Shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society First Book Prize, 2025

An Open Access edition is available thanks to the kind sponsorship of the libraries participating in the Jisc Open Access Community Framework OpenUP initiative.

Desire and Disunity explores the struggles of Christianising late ancient sexuality in the late Roman West. Through an examination of fourth to sixth century sermons, letters, laws, and treatises in Latin-speaking communities, the difficulties of late antique clerics in moving ascetically influenced sexual ideals into wider practice become evident. Western clerics faced challenges on several fronts: the dedication and devoutness of lay Christians varied, while the military-political upheavals of the fifth century created new challenges and opportunities for influencing one's flock. Furthermore, Roman sexual norms continued to inform the thinking of many clerics and lay figures alike, even when in opposition to more scripturally based moral reasoning. Problems of bigamy, concubinage, sex work, incest, homosexual acts, adultery, and more troubled western Christian communities, with contradicting rules and traditions on what was acceptable and what was not. What reach did elite clerical perspectives on sexual norms have amongst the non-elite? How did clerics navigate tensions between the idealisation of Christian communal purity and the actions of congregants that fell short of these ideals? What influenced clerical perceptions of sex and how did they articulate these ideas to their audiences? Clerical sources of this time reflect these challenges as well as varying church attempts to reform the sex lives of their congregants - and, indeed, church failure in doing so.

• Providing virtual coaching or tutoring
• Offering appropriate scaffolding
• Allowing analysis of student decision-making
• Providing the mechanism for students to review and comment on each others digital creations
• Creating a space for online discussion
• Providing expert coaching for modeling and animation work

This edited volume presents the latest research focussing on current challenges on the deployment of smart technologies and pedagogies for supporting teaching and learning in the post-covid19 era. This is at the core of studying the evolution of the learning process, the role of technology-supported pedagogical approaches, and the progress of educational technology innovations in the context of digital transformation in education and professional training.

A selection of the best papers from the Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA) Conference, 2022 are included in this volume, bringing together high-quality research on Smart Pedagogies in the Post-Pandemic Era; Smart Learning Technologies in the Post-Pandemic Era; and Case Studies of Smart Learning Environments. The volume contributes to the discussion of current issues in digital education between researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.

This revolutionary book explores theoretical and practical issues of listening to children, families, and professionals who advocate for and work with young children to promote social justice and improve their lives, and to ensure no one is left behind. Listening to children is explored across multiple disciplines internationally and highlights the practical application of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in the context of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The work explores innovations, theories, and partnerships, and draws on the voices of children, families, early childhood educators, speech-language pathologists, and multidisciplinary teams from across 17 countries to provide a shared vision for equity, peace and justice for all while integrating social environmental, economic, and dimensions of sustainability. Topics include giving children a voice; methods for listening to and documenting young children's perspectives; listening to and working in partnership with families, educators, and professionals; and wellness and wellbeing of young children and their families across multiple dimensions.

This book explores the religious experiences of two notable figures who endured severe trials under authoritarian regimes: Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (1877-1960) within the Islamic tradition, and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) within the Russian Orthodox Christian tradition. Against the tumultuous backdrop of the twentieth century's spiritual, social, political, and intellectual upheavals, both Nursi and Solzhenitsyn grappled with immense hardships because of their beliefs. Despite immense tribulations, both individuals demonstrated unwavering faith and resilience in the face of adversity, continuing their scholarly and literary activities. The current study centers on the dichotomy of spiritual confinement and expansiveness, illustrating how people can experience spiritual distress even without physical restraints. It explores the historical and conceptual aspects of imprisonment within Christian and Muslim perspectives, explores the reasons for Nursi and Solzhenitsyn's incarceration, examines their coping mechanisms in the face of hardship, and underscores the role of faith and spirituality. The author integrates personal experiences, particularly his own incarceration during the aftermath of the 2016 Turkish staged coup attempt, within the context of the narratives of Nursi and Solzhenitsyn. The book addresses court proceedings, release, departure from Turkey, and resettlement in Australia. Throughout, the author draws parallels between their own observations and those of Nursi and Solzhenitsyn, contributing to the broader discourse on individual spirituality and collective consciousness. The book offers insights into spiritual resilience in the face of adversity, utilizing the lives of these figures to illuminate shared human experiences. A unique collation of personal narration and scholarly reflection, it is relevant to academics and students in history, political science, sociology, Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, and to social scientists researchingthe phenomenon of exile and prison in different countries across the world. It also speaks to the work of activists and policymakers in human rights.

