Humanities & Social Sciences

What motivates “ordinary people” to support refugees emotionally and financially? This is a timely question considering the number of displaced people in today’s world is at an all-time high. To help counter this crisis, it is imperative for the Canadian government to determine which policies encourage volunteers to welcome asylum seekers, and which ones must be reviewed. Ordinary People, Extraordinary Actions relates the story of the St. Joseph’s Parish Refugee Outreach Committee over its thirty years in action, revealing how seemingly small decisions and actions have led to significant changes in policies and in people’s lives—and how they can do so again in the future. By helping readers—young and old, secular and faith-oriented—understand what drives individuals and communities to welcome refugees with open hearts and open arms, the authors hope to inspire people across Canada and beyond its borders to strengthen our collective willingness and ability to offer refuge as a lifesaving protection for those who need it.

"Dirty Thirties" is the sobriquet commonly applied to the agricultural crisis in the drylands of southern Saskatchewan in Canada that coincided with the Great Depression, and it is generally assumed that prior to this period healthier, normal conditions prevailed. In Happyland, Curtis McManus contends that the "Dirty Thirties" actually began much earlier and were connected only peripherally to the Depression itself. McManus has mined the rarely consulted records of Rural Municipalities in Saskatchewan, as well as government documents, ministerial correspondence, local community histories, newspapers, and publications of relevant government departments, to tell a story of a quarter-century of stubborn persistence but also of absurdity, despair, social dislocation, moral corrosion, and inconsistent and often inept government policy. Thanks to McManuss rare and welcome blend of sound scholarship and living breathing prose, it is a gripping and evocative story as well.

The book sheds new light on a much debated issue in the field of ancient history: the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire and its relationship with Judaism in the 2nd century. The contributions collected in this volume illustrate from a multidisciplinary perspective (including archaeology, cultural, religious, and political history) how Christianity found a peculiar way of integrating into the transforming empire under Emperor Hadrian. In this way, Christianity gained an increasing place within Roman society, which ultimately opened the door to its affirmation in subsequent centuries.

This collection of papers is the sixth volume in the Comparative Austronesian series. The papers that comprise this volume examine the concept of precedence as a form of local discourse and as a mechanism for ordering status, at different levels, within specific Austronesian-speaking societies. This is the first volume of its kind to focus entirely on precedence and to provide an explication of its social uses and the way in which it is contested. Each paper is ethnographically-focused and offers its own distinctive approach to the examination of precedence. The papers, however, relate closely to one another and are thus able to proffer a variety of comparative reflections.

Smallholder farmers’ interest in hermetic bags has been driven by the need to reduce grain storage losses due to insect pests and challenges (inefficacy) of current storage methods. Hermetic bags commercially available for grain storage include single-, double- and triple-layer plastic bags. For the last 12 years, more than 20 million hermetic bags have been sold to smallholder farmers and other users in Africa (primarily) and Asia. The rapid increase in the use of hermetic bags is due to the scalability of both awareness activities, including training to create demand and the supply chain efforts to improve availability through the private sector. Many of these hermetic bags have several benefits including (i) preserving grain without the use of insecticides, (ii) keeping grain in good quality from several months to at least two years, (iii) providing farmers the flexibility to sell when prices are high, and (iv) allowing farmers to store grain and seed using the same technology. Challenges to increase adoption of hermetic bags include limited awareness and availability of the technologies in rural areas, variability in the quality of the hermetic bags, and lack of standards to ensure effectiveness across different products.

This book is a first step toward a serious reassessment of the mostly unspoken theoretical and aesthetic premises underlying auteur theory.

In Screening the Fleet, Prof. Jonathan Rayner explores the representation of the modern Royal Navy on British television over a fifty year period from 1973 to 2023. Contextualising his subject with significant aspects of earlier naval representation, in recruiting, documentary and public information films from the 1940s to the 1960s, Rayner then brings his focus forward to 1973-2023. The 1970s were a significant decade for naval representation on television, and saw the broadcast of two definitive series: the BBC’s drama series Warship and the acclaimed documentary series Sailor. These landmark series set the benchmark for naval representation in both realist and in fictional portrayals. They also set precedents for audience perceptions, and these have affected the production, and the reception, of the series on the Royal Navy that have followed. Rayner’s work investigates how advances in technology allow programme makers to use new techniques in the spheres of naval drama and documentary. More recent series also need to balance the required conventions for any portrayal of the navy on television with the revelatory or iconoclastic approaches now expected by modern audiences. In focussing on the changing portrayal of the Royal Navy on television, however, Rayner also surfaces how the Navy itself has evolved in the post-World War II world. The series analysed in Screening the Fleet also evidence the changing nature and increasing diversity of the naval community as a reflection of changing notions of Britishness. Offering the first study of its type, this volume highlights evolving and emerging trends in factual and fact-based television programmes through their portrayal of a highly popular, patriotic and persistent subject over a fifty year period. It debates developments in television and documentary approaches using the representation of the Royal Navy, and its changing position in perceptions of British identity.

Research Ethics, Integrity, and Transparency guides researchers through ethics, integrity, and transparency when using big data, social media, and AI, with practical advice on consent, GDPR, bias, and open science. Bringing research ethics into the realities of digital data, this volume helps readers plan, run, and publish studies that can stand up to scrutiny. It reframes ethics and transparency as enabling conditions for trustworthy work, not a bureaucratic afterthought, and shows how to translate principles into defensible choices across the full research workflow. Written for PhD candidates and early-career researchers across the social sciences and management, this volume also supports supervisors, methods instructors, research ethics committees, and research offices who need an up-to-date reference for integrity and transparency in the digital age.

