Examines feminist strategies of persistence and adaptation in Central America from the 1980s to 2020.

A Praxis of Persistence establishes persistence as a framework for understanding methods of feminist activism in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Blending literary and ethnographic approaches, Kenna Neitch analyzes texts produced by activist movements from the 1980s to 2020-from collective testimonio to institutional publications (encuentros) to social media-and connects them to the movements' cultural impact and organizing practices, such as generative conflict, horizontal cross-border networks, and what she terms strategic adaptability. What these texts and practices have in common, Neitch argues, is feminist persistence-a balance of action, preservation, and creation adaptable across contexts. A Praxis of Persistence provides one of the first scholarly accounts of #MeToo in Central America while remaining grounded in the region's lineage of activism against sexual violence. Through the framework of persistence, this book highlights the vitality of Central American women's activism and offers a repertoire of methods for reckoning with the realities of uneven progress in feminist struggle.

A practical framework for leading through disruption with clarity and confidence

Traditional strategic plans often collapse when confronted by AI disruption, market shifts, and geopolitical upheaval. In The Map Vs. the Terrain: A Leader's Field Guide to Navigating Uncertainty, Bill Fournet, founder and CEO of The Persimmon Group and executive coach to over 30 C-suite leaders, draws on decades of real-world consulting experience to deliver a pragmatic approach to leading through the unknown.

Rather than relying on outdated military models or academic theory, Fournet provides a framework built from guiding Fortune 5000 companies, financial institutions, and major public-sector agencies through significant change. The book tackles the emotional toll of disruption, including burnout and decision fatigue, while equipping leaders with tools to build resilient teams and turn uncertainty into competitive advantage.

Readers will also find:

• Powerful real-world stories from decades of consulting at organizations including AT&T, IBM, and MTV Networks

• A fundamental leadership mindset shift from attempting to control the path to skillfully moving through unknown territory

• Pragmatic advice and tools for addressing the burnout and decision fatigue that accompany sustained organizational disruption

• Strategies for building resilient teams that adapt and thrive rather than freeze during periods of intense change

• A framework for transforming uncertainty into competitive advantage through clarity, agility, and confident decision-making

Designed for executives, senior managers, and organizational leaders responsible for guiding teams through complex transformation, The Map Vs. the Terrain provides the mindset and practical tools needed to navigate disruption without sacrificing team resilience or strategic clarity.

Sustainability is not a compliance obligation, a cost, or a moral afterthought. Properly managed, it is a powerful lever for value creation.

As the cracks in the neoliberal growth model deepen, and under the accelerating collapse of natural ecosystems, a new paradigm is emerging.

The Seven Principles Playbook for Sustainable Companies provides a framework for embedding sustainability into the structural DNA of businesses. Drawing on years of hands-on work with impact investors, entrepreneurs, auditors, legislators, private equity firms, and multinational executives, it distils what truly makes a company sustainable, not just on paper, but in practice.

Through real-world case studies, the book helps executives decipher sustainability through three essential lenses: ESG risk and compliance for investors, CSR and societal engagement for stakeholders, and, ultimately, long-term value creation for all. It discusses leading edge technologies and introduces practical tools and frameworks for leaders ready to move beyond reporting and into regeneration

This is not another inspirational business book-it's a guidebook for those who understand that the future of business depends on its ability to both thrive within planetary boundaries and also meet rising societal expectations. With clarity, rigor, and vision it equips leaders with all they need to transform sustainability from a side project into a core guiding strategy for long-lasting value creation.

To live through a film festival is to live through an intensive emotive experience of film viewings, encounters with friends and strangers, travel, displacement and the exploration of new spaces - both real and imaginary. It is the disorientating experience of this modern-day carnivalesque which marks a time out of time of a film festival when the norms of the everyday cinema-based or home-based film viewing experience are suspended, challenged or upended. Although some aspects of the film festival experience have changed over a long history of film festival cultures there are others that remain constant: an effort emotional and physical to attend a festival, excitement or festival buzz of being part of a festival, a sense of community of viewers rooted in the individual response to films, and the impact of seeing a film in the festival environment which ranges from pleasurable and inspiration through boring to outrages and abject.

Dorota Ostrowska's book explores the uniqueness of this occasionally irreverent, often disruptive and at times unsettling festival experience for the diverse festival audiences through the concept of festive chronotopes. It argues the importance of space for our understanding of festival experience as it is this space, intimate and collective, that shapes film festival programmes, moulds curational and programming practice and critical response, and drives the desire for the festive experience to be repeated and reinvented on annual basis.

