Looking at the everyday interaction of religion and media in our cultural lives, Hoover's book is a fascinating assessment of the state of modern religion. This revised second edition now looks at the digital age, "new media" and the significant role of social media on religion today. While the sheer volume and variety of information traveling through global media changes modes of religious thought and commitment, the human desire for spirituality also invigorates popular culture itself, recreating commodities - film blockbusters, world sport, politics, and popular music - as contexts for religious meanings.

Drawing on research into household media consumption, Hoover charts the way in which media and religion have continued to intermingle and collide in the cultural experience of media audiences. This second edition of Religion in the Media Age is essential reading for everyone interested in how today's mass media relates to contemporary religious and spiritual life.

This book explores the intricate interplay between humility, humor, and hope in the context of Christian leadership. Drawing upon biblical foundations and contemporary leadership theories, it provides a comprehensive understanding of how these three qualities synergize to enhance the effectiveness of Christian leaders. By examining their individual significance and exploring their combined impact, this volume advances the field of organizational leadership, particularly in addressing the challenges of leadership in a manner consistent with Christian principles. The authors illuminate the crucial roles of humility, hope, and humor in Christian leadership, making this a valuable resource for researchers interested in leadership within the context of faith. This contribution will aligns with existing literature on how Christians can leverage their faith for improved leadership capabilities.

How culture shapes the design and use of technology-and how we can resist the one-size-fits-all approach to technology design

Robots that encroach on your personal space, baffling emojis, a chatbot that gives you an answer that seems terribly rude-does any of this sound familiar? If so, you may know what it feels like to experience a clash of cultures, or even culture shock, in technology. Culture-shared values, norms, and behaviors-influences both the design of technology and its use. An encounter with new technology can teach us to embrace the unfamiliar, but a mismatch between design and user can create misunderstanding and loss of trust, and can even become a tool of digital imperialism. In Digital Culture Shock, computer scientist Katharina Reinecke travels through countries and cultures around the world to show the many fascinating ways that technology design and use can differ.

Reinecke argues that technology is inherently cultural because developers apply their own knowledge and experiences when creating it. And this can make the technology fail in other settings. For example, robotaxis trained on driver behavior on a California highway are paralyzed when confronted with the more complicated traffic flows of Egypt. Western online social networks, designed to convey one's individuality, violate the need to preserve the image of a family in more group-oriented cultures. Likewise, the visual complexity common in many East Asian websites can be overwhelming to North Americans and European users, who tend to prefer simpler designs. Making it clear what's at stake, Reinecke urges us to resist generalizing our own cultural peccadillos in technology design.

This edited volume brings together a group of scholars examining the effects of social change on the politics in South Asia. It cobbles an inductive analytical framework of South Asian margins to comparatively study the political transformations across the region.

This book envisages politics encompassing interests, imaginations, activities, and actions of numerous actors. Individual contributors analyze the collective choices made by national elites over the past few decades and their implications for development, democracy, and security of their respective country and the region. The resulting analytical framework provides a comparative political matrix of analysis that prioritizes the margins over the center. The matrix compares different countries around the axis of (1) Political Contestations and Engagements, (2) Decoloniality and Populism, and (3) Policy Frames and Visions. It is a contrapuntal analysis that establishes margins as a legitimate place to approach social scientific study of South Asia.

An important and timely contribution to the field, this book will be of interest to researchers studying Asian politics, comparative politics, area studies, in particular South Asia and Pakistan, and international relations.

How the Middle East can achieve political change and social progress

The Middle East is in upheaval: a widening chasm between state and society, the failure of governing elites to address citizens' genuine grievances, massive economic mismanagement-all made worse by repeated interventions by Western powers. Why has political change been so difficult to achieve? In The Great Betrayal, Fawaz Gerges argues that the convergence of political authoritarianism, meddling by the West, and the effects of prolonged regional conflicts have produced political paralysis and economic stagnation. The agency of everyday people has been thwarted by an authoritarian status quo that is maintained by a powerful partnership of external and internal forces.

Gerges traces more than a century of consequential events in the region, from the end of the Ottoman Empire and the European carve-up of the Middle East to the Iranian Revolution and the Arab Spring uprisings. He shows how the people of the Middle East have been systematically denied self-determination, political representation, and effective government. Gerges finds that the region, with its diversity, variability, and volatility, defies abstract grand theories; previous accounts that have attributed the Middle East's problems to any one cause such as modernism, ignore the complexity and specificity of the issues. What can we learn from the Middle East's vexed history? Gerges is optimistic, declaring that the region's future will be determined not by dictators and their superpower patrons but by a growing population of Arab and Muslim youth who demand to be treated as citizens and not as subjects.

