Metamorphic Imagery in Ancient Chinese Art and Religion demonstrates that the concept of metamorphism was central to ancient Chinese religious belief and practices from at least the late Neolithic period through the Warring States Period of the Zhou dynasty.

Central to the authors' argument is the ubiquitous motif in early Chinese figurative art, the metamorphic power mask. While the motif underwent stylistic variation over time, its formal properties remained stable, underscoring the image's ongoing religious centrality. It symbolized the metamorphosis, through the phenomenon of death, of royal personages from living humans to deceased ancestors who required worship and sacrificial offerings. Treated with deference and respect, the royal ancestors lent support to their living descendants, ratifying and upholding their rule; neglected, they became dangerous, even malevolent. Employing a multidisciplinary approach that integrates archaeologically recovered objects with literary evidence from oracle bone and bronze inscriptions to canonical texts, all situated in the appropriate historical context, the study presents detailed analyses of form and style, and of change over time, observing the importance of relationality and the dynamic between imagery, materials, and affects.

This book is a significant publication in the field of early China studies, presenting an integrated conception of ancient art and religion that surpasses any other work now available.

Disrupting Chinese Journalism provides a rich insight into the disruptive effects of digital technologies - especially smart-phones - on the Chinese print media market.

Pulling from an extensive corpus of original research, including 191 face-to-face interviews with managers and journalists, and a content analysis of some 4,000 news reports, Haiyan Wang examines how Chinese legacy newspapers have responded to the changing digital media environment, including by adapting their organizational structures, revenue models, and journalistic practices. This book also points to how the government has taken a more interventionist stance on editorial content, and how this has further complicated the digital transitions of the Chinese media.

This book is an invaluable resource for students of media studies, journalism, Chinese area studies, and digital technology.

Digital Intermediation offers a new framework for understanding content creation and distribution across automated media platforms - a new mediatisation process.

This book draws on empirical and theoretical research to carefully identify and describe a number of unseen digital infrastructures that contribute to a predictive media production process through technologies, institutions and automation. Field data is drawn from several international sites, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, London, Amsterdam, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Sydney and Cartagena. By highlighting an increasingly automated content production and distribution process, this book responds to a number of regulatory debates on the societal impact of social media platforms. It highlights emerging areas of key importance that shape the production and distribution of social media content, including micro-platformisation and digital first personalities. This book explains how technologies, institutions and automation are used within agencies to increase exposure for the talent they manage while providing inside access to the processes and requirements of producers who create content for platform algorithms. Finally, it outlines user agency as a strategy for those who seek diversity in the information they access on automated social media content distribution platforms.

The findings in this book provide key recommendations for policymakers working within digital media platforms and will be invaluable reading for students and academics interested in automated media environments.

Inspired by overtly negative coverage by the Western mainstream press of Muslims in particular, and minorities in general, this book asks: Why are negative narratives and depictions of Muslims and other minorities so hard to change?

News reports about Islam and Muslims commonly relate stories that discuss terrorism, violence or other unwelcome or irrational behaviour, or the lack of integration and compatibility of Muslims and Islam with Western values and society. Yet there is little research done on how studies on media reports about minorities seemingly fail to improve the situation. Combining empirical research with a structural analysis of the media industry, this volume presents evidence for the maligned representation of minorities by media corporations, analysing why negative narratives persist and outlining how these can be effectively transformed.

It is an outstanding resource for students and scholars of media, religion, culture, sociology, and Islamic studies, and is also of benefit for journalists, media representatives, and activists looking to effect change for minority representation in the media industry specifically or in society at large.

This book analyses a South-to-South connection between media activists and artivists - artists who are activists - in the Global South.