The book explores the idea of festive chronotopes in relation to a myriad of European film festivals, international, human rights, documentary and migrant, each of which is seen as a manifestation of a particular festive chronotope: imaginary, utopic, crisis, migrant and indigenous. Each of the chronotopes is presented as an expression of a different set of spatial relationships that bound the place, audiences and films of a film festival together.

Drawing on extensive research and their experience of more than 100 partnerships with educational leaders across early childhood, school, and tertiary settings, Jefferson and Anderson present a praxis driven exploration of transformational leadership. This book delves into how educators can move beyond conventional approaches to foster sustainable and wise change, rejecting the allure of quick fixes for deeper, more meaningful shifts. It explains how creativity, critical reflection, communication, and collaboration (the 4Cs) power transformation, and how values and context serve as essential structural pillars providing ethical direction and ensuring leadership is responsive to each school's unique environment.

The book directly addresses the crucial question: "how can leaders become transformative leaders?" It illuminates how the 4Cs foster both courageous individual leadership leadership-as-practice. Readers are provided with a map for developing transformative leadership communities through unique frameworks, practices and calls to action. By exploring elements like learning, values, and inquiry, this book offers not only the 'why' but, crucially, the 'how' to lead profound, joyful, and motivational transformation in schools.

Andre Drainville gives a provocative and necessary intervention into discussions of academic freedom, showing its connection to the evolving social relations of knowledge and power over the last thousand years. Rather than assuming that academic freedom is an established and well-defined, if threatened, right, Drainville historicizes the concept, understanding scholarly struggles for intellectual autonomy as part of the disputed, variously situated, processes of world ordering. Tracing instances of the freedom to think through the longue duree, he sets out a materialist history of the evolving relations between economic and social orders and the conditions of knowledge production from 12th century China to contemporary US campuses.

In order to resituate debates about academic freedom within broader discussions of global forms of power and counter-power, the book draws on black existentialism, English labor history, critical political economy; French structuralist state theory; theories of global patriarchy; structural anthropology; postcolonial theory. Focussing on the little tradition of scholarly action, the book discusses two dozen moments in the development of the social relations of knowledge production that are not typically rendered as part of the (apparently) coherent and continuous dominant discourse of academic freedom. These span historical contexts from the pre-capitalist world economies, the formation of modern capitalism, the post-World War 2 world ordering, to the contemporary 'new knowledge economy'. In each case, Drainville highlights how distinct structures of world order opened up, or narrowed, possibilities for scholars to institute self-regulated relations of knowledge production and how, above and beyond circumstantial considerations, scholars have time and again struggled for autonomy and indeterminacy.

Rich in detail yet theoretically sophisticated, this book is an indispensable resource for those concerned with academic freedom and intellectual autonomy, historically and in the new knowledge economy.

Introduces readers to the rationale and risks of using AI and big data in higher education and shares novel applications for improving educational practice.

Colleges and universities collect-and own-more data than ever before. These data can be analyzed with powerful new tools to support student learning and faculty research. Yet, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) also represent unprecedented encroachments on student privacy rights and potential for unparalleled monitoring of employee and faculty work. The Digitized Campus takes a comprehensive view of the origins and ramifications of embracing AI and big data in higher education. It addresses a timely and globally relevant topic and is accessible for readers without data science training. Chapter authors use historical, legal, philosophical, methodological, and practitioner lenses to offer insights for higher education leaders and faculty who will influence the use of artificial intelligence and big data for years to come.

This book outlines ways for universities to become more placeful, fostering an atmosphere of diversity, inclusion, dissensus, and creativity within the university. It argues that only by becoming more placeful can universities establish genuine connections with surrounding environments, communities, and ecologies.

The book addresses the spatial context within which contemporary universities find themselves. The chapters include various methodological approaches, including case studies, autoethnography, philosophical essays, participant observation, poetic narration, and in-depth interviews, reflecting the variety of spatial configurations in which contemporary universities find themselves, and conceptually linked to the normative dimension implied in the notion of a "placeful university".

This book captures the breadth and depth of spatial perspectives on the contemporary university within an interdisciplinary context. It shows that spatial perspectives might be approached through various methodological instruments, promising interesting insights. Readers with different disciplinary backgrounds and those interested in different issues will gain a deeper understanding of the spatial background of respective perspectives and issues.

