This book presents real-life applications of data science, artificial intelligence, and big data for the Sustainable Development Goals. It includes a list of case studies from different states across India. The case studies in the book use both structured and unstructured data like numeric data, textual data, and video/image data across the various chapters for analysis. It explores various aspects of data science starting from on ground data collection to dashboard based reporting, unsupervised methods like clustering for grouping data points, use of artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning, search or information retrieval, time series forecasting, and optimization.

• It showcases data science decision-making processes, driving innovation, and solving complex problems in real-life scenarios across sectors like governance, education, healthcare agriculture and sanitation
• The SDGs provide a framework for societal development and well-being for all; the data science and big data interventions in this book are aligned towards mapping the various SDGs
• Most of the data science use cases and initiative projects covered in this book have been implemented by central or state governments across different states of India
• Shows how data science intervention can transform the social sector, potentially driving positive change and addressing critical societal challenges
• Explained the fundamentals of data science theories with case studies, including concepts like classification, regression, predictive analytics, optimization, artificial intelligence, deep learning, and time series forecasting for readers of different disciplines

It serves as a valuable reference for graduate students, researchers, and scholars seeking to deepen their knowledge and engage with real life applications of data science. It will also serve as a valuable resource for government officers and policy practitioners, providing a range of cases on the use of data-based methods for improving governance and policy making.

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 funded by the Great Lakes Institute of Management, Gurgaon Campus, Delhi NCR, India.

Competition is a key element in the institutional design in Western liberal democracies. This book offers a conceptual and normative analysis of the value and ethics of competition.

We compete for jobs, promotions, grants, prizes, access to selective (university) programmes and the recognition and power that comes with it. While competition is widely accepted and even embraced, it is also clear that it comes with serious problems. This book questions the self-evidence with which competitive incentive structures and selection and distribution mechanisms are employed on the labour market, in education and in academia. It shows that the moral problems associated with competition are not mere unfortunate side effects that we should take for granted but baked into its very nature. It argues, in short, that even when competitions are considered fair, they tend to corrupt practices and come with significant opportunity, psychological and emotional costs, while undermining solidarity. As such, this book contributes to the latest philosophical debates on the nature and desirability of competition.

The Moral Problems of Competition will appeal to researchers and graduate students working in ethics, political philosophy, political theory, economics and sociology.

The Arts of Governance offers a global history of the creation, uses, and adaptations of the political advice literature produced at the court of or about the reign of Tang Emperor Taizong (r. 626-649). This book is the first to place the history of Sinitic mirror texts in a global and comparative historical framework. De Weerdt interprets medieval political advice literature as an administrative technology attested throughout Afro-Eurasia whose history is shown to have been cross-cultural from inception through the present. The five chapters explain key moments in the longue-duree global history of the Taizong mirror literature and do so by describing their global and comparative contexts as well as by probing the specific models of governance and the political agendas that were at play during each of these moments.

The first chapter documents the use of political metaphors of the body and the mirror in Sinitic political advice literature and explains the early medieval construction of "the arts of governance" as a model through these metaphors. Subsequent chapters show how later medieval Neo-Confucian politicians developed the "learning of emperors" as a model to respond to the early fourteenth-century Mongol infatuation with the Taizong mirror literature, and ask why the Tang mirror texts, after having been long overshadowed by Neo-Confucian alternatives, were adapted in various genres and different media at early modern East Asian and West European courts and broadly circulated in print. The fifth and final chapter delves into the remarkable phenomenon of the explosion of vernacular East Asian translations of these mirror texts (over forty unique modern Chinese translations) from the late twentieth century to the present.

The Arts of Governance vividly depicts the continuities and transitions in the longue-duree history of East Asian mirror literature, and challenges temporal and spatial divides such as medieval arts of governance/modern political theory and Euro-Mediterranean mirror literature/East Asian classics and commentary. It also invites readers to rethink the chronologies and modalities of vernacularization and the global exchange of administrative knowledge and technologies.

As the populist right gains political legitimacy and the backlash against feminist movements grows, pay and health inequalities are worsening, and misogyny has taken on new insidious digital forms, gender equality is as contested and uncertain as it has ever been. How did we get here? And why, despite over a century of protest, has more progress not been made?

In this book, acclaimed historian Pat Thane offers a clear-eyed introduction to the key forces that have driven as well as limited the pursuit of gender equality in Britain over the last century. From the fight for enfranchisement to the election of Margaret Thatcher, the rise of New Labour and the impact of austerity, she reveals that gender inequalities have always intersected with inequalities of class, income, disability and ethnicity. With examples spanning education, employment, political representation, health and sexual violence, she explores how and why such profound inequalities have survived and pervaded every area of our lives.

