This is the first critical, in-depth academic study of FC Barcelona (also known as Barca), one of the world's great football clubs, exploring the historical, political, cultural and commercial dimensions of this global sporting institution.

The book examines why and how the club grew from its genesis as a small sporting organisation in the developing urban landscape of Barcelona in 1899 to become a contemporary giant that has both shaped and transcended football. It considers how globalisation, cultural identity and political ideology can help us to understand the development of Barca, but also how the growth of the phenomenon of FC Barcelona helps us to better understand those forces shaping contemporary global societies. It brings together leading scholars from around the world to examine key themes such as governance, regional and national politics, storytelling, fandom, digital media, branding, commercialisation and sport diplomacy, exploring topics such as the European Super League fiasco and the rise of Lionel Messi as a global icon. It also includes a series of chapters looking at the importance of FC Barcelona around the world, including in Latin America, the United States, Africa and East Asia.

This illuminating, multi-disciplinary study of FC Barcelona is essential reading for anybody with an interest in football, Catalonian politics and culture, or the history, politics, culture and business of sport.

Global and authoritative, this textbook maps modern, live experience media, the categories that thrive on real-time engagement and human connection - even in the age of synthetic content, AI and the Metaverse. Sports and sports betting, festivals, comedy, concerts, tours and theme parks are covered - plus theatre, trade events, conventions, museums and galleries, and immersive media.

Live media events included are Burning Man, Glastonbury, the Indian Premier League, the English Premier League, Olympics, NBA and Bundesliga - plus sell-out Taylor Swift tours, the World Cup, Super Bowl, Ryder Cup and Formula One. Business models in this media category start with ticketing and advertising - now amplified with ecommerce, affiliate marketing, subscription and gambling transactions. Deep dives ask: Why is Saudi Arabia investing billions into golf and football? Why is standup comedy big in Nigeria? How are Broadway and the West End evolving? What do immersive technologies like Abba Voyage and the MSG Sphere offer for the future?

With class questions, a quiz, summaries and slides for each chapter, this is a guide and course structure for anyone at university level or in industry studying the media, music, entertainment, events, exhibitions, sports, social media or gambling industries.

An investigation of what it means to have children-morally, philosophically and emotionally

"Do you want to have children?" is a question we routinely ask each other. But what does it mean to create a child? Is this decision always justified? Does anyone really have the moral right to create another person? In Begetting, Mara van der Lugt attempts to fill in the moral background of procreation. Drawing on both philosophy and popular culture, van der Lugt does not provide a definitive answer on the morality of having a child; instead, she helps us find the right questions to ask.

Most of the time, when we talk about whether to have children, what we are really talking about is whether we want to have children. Van der Lugt shows why this is not enough. To consider having children, she argues, is to interrogate our own responsibility and commitments, morally and philosophically and also personally. What does it mean to bring a new creature into the world, to decide to perform an act of creation? What does it mean to make the decision that life is worth living on behalf of a person who cannot be consulted? These questions are part of a conversation we should have started long ago. Van der Lugt does not ignore the problematic aspects of procreation-ethical, environmental and otherwise. But she also acknowledges the depth and complexity of the intensely human desire to have a child of our own blood and our own making.

Highlights how millennial Jewish stars symbolize national politics in US media

Jewish stars have longed faced pressure to downplay Jewish identity for fear of alienating wider audiences. But unexpectedly, since the 2000s, many millennial Jewish stars have won stellar success while spotlighting (rather than muting) Jewish identity. In Millennial Jewish Stars, Jonathan Branfman asks: what makes these explicitly Jewish stars so unexpectedly appealing? And what can their surprising success tell us about race, gender, and antisemitism in America? To answer these questions, Branfman offers case studies on six top millennial Jewish stars: the biracial rap superstar Drake, comedic rapper Lil Dicky, TV comedy duo Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, "man-baby" film star Seth Rogen, and chiseled film star Zac Efron.
Branfman argues that despite their differences, each star's success depends on how they navigate racial antisemitism: the historical notion that Jews are physically inferior to Christians. Each star especially navigates racial stigmas about Jewish masculinity-stigmas that depict Jewish men as emasculated, Jewish women as masculinized, and both as sexually perverse. By embracing, deflecting, or satirizing these stigmas, each star comes to symbolize national hopes and fears about all kinds of hot-button issues. For instance, by putting a cuter twist on stereotypes of Jewish emasculation, Seth Rogen plays soft man-babies who dramatize (and then resolve) popular anxieties about modern fatherhood. This knack for channeling national dreams and doubts is what makes each star so unexpectedly marketable.
In turn, examining how each star navigates racial antisemitism onscreen makes it easier to pinpoint how antisemitism, white privilege, and color-based racism interact in the real world. Likewise, this insight can aid readers to better notice and challenge racial antisemitism in everyday life.

