Through an examination of the underlying technology driving digital currencies, this book offers a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms governing their operation, clarifying complex legal concepts and confronting the pressing issue of anonymity inherent in digital currency transactions.

The book focuses on two categories of digital currencies: cryptocurrencies (eg, bitcoin) and in-game currencies (the currencies used in the closed virtual environment of a game). Despite their differences in governance - cryptocurrencies being decentralised and in-game currencies being centralised - they share significant similarities in terms of anonymity, which presents a notable issue within the anti-money laundering (AML) framework.

Against the backdrop of both the international AML standards developed by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and the European Union AML regime, the book examines the AML compliance stage of the private sector and, specifically, the collection and retention of data relating to digital currency users. It analyses the new AML Regulation, alongside the 5th AML Directive, the Market in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) Regulation and the 'Travel Rule' Regulation, to construct a complete picture of the obligations imposed on virtual asset service providers and to assess whether the new framework disproportionately interferes with the right to privacy and data protection of the end user. In doing so, the book offers the first legal assessment of the proportionality of private-sector AML obligations in the field of digital currencies based on the argument that, in this context, EU AML law is increasingly transforming into a surveillance regime.

This second edition of Positive Psychology provides a detailed review of theoretical and empirical contributions to this expanding field. The contributors provide a scientific understanding of how a variety of human strengths and positive constructs help people to flourish in their daily lives.

The book, which has a mix of previous and new contributors, has three sections: Positive Subjective Experiences, Positive Traits, and Positive Institutional Perspectives and New Approaches to Positive Psychology. Chapter in the first section consider topics that include happiness, positive emotions, savoring, how to spend money well, key predictors of subjective well-being, meaning in life, and free will's link to well-being. Those in the second examine forgiveness and flourishing, mindfulness, welcoming accountability, and harmony and peace. The third set of chapters consider positive psychological capital, respectful workplaces, student success, positive psychology and possible selves, self-stories and growth, positive psychology and disability, self-determination and a positive psychology of disability, and a positive psychology for exploring cemeteries. Many chapters address applications and suggest future directions for the field.

The breadth and depth of the book make it a key resource for undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, practitioners, and anyone interested in social, positive, and clinical psychology.

This book develops a fresh approach to understanding social care, by using feminist social reproduction theory to critically assess the undervaluing of waged and unwaged caring labour in homes and communities.

Part One makes the case for why the feminist social reproduction approach offers a dynamic and compelling intellectual framework for exploring adult social care in theoretical and historical terms. Feminist social reproduction theory analyses the paradox that caregiving, in sustaining human lives, is both essential for and continually subordinated to capitalist accumulation. The book explores how this core contradiction has shaped the history of adult social care in homes and communities in the UK, from the post-World War Two welfare settlement to the present day Part Two comprises a case study of adult social care in a southern English region during the pandemic of 2020-2021focusing on caregiving infrastructures across households, communities and home care occupations. It provides detailed insights into how carers, volunteers and home care workers experienced the contradiction of being simultaneously essential to the sustenance and survival of the older and disabled people they cared for, and yet also poorly compensated, invisibilised and taken for granted.

The book will be of interest to scholars and students working on care, social reproduction and feminist theory, from across sociology, social anthropology, social policy, social work, human geography and history.

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Bringing together perspectives from the Global North and South, contributors explore how migrants, from marginalized newcomers to highly skilled professionals, reshape neighborhoods, labor markets, institutions, and political life. They also examine the impact of the history and structure of cities on how migrants settle, access opportunities, and experience belonging or exclusion. Chapters address topics from housing and work to culture, governance, and climate mobility. The Handbook emphasizes that cities are not neutral backdrops but dynamic socio-spatial arenas where rights, resources, and inequalities are organized and contested.

The Handbook on Migration and Cities is a vital resource for scholars and students of human geography, sociology, migration, and urban studies, especially those seeking a comprehensive overview of the migration-city nexus. Practitioners and policy makers working on immigrant integration and urban migration governance will also find great value in its comparative insights.