This book examines how British politicians, national and local newspapers, writers and commentators discussed the mass killing and deportation of Armenians during the period 1915-1923.

Seeking to fill a historiographical gap in the field of modern genocide studies, this volume shows the extent to which the British public sphere understood the concept of genocide before the Holocaust and before the word itself was invented. It demonstrates the centrality of the British discourse on the Armenian massacres and deportations as they were happening during the First World War and how it came to be as important as that on German excesses in Belgium. This book reveals for the first time how the news was widely circulated in the provincial press and not just in contemporary major titles, and how it found its way into everyday conversation and the subject of an adventure novel. In analysing how the violence was viewed as an orientalist projection onto the Turkish 'Other,' this volume makes an important contribution to the literature on the more troubling side of the 'British Self' and imperial colonialism.

This volume will be of interest to undergraduates studying First World War Britain as well as researchers investigating the development of modern genocide and how it was discussed and conceptualised.

From its development in the 1980s, the sanctuary city movement-municipal protection of people with uncertain migration status from national immigration enforcement-has been a powerful and controversial side of progressive migration policy reform. While some migration activists view sanctuary city policy as the most important aspect of their work, others see it as actively impairing efforts in the fight for migrant rights. In Making Sanctuary Cities, Rachel Humphris provides a new understanding of how citizenship is negotiated and contested in sanctuary cities and what political potentials are opened (and closed) by this designation.

Through long-term fieldwork across the sanctuary cities of San Francisco, Sheffield, and Toronto-three of the first municipalities to adopt this designation in their respective countries-Humphris investigates the complexity of sanctuary city policy. By capturing the wide-ranging meanings and practices of sanctuary in comparative context, Humphris uncovers how liberal citizenship is undermined by the very thing that makes it worth investing in: the promise of equality. Attending to the tensions inherent in sanctuary policy, this book opens vital questions about the ways governing systems can extinguish political ideals, and how communities choose to live and organize to fight for a better world.

Filming in European Cities explores the effort behind creating screen production locations. Ipek A. Celik Rappas accounts the rising demand for original and affordable locations for screen projects due to the growth of streaming platforms. As a result, screen professionals are repeatedly tasked with chores such as transforming a former factory in Istanbul to resemble a war zone in Aleppo, or finding a London street that evokes Barcelona.

Celik Rappas highlights the pivotal role crew members play in transforming cities and locations into functional screen settings. Examining five European media capitals-Athens, Belfast, Berlin, Istanbul, and Paris-the book delves into the overlooked aspects of location-related screen labor and its ability to generate production value. Filming in European Cities demonstrates that in its perpetual quest for authentic filming locations, the screen industry extracts value from cities and neighborhoods, their marginalized residents, and screen labor, enriching itself through this triple exploitation.

Politics of Tranquility concerns the Tibetan Buddhist revival in China, illustrating the lives of Tibetan Buddhist nuns and exploring the political effects that arise from their nonpolitical daily engagements in the remote, mega-sized Tibetan Buddhist encampment of Yachen Gar.

Yasmin Cho's book challenges two assumptions about Tibetan Buddhist communities in China. First, against the assumption that a Buddhist monastic community is best understood in terms of its esoteric qualities, Cho focuses on the material and mundane daily practices that are indispensable to the existence and persistence of such a community and shows how deeply gendered these practices are. Second, against the assumption that Tibetan politics toward the Chinese state is best understood as rebellious, incendiary, and centered upon Tibetan victimhood, the nuns demonstrate how it can be otherwise. Tibetan politics can be unassuming, calm, and self-contained and yet still have substantial political effects. As Politics of Tranquility shows, the nuns in Yachen Gar have called forth an alternative way of living and expressing themselves as Tibetans and as female monastics despite a repressive context.

This open access book develops a typology of cities by exploring how current levels of migration-related diversity and segregation relate to three groups of factors: international mobilities, inequalities and political-institutional aspects of local governance. Based on both quantitative and qualitative data from 16 cities in four European countries (France, Germany, The Netherlands, and Italy), the book compares the cities and uses a method of fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. It demonstrates the shared contingencies of factors among the cities within each type and the crucial differences between the types of localities, and offers a more differentiated, holistic understanding of migration-related diversity configurations through the five conceptualised types: (1) Superdiverse cities, (2) Postindustrial diverse cities. (3) Middle class diverse cities, (4) Divided cities, and (5) Marginal migration cities. As such, the book is a valuable read to all those who would like to learn more about urban migration-related diversity and how it is formed and governed.