The authors, Andrea Medrado and Isabella Rega, emphasise the urgent need to engage in South-to-South dialogues in order to create more sustainable connections between Global South communities and as an essential step towards identifying and facing global problems, such as state repression, social inequality and climate crises. Medrado and Rega analyse the characteristics of this connection, identify its unique contributions to the study of media and social change and discuss its long-term sustainability. They do so by focusing on instances when media narratives in countries of different Global South(s) intertwine and transform each other; specifically, the exchanges between Latin America (Brazil) and Africa (Kenya). They explore how media activism and artivism can be used as tools for global movement building and to challenge colonial legacies. They also discuss how to connect people with varied skill sets in different Global South contexts, promoting South-to-South solidarity, in a cross-continental challenge to marginalisation.

Crucial reading for students and scholars of media activism, social movements, global media and communication, development studies and international studies, as well as activists and social movement organisations.

What can social spaces tell us about social relations in society? How do everyday social spaces like teashops, reading rooms, and libraries reify-or subvert-dominant social structures like caste and gender? These are the questions that this book explores through a study of modern Kerala. Using archival material, discourse analysis, participant observation, and personal interviews, this book traces the transformation of public spaces through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The volume focuses on how "modernity" has also been a struggle for access to public spaces, and non-institutional spaces like teashops, markets, public roads, temple grounds, reading rooms, and libraries have all been crucial to how political culture was shaped, and how dominant hegemonies-caste, class, or capital-have been challenged. It suggests that the secular public sphere that emerged in the last century in Kerala was a result of the constant negotiations between conflicting ideas which were put to test in these social spaces. At a time when digital spaces are fast replacing physical ones, this book is a timely reminder of the struggles that led to the emergence of secular public spaces in Kerala. It contributes to similar studies on public space that have emerged from other parts of the world over the last decades.

A major contribution to understanding modern India, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of social history, political science, political sociology, gender studies, linguistics, and South Asian studies.

Never before in human history have vegetarianism and a plant-based economy been so closely associated with sustainability and the promise of tackling climate change. Nowhere is this phenomenon more visible than in India, which is home to the largest number of vegetarians globally and where vegetarianism is intrinsic to Hinduism. India is often considered a global model for vegetarianism.

However, in this book, which is the outcome of eight months of fieldwork conducted among vegetarian and non-vegetarian producers, traders, regulators and consumers, I show that the reality in India is quite different, with large sections of communities being meat-eaters. In 2011, vegetarian/veg/green and nonvegetarian/ non-veg/brown labels on all packaged foods/drinks were introduced in India. Paradoxically, this grand scheme was implemented at a time when meat and non-vegetarian food production, trade and consumption were booming. The overarching argument of the book is that a systematic study of the complex and changing relationship between vegetarian and non-vegetarian understandings and practices illuminates broader transformations and challenges that relate to markets, the state, religion, politics and identities in India and beyond.

The book's empirical focus is on the changing relationship between vegetarian/ non-vegetarian as understood, practised and contested in middle-class India, while remaining attentive to the vegetarian/non-vegetarian modernities that are at the forefront of global sustainability debates. Through the application of this approach, the book provides a novel theory of human values and markets in a global middle-class perspective.

This study of Lebanese historical thought and its role in national identity formation in the eighteenth century focuses on a sample of historians, mainly Christians, who lived and wrote during the Shihabi Emirate from 1697 till the Egyptian invasion in 1831.

These historians, who represent different trends in historical writing, were able to develop the idea of Lebanon as a unique entity and as a haven and to underline its specificity and distinctiveness. With a focus on primary sources, this book endeavors to penetrate into the main concerns and ways of thinking at this time when a Lebanese identity started to bloom. In doing so, it discovers a neglected century as a fruitful and rich period in the history of Lebanon and a prelude to nineteenth-century awakening.

This book will be of interest to scholars of the history and historiography of Lebanon and the Middle East, with relevance for specialized courses in the fields of history and historiography at universities.