This book offers a timely and compelling look at religion and poverty, focusing primarily on the two largest world religions, Christianity and Islam, and considering religion and poverty in the United States and international contexts.

Written by social scientists, the book incorporates relevant theology with a focus on how theology is lived in relation to issues of poverty. Topics include religion as it relates to social service provision, lived religion, philanthropy, faith-based social movements, public policy, and more. This volume synthesizes existing research on religion and poverty and includes new original research.

It is an essential resource for upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses focused on religion and poverty and is also an outstanding supplementary text for broader courses in religion, poverty, social welfare, philanthropy, and non-profit organizations.

Chapter [#1, 2 and 5] 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.

Honorable Mention, 2025 ACIS Lawrence J. McCaffrey Prize for Books on Irish America
A historical exploration of the Irish image in popular culture
It only took a century or so to segue from phrases like "No Irish Need Apply" to "Kiss Me, I'm Irish" in American popular culture. Indeed, the transformation of the Irish image is a fascinating blend of political, cultural, racial, commercial, and social influences.
The Green Space examines the variety of factors that contributed to remaking the Irish image from downtrodden and despised to universally acclaimed. To understand the forces that molded how people understand "Irish" is to see the matrix-the green space-that facilitated their interaction between the 1890s and 1960s. Marion R. Casey argues that, as "Irish" evolved between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, a visual and rhetorical expanse for representing ethnicity was opened up in the process. The evolution was also transnational; both Ireland and the United States were inextricably linked to how various iterations of "Irish" were deployed over time-whether as a straightforward noun about a specific people with a national identity or a loose, endlessly malleable adjective only tangentially connected to actual ethnic identity.
Featuring a rich assortment of sources and images, The Green Space takes the history of the Irish image in America as a prime example of the ways in which culture and identity can be manufactured, repackaged, and ultimately revolutionized. Understanding the multifaceted influences that shaped perceptions of "Irishness" holds profound relevance for examining similar dynamics within studies of various immigrant and ethnic communities in the US.

A panoramic history of the Muslim world from the age of the Prophet Mu?ammad to the birth of the modern era

This book describes and explains the major events, personalities, conflicts, and convergences that have shaped the history of the Muslim world. The body of the book takes readers from the origins of Islam to the eve of the nineteenth century, and an epilogue continues the story to the present day. Michael Cook thus provides a broad history of a civilization remarkable for both its unity and diversity.

After setting the scene in the Middle East of late antiquity, the book depicts the rise of Islam as one of the great black swan events of history. It continues with the spectacular rise of the Caliphate, an empire that by the time it broke up had nurtured the formation of a new civilization. It then goes on to cover the diverse histories of all the major regions of the Muslim world, providing a wide-ranging account of the key military, political, and cultural developments that accompanied the eastward and westward spread of Islam from the Middle East to the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific.

At the same time, A History of the Muslim World contains numerous primary-source quotations that expose the reader to a variety of acutely insightful voices from the Muslim past.

Why and how local coffee bars in Italy-those distinctively Italian social and cultural spaces-have been increasingly managed by Chinese baristas since the Great Recession of 2008

Italians regard espresso as a quintessentially Italian cultural product-so much so that Italy has applied to add Italian espresso to UNESCO's official list of intangible heritages of humanity. The coffee bar is a cornerstone of Italian urban life, with city residents sipping espresso at more than 100,000 of these local businesses throughout the country. And yet, despite its nationalist bona fides, espresso in Italy is increasingly prepared by Chinese baristas in Chinese-managed coffee bars. In this book, Grazia Ting Deng explores the paradox of "Chinese espresso"-the fact that this most distinctive Italian social and cultural tradition is being preserved by Chinese immigrants and their racially diverse clientele.