Since the 1970s, effeminate gay men, and fem bottoms in particular, have increasingly become the 'marginalised among the marginalised' in Anglo-American gay culture, which tends to place a premium on appearing, behaving, and sounding masculine. Effeminate Belonging compares how boys and men in Western and global majority contexts negotiate connections between homosexuality, effeminacy, and bottom identity and practice, and why conversations that re-connect sex role positionality and gender expression are important to gay men's sexual wellbeing and sense of belonging.

Providing new readings of autobiographical narratives in film, documentary, social media, gay porn, and written erotica, Richard Vytniorgu explores how fem bottoms negotiate gender nonconforming experience and bottom identities in different places and spaces, including in the home, school, LGBTQ+ community, online, and in their own bodies.

Consolidating key research on effeminacy and gay bottom identities in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, this interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and historical discussion of gay men's sexual and gendered identities offers new insights for readers interested in gender nonconformity, bottoming, and male homosexuality across cultures. Vytniorgu also offers new perspectives for readers interested in connecting socio-cultural and psychobiological dimensions of gender and sexuality, and for health and educational professionals seeking to deepen their knowledge of LGBTQ+ identities and sexual experiences.

Collectively, the sixteen chapters in this book investigate the power of creativity in the classroom, many through the specific lens of limited resources as an opportunity. The chapters are divided into two sections, eight chapters comprising Section I: Theory and Research and then the eight chapters comprising Section II: Additional Perspectives and Future Directions. Within these two sections, the more than two-dozen authors that contributed to this book tackle a wide range of the possibilities for designing creative classroom-based instruction wherein limited resources are highlighted and valued, rather than avoided or lamented. The two main sections of this book are each preceded by a brief introductory summary highlighting those sections' attributes and objectives, with the intention of providing helpful structure to the reader-but the book has also been designed such that each chapter stands independently and can be jumped to directly like a handbook. In its totality, this book exploring perspectives on creativity theory and research in education is designed to serve as a valuable resource for teachers, teacher educators, school administrators, parents, and education researchers, along with anyone else that is interested in optimizing our opportunities for nurturing creativity within classrooms.

This book focuses on enhancing teacher education quality by making evidence- informed decisions about policy, assessing quality, establishing effective strategies, and innovating teacher preparation programs. It advocates for the importance of rigorous program design and evaluation as the basis for shaping policy directions and claiming program effectiveness.

The book introduces "Design for Change" (DfC), a 20-year-long collaborative effort by a group of teacher educators dedicated to improving their practices. DfC is divided into two parts: Design for Change-Teams and Process (DfC-TaP) and Design for Change-Programs and Courses (DfC-PaC). DfC-TaP explores how to form and sustain a design team of academics, emphasizing the collaborative process's value in program development. DfC-PaC delves into applying practical theory to curriculum design, mapping programs to standards, creating meaningful learning and assessment tasks, and leveraging technology. The latterincludes a chapter on software for teacher preparation program design.

The book's ultimate goal is to offer a versatile framework for designing teacher education programs. The book employs evidence from longitudinal research to present generalizable concepts and structures for program developers and designers. By doing so, the book aims to contribute to the field by providing a research-based guide for building teacher education programs that enhance the overall educational experience for both faculty and students.

This book explores place-based pedagogies in the context of socioscientific issues in Tuerkiye. From local and global contexts, it delves into research-based learning activities for science teacher educators, offering insights to educators worldwide.

The book aims to empower teachers to provide students with learning experiences centered on local socioscientific issues essential for developing scientifically literate citizens. Each chapter showcases effective practices, focusing on local topics like gold mining, nuclear power plants, and river pollution. By incorporating socioscientific elements into science lessons, teachers are encouraged to foster students' responsibility values, argumentation, critical thinking, and awareness. Emphasizing the crucial components of place-basedness and relevancy of SSI learning environments, students are guided towards more sophisticated ways of conceptualizing and resolving SSI.

The intended audience includes science teacher educators, researchers, and educators devoted to engaging students in meaningful socioscientific learning experiences.

This is the first book to provide a coherent overview over the ethical implications of AI-related technologies in medicine. It explores how these technologies transform practices, relationships, and environments in the clinical field. It provides an introduction into ethical issues such as data security and privacy protection, bias and algorithmic fairness, trust and transparency, challenges to the doctor-patient relationship, and new perspectives for informed consent. The book focuses on the transformative impact that technology is having on medicine, and discusses several strategies for dealing with the resulting challenges. It also introduces innovative methods of ethics research for addressing existing desiderata and future challenges. This book is written to inform health care professionals, policy-makers, and researchers in medicine, health sciences, nursing science, social sciences, and ethics, but may also function as a primary textbook for graduate as wellas undergraduate university courses.

