This is the first book to focus on the psychology of esports and competitive gaming, bridging the gap between traditional sports psychology and the unique demands of digital competition. In doing so, it provides comprehensive insights into cognitive processes, motivation, personality traits, performance enhancement techniques, and the challenges faced by professional esports players.

The book is structured into three distinct sections, addressing the Foundations of Esports Psychology; Mental Optimization and Strategic Excellence; and Mental Health and Practical Applications. Featuring contributions from over 25 international experts, each chapter provides research insights and evidence-based strategies for competitive gaming environments. Topics include rapid decision-making in FPS/MOBA games, managing "always-on" training schedules, virtual team coordination, coping with online toxicity, and ethical considerations for young professionals. The book also emphasizes that esports requires distinct theoretical frameworks, rather than simply adapting traditional sports psychology.

Written accessibly whilst maintaining academic rigour, this is essential reading for sports psychologists, esports coaches, competitive gamers, researchers, students in sports psychology and esports management programmes, and organizations building sustainable gaming ecosystems that prioritize excellence and player well-being.

Speculative fiction imagines impossible futures and alternative pasts, alien species and angelic monsters, technological marvels and magical solutions. In recent years, however, many in its fandoms have protested the inclusion of nonwhite, nonmale, and nonheterosexual characters as betrayals of their beloved media for the sake of "wokeness." Nostalgic Futures: The Reactionary Fantasies of Speculative Fiction Fandoms examines how contemporary fan controversies- particularly those surrounding gender, race, and sexuality in speculative fiction media-intersect with reactionary movements within and beyond fandom. This book explores how the nostalgic fantasies of fans and far-right movements contribute to broader reactionary discourses, shaping not only the past they long for but the future they fear. From the Hugo Awards and PuppyGate to Star Wars' #NotMyJedi to Mass Effect and The Last of Us boycotts, Nostalgic Futures reveals how speculative fiction fandom has become a site of contestation over our visions of the past, present, and future.

What can sport do to produce positive social change in our world today? Now in a fully revised, updated and expanded fourth edition, this critical, challenging and comprehensive textbook introduces the study of sport, culture and society.

International in scope, the book challenges the reader to activate an audacious spirit of activism in and through sport. Full of contemporary examples, it places sport at the heart of the analysis and introduces the reader to every core topic and emerging area in the study of sport and society, including the history and politics of sport, gender, disability and advocacy, race and racism, violence and crime, health and wellbeing, media and digital communication, the environment, religion, poverty and sport for development and peace. This edition features new material on sportswashing, sports management, debates around the inclusion/exclusion of transgender people in sport and the Black Lives Matter movement. It also features a wider geographical range of examples and case studies, including Latin America, China, India and Africa. Each chapter offers a wealth of useful features, such as 'Sport in Focus' case studies, chapter summaries, guides to further reading, revision questions, practical projects, definitions of key concepts and weblinks. At its heart, Sport, Culture and Society is an invitation to make a difference.

This is a broad-ranging, in-depth and thoughtful introduction to the sociocultural analysis of sport and sets a new agenda for the discipline. It is essential reading for all students with an interest in sport.

Additionally, updated online teaching and learning resources are available, including a testbank, resource list and glossary.

Maternal morbidity in the United States remains alarmingly high, despite rapid medical advancements. The disparities in maternal outcomes - particularly across racial, socioeconomic, and geographic lines - are stark and persistent. This book investigates how artificial intelligence (AI) might help reduce these disparities, offering a critical examination of both its potential and its limitations within the evolving maternal health landscape.

This book engages with complex questions about how AI can complement or supplement the work of health care providers. It draws on the latest data and research to explore AI's role across a range of med tech applications, including chatbots, electronic medical records, virtual coaching, and social media. Through evidence-based analysis, it considers how these technologies might prevent maternal morbidity and mortality and promote health equity. This book also takes a carefully balanced approach, acknowledging the risks of AI - such as algorithmic bias - and evaluates when and how AI is most or least effective in meeting patient needs.

This is an essential resource for students, researchers, and professionals working in maternal health and related fields. It offers a timely and nuanced perspective on the intersection of technology and care.

The Struggle for Public Goods in the Shadow of Fascism examines the present diminishment of democracy through the prism of intensifying conflict between market freedom and citizen rights. The fate of democracy is at the center of this book's exploration of the decline of the welfare state and rise of radical right politics.