The Cuban Revolution is on the brink. Hyperinflation, mass migration, and deepening tensions with the United States are recasting the nature-and future-of the political experiment that has transformed Cuba and the Americas since 1959. The crisis born from the Soviet collapse has since become endemic, and the Revolution is now being rewritten from within.

In the streets of Havana, money is fragmenting. And with it, the political grammar of Cuban socialism.

This book offers an ethnographic and theoretical account of how the pluralization of monetary regimes is reshaping that grammar. It approaches Cuba's expanding black market not merely as an economic phenomenon, but as a lived social space, an experimental site of governance, and a catalyst of emergent subjectivities. Tracing three interlocking lines of inquiry-the tension between state-sanctioned labor and informal income as competing moral and political economies; the symbiotic relationship between the expanding non-state sector and illicit exchange networks; and a new economic rationality that redefines socialism along pragmatic rather than paternalistic lines-the study illuminates a transformative moment in which the foundational meanings of money, nation, and revolution are being renegotiated under conditions of radical uncertainty.

This is not a story of decline or rupture. It is an account of the Revolution's ongoing, contested reinvention-one that speaks to broader questions about the fate of socialist projects in a world shaped by crisis, informality, and the schizoid creativity of everyday life.

This Came to You from Chicago explores the unique traits, style, and practices of "Chicago Television" from World War II to the 1990s. Jason J. Nebergall traces how, unlike mainstream stations, city-based broadcasters, who often worked day jobs, provided a platform for underrepresented groups to share their perspectives and allowed citizens to experiment with storytelling, representation, and engagement. In analyzing the idea and follow-through of "to and from Chicagoans," Nebergall also illuminates how Chicago Television promoted civic engagement, fostered a sense of belonging and solidarity among residents, and contributed to the evolution of technological advances through the artistic risks of local and independent producers.

This Came to You from Chicago presents an ideological framework that analyzes Chicago Television as being deeply rooted in the political beliefs of its creators. Issues involving labor rights, women's liberation, the civil rights struggle, LGBTQ communities, and anti-capitalist activism appeared throughout the history of television in the Windy City. By bringing attention to the locality and widespread function of this programming system, Nebergall reveals how independent television developed with the vibrancy and diversity of Chicago's cultural landscape and local advocacy for social justice.

This book offers the first transnational account of screen agencies as a collective body supporting and shaping the European screen sector. Alternatively known as film funds or film institutes, screen agencies are publicly funded bodies which intervene at each stage of the value chain for film and television content. Agencies such as the Danish Film Institute, Creative Scotland, Screen Ireland and Northern Ireland Screen perform a diverse range of functions including allocating funds, developing talent, fostering international collaborations, and promoting cultural value. They play a crucial role in mitigating the risks associated with creative production, and within smaller nations - the focus of this research - their attempts to leverage scale make their role even more significant within the sector. Using original empirical research gathered from interviews conducted with those working within national agencies in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, this book offers critical insight into international screen production through the institutional lens of screen agencies.

By highlighting the interplay between esotericism, conspiracy theory, and fandom, Cypher Culture examines how marginalized and embattled groups learn to read cultural texts for hidden meanings in hostile environments. Drawing on Leo Strauss's theory of esotericism, Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman argue that "reading between the lines" has moved from classical philosophy into popular culture, where queer fandoms, political extremists, and others uncover whispered messages in mass media. The result is a shared interpretive practice with radically different ethical and political consequences.

Cypher Culture presents a series of case studies capturing a wide spectrum of esoteric fandom, from interpretations of Shakespeare and Disney to analyses of Taylor Swift, The Dark Knight trilogy of Batman films, and the QAnon phenomenon. Exploring the ways groups interact with these texts helps uncover the dynamics of fan culture and its political dimensions. The book's focus on the interplay of scene, surface, and receiver provides a nuanced framework for understanding how esoteric interpretations take hold and circulate within fan communities, particularly online.

Pairing close readings of popular media with cultural analyses of their dedicated communities of esoteric readers, Cypher Culture diagnoses the stylistic, contextual, and authorial elements of a text that invite esoteric interpretations. This approach goes beyond traditional views of esotericism, as formulated by Strauss, demonstrating its evolution in the digital age as not just an authorial strategy but a hermeneutic lens through which fans interpret popular culture.