Deng investigates the conditions, mechanisms, and implications of the rapid spread of Chinese-owned coffee bars in Italy since the Great Recession of 2008. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic research in Bologna, Deng describes an immigrant group that relies on reciprocal and flexible family labor to make coffee, deploying local knowledge gleaned from longtime residents who have come, sometimes resentfully, to regard this arrangement as a new normal. The existence of Chinese espresso represents new features of postmodern and postcolonial urban life in a pluralistic society where immigrants assume traditional roles even as they are regarded as racial others. The story of Chinese baristas and their patrons, Deng argues, transcends the dominant Eurocentric narrative of immigrant-host relations, complicating our understanding of cultural dynamics and racial formation within the shifting demographic realities of the Global North.

Explores the long history of anti-Zionist and non-Zionist American Jews
Throughout the twentieth century, American Jewish communal leaders projected a unified position of unconditional support for Israel, cementing it as a cornerstone of American Jewish identity. This unwavering position served to marginalize and label dissenters as antisemitic, systematically limiting the threshold of acceptable criticism. In pursuit of this forced consensus, these leaders entered Cold War alliances, distanced themselves from progressive civil rights and anti-colonial movements, and turned a blind eye to human rights abuses in Israel. In The Threshold of Dissent, Marjorie N. Feld instead shows that today's vociferous arguments among American Jews over Israel and Zionism are but the newest chapter in a fraught history that stretches from the nineteenth century.
Drawing on rich archival research and examining wide-ranging intellectual currents-from the Reform movement and the Yiddish left to anti-colonialism and Jewish feminism-Feld explores American Jewish critics of Zionism and Israel from the 1880s to the 1980s. The book argues that the tireless policing of contrary perspectives led each generation of dissenters to believe that it was the first to question unqualified support for Israel. The Threshold of Dissent positions contemporary critics within a century-long debate about the priorities of the American Jewish community, one which holds profound implications for inclusion in American Jewish communal life and for American Jews' participation in coalitions working for justice.
At a time when American Jewish support for Israel has been diminishing, The Threshold of Dissent uncovers a deeper-and deeply contested-history of intracommunal debate over Zionism among American Jews.

This timely and lively introduction to exploring the intersection of religion and humour evaluates existing scholarship and methodologies within the field, arguing for a culturally critical approach to the study.

Hinged on a qualitative sociological framework, this book asks questions about the construction, presentation, and purpose of humour in religious contexts. It is broken down by theoretical approach, with chapters covering:

• a "comparative religions" approach;
• a theological approach;
• how social sciences offer us useful tools for research; and
• a review of existing theoretical models.

As the first volume to introduce the field of religion and humour, this engaging book is essential reading for students approaching the topic for the first time, and for anyone with an interest in related fields such as religion and popular culture and humour studies.

Focusing on complex entanglements of religion and gender from a diversity of perspectives, this book explores how women enact agencies in transcultural Hindu and Buddhist settings. The chapters draw on original, in-depth empirical research in various contexts in South Asian religious traditions. Today, in an increasing number of such contexts, women are able to undergo monastic and priestly education, receive ordination/initiation as nuns and priestesses, and are accepted as ascetic religious leaders. They are starting to establish new religious communities within conservative traditions, occupying religious leadership positions on par with men. This volume considers the historical background, contemporary trajectories, and potential impact of the emergence of these new and powerful female agencies in conservative South Asian religious traditions. It will be of particular interest to scholars of religion, women's and gender studies, and South Asian studies.

Narratives of Qualitative Research uses a novel form of writing about how to do qualitative research called a praxis narrative. Each narrative is told from the author's perspective in carrying out one of his past research studies in the social sciences.

Told chronologically and in a first-person voice, the narratives position the reader alongside the narrator so as to vicariously experience how research happens in its situated particulars. Rather than a set of idealizations and universalized pronouncements, the author reveals what really goes on when one is in the thick of complex and challenging research studies, the points of trouble along with the successes. This will be relevant to researchers who have already undertaken one or more empirical research studies (though not necessarily using qualitative approaches) and now find themselves facing something new: a new analytic method, a new theoretical lens, a new form of data collection, a new domain of research questions, a new rhetorical approach. This requires letting go of the secure handholds of prescribed methods and responding to the contingencies that arise in the midst of the research. The reader is invited to follow along as the author makes visible his praxis of qualitative research.

Unlike more conventional texts, in this unique alternative, the reader can follow the author's journey through his research studies as a way to reorient their conception of qualitative research and their own praxis of it. This is fascinating reading for qualitative researchers and students taking qualitative research courses, across the social sciences, education, and behavioural sciences.