Examining how Indigenous Dayak communities living within coal mining concessions in Borneo experience and respond to intertwined health and environmental challenges, this book explores how their voices, knowledge, and lived realities can be meaningfully included in the design of local health systems and environmental health initiatives.

Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, the book centres Indigenous standpoints and highlights the importance of local knowledge in shaping more responsive and equitable health design systems. It examines how Dayak communities navigate everyday conditions, negotiate environmental and institutional pressures, and articulate their own visions of health and wellbeing. Engaging both Indigenous perspectives and design approaches from the Global North through the lens of the cultural interface, the book offers a critical account of current health design and environmental systems. It introduces the concept of localised design intention as a way to foreground context, values, and community agency, and to move beyond one-size-fits-all solutions towards approaches that are culturally grounded and socially just.

This book is intended for students, academics, and practitioners in design, health, and environmental fields, as well as policymakers and researchers working with Indigenous communities or interested in inclusive, participatory, and context-sensitive design approaches.

This book provides a fresh perspective on business strategy and business modeling, tailored to the dynamic creative and cultural industries. It bridges classical strategic thinking with contemporary dynamic approaches, introducing an innovative integrated framework that connects business strategy formulation with business modeling design. Featuring case studies from the film, music, gaming, and museum sectors across Europe and the United States, it offers actionable insights based on interviews with industry leaders. Key features include a comprehensive review of business strategy evolution, a detailed examination of business model innovation, and the introduction of the "Human-Centered AI Business Model" in light of AI's growing influence. The book's integrated framework combines academic rigor with practical relevance, equipping readers with strategic tools to navigate complexity and gain competitive advantage. Ideal for researchers, academicians, and advanced students in strategic management, entrepreneurship, and cultural industries, this book also serves as a practical guide for managers and entrepreneurs seeking to design organizations that thrive in complexity. With its unique focus on creative and cultural industries, it appeals to a global audience, particularly in regions with strong policy support for these sectors, such as Europe, Canada, and the United States.

Contributing authors consider why prevailing theories and practices must change in order to strengthen the link between management and humanity, and how this acceptance of change has lasting impacts on business policies. Acknowledging the need to re-invent managerial processes in a human-digital economy, chapters propose that leaders must embrace more empathetic, connected approaches amidst rising technocracies and algorithm-driven business strategies. Tackling key challenges such as climate change, artificial intelligence and global political pressures, the book outlines why leaders must master human interaction in order to transform the way they educate the next generation.

An authoritative source for speculations on the future of the field, A Manifesto for Humanistic Management is a vital resource for scholars and students of business, employment relations and corporate social responsibility. Business leaders, consultants and HR professionals will also benefit from its actionable recommendations.

This open access book aims to explore the dynamic interplay between human behavior and environmental design in shaping future habitats. The interplay between environment and behavior is a critical area of study with profound implications for designing better habitats for human well-being. The book offers a detailed examination of how behavioral science informs environmental design, sustainability practices, and the creation of future living spaces. By integrating theoretical insights with practical applications, the book provides a comprehensive resource for understanding and influencing the ways in which our environments impact and are impacted by human behavior. The book is a conference proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Environment-Behavior Studies, Committee of Environment-Behavior of Architectural Society of China (CEB-ASC 2024)? focusing on the rapidly changing social and technological conditions. CEB-ASC 2024 features keynote speeches and multi-topic parallel sessions from distinguished practitioners, researchers, and educators. Representatives are from Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA), International Association for People-Environment Studies (IAPS), and Man-Environment Research Association (MERA). Professionals and scholars from different fields such as architecture, planning, landscape, psychology, sociology, and artificial intelligence from various countries are invited to the conference, delving into various related topics and contributing wisdom to achieving a more sustainable, intelligent, resilient, healthy, and inclusive living environment. By delving into the core theories, methodologies, and pedagogies, this book promises to be a vital resource for advancing our understanding of how human behavior and environmental design intersect to shape the habitats of tomorrow.