An interdisciplinary roster of contributors across the humanities and social sciences draws connections between contemporary culture, neoliberalism and affect to examine representations of emotional self-management in personal, professional, and social contexts in the 21st century.

One of the most salient aspects of neoliberalism is the way its pervasiveness extends to the personal sphere, subjecting the personal to market logics as even private emotions become commodities to be administered and owned. Analyzing a range of cultural texts - including shows like Severance, novels like The Corrections, and even art exhibits like Contemporary Models of Realism from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow - contributors demonstrate how the omnipresence of neoliberalism across ideological perspectives and cultural contexts trains individuals to view themselves as individualist, competitive entrepreneurs in all facets of life on a global scale.

Although this collection reveals art's capacity to reproduce and circulate neoliberal logics amid unsuspecting audiences, it also - perhaps more importantly - highlights the ways in which aesthetic forms can conjure resistance.

In Animated Queerness: LGBTQIA+ Representation in Animated Media, scholars from different fields come together to examine the ways and mechanisms animated films represent, suppress, encode, and celebrate queer narratives.

This edited volume traces LGBTQIA+ animated audiovisual works across multiple decades, genres, and media platforms, while it explores implicit and explicit representation, fan creativity and intervention, corporate and social censorship, and global circulation.

The volume is divided into four parts. Part I includes historical and transnational approaches that highlight the queer legacies of creators such as Tove Jansson and Kunihiko Ikuhara. Part II examines how audiences use fan-made content and interpretative techniques to change canonical narratives. Part III analyzes global politics of representation, including censorship and intersectionality. Finally, Part IV studies the ways contemporary animated audiovisual works experiment with queer futurities, posthumanism, and alternative temporalities.

In bringing these essays together, this book argues that animation provides a fruitful space for creating queer worlds in which characters, storylines, and audiences perform fluid identities and imagine new modes of connection and empathy.

Starting in the early eighteenth century, importation was New Orleans's lifeblood, as coffee and other agricultural goods moved through the city's port and fanned out to all corners of the emerging nation. New Orleans became the United States' top coffee importer in the nineteenth century, jockeying for position with larger port cities. As the century progressed, coffee importers and brokers built ever-stronger connections between New Orleans and the national coffee trade.

Because New Orleans was such a coffee town, coffee culture began infiltrating the city's practices. Coffee exchanges opened, creating spaces to share new ideas and partake in important cultural conversations over coffee. For guests, coffee was prepared at home and served black or cafe au lait with milk. The French Market and similar venues boasted coffee stands, and enslaved women such as Rose Nicaud bought their freedom by selling coffee from carts in the market.

Heading into the twentieth century, Cafe du Monde and other coffee stands became integral to New Orleans traditions, and Louisiana coffee brands such as Community Coffee and PJ's made a name for themselves on grocery shelves across the country. When someone wasn't enjoying coffee at home, they drank coffee with chicory in the French Market-a tradition now closely associated with New Orleans, despite having its origins in Holland and France. Other cultures have also made an impact on the coffee culture of the Crescent City. The Vietnamese integrated New Orleans coffee practices into their own, using Cafe du Monde coffee in their traditional coffee preparation.

Modern New Orleans has become more interested in specialty coffee grown on small farms and ethically harvested. Multiple coffee roasters call New Orleans home and import their coffee from small farms in Guatemala, Brazil, and Colombia. The next generation of coffee production is creating a heightened interest in farming practices and sustainability, with coffee consumers gravitating toward brands that provide a living wage to farmers. Coffee Culture New Orleans tells the story of the Crescent City's flourishing coffee traditions from its founding to the present.

The first book-length study on mythology reception in video games, this monograph examines how video games characterize mythological characters from the perspectives of classical reception and game studies. Characters are vital to most stories, and many video games. They allow us to enter the fiction of a game, and facilitate our embodiment in the game world. Over time, what are initially blank slates transform into fictional existents with well-developed personalities and goals. In this context, narratology uses the term 'characterization' to refer to how character traits are ascribed to the entities we call 'characters'.

How does characterization operate in games? How do players impact this process? How is mythology transformed by video games? What can games 'do' that other media cannot? After establishing a theoretical framework, this book moves to six case studies that each analyze mythological characters in a particular game: Smite, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Immortals Fenyx Rising, God of War, Theseus and Asgard's Wrath 2. The scope of these studies is diverse, incorporating examples from mainstream, indie and virtual reality gaming. While the book's main focus lies with Greco-Roman mythology, it also includes games with Norse and Egyptian settings, or with playable characters from a wide range of international mythological traditions. Through these case studies, Alexander Vandewalle leads his readers to an understanding of different modalities or 'languages' of mythology reception in games. He argues for a striking diversity in mythological games and their characters, and illuminates how the relationship between games and antiquity is fundamentally one of continuous dialogue and play.

