines the coloniality of migration and asylum regimes, researchers' positionalities and critical pedagogies for teaching migration. It offers emancipatory perspectives on how migration can be studied, taught and understood, making it an essential resource for students and researchers across the social sciences.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with Greek Albanian families, this book explores how ethnic identity is lived, embodied, and performed in everyday life. Building on performativity theory and adapting it to the study of ethnicity and migration, it reveals how belonging, difference, and social boundaries are continually negotiated through everyday practices, relationships, and embodied experiences across Greece and Albania.

This timely contribution to migration studies, anthropology, sociology, and ethnic studies sheds new light on the performative production of ethnic identity. It offers a distinctive perspective on ethnicity, embodiment, and belonging as relational processes shaped by social norms, historical memory, migration, and transnational connections. Through rich ethnographic material, the book demonstrates how seemingly ordinary practices including greetings, celebrations, self-presentation, and language use become meaningful acts through which migrants and their families negotiate inclusion, exclusion, and cultural belonging in contemporary Europe.

This volume offers a critical examination of how widening age asymmetries across diverse Asian societies shape the representational economies through which older adults are constructed, mediated, and understood. Foregrounding the intersection of gender and age, it analyses the discursive positioning of older women in multimodal media environments and situates such portrayals within broader configurations of kinship, intergenerational obligation, and socio-emotional labour. The essays assembled here draw on textual, visual, and audiovisual materials from China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, and Taiwan to interrogate emergent narratives of ageing and to map shifting cultural, familial, and institutional expectations surrounding later life

By engaging with demographic change, transformations in family structures, and evolving regimes of care, the collection elucidates the rearticulation of filial responsibility, economic dependency, and affective interdependence in rapidly ageing societies. It further considers how contemporary multimedia reframes the experience of decline, loss, and grief, and how these representational practices mediate broader ideological debates about the status, agency, and social value of older adults. Collectively, the contributions provide a theoretically grounded and empirically rich account of the cultural imaginaries through which ageing is negotiated in Asia, highlighting the profound reconfigurations of social relations and life-course expectations unfolding across the region.

With public support for higher education dwindling, and sociopolitical interferences and funding cuts afflicting institutions worldwide, the role of the modern university has become increasingly precarious. Recovering the University attempts to rectify its existential state through a reframing of present obstacles and opportunities.

Returning to the fundamental principles that formed the backbone of universities, sixteenth president of the University of Toronto Meric S. Gertler and University of Toronto's director of strategic research Anthony Gray remind us of the unrivaled value of these institutions. They show readers why society needs universities - indeed, why their contributions are more important today than ever - but also how universities must evolve in light of contemporary circumstances. The book also considers the factors underlying the dramatic decline in public support for universities in Canada, United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, juxtaposed to those in China, Singapore, and the Middle East. Furthermore, it highlights the unique case study of the University of Toronto - an institution consistently ranked among the world's very best universities, while being unusually large, diverse, and inclusive - as an actionable model for other institutions.

Articulating a vital new vision for the university, Recovering the University will be transformative for educators, leaders, students, and anyone invested in the development of knowledge and learning.

This edited volume explores the complex and evolving role of universities in societal, economic, and organizational transformation, focusing on academic capitalism in Nordic higher education. Through a multidisciplinary lens, the chapters examine how higher education institutions navigate pressures related to entrepreneurship, collaboration, leadership, and ethical practices. It provides a comprehensive overview of the practical features of academic capitalism in day-to-day university work. Teachers and researchers share their experiences of working in contemporary universities. Chapters cover various attitudes to academic capitalism: for and against, but also how to live and survive with it constructively. Nordic countries, and especially Finland, are known as the "happiest country in the world," which provides interesting research themes for this book. Furthermore, the book contains interesting perspectives on AI and digitalization, and metaphors in the Nordic academic environment for researchers, teachers, advanced students, and practitioners interested in Academic capitalism, whether from practical or theoretical perspectives.

This book examines how European vocational education and training (VET) can move beyond fragmented reforms towards coherent, systemic transformation. Set against the backdrop of climate change, digitalisation, demographic shifts, and geopolitical uncertainty, it argues that VET is no longer a peripheral pathway but a strategic pillar of Europe's resilience, competitiveness, and social cohesion.

The chapters trace the historical evolution of European VET, identifying key milestones and comparing national models, including Germany's established dual system and Romania's ongoing reform trajectory. These developments are situated within major European Union (EU) policy frameworks such as the European Green Deal, the Digital Education Action Plan, and the European Skills Agenda. Going beyond diagnosis, this book advances a set of forward looking proposals, including a unified European VET framework, a dual certification mechanism to strengthen company engagement, and the establishment of a European Skills Intelligence Partnership in cooperation with technology actors.

Positioning VET as a strategic lever rather than a secondary educational track, this book offers a clear roadmap for reform. By integrating academic analysis with concrete policy design, it serves as a valuable resource for policymakers, educators, industry leaders, and social partners committed to shaping a greener, more digital, and inclusive European future.

Flourishing Through the Art of Living is a theoretical study of school education which begins by questioning its purpose. The book provides an answer to this question that is grounded in a view of what “flourishing” means for humans living in the social order of high modernity, and outlines the implications on the institutional, curricular, and pedagogical aspects of school education.

Education professor Thomas Falkenberg argues that school education has to address developmental aspects of flourishing as part of its mandate in order to contribute in a very substantial way to the developing political and societal concern for human flourishing. The book first explicates the specific demands that living in high modernity of the 21st century has on humans and then goes on to develop an understanding of the specificity of human existence and functioning. Next, the author expounds on an understanding of human flourishing as it is relevant to living in high modernity; and finally, proposes an approach to school education that supports such flourishing.

Flourishing Through the Art of Living is an interdisciplinary investigation that advances a vision for school education that will infuse sustained meaning, purpose, and hope in the lives of students.