Sources of hope in difficult times as expressed by artists and organizers are underscored as a constructive way forward. The rise of radical right politics has in part been fueled by the political capitalization of resentment and economic elite interest. State policies supporting basic functions of the welfare state, such as service benefits, anti-discrimination laws, and market regulation, are in the crosshairs of radical right politics. The welfare state is seen as undermining market interests and displacing "heritage citizens." Therefore, a primary intention of radical right politics is the disassembly of the welfare state.

Providing an important history of American social welfare, all of these are unpacked with careful attention and scrutiny to enable readers to perceive not only the winding path to how we got here but also the stakes in the current predicament. Tracing out the impact of the rise of far-right politics on American political discourse and social policy, this text will be an important resource for researchers, instructors, and students in sociology, social theory, social policy, human services and public administration, and American and political studies.

Charts novel territory for the future of family in the 21st century

As society becomes more polarized around political and cultural beliefs, family estrangement has received increased attention. Going no contact with a parent, sibling, grandparent, or other extended family member is often portrayed as a sign of the further fraying of society or as a result of selfish choices that privilege the rights of the individual over the ability to compromise. In Families We Lose, Rin Reczek takes a different view, arguing that going no contact isn't done on a whim by selfish people or due only to specific individual circumstances. Instead, she argues that contemporary family estrangement is indicative of a more fundamental culture clash in the very meaning and expectations of family in the US today. Reczek shows that estrangement is sparked by a confrontation between the traditional culture - which demands the family of origin is unconditionally forever - and a rivaling idea of family that values the quality of contact, focusing on equity, accountability, personal and relationship evolution, mutual respect, and maturity. At stake in the clash between compulsory and democratized kinship is a battle to determine the very meaning of "family" in the US today.

Based on in-depth interviews with a diverse set of adults who are 'no-contact' with one or more family-of-origin member, Reczek reveals how these adults set new expectations about family. She shows that estrangement can be a path to healing, self-acceptance, and democratized configurations of family around the shared values of mutuality and intentional community. Shifting the focus from family reunification to family freedom, Families We Lose imagines a world where adults are empowered to choose who gets to be in their family - even if it means leaving some ties behind.

This conference proceedings is for the International Conference on Green Policies and Practices: Catalyst or Pressure for Trade and Investment. The conference was organized on 22nd and 23rd November 2024 at University of Economics and Business, Vietnam National University - Hanoi. The conference is the 12th in the series of annual Conferences on International Economic Cooperation and Integration (CIECI), initiated in 2013 by the VNU-UEB. The theme of the conference, "Green Policies and Practices: Catalyst or Pressure for Trade and Investment", reflects one of the most pressing debates of our time: the balance between economic growth and environmental sustainability. As global trade and investment deepen, the urgency of integrating green standards into policies and practices has never been greater.

For built environment professionals, delivering socially impactful projects is more crucial and challenging than ever. This step-by-step guide provides an innovative approach to stakeholder engagement, empowering project teams to create meaningful social value through the stakeholder engagement process and build better projects.

Socially Successful Projects in the built environment will help the reader understand the theory behind a reframed approach to stakeholder engagement using a social value lens. The authors argue that projects in the built environment need to be technically feasible, financially viable, and socially successful. Project managers need to focus on all three elements, which are summarised as 'concrete, cash, and connection'. Failing to meet that third criterion can lead to pushback, protests, delays, and potentially unsuccessful projects. This book focuses on the third of those elements (the social dimension) and provides a step-by-step guide to how a project can be socially successful. In summary, this is about delivering better projects for both the stakeholders and the project teams.

In Socially Successful Projects in the built environment, the authors unravel the complex relationship between social value and stakeholder engagement and reveal a transformative practical theory for effective collaboration and facilitation. Along the way, they address key issues such as design philosophy, scenario development, stakeholder analysis, optioneering, and project learning, and provide practical advice on how to use these methods within real-world projects. This book is essential reading for all built environment stakeholders and teams working to deliver better projects.

Marriage and fertility rates are falling around the world, upending social security planning and threatening economic growth. In Love Apocalypse, anthropologists present their insights into this society-altering demographic shift, drawing on their research into the ways love, romantic relationships, and family are being transformed by cultural, social, and economic forces. Each case study in this volume examines a unique cultural context from either Asia (China, South Korea, Japan, India), Europe (Germany, Lithuania), or Latin America (Cuba, Peru), grounded in years of ethnographic research into how communities' experiences and perceptions of love, marriage, and family are changing in response to economic precarity, shifting gender relations, status competition, and diversifying cultural norms. It is increasingly clear that marriage and two-parent nuclear families will not be the universal norm of the twenty-first century even if this arrangement was largely idealized a mere generation ago. However, this does not mean the end of love, intimacy, or family but rather its transformation and the emergence of new intimate relationships and adaptations to the challenges and opportunities of life in the twenty-first century.

