This book offers the most comprehensive and in-depth exploration of applied psychology in fashion to date, drawing on cutting-edge research and theory from across psychology and related disciplines. It examines the relationship between fashion, dress, and the self; the psychological impact of dress and fashion industry practices on consumers and the industry's workforce; and the role of psychology in understanding fashion consumption, sustainability, and digital innovation.

Bringing together perspectives from areas such as social, personality, cognitive, clinical, occupational, and positive psychology, the authors investigate how fashion influences the self, mental health, and well-being. They also explore how psychological insights can inform inclusive design, ethical marketing, and sustainable fashion practices. The volume highlights the concrete contributions psychologists can make to steer the fashion industry towards a healthier, more inclusive, and environmentally responsible future.

This is an essential resource for students, researchers, and professionals working in fashion psychology, fashion design, marketing, and management. It will also appeal to those interested in the broader cultural and psychological dimensions of fashion.

This book addresses aesthetics from a process philosophy perspective to highlight how even the perception of fixed objects, such as painting and drawing, depends on the intertwining and layering of a range of processes.

Drawing on philosophers within the process tradition, the book argues that the visual arts and aesthetics need to directly address speed differentials in vision and the material medium. In doing so, it rephrases questions in aesthetics - which often involve perduring objects, substances or even eternal ideas - in terms of durational differences. From this perspective, aesthesis constitutes the confluence between visual finitude and the broader movements of material becoming.

Visualising an Aesthetics of Process is essential reading for all scholars, researchers and advanced students of aesthetics and metaphysics.

Remaking Urban Life in Chongqing's Public Rental Housing follows migrant families through an ordinary day-out the door for work and school, back after dark through night markets and shared courtyards-to show how a large state-led public rental housing (PRH) program becomes a lived urban form. Drawing on ethnography, 120 interviews, and sustained site observations across multiple estates, the book links predictable rent and indefinite tenure to the practical work of composing routines, and then shows how transport reliability, school access, and the governance of streets and plazas determine whether those routines feel possible, safe, and shared.

Set within Chongqing's distinctive policy architecture-land-ticket exchanges (dipiao), a more permeable hukou door, and metropolitan PRH build-out-the analysis treats planning documents and management contracts as maps that seek synchrony with household rhythms. Using Henri Lefebvre's "production of space" as a steady guide, it traces how conceived policy space and spatial practice sediment into the lived city: queue lines at bus loops, after-school relays at gates, micro-commerce along edges, and neighbourly care in stairwells and lift lobbies. The book closes with actionable design and governance tools that help agencies keep the housing platform, tighten the links, and design for the day.

Who should read this book? Urban planners and designers; housing and transport policymakers; sociologists and geographers of migration; property and facilities managers working on social-rental estates; graduate students in urban studies and China studies.

Key features include:

• Ground-level evidence connecting policy instruments to everyday mobility, schooling, and shared-space use
• Practical templates for governance and retrofit-service standards, micro-budgets, and a "kit-of-parts" for day-to-day operations.
• A clear theoretical through-line using Lefebvre's production of space to interpret migrant integration and urban sustainability.

What happens when performance defies social and political boundaries? Performing Transgression offers a new cultural history of non-elite spectacle in Heian Japan (794-1185), uncovering how performances on the margins-boisterous dengaku music and dance, daring sangaku acrobatics, and the infectious lyrics of imayo songs-challenged and fascinated the aristocracy.

Ashton Lazarus reveals how these unruly arts were documented by the very elites they unsettled, appearing in historical chronicles, diaries, prose, poetry, and illustrated scrolls. More than mere precursors to later forms like noh and kyogen, these performances formed a dynamic cultural force with real political impact. By tracing their influence through literary studies, performance studies, and historiography, Lazarus rethinks the interplay between politics, class, and culture in Heian Japan.

Performing Transgression illuminates how acts of defiance and creative expression resonate across time, offering fresh insights into the ways performance bridges the vanished past and the present.

An acclaimed historian's bold response to two simple, yet vexed, questions: What counts as China, and who counts as Chinese?

China became a capitalist superpower by investing in globalization. Now that it has established its credentials-and emerged as a major US competitor-its leaders are looking within, focused on suppressing dissent and fostering cohesion. The result has been an increasingly nationalist cultural agenda, celebrating a Chinese identity steeped in the mystique of the Middle Kingdom and nostalgia for heroic twentieth-century resistance. Yet Chinese nationalism, like nationalism everywhere, is fraught. Few Westerners, and even fewer Chinese, recognize that the very idea of China is up for grabs.