This timely collection of accessible essays interrogate queer television at the start of the twenty- first century. The complex political, cultural, and economic milieu requires new terms and conceptual frameworks to study television and media through a queer lens. Gathering a range of well-known scholars, the book takes on the relationship between sexual identity, desire, and television, breaking new ground in a context where existing critical vocabularies and research paradigms used to study television no longer hold sway in the ways they used to. The anthology sets out to confound conventional categories used to organize queer television scholarship, like "programming," "industry," "audience," "genre," and "activism." Instead, the anthology offers four interpretive frames - historicity, temporal play, ideological limitation and industrial contextualization - in the interest of creating new queer tools for studying digital television in the contemporary age.

This collection is suitable for scholars and students studying queer media studies, television studies, gender studies, and sexuality studies.

This book examines transnational civil society-based democracy-promoting resistance activities in Asia in a global era, focusing on the cases of Myanmar and Palestine.

The work contributes to our understanding of the nexus between globalization, power and democracy by examining: (i) the ways in which globalization/global governance are influencing various resistance practices of the civil societies in Myanmar and Palestine, and what this means for local democracy promotion; and (ii) the ways in which these two civil societies influence and have a democracy-promoting impact on their respective communities. It is guided by the overarching question of how civil society-based resistance contributes to local democracy in Myanmar and Palestine. The book is structured as follows: both civil resistance cases begin with an overview of each country's non-violent resistance history, and the findings are then presented for the two cases, i.e., the pro-democracy movements in the Saffron uprising in Myanmar and the Bil'in village struggle against the Israeli Security Barrier plans to build through their farmlands. Then follows a presentation of the life-story interview made with two members from the respective campaigns. A concluding chapter proposes some new theoretical insights for how civil resistance can impact on democracy. The book empirically and theoretically contributes to our understanding of how civil society-based resistance and democracy interrelate in a global era.

This book will be of much interest to students of civil resistance, democracy, Asian studies, Middle Eastern studies and international relations in general.

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

This book develops an original theory of performative beauty. Philosophical aesthetics has largely neglected one's own actions as a potential experience of the beautiful. Throughout the book, the author uses his own experiences of Argentine tango as a case study; one important incentive for social dancing is to have pleasurable and beautiful experiences.

This book begins by investigating the methodological causes for why beauty in modernity has been seen to result only from contemplating external objects. It then builds a theory of performative beauty that incorporates findings from new phenomenology, neuroaesthetics, enactivism, and somaesthetics and that reassesses existing inquiries of beauty. The result is an account that identifies kinaesthetic awareness as the point of emergence of both theory and practice, of creation (poiesis) and perception (aisthesis), and of moving (agency) and being moved (reception). Performative beauty is the pleasure of being moved by the dance where the dancer feels both as a creative improvisor and as an integrated part of the activity itself.

A Somaesthetics of Performative Beauty-Tangoing Desire and Nostalgia will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, dance studies, performance studies, and related fields of artistic research.

Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This book uses critical metaphor analysis to show from a cognitive perspective how climate change is conceptualized in the USA. The author enriches his linguistic analysis with cognitive aspects such as source-target domain mapping and metaphor opposition to explain how metaphor works in terms of framing this issue, drawing on a Critical Discourse Analysis-informed framework to demonstrate how politicians represent the climate crisis in their attempts to trigger social change. Using a data set of speeches given by US-based politicians, governors and mayors speaking in the context of the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement, the book categorizes metaphors on different conceptions such as war, construction, unfairness, journey, and cleanliness to bridge the gap between ecolinguistics and critical metaphor analysis. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in fields including applied linguistics, political communication, ecolinguistics,and cognitive linguistics and psychology.

This book is a fierce argument against social and caste discrimination in India, especially untouchability and emphatic call for social justice. Written by a first-generation Kannada Dalit writer, the book provides an insider's view of caste discrimination as the author has lived through and experienced it. It traces the roots of present-day activism against caste discrimination, the influence of Ambedkar, the rise of Hindutva, and the role of Dalit literatures in shaping discourses around caste in India.

An invigorating collection of essays and speeches by Mudnakudu Chinnaswamy, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of discrimination, literature, politics and political philosophy, exclusion studies, race, social justice, cultural studies, and South Asian studies.