The main purpose of this book is to examine the applications of nature-based solutions (NBS) and circularity in the built environment from a multidisciplinary perspective, but with a focus on energy, civil, and environmental engineering. The book is therefore divided into three sections, energy management, hydrology and water management, and applications of sustainable natural resources in soil improvement in the built environment.

Section 1 introduces the concepts of circularity and NBS in the built environment with a focus on energy management in buildings and infrastructure through case studies of auditing, assessment, and best practice in design.

Section 2 examines NBS in the form of water management. Chapters cover urban and rural resilience in water management, the circular design of waste management and NBS in coastal contexts.

In Section 3, chapters and case studies present solutions that can be applied to improve the physical and mechanical properties of the soil. It presents viable options for sustainable reuse of construction materials from civil infrastructure projects, and industrial wastes in soil improvement.

This book is important reading for researchers and professionals in civil engineering, water engineering, coastal engineering, sustainable infrastructure design and urban planning.

Now in its seventh edition, and fully revised with a complete reimagining of voice, structure, and purpose, Introduction to Family Processes explores the complex workings of inner family life. Focusing on family processes and dynamics, rather than sociological trends, political topics, or the individual psychological approach, the text presents the research underlying core family processes and offers practical strategies to enhance family well-being and strengthen positive relationships.

Key features of this edition include:

• A new chapter focused on parenting and intergenerational relationships, exploring how family roles evolve and shift over time.
• A contemporary focus, fully reflecting the values of inclusivity and diversity in the study of families, and including topics that speak directly to the lives of today's students, including digital life, family formation, identity, and resilience.
• A wealth of pedagogical features throughout, including Points to Ponder and TL;DR summary boxes, a Family Toolbox of activities, study questions, and suggested readings.

Tailored for students across undergraduate, postgraduate, and professional programs related to family studies, this book provides essential insights into the complex dynamics that shape how families function and thrive.

The Irvine Ranch: Fulfilling the Vision, 1977-2025 continues the story of the planning and development of the Irvine Ranch under a partnership of high-powered businessmen to the single ownership of Donald Bren.

The Irvine Ranch transformed from an agricultural empire into the most successful New Town in the United States in less than two generations. Since 1977, some of the most innovative and valuable master-planned residential, commercial, and retail developments have occurred on the Irvine Ranch in the cities of Irvine, Newport Beach, Tustin, and Orange. This book details the Irvine Company's success in planning and its strategic handling of major challenges, including infrastructure needs and responses to anti-growth sentiment and litigation. From the start of comprehensive planning of the Irvine Ranch in 1960 to today, the development is regarded by planning and real estate experts as the most significant and valuable master-planned community in the nation.

Successive generations of urban planners and real estate developers will look to the Irvine Ranch-shaped by Bren's long-term leadership-as a model of successful large-scale community development.

This book brings together illuminating interviews with the most influential scholars who have shaped the interdisciplinary field of death studies. From sociological explorations to psychological frameworks, cultural analyses to digital age considerations, these conversations reveal the rich tapestry of approaches that have advanced our understanding of mortality, bereavement, and end-of-life experiences. Readers will discover how seminal works in death studies emerged, the critical role of academic and community networks, and the transformative power of examining death through diverse disciplinary lenses. The collection highlights both theoretical developments and practical applications, showcasing how scholars have navigated personal and professional boundaries while contributing to this sensitive yet vital area of study.

This volume spans sociology, anthropology, psychology, cultural studies, digital humanities, and public engagement, making it an invaluable resource for academics, researchers, graduate students, and practitioners in death studies, palliative care, counseling, funeral services, and related fields.

The chapters in this volume were originally published in Mortality.

The Total Black Experience is the first book to chronicle the history and social significance of Positively Black, one of the longest-running public affairs shows in the history of television. Spurred on by the findings of the Kerner Commission, executives at WNBC-TV greenlit the show and turned production over to a small but dedicated team of storytellers who quickly made it their mission to carve out a space for serious and nuanced discussion of issues important to the Black community and to celebrate all aspects of Black culture. They believed that accurate representation of their experiences was a right, not a privilege. The show's first cohosts included the well-known Harlem-based activist Rev. Eugene Callender and Gus Heningburg, activist, successful consultant and mediator, and advocate for organized labor. Callender had founded Harlem Prep to equip young Black people for college, while Heningburg played a key role in stabilizing life in Newark following the rebellion there in the late 1960s. Both were adept at using the media to reach their constituencies. Combining in-depth interviews with painstaking archival research, The Total Black Experience introduces readers to key members of the Positively Black production team and analyzes thematic shifts in the show's content. The book celebrates Positively Black's longevity and challenges readers to explore the current state of Black representation on television.