Empresses-in-Waiting comprises case studies of late antique empresses, female members of imperial dynasties, and female members of the highest nobility of the late Roman empire, ranging from the fourth to the seventh centuries AD. Situated in the context of the broader developments of scholarship on late antique and byzantine empresses, this volume explores the political agency, religious authority, and influence of imperial and near-imperial women within the Late Roman imperial court, which is understood as a complex spatial, social, and cultural system, the centre of patronage networks, and an arena for elite competition. The studies explore female performance and representation in literary and visual media as well as in court ceremonial, and discuss the opportunities and constraints of female power within a male dominated court environment and the broader realms of imperial activity. By focusing on imperial women, the volume not only addresses questions of gendered rhetoric and agency but throws into relief general dynamics in the exercise of imperial power during a period in which the classical Mediterranean world at large, as well as the Roman monarchy, underwent crucial transformations.

An Open Access version of the Lewis Dagnall's chapter The Empress Sophia and East Roman Foreign Policy will be available on publication on the Liverpool University Press website.

From the anti-CRT panic to efforts to divert tax dollars to charter schools, the right-wing attack on education has cut deep. In response, millions of Americans have rallied to defend their cherished public schools. But this incisive book asks whether choosing between our embattled status quo and the stingy privatized vision of the right is the only path forward. In As Public as Possible, education expert David I. Backer argues for going on the offensive by radically expanding the very notion of the "public" in our public schools.

Helping us to imagine a more just and equitable future, As Public as Possible proposes a concrete set of financial policies aimed at providing a high-quality and truly public education for all Americans, regardless of wealth and race. With witty and provocative prose, Backer shows how we can decouple school funding from property tax revenue, evening out inequalities across districts by distributing resources according to need. He argues for direct federal grants instead of the predations of municipal debt markets. And he offers eye-opening examples spanning the past and present, from the former Yugoslavia to contemporary Philadelphia, which help us to imagine a radically different way of financing the education of all of our children.

This book explores key issues on the relational and operational dimension of the professional actions aimed at ensuring the well-being and inclusion of migrants in the reception system. Starting from the assumption that well-being is a multi-level phenomenon related to different and complex questions, the chapter authors articulated their reflections developing some thematic contents, complementary to one another, from the perspectives of different social actors involved in the inclusion process. A special attention is paid to the risk factors as potential obstacles to the inclusion, not only in the achievement of well-being but also in the relationship with the receiving society and with the reception system. Case studies will be presented to show how this complexity is explored integrating different theoretical perspectives with the participation of all social actors involved in inclusion pathways (unaccompanied migrant minors, immigrant families, refugees, social operators, voluntary guardians).

The authors share the social responsibility in investing in human and professional resources in the reception system and in connecting it with the local community. Updating the social workers' tools and methods become more and more relevant to enable the diffusion of new skills, functions, and roles in the management of reception of migrant minors and adults.

This book offers a unique exploration and analysis of social responsibility and associated ethical concepts used by business and financial organizations. Mussell lays out the argument that a realist analysis of social responsibility reveals caring relations underpinning this ethical behavior. The combination of a realist social ontology with contemporary relational care ethics provides the theoretical framework needed to successfully explore the ethics of social responsibility. She then applies this realist caring relations argument to three specific contexts in which social responsibility is explicitly evident - including corporate social responsibility, socially responsible investment, and the legal concept of the fiduciary. By tracing the historical development of each concept - including how economic methodology has influenced interpretations and practice - a complex picture emerges, showing how ethics, economic theory, and political theory intersect. This is an insightful work of philosophically informed contemporary political economy, analyzing the evolution and connection of key ethical concepts widely used by organizations.

In Our Place in History, celebrated attorney, educator, and founding director of the Asian American Justice Center Phil Tajitsu Nash offers an important counternarrative to this myth, foregrounding the history of Asian American activism in a way few other books have done. Nash focuses on ten episodes over the past fifty years where Asian Americans rose up to defend their rights, challenge discrimination, and join with others to build a more just world-from the movement for reparations for the World War II-era internment of Japanese Americans to the push to foreground class economics and working rights through the recent struggle against anti-Asian violence.

As Asian Americans and their allies push for Asian American History in curriculums across the country, Our Place in History provides a readable, authoritative guide to the impact made by Asian Americans-bringing them from the margin to the mainstream of American history.