This book draws upon diverse approaches and understandings of sustainability transformations, social transitions and environmental accountabilities. It presents case studies that highlight real-world consequences of changing ideas about how best to achieve effective and durable sustainability transformations and examines how environmental accountabilities and social transitions influence sustainability transformations. Each chapter provides insights regarding how new knowledge and perspectives matter for whether, when, and how people, governments, corporations and international organisations seek and pursue solutions to social-ecological challenges and sustainability dilemmas. It pays sustained attention to whether and how understandings and applications of accountability can improve international sustainability transformations. The chapters presented in this book consider some pressing questions concerning social transitions and environmental accountabilities: how can they contribute to sustainability transformations, how do they influence the scalability of sustainability transformations, and, how can such sustainability transformations become durable?

This book explores the relationship between the production of new urban spaces and illiberal community-making in contemporary India. It is based on an ethnographic study in Noida, a city at the eastern fringe of the state of Uttar Pradesh, bordering national capital Delhi.

The book demonstrates a flexible planning approach being central to the entrepreneurial turn in India's post-liberalisation urbanisation, whereby a small-scale industrial township is transformed into a real-estate driven modern city. Its real point of departure, however, is in the argument that this turn can enable a form of illiberal community-making in new cities that are quite different from older metropolises. Exclusivist forms of solidarity and symbolic boundary construction - stemming from the differences across communities as well as their internal heterogeneities - form the crux of this process, which is examined in three distinct but often interspersed socio-spatial forms: planned middle-class residential quarters, 'urban villages' and migrant squatter colonies.

The book combines radical geographical conceptualisations of social production of space and neoliberal urbanism with sociological and anthropological approaches to urban community-making. It will be of interest to researchers in development studies, sociology, urban studies, as well as readers interested in society and politics of contemporary India/South Asia.

This book is about the conflict which resolved the Greek-Turkish War of 1919-1922: the Great Offensive. On 26 August 1922, the army of the GNA executed the Great Offensive against the Greek defence line extending from the Bay of Gemlik to the Meander River. The Turkish Forces split the Greek Army into two large groups, annihilated one of the groups in the field at the Battle of Dumlupinar on 30 August and pursued the remaining forces of the Greek Army towards the Aegean and Marmara coasts until 18 September. Within these 24 days, the face of Western Anatolia changed unalterably: numerous towns, villages and cities of Western Anatolia were reduced to ashes.

This conflict was a turning point in the histories of Turkey and Greece, as it played a significant role in shaping the present-day demographic and geopolitical landscapes of both nations. It resulted in a population exchange in 1923 that dramatically altered the lives of Muslims in Greece and Greek Orthodox people in Turkey and paved the way to the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. Despite the outcome of this war and the existence of a rich literature on its military and political history, the landscapes, memoryscapes and material culture have not been systematically investigated.

This book bridges that gap via an archaeological, historical and oral-historical study of the Great Offensive and its aftermath. With its wide chronological perspective, this book is not a pure analysis of a historical war, it is instead a journey into the foundation myth of the Turkish Republic and the ideological foundations of the Turkish state.

This volume demonstrates how Bolivia is part of a regional border system and intends to contribute to public policies, related to violence and distortions stemming from global illegal markets, specifically for vulnerable populations.

The book offers a multinational investigation on the changing and unknown image of the relationship systems that surround countries and, in particular, the structuring and functions of their borders. The chapters offer a reflection on how the lines of borders connect us to distant regions, which defines the real scope of the borders of globalization, while also impacting trade, labor flows, and organized crime. The book reveals how Bolivia has advanced from an image of borders, built through territorial disputes with neighbors, to today's conception of them. In doing so, it argues that underlying tensions have developed between the local and the global, namely, Bolivia inserting itself into the global system of illegal markets, thereby generating critical scenarios for various social groups.

Bolivia's Border System comprises the first research into Bolivia's border subsystem and illegal markets. It will be a vital resource for researchers of Bolivia and Bolivian history, international relations, security studies, border studies, and contemporary Latin America.

