This book offers an insight into the Armenian diasporic communities in India through the lens of diaspora studies. It focuses on the dynamics of the communities within urban spaces, their affiliations and affinities within and beyond their 'memory' and highlights complexities of the Armenian diasporic communities in India. It studies identity transformations through time and space and how the community integrates with the society in the host country. It also underlines how cultural, linguistic and political transformations in India, from being part of the British Empire to Independence, helped form a critical consciousness among the Armenian communities settled there. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of Armenian studies, migration and diaspora studies, South Asian history and the history of East by and large.

This book provides theoretical foundations for circular economy concepts, principles, and models while analysing their applications across agriculture, industry, and energy sectors. It systematically evaluates measurement frameworks and indicators that track circular economy progress among countries, with particular focus on EU member states. The authors develop and test indicator frameworks through case studies that reveal patterns of progress, convergence, or divergence in circular economy implementation. By examining policies that promote circular economic development, the book identifies the best practices for EU nations and gives recommendations based on tested frameworks.

Features:

• Provides comprehensive analysis of the theoretical and practical implementation of circular economy principles in agriculture, energy, and other industries
• Discusses the frameworks for the assessment of circular economy developments based on practical, tested applications
• Presents policies and measures to promote circular economy development which are examined, critically assessed, and systematized
• Provides policy recommendations to promote circular economy development in EU countries based on the results of practical applications of circular economy frameworks
• Includes case studies on the assessment of circular economy development, convergence, clustering, and ranking of EU countries

Circular Economy Assessment: Indicators and Applications is for academics, researchers, students, professionals, entrepreneurs, and policymakers interested in sustainability.

This book examines the new era of the Olympic Movement as it is forced to navigate through old and new socioeconomic, geopolitical, and environmental challenges.

Against a background of geopolitics, commercialization, technological development, extreme weather, and associated accelerating changes in global society, this book looks at the past, present, and future of the idealistic philosophy of Olympism, and at the duality of the Olympic Movement as it faces the often-contradictory challenges of the 21st century. Drawing on multi-disciplinary perspectives from history, sociology, political science, philosophy, business and management, and communications, this book discusses the evolution of the Modern Olympic Movement and the role of Olympism before exploring in depth the new era of the Olympic Games, including the impacts of Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022, the significance of Paris 2024, the legacy of Olympic Agenda and Thomas Bach's presidency, and looking ahead to Los Angeles 2028, Brisbane 2032 and beyond. This book unpacks the key themes that run through contemporary Olympic Studies, including nation-branding, diplomatic boycotts, international politics, sports-washing, greenwashing, corruption, sustainability, public spending, public resistance, surveillance, athlete activism, cultural diplomacy, and the external impacts of Covid-19 and extreme weather. It argues that the Olympic Games can still add value to the "incoherent mosaic" of the human experience, and asks what lies ahead for the Olympic Movement.

This book is essential reading for anybody with an interest in the Olympic Games, mega sports events, or the wider significance of sport in contemporary society.

The story of Jackie Robinson's prodigious talent, his courageous journey, and his influence on both the game of baseball and American society writ large has been told well and often. What hasn't been told is the full story of his first season in the minor leagues in Montreal. In 1946, before moving up to the Brooklyn Dodgers, Robinson spent a season thrilling home crowds in a Canadian city with Major League aspirations. He played for the AAA Montreal Royals of the International League, leading the team to victory in the Junior World Series.

As it turned out, postwar Montreal was the ideal location for Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey's "great experiment" to finally integrate America's pastime. Although both Rickey and Robinson have rightly been at the center stage of this story, it was the masses of cheering Montrealers who first showed the world that professional baseball was ready to bury race-based segregation. As Robinson told a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reporter years later, "Had it not been for the fact that we broke in in Montreal, I doubt seriously if we would have made the grade so rapidly. The fans were just fantastic, and my wife and I had nothing but the greatest of memories."

In Royal Treatment Sean J. McLaughlin explores Robinson's experience in Canada as a Minor Leaguer and the warm embrace he received from Montrealers well before he became one of baseball's household names. Bringing the early fan experience of Robinson directly to the foreground, Royal Treatment is an intimate look at a pivotal juncture in Robinson's career, and the overwhelmingly positive relationship he had with the community that supported his rise to fame. This baseball story centers Robinson within the context of the Black American expatriate experience in Montreal in the postwar era.

There are two popular and competing viewpoints on sports. Many consider them a mere distraction from important social and political problems. Others champion sports as a powerful force for good: teaching character, promoting peace, and encouraging racial and gender equality. Andrew Bertoli shows that these dominant perspectives underestimate the full extent to which sports impact modern life. Sports can worsen relations between nations, divide countries internally, and disadvantage individuals from underprivileged backgrounds. Sports can also, however, build social capital, make people feel more connected, and provide participants with physical and cognitive benefits. Much depends on how people approach sports, both at the individual and societal levels.