This innovative and timely book critically explores ethical and governance issues and debates relating to the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the hospitality and tourism industries.

The hospitality and tourism sectors are at the forefront of technological advancements, with AI playing a pivotal role in transforming customer engagement, operational strategies, and decision-making processes. Recent innovations, particularly in generative AI applications such as chatbots, content creation, and predictive analytics, have revolutionised how services are delivered and experienced. However, these advancements come with ethical challenges, including privacy concerns in personalised marketing, biases in decision-making algorithms, the lack of transparency in AI-driven processes, issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion, and disparities that perpetuate systemic biases. The book aims to help businesses, researchers, and policymakers tackle these challenges and adopt responsible AI practices.

This important and topical volume offers academics, researchers, and policymakers an interdisciplinary exploration of the ethical complexities of AI in the tourism and hospitality industries and strategies to foster inclusivity and mitigate these issues.

This book examines the complex interrelationship between rugby, honour, and the African moral philosophy of ubuntu, positioning sport within the broader history of coloniality to reveal how athletic practices can become powerful vehicles for social justice transformation.

The book offers a nuanced analysis of how Springbok rugby served as both an instrument of colonial and apartheid exclusion and a catalyst for democratic change in post-apartheid South Africa. The re-entry of the Springboks into international rugby involved the transformation of South African rugby and sporting honour that is worthy of study from a decolonial perspective. Through a creative methodological lens that centres ubuntu as a humanising philosophical framework, the book explores how notions of sporting honour shaped racial boundaries and colonial conduct, while simultaneously demonstrating sport's potential for advancing inclusion and social justice. The book provides fresh insights into the connections between rugby and other sports, South African colonial societies, the collapse of apartheid, and the transition to democracy. By considering rugby as a postcolonial, post-apartheid sport, it reveals nuanced complexities and possibilities for weaving a desirable fabric of inclusive sociality. This involves transcending damaged and limiting notions of colonial honour and rethinking colonial violence through ubuntu's humanising principles, offering a compelling critique that reimagines how rugby, and sport more broadly, can be re-humanised and transformed into a force for positive social change.

This book will appeal to students, scholars, and academics across multiple disciplines, including sports studies, African philosophy, postcolonial studies, sociology, and social justice research, as well as anyone interested in sport, ubuntu, and social change more generally.

As the first major U.S. urban center located west of the Appalachian Mountains, Cincinnati depended on the Ohio River for its early development, eventually becoming one of the country's iconic river cities, with incredible growth during the golden age of steamboats. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the river had lost its shine and became known as the "poor man's highway." The twentieth century ushered in a period of incredible activity concentrated on the Ohio River. Local elites began a series of infrastructural projects focused on transforming both the Ohio River and Cincinnati, bringing to the fore a new kind of river city. Unlike many water management projects that wanted to tame rivers, Cincinnati elites sought to build a sustained relationship with the Ohio River. For its part, the Ohio River actively took part in these projects, becoming a major contributor to the successful realization of elite objectives around urban growth, public health, and white supremacy.

Doing Gender in Media, Art, and Culture provides a critical introduction to recent developments in cultural gender studies. Focussing primarily on the fields of art, culture, and media, it encompasses literary, historical, film, performance, and indigenous studies, as well as the digital humanities.

Gender studies currently find themselves at the heart of a deeply troubling socio-political landscape. The 18 chapters in this volume aim to provide knowledge on how to understand the current backlash against feminism and how to navigate the increasingly polarised debates surrounding systemic racism and sexism, anti-trans violence, and non-binary gender identifications. It teaches its readers how to address epistemic inequalities in knowledge production and how to make sense of the role of gender in thinking about racism, climate change, and armed conflict. Analysing the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion is a core task of feminist scholarship and, consequently, motivates the intersectional and gender-sensitive research methods that are brought to the fore in this book.

This vibrant and wide-ranging collection of essays is essential reading for anyone seeking an accessible yet sophisticated guide to the foundational issues, concepts, and debates within gender studies.