Reimagine what it means to be human in the age of AI

Artificial intelligence was created by modeling human cognition. While AI was built to run on slow and deliberate thinking processes, humans maintained dominance in fast, intuitive, emotion-based cognition: until now.

In The AI Instinct: The Future of AI and Human Decision-Making, Rana Gujral introduces the concept of Artificial General Experience (AGE): systems designed not only to solve problems, but to structure and update a continuous stream of experience. The book follows the rise of AI from a background tool to a force that shapes how we think, feel, and experience the world. Drawing on his pioneering work in cognitive AI at Behavioral Signals, Gujral takes readers to new depths in understanding where AI is headed and provides a fresh perspective on what it means to be human in a world where intelligence is no longer uniquely ours.

Readers gain a clear understanding of how cognitive AI operates in the real world: where it delivers value, quietly steers human decisions, and where the hype runs ahead of reality. From there, the book turns to the path toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and AGE, exploring brain-computer interfaces and other emerging technologies that blend human bodies and machine intelligence, and argues that intelligence is shifting from isolated minds and standalone models to shared hybrid systems that shape how we think and live. The book closes by examining futures beyond AGI, where superintelligence appears not as a distant machine overlord but as composite minds that fuse human and AI capacities into new kinds of persons. Drawing on cognitive science, neuroscience, and philosophy, The AI Instinct asks what truly makes us human and how we can hold onto agency at the frontiers of hybrid thinking.

Perfect for technologists, business leaders, young people preparing for the world they are about to inherit, and any curious reader trying to make sense of AI's rapid ascent, The AI Instinct offers a grounded, forward-looking roadmap for navigating a future in which our choices, our institutions, and even our identities are increasingly tied to and impacted by AI.

St. Joseph's Day in New Orleans investigates the origins and evolution of the St. Joseph's Day holiday, revealing its deep connection to the mid-Lent celebration known as Mi-Careme. Initially conceived as a welcome break from Lent's austerity, mid-Lent featured masked balls, dancing, and exuberant public revelry-traditions later associated solely with Mardi Gras. Through a meticulous review of historic newspaper accounts, archival resources, and city records, Laura Guccione shows that, in New Orleans, St. Joseph's Day and mid-Lent were not separate observances but two names for the same festive occasion. In the city's early and antebellum years, this holiday was a communitywide, inclusive event open to a broad cross section of residents.

After the Civil War and Reconstruction, these holidays changed, with celebrations shifting from public gatherings to private, exclusive balls. As Mardi Gras grew larger and more spectacular, gained cultural importance, and changed shape in response to an increasing Anglo-American influence, St. Joseph's Day lost some of its prominence. Still, the holiday persisted as a more scattered, ethnically rooted tradition, gaining new meaning for groups whose histories have often been overlooked in mainstream narratives of New Orleans culture.

The participation of Black masking Indians, who have long taken to the streets on St. Joseph's Night, can be traced to the holiday's mid-Lent origins. Their celebrations are a form of cultural resistance, emphasizing visibility and pride in a city where Black contributions are often overlooked. The Baby Dolls and other culture bearers also contributed to this intricate mix of street performance and celebration over the long history of St. Joseph's Day.

Sicilian immigrants in New Orleans, who connected the holiday to the feast day of Sicily's patron saint, also played a major role in adapting and reshaping St. Joseph's Day. Through the building of elaborate St. Joseph's altars-traditions brought from Sicily to New Orleans-they found a meaningful way to place themselves within the city's cultural scene. Although St. Joseph's Day is often seen as a shared celebration between Black masking Indians and Sicilian Americans, Guccione argues that the two groups interpret the day differently: One sees it as part of mid-Lent, while the other views it as a sacred feast day. Despite these differences, both groups have historically used St. Joseph's Day as a platform to assert identity, cultural resistance, and community pride.