This book highlights some of the profound and startling ways that sports and politics have interacted throughout recent history, including: how the Olympic torch relay was started by the Nazis and reflected Hitler's ambition to dominate Europe; the twentieth-century feminist movement to keep women out of the Olympics and the motivations of the female sports leaders who led it; how Michael Jordan's determination to stay out of politics during his career may have made him the most politically impactful athlete in history. Bertoli's insightful analysis challenges many conventional views while also helping readers understand how they can better utilize sports for themselves, their families, and their communities.

Stepping into the vibrant and uncharted margins of Intercultural Communication, Education and Research (ICER), this edited volume challenges the field's established narratives by actively listening to the thinkers, educators, and practitioners whose transformative work has previously been overlooked.

Moving beyond cliches, this volume introduces the 'unsung maverick' not as a heroic figure but as a precarious rope-dancer performing vital and innovative work without a safety net. Through powerful, first-hand accounts, ranging from autoethnographies to poetic experiments, the contributors pull apart dominant paradigms and reveal how systemic biases and linguistic hierarchies have silenced crucial perspectives. Representing a platform for methodological rebellion and epistemic justice, this book showcases how interculturality is lived and reimagined from the ground up.

For anyone ready to move past the usual references and discover the fertile and creative potential at the edges of ICER, this edited volume urges us to listen, learn, and help shape the conversation about interculturality today.

Chapters discuss the 'animal turn', in which disciplines that have traditionally ignored, or not seriously considered nonhuman animals, have begun to consider the 'animal question'. The contributing authors examine how societies have thought about animals and our connection to them over time. They address the different ways in which nonhuman animals have interacted with human society, including as food, in products, as pets, as workers, as entertainers and as targets of wildlife management concern. The Research Handbook on Animals and Society emphasises that the consideration, treatment and welfare of animals is a crucial and fast-developing social justice issue.

This is an essential resource for students and academics across the social sciences interested in human-animal studies and social justice. It is also a beneficial guide to research on animals and society for activists and practitioners involved in animal rights.

Building critically from the work of Erich Fromm, who argued that societies based on class domination foster aggressive personalities and normalize pathology, this unique book envisions spiritual-intellectual-emotional unity to promote a living experience of fulfilling and productive social relations.

Visions of a Sane Society posits that the familiar left-versus-right political spectrum concept is long-outdated and that the political and cultural battles of today are between those who support a common humanity and shared prosperity, and those who seek self-aggrandizement and personal gratification. Based on contemporary research and psychodynamic theory, this work develops Fromm's concept of the sane society to show the adverse emotional and intellectual consequences of alienated labor lead to authoritarianism and consumerism and that, in order to save the world from fascism and ecosystem collapse, the progressive side must succeed to unite diverse activist groups, overthrow the old hierarchies, and establish a society with ideals of democracy and equality. Fromm's vision of a postcapitalist society would necessarily overcome the alienation inherent to capitalism, requiring not simply a change in the economic system through a humanistic socialism, but a fundamental change in the very nature of social character, which would be an egalitarian democratic society of caring, sharing, of people living in harmony with each other, and with Nature.

This book is an important and vital resource for students and instructors in sociology, social theory, political sociology, social psychology, and political science, as well as activists, organizers, and community workers who want to understand contemporary social dynamics and the way toward a healthy and sustainable society for all.

Leading scholars recontextualise Durkheim's ideas, placing him in dialogue with other core figures in the social sciences from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Each chapter covers a different topic, and together they address issues in sociology, politics, philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, criminology, nationalism, religious studies, ethics, suicide, gender, anthropology, and post-colonialism. This book showcases the enduring relevance of Durkheim's work, establishing its innovative potential and continued inspiration for modern analysis.

This interdisciplinary investigation of Emile Durkheim will benefit scholars and students across the social sciences, particularly those in the fields of sociology, criminology, philosophy, politics, religious studies, and anthropology.

This book provides justification, a framework and examples for an emergent alternative approach to planning and community development. Planning, design and community development have often been practiced in a monocultural way, as if all communities are the same, meaning that communities of color and low-income communities are often overlooked or ignored, if not outright harmed. This book highlights a new approach for transformative community development, where worldviews are rooted in the culture of communities of color and everyday people can find expression in decisions about a community's future. This transformative approach gives voice to people on the margins, unapologetically embraces issues of social justice and seeks to increase the overall health and well-being of the community. This book explores the motives, vision, tenets and challenges of this transformative paradigm and provides numerous case examples from the U.S. and Canada. Including a range of diverse contributors, chapters explore themes such as decolonial planning, climate injustice, Black planning, ethics and more. This book is essential for professionals, students and professors of urban planning, design and community development in the U.S.