This volume examines the war in Ukraine from a range of historical, military and feminist perspectives, exploring aspects such as the attitude of neighboring states, political leadership, local government, social mechanisms and the cultural and media policies of both Russia and Ukraine.
The contributors explain how Ukraine shaped its identity following its separation from the USSR and how Russia built its military power and implemented its invasion plans. Considering the impact of the war not only in Ukraine, but also the Baltic states, chapters discuss the leadership role of President Zelensky, patriotic attitudes, the victimization of women and the impact on Poland as it helps and aid to huge numbers of refugees.
Providing much needed context on the Russia-Ukraine war, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, political science, gender studies, international and national security and public politics.

This edited book analyzes Kosovo's foreign policy and bilateral relations with the United States and several European countries.

After the 1999 liberation from Serbia, Kosovo built close relations with various countries that supported it in the process of reconstruction, economic stabilization, institution-building, and state-building. From 1999 to 2008, many of these states were politically and operationally engaged in Kosovo under the leadership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). Since its independence in 2008, the Republic of Kosovo has adopted a foreign policy in accordance with its values and strategic interests, a foreign policy that aims to strengthen Kosovo's security and foster its socio-economic prosperity in collaboration with primarily Western countries. In this volume, each chapter is dedicated to Kosovo's bilateral relations with a selected state with which it has established diplomatic relations. The book shows that Kosovo has been able to develop and achieve strong bilateral relations with major allies and partners. It argues that Kosovo's foreign policy aims to develop, maintain, and enhance the position of the young state on the international stage. The volume bridges various methodological and disciplinary approaches in order to present Kosovo's foreign policy objectives and the trajectory of its relations with some of its most important international partners.

This book will be of interest to students of Balkan politics, state-building, foreign policy, and International Relations.

Are we seeing the presidentialization of politics in Japan? Certainly, many recent prime ministers have demonstrated powerful leadership, notably Junichiro Koizumi and Shinzo Abe. While the phenomenon of presidentialization has been much discussed for years, the Japanese case has not received much attention in the English language.

Iwasaki analyses the state of Japanese politics using the established analytical framework of presidentialization - looking at leadership power resources, leadership autonomy, and the personalization of the electoral process - and assesses the factors that have been claimed to lead to similar changes in other countries. He argues that there are also unique variables that contribute to the presidentialization of Japanese politics. Most notably, the introduction of public subsidies to political parties and electoral reform in 1994.

A valuable contribution to the global scholarship on presidentialization, which will be of particular interest to scholars of Japanese politics.

This book reflects on the reasons for the decline of international cooperation in world politics and studies ways to restore legitimacy in the international order. It engages with the concept of legitimacy in international relations theories and practices to examine the discussions around power shifts, the decline of liberalism, demands for inclusive international architectures, and challenges to multilateralism, as well as established norms by leaders and nationalisms. It studies the impact of the post-COVID-19 world order on the nature of power in the international system and changes in normative concerns of security. The volume also interrogates political legitimacy through an area studies lens by examining the concept of legitimacy separately in the USA, Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

An important and timely text featuring contributions from eminent scholars, this book will be of use to students and researchers of modern history, political science, and international relations. It will also be of interest to think tanks and policy-making bodies concerned with international affairs and foreign policy.

This book analyses credit crisis issues in China from the aspect of individuals, enterprises, and government through investigations of six Chinese urban and rural areas.

After China's reform and opening up in the 1970s, a slew of new problems involving integrity, trust, and credit appeared with the establishment of a market economy and the creation of new business opportunities. To track these phenomena down to their very origins and to explore the theoretical principles underlying them through a truly holistic sociology, this book highlights a native Chinese perspective when dissecting and analysing the characteristics of their origins, mechanisms, and manifestations.

The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of economic sociology, Chinese studies, and those who are interested in the sociology of credibility in general.

Drawing on historiography of the Japanese occupation in the Chinese, Japanese, and English languages, this book examines the politics of the Manchukuo puppet state from the angle of notable Chinese who cooperated with the Japanese military and headed its government institutions.