In this sweeping history, Xu Guoqi explores the transnational construction of Chineseness. The Idea of China describes an identity constantly under renovation. Through dialogue and confrontation with neighbors, more distant outsiders, and Chinese speakers and writers within the state, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the diaspora, the idea of China has been reshaped repeatedly across time. Even bedrock cultural formations like Confucianism have been reimported to China after their translation in Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and elsewhere. The idea of China has always been and remains a continuing process, invented, subverted, and reinvented to serve the shifting needs of kings and bureaucrats, industrialists and intellectuals, allies and adversaries.

Xu's chronicle is as provocative as it is rigorous, and his conclusion could hardly be starker: China, fundamentally, is constituted by a shared history. To accept this is to begin moving past the heated great-power rivalries that threaten international peace and stability today.

Night Sweats: Cyberfeminist Practices intervenes in this moment of rapid biotechnological development and international political turmoil with thought-provoking, creative, and justice-oriented essays on art and life: opting out of the sludge and consent theatre presented by standard "terms and conditions"; creating plant-assisted reproductive technologies (pARTs) such as indecision trees; practicing compassionate inquiry; and becoming a cyborg-elder. Refusing the authoritarian turn and backlash against reproductive, LGBTQIA+, and racial justice movements, its authors and contributors-artists, writers, scholars, designers, activists, and educators-draw on the twenty-five years of cyberfeminist art work from the subRosa art collective, as well as Black, postcolonial, and environmental feminisms.

The overall motto of the book is "we will save ourselves," with examples taken from critical and revisionist histories of alchemy, the automation of writing systems, and reproductive mutual aid. In doing so, the authors develop new analyses of (cyber)feminist contributions to bioart, tactical media, gender, women's, and sexuality studies, media studies and communication, technoscience studies and STS, durational art, and performance studies.

This book serves as an essential reference for understanding the complex landscape of public opinions regarding climate change in Malaysia. Using a multi-dimensional critical analysis to examine the public opinion discourse in two online newspapers, this book aims to equip readers with a heightened awareness of how language shapes understanding, instil beliefs, and drives action or inaction towards this global crisis. It aims to raise readers' awareness about fostering increased public engagement, drawing on Malaysia as a case study to motivate active participation in the critical dialogues that influence the future of the planet. The book also offers possible implications for public understanding of climate change in Malaysia, and implications for climate mitigation policies. The book will be of interest to the public, academics, researchers, students, and practitioners in applied linguistics, corpus linguistics, media and communication studies, and sociolinguistics.

Explores silence in its philological dimensions: as a vehicle of meaning, a narrative device and a medium for expressing or concealing emotion.

This book explores how silence occurs across languages, literatures and cultures, fulfilling a wide range of communicative functions. It examines how silence can be collective or individual, intentional or unintentional, conveying meanings that extend beyond words and shaping interaction, perception and expression.

The volume investigates the multifaceted nature of silence from literary, semiotic and cultural perspectives, weaving together analyses that reveal its complexity across different media and contexts. The chapters address silences both within and beyond interaction, including interaction-like contexts, encompassing such diverse phenomena as animal silence, the silence of trauma and the iconic phase of silence.

Taken together, the contributions provide a comprehensive and multidimensional understanding of silence in auditory and visual forms of expression, and across varied linguistic and cultural contexts.

This book offers a comprehensive and transformative journey for researchers, aimed at fostering inclusive, ethical, and impactful research practices in collaboration with Indian transgender communities. The book begins with a compelling personal reflection by the author, offering readers a relatable entry point. This reflection highlights the profound influence of one's background on their research approach, setting the stage for a more introspective and empathetic exploration of the subject matter. Secondly, this book would address crucial aspects of researching with Indian transgender individuals. From understanding the complexities of transgender identity to understanding ethical considerations, designing inclusive research, and advocating for change, this book offers a holistic perspective that benefits both research scholars and experienced researchers. Moreover, drawing from authors' own real-world experiences, the book not only identifies ethical dilemmas but also provides practical solutions and guidance on how to respect privacy, obtain informed consent, and uphold ethical responsibilities to transgender participants. This book places a strong emphasis on collaboration and trust-building. It will offer strategies for researchers to evolve from passive observers to active collaborators, fostering genuine partnerships with transgender individuals in the research process. The book explores how to translate findings into meaningful action and policy change. By sharing authors' own journey in effecting change, it may empower researchers to become advocates for social justice and inclusivity. Lastly, the inclusion of appendices featuring research tools and sample interview protocols enhances the practical utility of this resource, making it a go-to reference for researchers.

