This book examines the growing diversity of religions and worldviews across South & Central Asia, and the factors affecting prospects for 'covenantal pluralism' in these regions. Going beyond banal appeals for mere 'tolerance', the theory of covenantal pluralism calls for a constitutional order of religious freedom and equal treatment combined with a culture of practical religious literacy and everyday virtues of engagement across lines of religious difference.

According to the Pew Religious Diversity Index, half of the world's most religiously diverse countries are in Asia. The presence of deep religious/worldview difference is often seen as a potential threat to socio-political cohesion or even as a source of violent conflict. Yet in Asia (as elsewhere) the degree of this diversity is not consistently associated with socio-political problems. Indeed, while religious difference is implicated in some social challenges, there are also many instances of respectful multi-faith engagement, practical collaboration, and peaceful debate.

Volume II offers a pioneering exploration of the prospects for this robust and non-relativistic type of pluralism in South & Central Asia. (Volume I examined East & Southeast Asia.) The chapters in these volumes originally appeared as research articles in a series on covenantal pluralism published by The Review of Faith & International Affairs.

This book examines the growing diversity of religions and worldviews across East & Southeast Asia, and the factors affecting prospects for 'covenantal pluralism' in these regions.

According to the Pew Religious Diversity Index, half of the world's most religiously diverse countries are in Asia. The presence of deep religious/worldview difference is often seen as a potential threat to socio-political cohesion or even as a source of violent conflict. Yet in Asia (as elsewhere) the degree of this diversity is not consistently associated with socio-political problems. Indeed, while religious difference is implicated in some social challenges, there are also many instances of respectful multi-faith engagement, practical collaboration, and peaceful debate.

Whether or not religious/worldview difference is part of a positive pluralism depends on a complex array of legal and cultural conditions. This book explores these dynamics and contingencies in Asia, structuring the inquiry according to the theory of 'covenantal pluralism'. Covenantal pluralist theory calls for (a) a constitutional order characterized by freedom of religion/conscience and equality of rights and responsibilities, combined with (b) a culture of practical religious literacy and virtues of mutual respect and protection.

Volume I offers a pioneering exploration of the prospects for this robust and non-relativistic type of pluralism in East & Southeast Asia. (Volume II examines South & Central Asia.) The chapters in these volumes originally appeared as research articles in a series on covenantal pluralism published by The Review of Faith & International Affairs.

The Twilight of World Trotskyism analyzes the reasons behind the historic failure of the Trotskyist movement around the world.

The book begins this assessment by briefly recapitulating the origins of Trotskyism, as a political current within the communist movement, and elaborating its major elements, before describing the historical development of Trotskyism in the four countries where it has sunk the deepest roots and which house the clear majority of the world's Fourth Internationals: Argentina, Britain, France and the USA. It then proceeds to map the current state of the global Trotskyist movement. Whatever their current size and status, Trotskyist organizations aspire to become mass political parties and lead revolutionary seizures of power. It is therefore appropriate to examine them through the metrics applied to mainstream parties, namely organization, membership and political influence.

The author looks at the dynamics of the Trotskyist movement, focusing in particular on the supposedly harmful effects of the communist movement before then turning to examine the role of Trotskyist organizations in the many revolutionary situations that have appeared since the 1920s and in the various 'cycles of protest' that have occurred in the latter half of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st century. The final section examines the two success stories frequently cited in Trotskyist literature, namely the cases of Bolivia and Sri Lanka. The book concludes by setting out and examining a wide variety of explanations for the chronic and sustained weaknesses of the Trotskyist movement, including its flawed appraisals of contemporary politics and economics, ultra-radical programmes and policies, failures in understanding the dynamics of protest and the baleful legacy of Soviet communism. It is argued that these weaknesses are rooted in Trotskyist doctrine and are therefore integral, not peripheral, features of world Trotskyism.

This volume will be essential reading for activists and scholars interested in the transnational history and politics of the radical left.

This book examines teachers' work in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, where educators grappled with a worldwide virus that profoundly affected teaching and learning. This difficult situation allowed educators and researchers to reflect critically on the enduring labor experiences that persist through this uncertain period, some of them rooted in conditions prevalent long before the pandemic hit.

Written from a perspective that cuts across labor studies and education, the book explains how cultural and legally inscribed expectations of teachers have been remarkably impermeable over time. In particular, the volume focuses on the educational transformations that have taken place worldwide since the pandemic occurred, including reduced educational resources, labor strife, and contradictory governmental directives. As the book articulates, these changes affect some of the most persistent educational topics, including student achievement, student health, and teacher satisfaction.