The war in Asia between 1931 and 1945, and particularly the early years of the conflict from 1931 to 1937, is a topic of world history that is often glossed over or misinterpreted. Much of the research and public opinion on this period in China, Japan, and the West deem these Chinese figures to be traitors, particles of Japanese colonialism, and collaborators under occupation. In contrast, this book highlights the importance of analyzing the national ideas of Manchukuo's Chinese government leaders as a method of understanding Manchukuo's operating mechanisms, Sino-Japanese interactions, and China's turbulent history in the early twentieth century.

Chinese Government Leaders in Manchukuo, 1931-1937 fills a gap in this research and is an ideal resource for scholars studying wartime Asia and Europe, as well as non-specialist readers who are interested in collaboration in general.

This book analyses the intersections between contemporary art and environmental activism in Indonesia.

Exploring how the arts have promoted ecological awareness from the late 1960s to the early 2020s, the book shows how the arts have contributed to societal change and public and political responses to environmental crises. This period covers Indonesia's rapid urban development under the totalitarian New Order regime (1967-1998) as well as the enhanced freedom of expression, alternative development models, and environmental problems under the democratic governments since 1998. The book applies the concept of 'artivism' to refer to the vital role of art in activism. It seeks to identify and contextualise both the potential and limits of environmental artivism in Indonesia, a country whose vibrant art scenes and monumental social transformations provide a productive laboratory for exploring the power of creativity as a social and political change agent. It provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary art from Indonesia, with an in-depth analysis of artivists who seek to address and find solutions for some of the most pressing environmental issues of our times.

With its detailed, empirical approach to environmental art from Southeast Asia, this project fills in an important gap in the literature on art and activism. It is aimed at academics, students, artists, curators, policymakers, activists, and general readers with an interest in the environment, art history, and Indonesian culture, society, and politics.

This book discusses the significance of social geography, a multidimensional sub-discipline of georgraphy encompassing social health, social security and social ethos. It presents the socio-spatial dynamics of the population in India through an understanding of the various issues related to migration, urbanisation, unemployment, poverty and public health. With a thorough analysis of various social indicators relating to health, education, income and employment, the volume presents a detailed picture of the social geography of India.

It discusses in detail,

• The origin, nature and scope of social geography, its relations with other social sciences and applications
• The nature and importance of social well-being along with welfare geography and the role of welfare state in ensuring social well-being
• The population of India and its attributes
• The status and spatial patterns of various social indicators relating to health, education and income and employment
• The composite indices which aggregate several social indicators such as the Human Development Index, Multidimensional Poverty Index and Sustainable Developmental Goals Index in the context of India.

This comprehensive book will be useful for students, researchers and teachers of social geography, human geography, population geography, demography and sociology. The book can also be used by students preparing for exams like civil services, UPSC, PSC and other competitive exams.

Mental health is a rapidly increasing topic in the field of sport psychology. As the relevance of athletes' mental health has come to prominence through emerging research, there is a high demand for evidence-based practice in order to promote athletes' mental health and prevent mental disorders as well as maladaptive syndromes. However, there is currently no comprehensive overview available that highlights the empirical evidence for the constructs of mental health, illustrating the latest developments in research, or that highlights implications for future science and practice.

The Routledge Handbook of Mental Health in Elite Sport delivers such an understanding and overview for this field, offering students, researchers, mental health professionals, applied sport psychologists, and coaches a state-of-the-art and insightful summary of science in the newly emerged field of clinical sport psychology and mental health in athletes.

This thorough volume covers major current and emerging topics on mental health and mental illness (e.g., depression), subclinical syndromes (e.g., burnout), as well as a comprehensive overview of research on prevention (e.g., green exercise) and treatment of mental health disorders in athletes and will be a vital resource for researchers, academics, and students in the fields of sport psychology, clinical psychology, sport coaching, sport sciences, health psychology, and physical activity and related disciplines.