To curb the influence of minority populations and "outside enemies," the Ottoman government implemented new and experimental Tanzimat reforms within the empire's center and provincial regions. By the 1860s, the city of Ruscuk in present-day Bulgaria and capital of the Ottoman Danube province became a test case for this expansive reform movement within an urbanizing and contested peripheral landscape. In Empire and Nation in the City, Mehmet Celik traces how the Danube province and Ruscuk, in particular, experienced a series of swift political transitions from a "modernized" Ottoman administration, to a Russian provisional government, and finally to a Bulgarian nation-state.

Celik examines the transformative effects of each political system, arguing that Bulgarian nationalism was not a uniform ideology, but a flexible and mutable one that engaged multiple loyalties-Bulgarian and Ottoman among them. To understand these competing loyalties, he explores the diverse religious and multiethnic makeup of Ruscuk and the multifaceted responses to imperial control, nationalist sympathies, and political movements. Rather than assess Ottoman rule and Bulgarian nationhood as separate periods, Celik bridges these moments to understand the continuity of Ottoman reforms within a burgeoning Bulgarian nation.

The African Origins of Democracy challenges the myth that democracy was born in ancient Greece. Drawing on archaeology, anthropology, and political science, Bernd Reiter shows that egalitarian African societies practiced self-rule tens of thousands of years earlier-and that these traditions spread outward through migration and exchange. At the heart of the book is Botswana, where dikgotla-village assemblies-still embody living democracy today. Bold and provocative, this book rewrites democracy's story, centering Africa as its birthplace and urging us to imagine futures beyond elite-driven representative systems.

This book reconsiders Iamblichus' Response to Porphyry, Late Antiquity's seminal work on theurgy, which is often referred to as De Mysteriis. Was this text intended to be more than just a defence of ritualism or a philosophical crossing of metaphysical wits between Porphyry and Iamblichus? This volume examines whether De Mysteriis constituted a manifesto of restoration, a call to resignify and revive a religion that Iamblichus felt was spiralling into barren traditionalism.

Through a nuanced examination of Iamblichus' theurgy, this book shows the emergence of a sophisticated philosophico-ritualistic system, one designed to reform religious practice through divine epiphanies and direct communication with the gods. Using a thorough textual analysis, this book uncovers crucial distinctions between theurgy and magic and explores the mechanics of divine illumination during theurgic rituals in the context of Iamblichus' intricate hierarchy of spiritual beings. In this system, this book demonstrates, material objects could become vessels of divine power and humans could become interlocutors with the divine itself.

This book brings together recent results of extensive and varied archaeological, stable isotope and ancient DNA research from the south coast of Tierra del Fuego and carefully integrates them with earlier archaeological, ethnographical and paleoenvironmental works in the region. Fuegian societies have fascinated travelers, naturalists and scientists during the last two centuries. The chapters analyze and review data on demographic trends, the trophic relations between human and faunal communities in ancient food webs and population genetics, providing a comprehensive picture of the hunter-gatherer history in the Fuegian Andes.

During the last decade, new perspectives and methodologies in archaeological research have taken place in the southern coast of Tierra del Fuego. Now, new results are emerging on the long-term interaction between human and coastal ecosystems. This book attempts to tell this state of the art in a comprehensive and approachable manner. In this sense, the book synthesizes current research that will be accessible to students and professionals alike.

This book offers a Lacanian interpretation of Freud's Moses and Monotheism to explore the enigma of constitutional instability in Ecuador-a country that has sanctioned twenty constitutions since independence. Drawing on historical archives and psychoanalytic theory, Ernesto Espindola argues that existing literature underestimates the affective investments of political elites in constitutional 'abolition-replacement events', often led by charismatic or authoritarian figures.

Through a Lacanian discourse analysis of Ecuador's 1869 and 2007-2008 Constituent Assemblies, and the 2015 reform abolishing presidential term limits, the book examines the ideological grip of messianic leadership and its relation to heroic identification, the paternal imago, and the fantasy of national redemption. Espindola shows how constitutional instability in Ecuador is not merely a legal or institutional phenomenon, but one deeply entwined with unconscious desires, symbolic attachments, and the repetition of political trauma.