Women's Liberation addresses the fundamental question at the heart of this long fight for change: is gender inequality a mainstay of our social, economic and political fabric or is a more hopeful future possible? This lucid and accessible book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding contemporary debates about gender in Britain, as well as twentieth-century social and political history.

This book examines the evolving landscape of media across Asia, offering critical insights into contemporary challenges facing journalism, digital communication, and media representation in the region. Drawing from six rigorous research studies, the volume explores diverse dimensions of Asian media systems, from authoritarian resistance strategies to digital platform dynamics.

The book provides empirical analysis of key media phenomena, including journalistic resistance in authoritarian contexts, public health communication framing in China, the emergence of podcasting in India, Japanese cosmetic brand strategies on Chinese social media, smart home technology adoption patterns, and gender representation in Indonesian digital news. This volume will serve as an essential resource for understanding contemporary media dynamics in Asia. It will particularly benefit those studying comparative media systems, digital communication strategies, and the intersection of technology, culture, and society in Asian contexts.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Media Asia.

This book provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of the transformation of Western Balkan candidate countries as they move toward European Union (EU) accession. It assesses this multidimensional process as shaped both by reforms in the region and by developments within the EU itself. The volume examines enlargement credibility amid democratic backsliding, radical-right pressures, and debates on EU reform, alongside questions of strategic autonomy and authoritarian norm diffusion. It traces accession-driven change in public administration, regulatory capacity, the rule of law, and government-civil society relations.

The book also explores policy areas increasingly defining the accession agenda: migration as an institutional challenge; economic transformation supported by EU investment and efforts to reduce disparities and foster inclusive development; infrastructure as a catalyst for convergence; the intertwined digital and media transition; and climate and energy reforms required for alignment with the European Green Deal.

Together, the chapters offer an evidence-based evaluation of the impact, challenges, and limits of EU-driven transformation in the Western Balkans. This book is of key interest to scholars and students of EU studies and European integration, political science, international relations, and public policy.

Only nine countries have possessed nuclear weapons in the roughly eighty years since the US first introduced the atomic bomb to the world. Since then, a dangerous game of "will they, won't they?" has been played between these nations. The most infamous standoff is the Cold War between the US and USSR, but the emergence of North Korea's nuclear program in the 1950s-with the support of the USSR-is often overlooked. While repeatedly downplayed in media over the decades, public consciousness is beginning to recognize North Korea's nuclear ability.

In North Korea, Nuclear Brinkmanship, and the Oval Office, Frederick H. Fleitz, who has more than twenty-five years of experience working in US national security agencies, reveals the advanced state of Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program. Fleitz examines the history of US policy toward North Korea from the Eisenhower administration to the end of the Biden administration and offers a history and an analysis of the development of nuclear infrastructure in North Korea despite US efforts to impede the development. He attributes this state of affairs, in part, to mistakes and inconsistencies in US policy from administrations of both political parties. Further, Fleitz covers the strategies employed by North Korea to delay, defuse, and otherwise work around various sanctions and agreements that both nations view as obstacles to their nuclear aims.

Offering the work as a "resource for US officials, experts, media, and allies," Fleitz stresses the urgency of a coherent and effective US policy that recognizes both the seriousness of nuclear threats and the global, political, and military realities that have given rise to them.

Qi provides a comprehensive exploration of the complex and evolving dynamics in and between Taiwan, China, and the United States from 2016 to 2024.

Through three unique analytical perspectives - Movement Government and Movement Society, Cross-Strait Relations Trio, and Strategic Ambiguity - these chapters delve into 23 significant political, economic, and social developments that have shaped the Taiwan issue. It provides a broad spectrum of political, economic and social developments, extending beyond the first term of Tsai Ing-wen's administration and provides valuable frameworks that extend beyond the Taiwan context, applicable to state-society relations in other countries and other geopolitical conflicts.

An essential resource for academics, researchers and students in comparative politics, international relations, political sociology as well as policymakers and those interested in further understanding the East Asian geopolitics, the future of Taiwan-China-US relations and the evolving dynamics in East Asia.

This book examines paradiplomacy as a concept and its evolution in diplomatic studies. The analysis explores how subnational governments have become actors in international politics, with particular focus on India's paradiplomatic endeavors. The work provides comparative analysis of strategies adopted by China and Brazil, offering lessons for India's approach. It further includes:

• Comprehensive examination of paradiplomacy as a concept and its evolution over centuries in diplomatic studies
• Analysis of India's paradiplomatic endeavors and the growing role of state governments in foreign policy discourse
• Comparative study of paradiplomatic strategies adopted by countries including China and Brazil with lessons for India
• Theoretical framework for understanding subnational governments as actors in international politics and diplomacy
• Investigation of cities' increasing involvement in foreign policy as a global trend in contemporary international relations

This title has been co-published with Knowledge World Publishers. T&F does not sell or distribute the print versions in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri lanka.