Across humanities disciplines, public scholarship brings academics and community members and organizations together in mutually-beneficial partnership for research, teaching, and programming. While the field of publicly engaged humanities scholarship has been growing for some time, there are few volumes that have attempted to define and represent its scope. The Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship brings together wide-ranging case studies sharing perspectives on this work, grounded in its practice in the United States.

The collection begins with chapters reflecting on theories and practices of public humanities scholarship. The case studies that follow are organized around six areas of particular impact in public humanities scholarship: Informing contemporary debates; amplifying community voices and histories; helping individuals and communities navigate difficult experiences; preserving culture in times of crisis and change; expanding educational access; and building and supporting public scholarship. The Companion concludes with a glossary, introducing select concepts. Taken together, these resources offer an overview for students and practitioners of public humanities scholarship, creating an accessible vocabulary rooted in the practices that have so advanced academic and community life.

Although drawing on case studies from the US, these examples offer perspectives and insights relevant to public humanities around the world. This book will be of interest to anyone working within the public humanities or wanting to make their work public and engage with wider communities.

Winner of the Choice 2025 Outstanding Academic Title Award

A timely and insightful exploration of the vital relationships among effective communication, education, peace, and democracy

Communication and Education: Promoting Peace and Democracy in Times of Crisis and Conflict explores the complexities of addressing divisive societal challenges, reducing conflicts, and building and sustaining peace and democracy around the world. Contributions by an international panel of experts provide evidence-based practices, findings from ongoing research projects, policy analyses, and cutting-edge theories, frameworks, and models for confronting global challenges to peace and democracy.

Examining the crucial role of crisis communication and education on a global scale, this research-based compendium covers a broad range of key topics, such as democratizing education, promoting peace through complexity science, understanding how factionalism threatens democracy, encouraging citizen participation, and more. Throughout the text, the authors highlight the need for equity, compassion, critical thinking, and active engagement to create a sustainable future based on democratic values.

Designed to enhance the knowledge base of crisis communication related to crises impacting education, peace, and democracy, Communication and Education:

• Explores different strategies and practices for fostering democracy in education, such as the IDEALS framework for creating positive school cultures
• Discusses emotional geographies in schools and their impact on democratic school climate and teacher burnout
• Emphasizes empathic communication and participatory skills among teachers
• Offers practical strategies and examples of harnessing technology for peace and democracy
• Provides real-world case studies illustrating the transformative power of education, music, diverse perspectives, and open communication channels
• Examines the ecological interdependence of effective communication, education, democracy and peace

Part of the Wiley Blackwell Communicating Science in Times of Crisis series, Communication and Education: Promoting Peace and Democracy in Times of Crisis and Conflict is essential reading for communication and education scholars, researchers, students, practitioners, and community scientists.

An up-to-date and comprehensive resource for scholars and students of critical intercultural communication studies

In the newly revised second edition of The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, a lineup of outstanding critical researchers delivers a one-stop collection of contemporary and relevant readings that define, delineate, and inhabit what it means to 'do critical intercultural communication.' In this handbook, you will uncover the latest research and contributions from leading scholars in the field, covering core theoretical, methodological, and applied works that give shape to the arena of critical intercultural communication studies.

The handbook's contents scaffold up from historical revisitings to theorizings to inquiry and methodologies and critical projects and applications. This work invites readers to deeply immerse themselves in and reflect upon the thematic threads shared within and across each chapter. Readers will also find:

• Newly included instructors' resources, including reading assignments, discussion guides, exercises, and syllabi
• Current and state-of-the-art essays introducing the book and delineating each section
• Brand-new sections on critical inquiry practices and methodologies and contemporary critical intercultural projects and topics such as settler colonialism, intersectionalities, queerness, race, identities, critical intercultural pedagogy, migration, ecologies, critical futures, and more

Perfect for scholars, researchers, and students of intercultural communication, intercultural studies, critical communication, and critical cultural studies, The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, 2nd edition, stands as the premier resource for anyone interested in the dynamic and ever evolving field of study and praxis: critical intercultural communication studies.