Andersson utilises a micro-meso-macro framework to examine creative cities, providing illustrative case studies from fields including geography, economics, political science and urban planning. At the micro level, he explores personality traits and environmental stimuli; at the meso level, neighbourhood attributes; and at the macro level, cultural values and institutions. Chapters also consider spatial design across each level of the framework and are informed by the contributions of Jane Jacobs and Jan Gehl. Ultimately, the author underscores the importance of smaller, intimate spaces and fragmented, decentralized planning in the cultivation of adaptability, creativity and bottom-up entrepreneurship.

Understanding Creative Cities will be greatly beneficial to scholars and students of human geography, urban design, urban planning, urban studies and the social sciences, including economics, politics and sociology. It is also a vital resource for city and municipal policymakers and urban planners interested in cultivating creative cities.

What happens to species when climate disruption causes suitable habitat within one country to move or vanish? In Borders of Biodiversity, Will Wright examines the histories of transnational conservation efforts to address the tension between a warming world in which living things are on the move and an increasingly walled world in which their movements are constrained. Focusing on the histories of three border-crossing species-gray wolves, monarch butterflies, and giant sequoias-from the 1850s to the present day, Wright reveals how nonstate actors like citizen scientists think beyond political borders and diplomatic traditions and find collaborations with fellow-minded conservationists by following nature beyond the nation-state.

The people at the heart of these intertwined stories in Canada, Mexico, the United States, and Indigenous nations of North America recognize that biota have their own forms of territoriality that should be respected and defended. Wright argues that the realities of climate change are fundamentally at odds with site-specific conservation, which follows the possessive logic of nation-building by bounding space to protect habitats when many ecologies do not naturally fit within traditional protected areas. Taken together, these stories make clear that conservation efforts must forge solidarity across borders for biological well-being-or face the extinction of shared species.

At the quarter mark of the twenty-first century Canada faces two existential threats: runaway climate change and the rising global tide of right-authoritarian imperialism. The inextricable relationship between the two threats requires clear vision and bold policy as Canada reconceives its future.

Arguing that peace, order, and good government form the cornerstone of Canada's national identity, Byron Williston revives the vision of philosopher George Grant to explore how these values can guide Canada in reimagining its identity across its own regions, within the North American context, and in the global political order. In a work that lays out a positive vision for Canada rooted in the ideal of an ecological nation, Williston argues that this country faces a stark choice between this ideal and absorption into the American empire. The key is a refined governance model addressing the failed history of Canadian climate policy and overcoming the false belief that Canada is essentially a land of inexhaustible resources. The nation-building project described here will both benefit all Canadians and avoid capture by the forces of social and political regression. It will help secure a sovereign and flourishing future for this country.

The challenges Canada faces are profound. To meet them the country must engage fully with the eco-national project. While daunting, this moment provides a unique opportunity for Canada to link its national well-being to that of planetary health and to create a singularly Canadian political ethic informed by Indigenous knowledge and developed in step with the ongoing project of reconciliation

How can we adapt to reduce the adverse effects of climate change on humanity and the environment? In this enlightening book, Ian Noble outlines the history of adaptation, new ways of adapting and how approaches to mitigation and adaptation are changing.

Looking at how we have thought about the joint roles of mitigating our emissions and adapting to changed climates to avoid suffering, the book presents adaptation from both scholars' and practitioners' viewpoints and draws upon the experience of those most affected. Turning to the future, it maps potential ways forward and the challenges of adaptation in a world beset by other crises, both natural and political.

Key Features:

• Explores the ways adaptation could be financed
• Takes up the current debate on transformative adaptation
• Assesses how adaptation can be incorporated in future climate action
• Analyses topics such as insurance and recompensing people for losses and damages from extreme weather events

This is an essential read for scholars and students of geography, politics and public policy, the environment, and sociology. It will also be invaluable to practitioners in risk management and climate compliance, alongside mitigation specialists, legal professionals in climate litigation and journalists reporting on climate issues.

Europe's unquenchable flames, from hearth to Pyrocene, reveal a civilization's combustible coreThis work offers a sweeping history of Europe told through flame-and a history of fire refracted through Europe's landscapes, sciences, and empires. Drawing on and substantially updating his classic Vestal Fire, Stephen J. Pyne's incisive new volume follows fire from Iceland's oceanic fringes to the Siberian taiga and the Mediterranean's blaze-prone rim, showing how Europe's peculiar geography, history, and culture forged a singular pact with combustion. Organized in three sections, it moves from the elements of practice and ideas that make up Europe's core fire narrative to vivid portraits of five fire provinces (Mediterranean, Central, Boreal, Eurasian, and Atlantic) before turning to the global consequences of European expansion.