This sequel to Breslin's critically acclaimed Lessons from Lockdown explores how school leaders, teachers, parents and pupils have navigated their way through and from lockdown. This is the story of 'doing' schooling against the topsy-turvy backdrop of a pandemic that has caused us all to reflect not just on the purpose and substance of education but also the world that schools might, in the future, need to prepare children and young people for. Drawing on the voices of more than a hundred pupils, parents and professionals, it captures the range of experiences as teachers and students grappled with new ways of working, policy chaos and the complexity of schooling and teaching in such a landscape.

Bubble Schools is a must-read for all concerned about the shape that our public education systems take as we begin to move forward from a system-shock that has revealed both the strengths and the weaknesses of education policy, system design and long-established classroom practice.

This book focuses on reconnecting with the lost rich humanitarian content of the Qur'an through a hermeneutical investigation of al-Khidr's story. Through an active engagement with primary and secondary sources, the book provides a new analytic reading of this puzzling Qur'anic story.

By reinvestigating the largely overlooked pluralistic message in the Qur'an, the book debunks an Islamic fundamentalism, which often uses the text as a justification for ill-informed choices that can be easily seen to drag the Qur'anic text in unexpected directions. It introduces current academic controversies over proper addressing of critical issues in Islamic heritage and goes beyond mystic romanticization to clarify blind spots in reading al-Khidr's story. Through rethinking al-Khidr's story, the book addresses the exegetical classical and modern attempts to reconcile the Qur'anic unconditional endorsement of the right to life for everyone regardless of their faith, with the perplexing reference to infidelity as a justification for killing found in chapter 18.

The Qur'anic Dilemma will be of interest to all scholars of Islamic Studies or those interested in Qur'anic interpretation, Muslim ethics, or comparative theology.

This book results from interviews conducted with higher education leaders in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US, and the UK. It gives the reader a deep and personal insight into what leaders faced in transforming their universities through the financial shocks, changes in learning practice, and returns to new ways of working accelerated by the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The features of the book are a series of reflections about issues faced by leaders, recorded, analysed, and reflected on at the time they happened. These are combined in an overall theoretical framework, also informed by other scholarly work in the field, to allow the reader to understand what has happened to our universities and what they will and must do next.

For leaders, staff, students, and employers, the book will give an in-depth context, analysed into a simple agenda, to frame future expectations of the changing world of higher education and its implications for leadership in this and other sectors.

This book encourages readers to think about reading not only as an encounter with written language, but as a lifelong habit of engagement with ideas. We look at reading in four different ways: as linguistic process, personal experience, collective experience, and as classroom practice. We think about how reading influences a life, how it changes over time, how we might return at different stages of life to the same reading, how we might respond differently to ideas read in an L1 and L2. There are 44 teaching activities, all founded on research that explores the nature, value and impact of reading as an authentic activity rather than for language or study purposes alone. We consider what this means for schools and classrooms, and for different kinds of learners. The final part of the book provides practical stepping stones for the teacher to become a researcher of their own classes and learners. The four parts of the book offer a virtuous join between reading, teaching and researching. It will be useful for any teacher or reader who wishes to refresh their view of how reading fits in to the development of language and the development of a reading life.

This book critically analyses early school foreign language teaching policy and practice, foregrounding the influence of the socioeducational and cultural context on how policies are implemented and assessing the factors which either promote or constrain their effectiveness. It focuses on four Asian contexts - Malaysia, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Thailand - while providing a discussion of policy and practice in Canada and Finland as a comparison. Concentrating on the state school sector, it criticises the worldwide trend for a focus on English as the principal or only foreign language taught in primary schools, founded on a rationale that widespread proficiency in English is important for future national success in a globalised economy. It maintains that the economic rationale is not only largely unfounded and irrelevant to the language learning experiences of young children but also that the focus on English exacerbates system inequalities rather than contributing to their reduction. The book argues for a broader perspective on language learning in primary schools, one that values multilingualism and knowledge of regional and indigenous languages alongside a more diverse range of foreign languages. This book will appeal to educational policymakers, researchers and students interested in early foreign language learning in state educational systems worldwide.