This collection of eleven essays explores emotions and affect in Korean culture across a broad temporal span, from the Koryo dynasty (918-1392) to the present. Drawing on a diverse array of sources-including memoirs, diplomatic letters, newspapers, films, video diaries, photographs, and ethnographic interviews-the volume examines how emotions intervene in public discourse and how affect is shaped, intensified, and managed through expressive practices. Each contributor's critical intervention lies in offering a non-essentializing approach to studying emotions and affect in Korea. Rather than positing uniquely "Korean" feelings such as han or hwabyong as inherent or fixed emotional traits, the contributors argue that what is culturally distinctive is not the emotions themselves but how they have been expressed, mediated, and interpreted within specific social relationships and historical experiences. In this framework, emotions and affect are not static or universal but are historically and discursively produced.

Emotions, Affect, and Narrative in Korean History and Culture also contends that to understand the present, we must critically engage with the emotional content of the past. By analyzing how different historical actors and social groups expressed particular feelings at specific moments, the essays illuminate how emotions and affect were used to narrate lived experiences and construct discourses in textual, literary, and visual forms. Together, these studies reveal how emotions and affect have functioned as a powerful medium for shaping collective memory, identity, and political subjectivity in Korea. Structured in three parts, the volume explores how emotions and affect have taken shape across different historical epochs and social milieus in Korea. Each contributor examines the shifting ways these emotional narratives have been formed, expressed, and transformed over time. Emotions, Affect, and Narrative in Korean History and Culture contributes to the dynamic field of emotion studies by adding important Korean examples.

This book is the first to connect Classics with Public Policy, opening up discussion of the study and application of Classics in, and for, policy communities across the United Kingdom.

It confronts and dismantles existing dominant narratives that classicists do not 'do' policy and shows that, like any other skill, policy engagement can be taught. It provides examples from UK research and policy contexts and makes suggestions for how subject associations, learned societies and universities can embed the pedagogy of policy engagement into their courses. Contributions range from academic classicists to a Former Secretary of State to a current junior civil servant, and each reflects on their routes into policy and recommends ways for colleagues to begin, or extend, their policy influence. At a time when the Arts and Humanities are under increasing financial pressures, this book provides much-needed case studies of personal and professional experiences which highlight the 'value' of classicists' research, evidence for informing policy priorities and the 'relevance' of Classics for employability and career success in UK government, parliament and beyond.

This volume is of interest to anyone studying or working in the fields of Classics and public policy, particularly in the UK.

This book examines the nature of party competition in hybrid regimes, focusing on Georgia, a post-Soviet hybrid regime. It explores the coexistence of programmatic and clientelistic forms of party competition, offering a nuanced understanding of electoral dynamics in non-democratic contexts.

Guided by three research questions, the book investigates the extent of programmatic party competition, its emergence, and its coexistence with clientelistic practices. Using a multi-method research design and a range of primary data, it integrates programmatic and clientelistic frameworks to analyse party competition in democratic and non-democratic contexts. The book applies process tracing methodology to demonstrate how intra-party competition influences pre-election manifestos and expands an established behavioural model to better suit non-democratic settings. Readers gain a comprehensive understanding of the complexities of party competition in hybrid regimes.

This book is intended for researchers and students studying electoral politics, party competition, coalition politics, and area studies, particularly those focusing on post-Soviet societies and the Caucasus. It is also valuable for scholars interested in hybrid regimes and non-democratic political systems.

This book analyses the historical interactions between UNESCO and China during the often-neglected period of 1945-1971.

Spanning from UNESCO's inception up to the year the People's Republic of China (PRC) regained the official Chinese seat at the United Nations, this book uncovers the multifaceted dynamics of this relationship by mapping out interactions in three major aspects: education, science, and culture. It sheds light on China's complex role in the postwar world order, demonstrating how the nation perceived and practiced its international role during this tumultuous period. By examining UNESCO's presence in China during the civil war and Cold War, this book reveals the tensions, difficulties, and legacies of science diplomacy and cultural diplomacy facilitated by the organization. This book also maps out some "lost links" in the current narratives of both UNESCO and China's diplomacy, providing the historical trajectory necessary to understand China's current and future engagement with the organization and the broader world.