A fascinating collection of essays exploring a fresh contemporary approach to the person and doctrine of Jesus Christ

How should Christians think about the person of Jesus Christ today? In this volume, Sarah Coakley argues that this question has to be 'broken open' in new and unexpected ways: by an awareness of the deep spiritual demands of the christological task and its strikingly 'apophatic' dimensions; by a probing of the paradoxical ways in which Judaism and Christianity are drawn together in Christ, even by those issues which seem to 'break' them most decisively apart; and by an exploration of the mode of Christ's presence in the eucharist, with its intensification, 'breaking' and re-gathering of human desires. In this sequel to her celebrated earlier volume of essays, Powers and Submissions, Coakley returns to its unifying theme of divine power and contemplative submission, and weaves a new web of christological outcomes which remain replete with controversial implications for gender, spirituality and ethics.

The Broken Body will be of interest to those working in the fields of systematic theology, philosophy of religion, early Christian studies, Jewish/Christian relations, and feminist and gender theory.

"Fusing biblical and patristic theology, analytic philosophy, and spiritual tradition, Sarah Coakley has produced a fascinating, inspiring, and compelling account of Christ's identity, and its importance for questions of life."
-Professor Mark Wynn, University of Oxford

"Coakley argues that good Christology arises only from intellectual and spiritual postures learnt by encountering Christ openly. This volume subtly and powerfully facilitates such encounter, with God and, in him, with our neighbours, especially the Jewish people."
-Professor Judith Wolfe, University of St. Andrews

"Everything we have come to expect from Sarah Coakley is here in this extraordinary collection: wonderful clarity; startling and fruitful comparisons, within and beyond the theological canon; a brisk defiance of feminist conventions that in turn sharpens and deepens feminist analysis; a resistance to cheap theological certainties; and an abiding faithfulness, anchored in Christ, borne aloft by the Spirit. Christology is here shown to embrace abjection and jouissance, to advocate sacrifice that is itself the end of patriarchal violence, and to demand a eucharistic sharing that is incomplete without solidarity to the outcast and the poor, themselves the face of the living Christ. In these essays Coakley exemplifies the semiotic richness of priest and scholar, a breaking open of theological reserves that will transgress, startle, renew, instruct. This is sacrifice, re-made."
-Professor Katherine Sonderegger, Virginia Theological Seminary

The quest for sustainability has generated lifestyle changes for individuals across the globe, transformations within the arts, sciences, business, design, engineering, and agriculture, innovative policies and laws, and historic international agreements. Yet the means to achieving sustainability remain unsettled and disputed, even as its crucial importance in the face of the climate crisis grows.

The third edition of this popular and lively text explores the concept and practice of sustainability across a broad range of issues and topics. Fully revised and updated, the book underlines the importance of creativity in the service of conservation within ecological, economic, technological, political, legal, and cultural arenas. Chapters conclude with new Discuss, Explore, and Take Action sections that pose probing questions for review and discussion. A new final chapter presents four practical principles that readers may employ to guide the investigation of sustainability problems and their crafting of viable solutions.

Sustainability presents a hopeful account of the opportunities before us while squarely confronting the daunting challenges that lie ahead. It provides a crucial resource for students grappling with many of the most urgent issues of our time.

The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook gathers the best sustainability practices and latest research from the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, planning, development, ecology, and environmental engineering and presents them in a graphically rich and accessible format that can help guide urban design decisions in cities of all sizes.

The book presents a comprehensive framework that organizes more than 50 elements of sustainable urban design under five main topics-Energy Use & Greenhouse Gas, Water, Ecology & Habitat, Energy Use & Production, and Equity & Health-and relative to four project scales: Region & City, District & Neighborhood, Block & Street, and Project & Parcel. Each element chapter includes a summary of importance and background, compares typical practices and recommended approaches, explains connections to other elements, and concludes with urban design guidelines that can be used to directly inform projects and decisions.

Easy to use and reference, The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook provides both an in-depth introduction to topics across sustainable urban design and serves as an on-going reference for anyone involved in the creation of sustainable urban environments. This resource will be useful to design and planning professionals, community members, students, and elected officials in guiding decisions about our sustainable future.

Acting as a follow up to Volume 41 of Studies in Symbolic Interaction (2013), Symbolic Interaction and Inequality explores further the concept of Radical Interactionism, a perspective of researching domination and subordination introduced by scholar Lonnie Athens.

Demonstrating advancements made in Radical Interactionism over the past decade, chapters examine the omnipresent and insidious nature of inequality as well as its social construction among family members, cisgender and gender-diverse people, as well as university students and personnel, particularly college athletes.

Highlighting fruitful accomplishments achieved by a range of symbolic interactionists, this volume exhibits the significance of studying inequality, a venture that not only enriches symbolic interactionism but human life as a whole.