Theories of Early Childhood Education continues to provide a comprehensive overview of the various theoretical perspectives in early childhood education from developmental psychology to critical studies, Piaget to Freire. This revised and updated edition includes additional chapters on Michael Alexander Halliday's view of language learning and the attachment theory work of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Each author questions assumptions underpinning the use of theory in early childhood education and explores the implications of these questions for policy and practice. Theories reported in this book are a timely reminder of the importance of the relationship between theory and practice necessary for teacher candidates, teacher educators, and early childhood teachers. Students will learn the fundamentals while in-service teachers and professionals will learn the theory behind field observations for their certification exams.

A practical, accessible handbook for chairing a department.

Over the course of a typical academic career, most faculty will serve at least one term as chair of a department. It's a leadership and service role that's at the very heart of faculty satisfaction and student success, yet few receive any training on how to do the job. How to Chair a Department is a practical, accessible handbook for new and prospective chairs, providing both principles and practices for effective departmental leadership. Based on his dozen years of chairing departments, Kevin Dettmar provides invaluable advice on:

* hiring tenure-track and visiting faculty
* mentoring faculty colleagues at every stage of their careers
* working with staff and other departmental administrators
* managing department resources and budgets
* meeting the needs of students
* dealing with stress and conflict
* connecting the department to the larger university or college as a whole
* overseeing the department's curricula
* maintaining a scholarly or creative profile
* preparing for career moves after chairing a department

How to Chair a Department demystifies this important faculty position and argues that the role of chair, though sometimes seen as a burden, can prove to be a genuine opportunity for personal and professional growth.

A timely book about assessing, coping with, and mitigating burnout in higher education.

Faculty often talk about how busy, overwhelmed, and stressed they are. These qualities are seen as badges of honor in a capitalist culture that values productivity above all else. But for many women in higher education, exhaustion and stress go far deeper than end-of-the-semester malaise.

Burnout, a mental health syndrome caused by chronic workplace stress, is endemic to higher education in a patriarchal, productivity-obsessed culture. In this unique book for women in higher education, Rebecca Pope-Ruark, PhD, draws from her own burnout experience, as well as collected stories of faculty in various roles and career stages, interviews with coaches and educational developers, and extensive secondary research to address and mitigate burnout. Pope-Ruark lays out four pillars of burnout resilience for faculty members: purpose, compassion, connection, and balance. Each chapter contains relatable stories, reflective opportunities and exercises, and advice from women in higher education.

Blending memoir, key research, and reflection opportunities, Pope-Ruark helps faculty not only address burnout personally but also use the tools in this book to eradicate the systemic conditions that cause it in the first place. As burnout becomes more visible, we can destigmatize it by acknowledging that women are not unraveling; instead, women in higher education are reckoning with the productivity cult embedded in our institutions, recognizing how it shapes their understanding and approach to faculty work, and learning how they can remedy it for themselves, their peers, and women faculty in the future.

Contributors: Lee Skallerup Bessette, Cynthia Ganote, Emily O. Gravett, Hillary Hutchinson, Tiffany D. Johnson, Bridget Lepore, Jennifer Marlow, Sharon Michler, Marie Moeller, Valerie Murrenus Pilmaier, Catherine Ross, Kristi Rudenga, Katherine Segal, Kryss Shane, Jennifer Snodgrass, Lindsay Steiner, Kristi Verbeke

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the academic journeys of Dalit students and their lived experiences of systemic exclusion in Indian higher education. It explains their educational journeys beyond caste-based discrimination, specifically analyzing the power dynamics, resilience, and resistance in their institutional life.

The volume

- Describes institutional culture, practices and contexts that contribute to a negative environment for Dalit students, and what changes would be required to create a positive campus climate for them;

- Provides a comparative analysis with the U.S. higher education contexts while drawing theoretical frameworks from critical race theory in educational settings, social reproduction theory, and diversity research;

- Discusses the significance of developing anti-casteist, democratic, and inclusive university spaces in India, with an emphasis on how Indian university campuses can be transformed through diversity, equity, inclusion initiatives, and indispensable support programs to assist Dalit and other vulnerable students

Nuanced and accessible, this book will be of interest to students, teachers, and researchers of education, higher education, sociology, exclusion studies, and Dalit studies. It will also be useful for policymakers; social activists; NGOs; research centres; and those working in the areas of higher education, reservations, public policy, caste, anti-caste, and exclusion studies.

This book critically examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated digital innovation within higher education using case studies from Africa. Imagining a future for post-pandemic higher education, it analyses the challenges and opportunities of remote teaching and learning.