Tracking millennia of human-made fire, Pyne reveals a relationship in which Europe's elites sought to keep fire a servant, ever more tightly controlled. The transition to a fossil-fueled modernity, however, led to a paradox in which Europe lost its mastery as land use, climate, and flame turned feral and the Earth pivoted toward a Pyrocene in which humanity's binge burning created a fire age to rival the ice ages.

The result is both a lucid synthesis and a provocation: what Europe's global expansion set into motion has returned to kindle a resurgence of wildfire across the continent, starkly visible in the heat-dome summers of the 2020s. As tool, ecological process, threat, and symbol, fire illuminates Europe's past-and its environmental futures.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the background, practice, potential and challenges associated with developing and using perceptual indicators for assessing sustainability.

Sustainability Indicators (SIs) are usually described and portrayed as quantitative metrics that rest above the human realm of subjectivity, opinion and bias. Thus, they are the basis for objectively measuring progress towards the attainment of targets in sustainable development. Unlike the "hard" metrics described above, the way in which we experience the world and frame our personal decisions based on that experience, past and present, is founded on perceptions and these can be inherently subjective. This book argues that perception-based indicators are an important subset of SIs in assessing sustainability, environmental quality and well-being. The chapters draw upon examples such as the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) produced by Transparency International (TI), and a variety of happiness indices, amongst many others. The chapters in the book can be thought of as comprising two parts. The first section provides a broad review of the field of SIs, addressing the challenges involved in identifying, defining and populating SIs, especially for countries in the Global South. The second part of the book summarises the range of participatory approaches that have often been used to develop perception-based indicators of sustainability, along with their respective pros and cons.

This book will be useful for students studying social sciences, economics, environmental studies, human geography, politics and international development. The book may also appeal to students taking courses in business studies.

Yosemite National Park hosts more than four million visitors annually, a number that underscores both the national park's immense popularity and its limits. Large numbers of visitors means air pollution from car emissions, noise pollution that drowns out the sounds of nature, and destroyed habitat-especially near campgrounds and crowded hiking trails. From the first party of tourists in 1855 to the millions who visit today, Yosemite's visitors have played a primary role in shaping the park's history. Visitors drove Yosemite's development and, ultimately, its popularity, but in doing so, they have turned out to be the greatest threat to the very experiences they seek.

In seeking to understand how visitors' perceptions and experiences have shaped their understanding of the purpose of national parks, and nature more broadly, The Mountains Are Calling places visitors at the center of Yosemite's story. In histories of the national parks, environmental historians traditionally focus on either a conflict between preservation or exploitation, or a celebration of its founders, but such approaches often overlook the millions of visitors or depict them as backdrops in a larger morality play over the preservation of nature. Michael W. Childers instead addresses the lived experiences of visitors and their role in creating national parks, within the context of national park policy shifts and broader American cultural history. Foregrounding the stories of Indigenous people, tourists, innkeepers, soldiers, rangers, climbers, concessioners, and administrators, The Mountains Are Calling tells a more complete story of the park's past to make sense of tourism's environmental costs.

Chapters present in-depth research and case studies on current challenges and opportunities in sustainable construction. Contributing authors emphasise how circular green construction adopts regenerative approaches that aim to preserve the value of materials, reduce embodied carbon and extend the functional lifespan of the building. The book provides forward-looking discussions to shape policy and influence the future of green building through circular approaches, deconstruction strategies and adaptable designs.

This Research Companion is an important resource for students and academics in built environment disciplines including construction management, building technology, civil engineering, architecture and urban planning. It also provides actionable insights for practitioners and policy-makers involved in sustainable building practices.

At the end of the nineteenth century, William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal glorified cubanas as "the most feminine and simple women in the world." Ever since, the stereotype of Cuban femininity as chaste and dutiful has informed Cubans' racial, social, and ethnic identity in the dominant American imagination, and this gendered and deracialized narrative has taken different forms and served various purposes throughout the Cuban diaspora.

In Making the Miami Cubanita Paula Davis Hoffman examines the cultural precepts and political aims underlying the construction of Cuban femininity in pop culture outlets produced by, for, and about Cuban Americans of the Cuban diaspora. By incorporating academic texts, oral interviews, and elements of popular culture as well as personal accounts of growing up in a first-wave Cuban exile family, Hoffman discusses the historical forces that molded vacillating constructions of Miami Cuban women. Organized by decade, this book traces internal and external articulations of Cuban American culture and examines how Cuban American exceptionalism played into the evolution of the term chonga, originally an insult disciplining young cubanas who performed stigmatized ethnic signifiers that has today become a label some proudly own. Not only does Hoffman fill a gap in academic research surrounding the subculture of Cuban American women, she further demonstrates how migration, race, gender, and sexuality are informed by popular culture and political agenda within the diverse context of South Florida.