Engaging with Lacan, Freud, and the Essex School of Discourse Analysis, this book offers a novel framework for understanding the psycho-political dynamics of constitutional change in postcolonial contexts. It will appeal to scholars in political theory, psychoanalysis, Latin American studies, and cultural studies.

Decolonizing Bodies explores processes of racialization through decolonial and radical relational lenses. It weaves together theory and the author's personal stories to examine how human bodies and whole nations are racialized by late capitalism's colonial legacies. It begins by introducing Radical Relational Individuality, a decolonial and relational perspective on embodied humans. It then discusses mixed-race myths in Mexico and Canada that reveal the persistence of systemic racism as global white ignorance and structural gaslighting. It engages with the trauma of racism embedded in human bodies, how institutions perpetuate white supremacy, and the need for racial healing for everybody. Decolonizing Bodies includes an interview with educator and leadership coach Tovi C. Scruggs on her transformational teachings and concludes by discussing decolonial cosmopolitan localism based on pluriversality, a shared world, shared humanity, and an expansive form of radical relational freedom that centers an ethic of love and our deep interconnections and dependencies on everybody and everything. This book will be of interest to scholars of sociology, race and racism, and decolonial approaches.

This book unpacks the multifaceted ways of living with heritage in contemporary Vietnam. It shows how heritage shapes our community and shines possible directions of pathways to the future(s). It also shows that heritage is something being reconfigured, recombined, or compounded (and sometimes erased) over time and across space through changing contexts. Within this collection, the chapters cover a broad range of these aspects of heritage: The first shows how heritage is mobilized as a key instrument in constructing a national cultural identity, followed by a call for the preservation of the collective housing complex, a significant architectural symbol of life during the Subsidy Period. Another then examines passive design in the traditional Cham house, a living heritage hiding in plain sight, and the book goes on to highlight the dark aspect of heritage by recounting the construction process of the Dian-Vi?t Railway. Using the case of the arch bridges of Hu? Imperial City across Ng? Ha River, another chapter demonstrates the contradiction between preservation and living with the needs of the present. One author shows how performance of intangible cultural heritage is a collaborative process that involves diverse actors, and the next unveils the dedicated commitment of folklore practitioners and heritage scholars in ensuring Mother Goddesses worship belief practices lives on in the face of political and social challenges. Finally, the book recounts the dedicated contribution by heritage researchers working on the Complex of Hu? Monuments, key actors in the heritage field whom we often take for granted. Relevant to scholars in cultural studies, history, archaeology, and heritage studies, specifically, and to Southeast Asian humanities and social science researchers more broadly, particularly those with a specific interest in Vietnam, this is a timely contribution to discussions on Vietnamese heritage - past, present, and future.

This book examines one of the most important questions in peace research: What leads to enduring peace after civil wars, and what leads to the resurgence of violence? For decades, intrastate conflicts have been the predominant form of armed conflict, and most recent civil wars were conflicts that recurred. The research presented in this book focuses on influenceable factors, first and foremost on the type of civil war termination and on the post-civil war order that is shaped by the distribution of military power between the former warring parties and the scale of political compromise. Moreover, it shows that the peacekeeping environment has a major influence on whether peace endures. The insights provided in this book are relevant for the academic community, and for decision-makers and practitioners involved in civilian or military efforts to establish and preserve peace.

This book offers a bold re-examination of how African spirituality and religion are understood, challenging centuries of misrepresentation shaped by colonial and Abrahamic thought. It argues that describing African religions through any form of modified monotheism, whether "implicit," "diffused," or "accommodated", distorts their true nature and philosophical depth. Critiquing both colonial and postcolonial scholarship, the author shows how figures such as John Mbiti, Bolaji Idowu, John Bewaji, Thaddeus Metz, Motsamai Molefe, and Kirk Lougheed remain confined by Abrahamic categories that obscure African metaphysical perspectives.

Drawing on the ritual systems and spiritual knowledge of six major Afro-religious traditions (Kemet, Yoruba, Anlo-Ewe, Igbo, Akan, and Shona) the book advances panentheism, a non-Abrahamic monotheistic framework, as the most accurate model for understanding African religions. Combining philosophical analysis with ethnographic insight, it redefines the conceptual vocabulary for African religious scholarship, resolving long-standing debates and demonstrating the value of thick description for studying African religiosity. An original contribution to African philosophy, religious studies, and decolonial theory, this book reshapes how African spirituality is to be studied and understood.