Today, economic growth must be in harmony with environmental sustainability. Green Wealth: Navigating towards a Sustainable Future delves into the connection between financial prosperity and ecological accountability, addressing several aspects of sustainable development, such as renewable energy, circular economy, green technology, sustainable agriculture, and conservation initiatives.

Green Wealth examines the financial advantages of implementing sustainable practices in different industries. Through examination of case studies of firms, expert interviews, literature research and data analysis, important lessons are learned, and actions are recommended.

This book aims to contribute to the worldwide discussion on sustainable development and encourage positive change through well-defined goals, a wide range of topics, thorough methodology, and practical outcomes.

Contemporary Studies in Economic and Financial Analysis publishes a series of current and relevant themed volumes within the fields of economics and finance. Both disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies are welcome.

This book compares the ways in which the national media in two different countries construct (frame) and develop the image of the religious other, in this case Muslims in all their variety. Although it introduces concepts such as race and racism, otherness, Orientalism and Islamophobia, which may be familiar to the majority of readers, in this manuscript they serve the purpose of a comparative analysis which has not been done on the subject to date. The manuscript analyzes the thematic distribution of the articles, as well as the definitions, metaphors and stereotypes used, thus presenting a complete and diverse image of Muslims along with the similarities and differences in the thinking patterns employed by Bulgarians and British on the subject and expressed in the respective mainstream media. In this respect the manuscript fills a void in the scholarly literature on the ways the media discourses in two very different countries present the image of a religious group. Here we can even talk about the existing divide between East and West and the changing perception of the religious Other fostered by the general digitalization and free flow of information.

As English is an international language it undeniably makes access to information easier, however, there are not many culture specific studies presenting the current state of a problem or the analyses on that particular topic (the image of Muslims) in that international medium. Therefore, the manuscript aims at introducing English speaking scholars, students, media people, and generally everyone interested in the topic, to the Bulgarian way of seeing, depicting and talking about Muslims. As stated above, the manuscript draws parallels between the language used by the Bulgarian and the British media, thus providing a similar starting point as the majority of the potential readers are probably more familiar with the latter. In addition, scholars working extensively with other local cultures and/or media and resorting to English as a medium for the popularization of their research, can use the presented analytical frame to their specific analyses and contribute even further to the enrichment of the global data base on the topic.

We need a new realism in the face of global climate catastrophe.

Extreme heat, fires, floods, and storms are transforming our planet. Yet instead of serious responses from world leaders, we get increasing emissions, divisive politics, and ersatz solutions that offer more of the same: more capitalism, more complexity, more "progress."

The impasse we face is not only political and institutional, but cognitive, existential, and narrative. We're incapable of grasping the scale, speed, and impact of global warming. Our brains can't make sense of how radically our world is changing. And we optimistically cling to a civilizational narrative that promises a better tomorrow if we just keep doing what we're doing.

It's well past time, Roy Scranton argues, to free ourselves from our dangerous and dogmatic faith in progress. Such unwarranted optimism will only accelerate our collective disintegration. If we want to have any hope at all for the future, it must be grounded in a recognition of human limits-a view Scranton calls ethical pessimism.

Drawing from psychology, philosophy, history, and politics, as well as film, literature, and personal experience, Scranton describes the challenges we face in making sense of our predicament, from problems in communication to questions of justice, from the inherent biases in human perception to the difficulties of empirical knowledge. What emerges is a challenging but ultimately hopeful proposition: if we have the courage to accept our limits, we may find a way to embrace our unknowable future.

Sustainability has become a touchstone for development worldwide, promising an antidote to environmental degradation and capitalism's excess: waste. Refusing Sustainability presents a fundamentally different account of sustainability and waste itself by uncovering the intersections of international environmental reforms and racialized labor. In Bulgaria, Roma comprise the bulk of the country's waste workers, while anti-Roma racism casts them as socially disposable. Without their labor, however, the country cannot meet the sustainability targets required by the European Union. Drawing on fieldwork that spans twenty years, including eleven months working alongside Romani women street sweepers, and years embedded in waste organizations, political campaigns, Roma NGOs, and activist groups, Elana Resnick examines the power hierarchies that shape both waste management and European geopolitics.