Landmark study providing a systematic book-by-book and thinker-by-thinker account of the development Deleuze's philosophy up to and including The Logic of Sense.

Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Sense is a landmark study that offers a detailed and systematic exposition of Deleuze's early philosophy that frames it as a project of constructing a philosophy of sense. Through a detailed book-by-book and thinker-by-thinker analysis, Nathan Widder demonstrates how the development of this philosophy of sense underpins the concepts and theses that define Deleuze's thought in this period, along with his approach to questions of philosophical method and system, to the history of philosophy, and to the structuralism and psychoanalysis of his day. This transformative work also challenges the dominant interpretations of Deleuze by showing how The Logic of Sense, rather than Difference and Repetition, is really the early Deleuze's magnum opus. But this study not only breaks with dominant orthodoxies; it also revolutionizes the scholarship by tracing concretely the threads that give Deleuze's wide-ranging thought its coherence and clarity. For readers of all levels who are looking to unlock Deleuze's philosophy in this way, this book provides the keys.

Reveals how mise-en-scene has shaped the fields of film and television studies.

Visions in the Frame provides a detailed evaluation of the journey and status of mise-en-scene-the organization of the visual field within the frame-as a critical concept in film and television studies. The first part of the book looks at the persistence of mise-en-scene within film studies amid a series of fluctuations in theoretical, historical, cultural, philosophical, and critical approaches. The second part shifts focus to consider television studies and the extent to which mise-en-scene has remained an ambiguous element in the growth of the discipline. The third part engages in a series of close readings from a range of styles and genres of television shows, exploring the relationship between visual composition, meaning, and significance as a central critical focus. Across the three parts of the book, Visions in the Frame presents a rigorous and valuable context for understanding the contrasting position and influence of mise-en-scene within film and television studies, using this to offer guidance for its future role within both disciplines.

In 1977, George Lucas created a galaxy far, far away that somehow contained no Latinos. Forty-seven years later, Diego Luna's Cassian Andor speaks unapologetically accented English as he leads a rebel cell against the Empire, Pedro Pascal's Din Djarin anchors Disney's flagship series, and Oscar Isaac's Poe Dameron commands X-wing squadrons with a confidence that refuses to apologize for difference. The transformation didn't happen by accident-it was fought for character by character, film by film, against resistance both corporate and cultural.

In Galactic Herencia, Christopher Gonzalez uses personal, historical, and critical reflection to trace this long arc from erasure to visibility, examining how Latinx actors bring cultural resonance to roles in a fictional universe that never explicitly acknowledges their heritage-and what it means when so few performers must carry the hopes of so many. The book moves from the painful absences of the original trilogy through the breakthrough moments of Rogue One and The Mandalorian, to the current struggles over authentic representation in an era of franchise expansion and toxic fandom. By centering Latinx perspectives on a globally dominant franchise, Galactic Herencia makes visible the cultural work that representation does-demonstrating that genuine inclusion isn't about quotas but about empowering stories that affirm our full humanity.

Explores how non-Israeli filmmakers have used the essayistic travelogue to capture Israel's complex and contested landscape.

Brief Encounters offers the first extended exploration of a distinct and often overlooked corpus of travel documentaries made by foreign filmmakers in Israel and British-Mandate Palestine over the past century. Focusing in particular on the tumultuous period of the 1960s to 1970s, Ohad Landesman shows how renowned filmmakers such as Chris Marker, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jules Dassin, Susan Sontag, and Claude Lanzmann turned to the essayistic travelogue to grapple with a bitter reality of armed conflicts and political upheavals. At the journey's outset, each filmmaker had a different vision of Israel in mind, shaped by either socialist ideals, biblical myths, or Zionist sympathies. Yet what was found rarely affirmed initial expectations. And accordingly, these travelogues end up becoming testaments to disillusionment, as the filmmakers come to confront the unrealizability of their fantasies through the landscape of Israel. Using close analysis, the book aims to recover the significance of such transnational perspectives for what they say about the evolving image of the Israeli nation and, more broadly, the fruitful intersection of cinema and travel.