The book explores the structural barriers around access to higher education and how these were reconfigured and amplified by technology-dependent teaching and learning. Case studies from countries across Africa provide unique insights into the challenges experienced by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) during the COVID-19 pandemic, examining examples of emergent pedagogies such as online, mobile and social media-enhanced teaching, and blended learning. The chapters consider online assessment and teacher professional development, critically examining some of the benefits and structural challenges of digital technology integration in the context of pre-existing education disparities (such as students and teachers living in poverty-stricken and highly unequal societies).

Offering invaluable insights into higher education in Africa, the book will be essential reading for researchers, scholars, and students in the fields of higher education study, digital education and educational technology, and African and comparative education. It will also be of interest to higher education managers and policymakers.

This book studies the importance of adopting Green Academia as a systemic long-term counter-intervention strategy against any form of impending pandemics in the post-COVID era and beyond. It argues that anti-nature and capitalistic knowledge systems have contributed to the evolution and growth of COVID-19 across the globe and emphasizes the merits of reinstating nature-based and environment-friendly pedagogical and curricular infrastructures in mainstream educational institutions. The volume also explores possible ways of weaving ecology and the environment as a habitual practice of teaching and learning in an intersectional manner with Science and Technology Studies. With detailed case studies of the green schools in Bhutan and similar practices in India, Kenya, and New Zealand, the book argues for different forms of eco-friendly education systems and the possibilities of expanding these local practices to a global stage.

Part of the Academics, Politics and Society in the Post-COVID World series, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of sociology, cultural studies, decolonial studies, education, ecology, public policy social anthropology, sustainable development, sociology of education, and political sociology.

This book examines Latin narratives produced in the aftermath of the First Crusade and challenges the narrative of supposed brutality and amorality of warfare in this period--instead focusing on the moral and didactic concerns surrounding warfare and violence with which medieval authors wrestled.

The battle oration, a rousing harangue exhorting warriors to deeds of valour, has been regarded as a significant aspect of warfare since the age of Xenophon, and has continued to influence conceptions of campaigning and combat to the present day. While its cultural and chronological pervasiveness attests to the power of this trope, scholarly engagement with the literary phenomenon of the pre-battle speech has been limited. Moreover, previous work on medieval battle rhetoric has only served to reinforce the supposed brutality and amorality of warfare in this period, highlighting appeals to martial prowess, a hatred for 'the enemy' and promises of wealth and glory. This book, through an examination of Latin narratives produced in the aftermath of the First Crusade and the decades that followed, challenges this understanding and illuminates the moral and didactic concerns surrounding warfare and violence with which medieval authors wrestled. Furthermore, while battle orations form a clear mechanism by which the fledgling crusading movement could be explored ideologically, this comparative study reveals how non-crusading warfare in this period was also being reconceptualised in light of changing ideas about just war, authority and righteousness in Christian society.

This volume is perfect for researchers, students and scholars alike interested in medieval history and military studies.

The modern concept of passing leisure hours pleasantly would, in the Middle Ages, have fallen under the rubric of Sloth, a deadly sin. Yet aristocrats of past centuries were not always absorbed in affairs of state or warfare. What did they do in moments of peace, "downtime" as we might call it today? In this collection of essays, scholars from various disciplines investigate courtly modes of entertainment ranging from the vigorous to the intellectual: hunting, jousting, horse racing; physical and verbal games; reading, writing, and book ownership. Favorite pastimes spanned differences of gender and age, and crossed geographical and cultural boundaries. Literary and historical examples come from England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy.

Courtly Pastimes analyzes the underlying rationales for such activities: to display power and prestige, to acquire cultural capital, to instill a sense of community, or to build diplomatic alliances. Performativity ? so crucial in social rituals ? could become transgressive if taken to extremes. Certain chapters explore the spaces of courtliness: literal or imaginary; man-made, natural, or a hybrid of both. Other chapters concern materiality and visual elements associated with courtly pastimes: from humble children's toys and playthings to elite tournament attire, castle murals, and manuscript illuminations.

Reconstructing a Maritime Past argues that rather than applying geo-ethnic labels to shipwrecks to describe "Greek" or "Roman" seafaring, a more intriguing alternative emphasizes a maritime culture's valorization of the Mediterranean Sea. Doing so creates new questions and research agendas to understand the past human relationship with the sea.