This book develops a sociological framework for understanding how societies produce and transform meaning. Rather than treating meaning as a fixed property of individuals or texts, it introduces relational meaning-making, in which meanings stabilise in particular situations while remaining open to alternatives. Revisiting Max Weber's concept of Sinn and Alfred Schutz's phenomenology, the book rethinks identity, agency and social structures. Drawing on Weber, Mead and Parsons, it explores why sociological theory has struggled to grasp the dynamics of meaning, and examines the contemporary crisis of meaning, self-referential individuals, and the implications of digital communication and generative AI. This book argues that relational meaning-making is a fundamental process through which society interprets and reshapes itself.

The Palgrave Companion to Stanley Cavell's Aesthetic Thought is a collection dedicated to the intersections between Stanley Cavell's aesthetic thought and an array of major philosophical figures: Kant, Nietzsche, Schelling, Wittgenstein, Austin, Heidegger, Benjamin, Arendt, Derrida, Diamond, Bugbee, and others. It offers a comprehensive account of Cavell's aesthetic legacy by exploring its indebtedness and relevance to these philosophical interlocutors. The volume's premise is that Cavell's conversational mode of philosophizing is intimately connected to his original understanding of art and film and to their centrality in his work. The featured essays elucidate different aspects of this connection, as each chapter reconstructs Cavell's dialogue with another thinker on a subject chosen from the vast gamut of Cavell's work: aesthetic experience, philosophical style, perfectionism, reading, literary form, modernism, film genres, and more. The Palgrave Companion to Stanley Cavell's Aesthetic Thought offers cutting-edge perspectives on traditional Cavellian themes while also opening unexpected avenues of "doing things with Cavell." It addresses scholars and students interested in Cavell, aesthetics and the arts, dialogical thinking, and their significance for modern philosophy at large.

This book explores how people imagine, create, and sustain societal futures through the interplay of imagination, change, and preservation. Drawing on possibility studies and creativity research, it uses the concept of creative preservation as a unifying framework for understanding how communities creatively renew and take care of what already exists rather than only pursuing radical novelty.

Emerging from discussions held at the 4th International Conference of Possibility Studies, the volume begins at the level of global social and ecological systems, examining the extent to which social innovation can function as a force of preservation and regeneration. It then turns to intergenerational creative continuity and ageing to reveal novelty in what societies neglect in old age, before reflecting on methodological considerations from new materialism for addressing work on societal futures. The book then critically discusses the past and present disruptions in academia and proposes perspectives to care for and preserve the possibility for research to contribute meaningfully to societal change. It concludes by exploring the transformative potential of wonder and astonishment in education as a practice of caring and an attitude of exploring individual and collective possibilities.

A thought-provoking response to the growing concerns around how social scientists can provide frameworks to adjust to and contribute to a more caring and sustainable society, this book is for researchers and students in sociology and social theory, education and pedagogy, philosophy and critical theory, cultural and performance studies, creativity studies, sustainability studies, STS, and futures and possibility studies.

From a murdered teenager being interviewed as though he were alive, to a widow speaking with a chatbot made through voice cloning the digital relics of her late husband, AI-generated versions of the deceased are becoming uncanny in their humanlike form. Are personal memories, so central to our sense of personality, individuality and agency, already lost to a future in which we feel compelled to embrace the humanlike comfort of bots?

Memorybot is the story of the consequences of generative AI on human memory. It reveals how in regenerating past lives, and through mining and sharing present ones, AI removes the once memorial limits of a living individual. The most traumatic and joyous parts of human existence are perpetually subject to a continuous extraction of memories. Hoskins argues that we are witnessing the emergence of a new societal paradigm, characterised by the increasing dominance of hybrid memory, the erosion of anonymity, and the effective end of human forgetting.