Instead of focusing on only environmental harms or toxic distributions, Refusing Sustainability approaches Romani life-worlds as spaces of creative production, and also tells several larger stories: of postsocialist racial capitalism, environmental progressivism, democratic failures, mutual aid, and the power of women's friendships. Through these stories, Resnick illuminates how ordinary people, racialized as discardable, resist systems that simultaneously rely on and exclude them.

The Americas is a region on the move and is both the source and recipient of some of the largest migrations in the world today. While much scholarship and public commentary focus on the considerable movement of people northward toward the United States, most of the millions of migrants from the Americas are in fact, the authors reveal, staying within other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Through a combination of engaging narratives and evidence-based analysis, On the Move tells a story of both triumph and tragedy. The authors explore the complex composition of migration flows and the varied and uneven ways in which host countries in the region have responded. This book takes readers beyond the typical debates on US immigration policy and represents the first comprehensive look at how countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are reacting to an unprecedented wave of people around the world who choose-or are forced-to move across borders.

Ghosts and Things argues that Victorians turned to the dead to understand the material culture of their present. With the rise of spiritualism in Britain in the early 1850s, seances invited participants to contact ghosts using material things, from ordinary household furniture to specialized technologies invented to register the presence of spirits. In its supernatural object lessons, Victorian spiritualism was not just a mystical movement centered on the dead but also a practical resource for learning how to negotiate the uncanniness of life under capitalism.

Aviva Briefel explores how spiritualism compelled seance participants to speculate on the manufacture of spectral clothing; ponder the hidden histories and energies of parlor furniture; confront the humiliations of consumerism as summoned spirits pelted them with exotic fruits; and comprehend modes of mechanical reproduction, like photography and electrotyping, that had the power to shape identities. Briefel argues that spiritualist practices and the objects they employed offered both believers and skeptics unexpected frameworks for grappling with the often-invisible forces of labor, consumption, exploitation, and exchange that haunted their everyday lives.

Ghosts and Things reveals how spiritualism's explorations of the borderland between life and death, matter and spirit, produced a strange and seductive combination of wonder and discomfort that allowed participants to experience the possibilities and precarities of industrial modernity in novel ways.

The Growth-Environment Debate covers economic, population, and material growth, and their turbulent relationship with environmental sustainability. Katz-Rosene identifies five distinct competing discourses, each of which presents different interpretations of the growth-environment relationship, detailing their core claims, arguments, and sets of proponents. Drawing on ecological political economy and discourse analysis, the book enables readers to situate their own ecopolitical economic views within the great growth-environment debate.

This book is an essential read for students, scholars, and researchers of environmental economics, politics, and sociology. It is also valuable for policymakers wanting to learn about the complexities of the relationship between growth and sustainability, providing a detailed understanding of diverse perspectives on the issue.

Highly informalized cities of the global South are often portrayed as chaotic and out of control - this book reveals a spatial logic of informal urbanism that is central to the economic life and livelihoods of such cities. 'Inventraset' is a concept that shows how informal street vending, transport and settlement are fundamentally integrated with each other and the more formal city. Street vending and transport provide crucial forms of employment and mobility, while informal settlement is the key source of affordable and adaptable housing. Informal urbanism is not ideal but it is the way such cities work; it is often hidden or camouflaged within the ideal of a clean, green and modern city to which middle-classes and elites aspire. Through comparative studies, with a focus on Manila and Jakarta, the book maps and analyzes how such cities work through alliances and synergies between vending, transport and settlement - inventraset assemblages are inventive and transgressive, yet settled.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the city of Edirne was a bustling center linking Istanbul to Ottoman Europe. It was also the capital of Edirne Province-among the most religiously diverse regions of the Ottoman Empire. But by 1923, the city had become a Turkish border town, and the province had lost much of its non-Muslim population. With this book, Jacob Daniels explores how one of the world's largest Sephardi communities dealt with the encroachment of modern borders.

Using Ladino, French, English, and Turkish sources, Daniels offers a new take on the ways in which ethno-religious minorities experienced the transition "from empire to nation-state." Rather than tracing a linear path, Edirne Jews zigzagged between the Ottoman Empire and three nation-states-without moving a mile. And by maintaining interstate Sephardi networks, they resisted pressure to treat the shifting border as a limit to their zone of belonging. Ultimately, proximity to the border would undo Edirne's Jewish community, but the way this ending came about-local Jews were rarely killed or deported-challenges common assumptions about state borders and Jewish history. By studying Jewish encounters with the nation-state alongside the emergence of modern borders, Daniels sheds light on both phenomena.