This study makes this argument in three sections. Chapters 1 and 2, contrasting intellectual histories of maritime archaeological interpretive approaches common in Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, propose that the former perspective - which embodies contemporary and fluid perceptions of culture - is a better theoretical framework for future research. Chapters 3-5 re-interpret the corpus of submerged sites in the Mediterranean Sea with this approach, arguing that this dataset does not represent "Phoenician," "Muslim," or "Byzantine" seafaring, but the practices of a maritime culture. Key to this section is the author's method that utilizes superimposed polygons to model patterns of maritime activity, generating centennial results at different scales. Having built the models of a maritime culture's valorization of the Mediterranean Sea, Chapter 6 contains the first comparisons of these models to other datasets, questioning the relevance of textual media to understand maritime activity, while finding closer analogues with other archaeological corpora.

By deconstructing interpretive methods in maritime archaeology, offering a new synthesizing interpretive approach that is scalable and decoupled from past perceptions, and critically examining the applicability of various media to illuminate the past maritime experience, this book will appeal to scholars at various stages of their careers.

This book provides empirically grounded insights into the causes, trajectories, and effects of a severe decline in university autonomy and the relationship to other dimensions of academic freedom by comparing in-depth country studies and evidence from a new global timeseries dataset.

Drawing attention to ongoing discussions on standards for monitoring and assessment of academic freedom at regional and international organizations, this book identifies a need for clearer standards on academic freedom and a human rights-based definition of university autonomy. Further, the book calls for accompanying international oversight and the inclusion of criteria related to academic freedom in international university rankings. Five expert-authored case studies on academic freedom from diverse nations (Bangladesh, Mozambique, India, Poland, and Turkey) are included in the volume.

Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative evidence, the book offers a unique and timely contribution to the field and will be of great interest to scholars, researchers, and students in the fields of higher education, human rights, political science and public policy.

This Open Access book is available at www.taylorfrancis.com, and has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Inclusive College Classrooms provides instructors with research-based practices and tools to create an effective and inclusive classroom environment. Filling a visible gap in pedagogical training, this important book responds to current barriers to inclusion in higher education by helping instructors improve the methods they are already using and identify new methods that could enhance their courses. The inclusive approach in this book is informed by critical pedagogy, universal design for learning, and intersectional social justice pedagogies. The authors identify practices in education that exclude historically marginalized groups and outline teaching strategies that can create more inclusive classrooms, where all students can feel heard and represented. This timely volume is packed full of hundreds of example lessons from across a range of disciplines, tips for moving classes online, questions to generate dialogue about various methods, and appendices on lesson planning. With this book in hand, instructors can continually adapt and revise their pedagogy to be more inclusive and effective.

Focusing on teaching and learning in educational institutions, Transforming Professional Practice in Education explores the value of enhancing dialogue to improve both professional relationships and practices. Offering a critique of the present state of education, this book focuses on the belief that education should be about being and becoming human, and how everyone implicated in education learns through dialogue with others, and that humans are relational beings who develop and flourish within reciprocal relationships.

The authors offer an alternative to reductive and systems-driven procedures by building a case for psychologically robust educational methods. They provide an authoritative and theoretically well-grounded rationale for psychological approaches to professional practice to promote debate about the purposes of education. Rich with practical examples, the chapters discuss the risks of professional isolation, ethics vs morals in education, the nature of relationships in education, and interventions that would ground these ideas in practice.

This book is important reading for clinical, educational, and other applied psychologists. It is also of value to those within educational institutions, such as SENDCos and those responsible for the safety of children and young people, who are seeking to develop their understanding of how dialogue enhances professional encounters, and who are looking for alternative ways of engaging with education, which improve mental health and wellbeing.

Atheists are a growing but marginalized group in the American religious patchwork and they have been the target of ridicule and discrimination throughout the nation's history. This book is the first comprehensive study of anti-atheism in the United States. It traces anti-atheism through five centuries of American history from colonization to the era of Donald Trump and contemporary conspiracy ideologies, such as the atheist New World Order. Describing anti-atheist prejudices and explaining the social and psychological mechanisms behind anti-atheist attitudes, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, religious studies and history with interests in religion in the United States.

This practical book offers a multifaceted view of cultural inclusion from the perspective of special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

It provides a road map for teachers to ensure increased participation in arts and culture for children and young people with SEND, defining a series of characteristics for good practice. Chapters explore spaces as diverse as galleries, museums, theatres and performance venues and include a variety of case studies, highlighting the experiences of young people and the organisations who partner with schools.

Cultural Inclusion for Young People with SEND offers a compelling call to action and is an essential resource for those who have the power to improve and support the development of future provision for children with SEND.