This book will be of interest to scholars and students specializing in modern China, cross-strait Relations, East Asian studies, the history of science, Cold War history, diplomatic history, international history, transnational history, and global history, particularly through the lens of international organizations.

Aesthetic Transaction, Digital Answerability and Literature: Contact Light brings the theories of John Dewey, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Louise Rosenblatt into the evolving world of digital culture, where texts, images, and performances move through widening currents of circulation and meaning gathers shape through renewed contact. Dewey describes aesthetic activity as a rhythmic joining of feeling and form. Bakhtin's early essays, often overshadowed by his later studies of dialogue, offer a vivid account of expression as an act charged with responsibility and animated by the demand for response. Rosenblatt reimagines reading as a poem created in the meeting of text and reader in lived time. Together, their theories show aesthetic activity as a practice of perception and relation moving through everyday experience.

Digital culture brings these ideas into sharper view. A single sentence, image, or gesture travels outward and returns in altered settings, gaining new resonance with each encounter. Contemporary theorists such as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun show how circulation and repetition shape attention and response, revealing aesthetic activity as a living exchange carried by the ways expression is seen and shared. Examples ranging from the acclaimed Broadway adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray to the swift, recursive currents of TikTok illustrate how meaning deepens through repetition, reinterpretation, and collective attention.

In this edited volume, D'Orazzi, Hajek, Mullan, and Ohashi unveil the rich tapestry of language education across Australia's diverse landscape. The contributors present various case studies and experimental practices that are transforming language learning in established European and Asian language programmes, as well as showcasing vital efforts to preserve and revitalise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages.

First-hand accounts in the volume reveal how collaborative approaches are creating resilient, inclusive language programmes, and explore evidence-based strategies for sustainable language programme development. The insights into decolonised pedagogical approaches that honour Indigenous knowledge systems, the proposed frameworks for cross-institutional collaboration, and the solutions to common challenges faced by language educators in English-dominant countries everywhere, all provide a roadmap for innovation applicable beyond Australian borders.

An essential resource for language and culture educators, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from applied linguistics and language, this volume also offers substantive theoretical advancements while simultaneously providing innovative pedagogical frameworks for those dedicated to addressing diverse learner demographics.

Chapters Introduction and 4 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This edited volume contributes to debates about China's influence, and explores three specific themes in the context of global China: the effects of (un)intentional influence and influence externalities; the role of intermediaries, the sub-state and non-state actors that are conduits for influence; and the conditioning effects of host country institutions.

The work advances conversation of public and academic interest by problematizing existing conceptualizations of China's influence and offering a fresh approach. Existing research has paid surprisingly little systematic attention to how local, national, and global factors outside of China-and beyond its control-condition whether and how China's investments in global influence bear fruit. A central claim of the book is that scholars need to pay more careful attention to how these external factors create unexpected consequences for influence-seeking states. This book explores three specific themes in the context of global China: the effects of (un)intentional influence and influence externalities; the role of intermediaries, the sub-state, and non-state actors that are conduits for influence; and the conditioning effects of host country institutions.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian Studies, Politics, Regional Studies, and International Relations.

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

From the early nineteenth century, Indian itinerant artists have been journeying to the imperial centers. The emerging Indian circus enabled a multitude of surplus labour and migrant artists to find their place within its rubric, subsequent to the encounters with the colonial circuses. The touring Indian circus along with its performers - both human and non-human - played a crucial role in the global circus networks, provoking a range of receptions and discourse. This collection features source materials, including advertisements, biographies, legal documents, news articles, playbills, posters, reviews, thereby filling a critical void in circus histories.

Native American Religions: Teaching and Learning on Stolen Land is an introduction to the religious lives of Native American people in North America. Weaving together historical, ethnographic, theoretical, and legal materials, the book focuses on how religion is politicized in North America in the Native American context. Noting that no Native language actually has a word translatable to "religion," as the sacred and the secular are not separate spheres in Native traditions, and that religion is a colonial construct, the book adopts theories and methods from Native American and Indigenous Studies to understand Native American and Indigenous religious traditions.

Written with the student in mind, this cutting-edge volume brings together 17 Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars at various career stages to offer a theoretical framework through which to think about the role of religion in U.S.-Native relations alongside real-world case studies. This book introduces students to the histories of Native American peoples, including discussion of Indigenous intellectual traditions, Indigenous sovereignty movements, and practices such as cultural appropriation and land acknowledgement, to make the case that Native American religions are a political phenomenon. With student-friendly pedagogy throughout, including discussion questions and "further resources" lists, it is a must-read for all students and teachers of Native American Religions, Religion in America, or Indigenous Studies.