This book addresses the multiple repercussions of South Africa's democratic transition beginning in 1994 by examining a number of themes with local, national, regional, and global relevance: the politics of nation building, public memory, residential segregation, higher education, media, racism, trade unionism, women's rights, and global climate change, to name only a few.

Drawing from the rich archive of previously published articles from the journal Safundi, South African Transitions documents both the country's, and the journal's mutual history over the past quarter century. Divided into five sections, the first part of the book explores the broad theme of South Africa's transition to non-racial democracy by foregrounding issues of nationalism, diplomacy, rural change, social trauma, historical commemoration, and political feeling at local, national, and international levels. The second section focuses on the question of civil society, including essays on media, racism, histories of segregation, legacies of criminal violence, and comparative patterns of incarceration, underscoring the endurance of certain long-term problems and the emergence of new ones. Part three surveys the role of education in transforming South Africa, while part four situates South Africa's opportunities and challenges within regional and global contexts to better understand the South African situation and its relationship to conditions around the world. The penultimate section has contributions that confront the present by identifying the struggles and crises of South Africa's current political moment, including labor movements, the matter of land restitution, feminist activism, LGBTQI rights, and the Marikana Massacre of 2012. The book ends with an essay on the fire at Jagger Library at the University of Cape Town by historian Bill Nasson, a moment of contingent destruction that speaks of the Covid-19 pandemic and the burgeoning climate crisis at present.

Traversing across time and place, South African Transitions will be an indispensable resource for scholars, researchers, activists and policymakers, as well as those readers who are generally interested in understanding South Africa's social, political, and intellectual transformations over the past several decades.

The concept of the "free press" is often celebrated as the vehicle which finally brought freedom of speech and democracy to post-apartheid South Africa, but historically, the position of the press was more complicated.

This book dives into the history of slavery at the Cape between 1800 and 1838, reflecting on the fact that several founding journalists and printers were slave owners themselves and advertised slaves as regular "property" in their publications. The book presents an inclusive history of the founding of colonial newspapers and magazines, driven by the question of how we in the 21st century should make sense of the role that newspapers and journalism played at key points in the history of slavery and its aftermath. The "slave press" was a label originally attached to The Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser when it was founded by a pair of well-connected private British slave traders.

This book challenges us to confront the ghost of the slave press, and to consider the complicated history of press freedom in South Africa. This important book will be of interest to scholars and students of journalism and media history, in South Africa and beyond.

Focused on two renowned Arabic networks, Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiyya, this book examines Arabic media discourses and strategies adopted in the coverage of the conflict in Ukraine.

Providing an in-depth textual analysis of the coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the book focuses on the types of discourse employed, key linguistic devices used, and the representation of different actors, whether directly or indirectly involved. This encompasses the attitudes and perceptions of Russians, Ukrainians, Europeans, Americans, and NATO, as well as the wider international community. The book aims to establish the inextricable link between language and the socio-cultural and political ideologies that contribute to the production of media discourse on conflicts. It is argued that some of these ideologies are represented through language, which itself reflects the networks' policies, the influence of their sponsors, and their individual stances towards the war.

The book will be of interest to students and researchers in a range of fields, including Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies, Media and Communications, and Applied Linguistics, as well as to general readers interested in media's coverage of conflicts.

This book examines the everyday state from the perspective of the lived experiences of peripheralized Indigenous tribal peoples in contemporary Tripura, Northeast India.

Building on discussions in the anthropology of the state and development literature and based on rich ethnography data, this book examines the concrete rural Indigenous people's experiences of the state and how they negotiate those interactions to their advantage and for their own empowerment. The author addresses the following questions: How do members of peripheralized Indigenous tribal communities imagine, perceive, and experience the state in their everyday practices? What are the various strategies and approaches that they use to undermine and negotiate the complex power relations to their advantage in their relations with the state? This book argues that the state is experienced as both hope and despair and broken promises by the peripheralized Indigenous community.

A fresh perspective of studying Indigenous/tribal in Northeast India, this book will be useful for researchers and scholars of the anthropology of state and development, development studies, social work, sociology, political science, tribal/ Adivasi/Indigenous studies, Northeast India studies, and South Asian studies.