This book presents thirty-three essays examining postcolonial literature, cultural studies, and literary pedagogy. Contributors analyze diverse literary traditions including Indian progressive poetry, Dalit autobiographies, African literature, and Caribbean writing. The volume explores themes of gender, identity, migration, and digital humanities while examining works by authors from Premchand to contemporary writers, besides which it also offers:

• Comprehensive collection of 33 scholarly essays examining diverse aspects of postcolonial literature and cultural studies
• Interdisciplinary approach covering Indian, African, Caribbean, and diasporic literary traditions
• Critical analysis of progressive aesthetics, Dalit literature, and gender representation in contemporary writing
• Examination of digital humanities and raciolinguistic perspectives in literary studies
• Tribute volume featuring extensive analysis of Harish Narang's literary contributions and pedagogical philosophy

The book offers a special focus on Professor Harish Narang's literary contributions includes critical essays and an exclusive interview. With foreword by Kapil Kapoor, this collection offers comprehensive perspectives on literature, politics, and pedagogy in the contemporary global context.

This title has been co-published with Aakar Books. T&F does not sell or distrubute the print versions in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Deploying feminist and queer theories of embodiment and subjectivity, The Impossible Subject of Suicide stages an intervention into dominant understandings of suicide that position suicide prevention as the only possible and ethical response to suicide, thus ruling it out as a legitimate choice.

With attention to scholarly research, news media, fiction, public health, and social media, the author investigates the cultural mechanisms at play in positioning and sustaining suicide prevention as a pre-discursive, a-contextual, and natural response to suicide. As the prevention narrative relies on the assumption that "normal," "healthy," and "rational" people want to live, it relegates the suicidal subject to de-agentified subject positions such as mentally ill, at-risk, or vulnerable, and thus effectively silences those who consider death. As such, the suicidal subject cannot exist as a subject in its own right: it is an impossible subject.

A study of the ways in which the subject's agency is conditioned by the expression of a normative desire to live, this book interrogates the taken-for-granted knowledges of suicide that have for decades informed understandings and representations of suicide, and aims to render the lives of those who live with suicide more liveable and open up a space from which those who have culturally been silenced can speak. It will, therefore, appeal to scholars in the social sciences and humanities with an interest in mental health, suicide, and/or questions around agency, embodiment, and subjectivity.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Faces and the City advances the understanding of the role of faces and face representations, their meanings and interpretations, in physical and digital urban space.

This comprehensive study builds a typology of biological, represented and digital faces within urban space and presents an interdisciplinary approach to the facial presence in urban space, which it is used to analyse in depth urban faces and facial representation in public art, monuments, memorials as well as memorial practices, including digital ones.

This innovative volume will interest PhD students and scholars in semiotics, visual communication, digital humanities, cultural geography and urban studies, as well as those working in urban planning and design, architecture, memory studies and art history.

This book explores the 21st-century practices of using sport and physical activity to engage with social issues and inequalities.

Based on two years of ethnographic research exploring and contextualizing one not-for-profit organization, Back on My Feet, which uses running to empower those experiencing homelessness in cities across the United States, and including interviews and participant observation, this book takes a critical look at how this organization fits within wider historical dynamics of urban homelessness, race, and neoliberalism in the United States. Arguing that such programs and interventions can unintentionally reinforce the systems that create homelessness, this book closely examines aspects of the work of Back on My Feet and similar organizations, including how sport and physical activity can help participants foster identities beyond "homeless," how such programs fit within urban change and homeless discourses, the experiences of both recovery participants and volunteers, and the tension between helping individuals and addressing systemic issues.

Empirically rich and challenging some long-eld assumptions about the social role of sport and physical activity-ed interventions, this is fascinating reading for any advanced student, researcher, practitioner, or policymaker working in sport studies and development, cultural studies, urban studies, or political science.

This handbook presents a novel approach to updated, authoritative accounts of research on the sociologies of food and drink.

Foregrounding the discipline of sociology in its various forms, it presents a range of theoretical approaches - including theories of practice, figurational sociology, symbolic interactionism, Conversation Analysis as well as inspiration derived from Science and Technology Studies. It emphasises the improved analyses that properly theorised and identifiably sociological perspectives can contribute to our understanding of activities associated with food and drink and their socio-cultural contexts. The book opens with a chapter which both introduces newcomers to the scope of the field and establishes the rationale for the book's focus. The subsequent chapters provide comprehensive expositions of major contributions, intellectual turning points, and ruptures or disciplinary breakthroughs as well as emerging directions for future study.

Thus, The Routledge International Handbook of the Sociologies of Food and Drink provides an essential overview of a variety of established theoretical approaches as well as more recent conceptual developments. It will appeal to scholars, researchers, and students of sociology with interests in culture, consumption, and social theory, as well as food and drink.