This book explores the major challenges of mediation during armed conflicts and post-conflict peacebuilding in an age of division, when the permanent members of the UN Security Council are fundamentally divided. The author argues that it is critical to mediate armed conflicts and implement peacebuilding by maintaining the fundamental rules of the international system, such as respecting "national sovereignty, borders of states, and self-determination of peoples," even in the age of division. At the same time, he calls for "adaptive peacebuilding," reflecting local contexts, histories, and political dynamics, avoiding text-tailored approaches.

Dialogues and interviews with the leadership of conflicted states provide unique perspectives on both inter-state and intra-state wars, presenting major findings regarding the wars in Ukraine, South Sudan, and Afghanistan.

This volume targets scholars and students of international relations and international organizations, especially those interested in mediation and peacebuilding; it is also valuable for practitioners working for UN, NGOs, think-tanks, diplomats, policymakers, and member states.

Rounding the Bases offers the first comprehensive history of Japanese Little League, tracing its origins near U.S. military bases in the 1950s to its rise as one of the world's most successful youth sports programs. Drawing on interviews with American and Japanese figures, along with diverse archival materials, the book uncovers overlooked individuals and forgotten facts, including early organizational challenges and uneven World Series participation after its 1964 founding in the Tokyo metropolitan area.

The emergence of the West Tokyo league and a strong regional association in Osaka contributed to World Series championships in 1967 and 1968. Lasting corporate support for Japanese Little League from Mitsui Bussan and Fuji-Sankei followed. The narrative unfolds at ground level-detailing who did what, when, and why-while situating Little League within the broader landscape of Japanese baseball, from nanshiki rubber-ball leagues to school teams to the professional game.

The book challenges cultural stereotypes and highlights structural differences from the American model. It also explores how this U.S. import intersected with postwar Japanese history: Cold War cultural policy, revived national pride and a return to bushido (Samurai moral code) ideals, growing middle-class affluence and corporate influence, and more liberal societal attitudes in the late twentieth century.

Rounding the Bases is a unique contribution to baseball history and will appeal to both casual fans and serious scholars of the game.

This novel volume examines Chinese and Indian mindful movements (such as tai chi, qigong, Daoist meditation, and hatha yoga) to demonstrate how the contemplative practices of the body and mind can amount to a form of transformative philosophy through ways of thinking, knowing, and doing.

The book explains how these body practices use kinesthetic imagination, repetition, and slowness to bring about cognitive and epistemic changes in how we experience ourselves and the world. The chapters look in-depth at the details of these practices, drawing analogies with everyday experiences such as singing, hearing musical earworms, reading and re-reading texts, and recalling folk wisdom; the book suggests these body practices can be cognitive, epistemic, and philosophically transformative. The chapters also explore these practices in a first-person, biographical style, drawing on the author's own experiences as a student and teacher of these practices. The descriptions take on a range of modes, from that of an insider to that of a skeptic, to those that are instructional in nature, and then to those that are more phenomenological. These various, sometimes-conflicting, descriptions raise meta-level questions about how best to understand the practices.

Focused on the study of embodied contemplative practice, this book will be of interest to scholars and postgraduates in the fields of Asian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, and the philosophy of religion more widely. Philosophers studying embodiment, embodied cognition, and religion will also find the volume of useful. Practitioners of martial arts, qigong, yoga, and meditation may benefit from the book.

Between 1392 and 1592-a period bounded by Japanese pirate raids along the Korean coast and Japan's invasion of Choson Korea-more than 4,600 Japanese trade missions were recorded by the Choson government. In response to these missions, the famous official Sin Sukchu compiled regulations, detailed information about Japanese contacts, and other material, which was printed in 1472 as the Haedong chegukki. Additional information was added in 1512, creating a still more detailed report for overseeing Japanese and Ryukyuan diplomacy and trade with the Choson government. The 1512 text, which is translated here into English for the first time, shows in rich detail how Korea managed these foreign relations for some two centuries. The regulations illustrate the depth of the management of contact, trade, movement, and other aspects of presence in Choson. Korea-Japan trade practices are depicted in numerous profiles of Japanese contacts from Tsushima to Kyoto, including the use of impostor identities designed in Japan for trade and diplomacy in the second half of the fifteenth century and sixteenth century.

Copious notes and explications supplement the present translation of the Haedong chegukki and supply the reader with the background information necessary to identify the names and places mentioned and understand their relation to Korean and Japanese political history and the structure of relations that linked the two countries. Historians of Korea, Japan, and East Asian foreign relations will find the translation a most valuable resource.