Written by a leading international scholar of memory studies, Memorybot is a haunting read for anyone concerned about the growing influence of AI technologies and services, and for the fields of media, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, history and memory studies.

This book offers insights into the development and implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 4, the UN's global education agenda. It highlights important tensions within the agenda and identifies key topics to address as we move closer to--and beyond--the conclusion of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, 2015-2030). Novel research, new perspectives, and critical reflection on these topics will help determine the path forward in the coming years. To this end, this book presents an array of critiques, best practices, and promising areas for future activity related not only to SDG 4 but also to future global education agendas. Challenges and barriers to meeting global goals, as well as innovative ideas and solutions, are emphasized to inform SDG4 and its successor. This edited volume benefits from insider insights, practitioner knowledge, scientific findings, and philosophical inquiry related to the progress achieved (and not achieved) in the 2030 Agenda. The book consists of contributions from top academic and policy scholars around the world.

The industrial revolution, environmental crises and socio-economic challenges underline the need for sustainable growth. Financial mechanisms used for systemic restructuring of the economy and reducing its carbon intensity are an effective and at the same time necessary tool for large-scale transformations. The taxonomy of "green" projects is a system of classification of economic activities, categories of projects and assets that contribute to sustainable development and are aimed at improving the efficiency of using existing natural resources, reducing negative environmental impacts, improving energy efficiency, energy conservation, mitigation of climate change and adaptation to climate change. This book evaluates these approaches as a means of systemic restructuring of the economy and of reducing carbon intensity throughout the world. Featuring select contributions presented at the 2nd International Scientific Conference "Green Taxonomy for Sustainable Development" (CONGREENTAX) held in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, this book demonstrates modern achievement in green taxonomy focusing on scientific developments for real-world applications. It emphasizes the importance of a green taxonomy for achieving sustainable development goals by considering both fundamental methods and practical aspects of sustainable development-oriented processes. This book is useful for researchers, scholars, academics, practitioners, and policy makers interested in green taxonomy and sustainable development.

This book explores how histories of technology, engineering, and information science can help us better understand history, while also informing how we envision and build more equitable futures. The chapters extend vibrant conversations in the history of technology as well as other fields, including Ccience and Technology Studies (STS), cybernetic studies, literary studies, development studies, discard studies, engineering ethics, and infrastructure studies. In doing so the authors pay tribute to Ronald R. Kline, one of the leading historians of technology and STS scholars of our era. This book showcases cutting-edge research around the state of technology studies today and its influences across and beyond academic fields.

This book provides a unique look into the civil spaces of post-transformation societies in Central and Eastern Europe. It investigates the dynamics of civil spheres in a region characterized by overcoming dictatorship and experiencing transitions and tremendous social change. Empirically, the book provides ten case studies that analyze the often ambivalent processes of polarization and democratic backsliding, memory culture and the role of emotions, as well as new forms of democratic resilience that have emerged in the region. The book utilizes civil sphere theory and introduces the concept of post-transformation as the central parameter of complex social and political developments in Central and Eastern Europe. In combining these theories, the book illuminates the tensions between institutionalization and informality, trust, mistrust, and the evolution of a "we-ness" and abstract solidarity, and thereby, explores how democratic "software" is programmed against the backdrop of different socialist and post-socialist legacies.

This book contributes to the advancement of knowledge regarding higher education policy and management, not only in Indonesia, but in countries that have economic inequality and are forced to operationalize neoliberal-oriented education, using the analytical approach of Bourdieu's thought. The various chapters demonstrate Bourdieu's thinking for higher education policy analysis, maps neoliberal issues in higher education management, highlights internal and external environmental problems in Indonesian higher education, and showcases a series of comprehensive challenges and criticisms of Indonesia's higher education policy. This book serves as a useful reference for public policy students with an interest in the conceptualization of higher education policy and for higher education leaders to formulate strategic policies and develop higher education policies that are more just and democratic.