The discovery of the two inherited susceptibility genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 in the mid-1990s created the possibility of predictive genetic testing and led to the establishment of specific medical programmes for those at high risk of developing breast cancer in the UK, US and Europe. The book provides a coherent structure for examining the diversity of practices and discourses that surround developments linked to BRCA genetics, and to the evolving field of genetics more broadly. It will be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology, sociology, history of science, STS, public health and bioethics. Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9780415824064_oachapter8.pdf

"The relational complexity of urban and rural landscapes in space and in time. The development of historical geographical information systems (HGIS) and other methods from the digital humanities have revolutionised historical research on cultural landscapes. Additionally, the opening up of increasingly diverse collections of source material, often incomplete and difficult to interpret, has led to methodologically innovative experiments. One of today’s major challenges, however, concerns the concepts and tools to be deployed for mapping processes of transformation—that is, interpreting and imagining the relational complexity of urban and rural landscapes, both in space and in time, at micro- and macro-scale. Mapping Landscapes in Transformation gathers experts from different disciplines, active in the fields of historical geography, urban and landscape history, archaeology and heritage conservation. They are specialised in a wide variety of space-time contexts, including regions within Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and periods from antiquity to the 21st century."

Artists and creative workers have long been attracted to urban environments. Yet the ‘creative city ‘of the 21st century comes with its own pitfalls. From precarity at the level of the worker to gentrification at the level of the city: the creative engine starts to sputter. Therefore, after or even against the creative city, this book highlights the ‘common city’. The Rise of the Common City explores the value of commoning for cultural practices in urban contexts. The volume defends the hypothesis that a common culture offers better guarantees of urban sustainability than a purely market- or government-driven culture. After all, cultural dynamics are only possible by sharing. We understand culture in a broad anthropological sense, as a socially shared sign and meaning system through which urbanites can give meaning to their environment and their lives. Creative labour and artistic practices keep cultural dynamics alive by intervening in such processes of meaning. They can question, redraw or simply confirm meaning-making processes, habits, values and norms. That is why culture is too important to be left to the market and the government alone. Culture belongs to everyone. The Rise of the Common City examines the value of commoning for culture, but also the value of culture for commoning. What is the culture of the commons? And vice versa, what strategies, norms and rituals do commoners use to define a common space between government and market? The book sketches answers to these questions through conceptual and empirical work, ranging from sociology and philosophy over urban and cultural studies to law and policy science. The volume includes contributions by Walter van Andel, Iolanda Bianchi, Gideon Boie, Giuliana Ciancio, Lara García Díaz, Pascal Gielen, Arne Herman, Gökhan Kodalak, Thijs Lijster, Lara van Meeteren, Hanka Otte, Ching Lin Pang, Tian Shi, Stavros Stavrides, Maria Francesca De Tullio, Louis Volont and Bart Wissink. If there is any conclusion to be drawn, it might be this: the future of culture will have to be common, or there will be no culture at all.

Malaika and the Seven Heavens explores Toyin Falola’s personal journey with Islam, beginning with his early years in Ibadan, Nigeria. Growing up in environments where Islam coexisted with traditional African religions and later living in a predominantly Christian country, he witnessed the complexities of cultural and religious diversity. In this memoir, Falola shares stories of deep understanding, personal development, and the beauty of a faith that transcends language, nationality, and culture. Although faith is a lifelong journey, Falola identifies key moments in his upbringing that shaped his perception of faith, such as observing Islamic prayers, witnessing the significance of pilgrimage, engaging with spiritual leaders, and interacting with both Muslims and non-Muslims. By blending personal observations and reflections with the broader historical and cultural contexts of Islam, the book provides a unique perspective on the lived experiences of Muslims. In addition, Falola’s comparative perspective on the interaction of Christianity, Islam, and African Traditional Religion illustrates how these faiths influence and coexist with one another. Chapters explore firsthand experiences at madrassas, Islamic education, the influence of Islamic music on Yoruba culture, the historical importance of places like Oja Oba in Ibadan, the role of women in Islam, the intersection of traditional medicine with Islamic healing practices, and the broader social and political implications of Islam in Nigerian cities such as Ilorin and Lagos. Ultimately, Malaika and the Seven Heavens aims to foster a deeper appreciation for our shared humanity, inspire meaningful conversations that bridge cultural divides, and enrich our collective knowledge.

This open access book defines the cinematic Gothic as an aesthetics of memory and exile. Guided by three intersecting concepts – memory, travelling, and touch – it suggests that the cross-border movements of exiles, émigrés, and professional travellers had a crucial impact on the emergence, development, and dissemination of the Gothic. This approach expands the canon to overlooked films, filmmakers, and national traditions. Drawing on film, memory, and gothic studies, the book urges the reader to think across other disciplines, including phenomenology, neurology, cognitive neuroscience, and disability studies. From hands to pianos, accordions, gloves, amnesia, and wounded bodies, the volume proposes a reappraisal of the Gothic by redrawing its scope, retracing its origins, and refocusing attention on surfaces as sites of socio-political meaning.

Centrifugal classifiers are processing machines used in the gas-particle classification. The aim of this work is to reduce energy costs by improving the classification properties and reducing the pressure drop. In addition to design measures, the focus is also on model development. For the development of the models, a deeper understanding of the flow processes is required.

This open access book explores how people in England who are affected by dementia (either by having a diagnosis or being a carer or loved one of someone who does) navigate different dementia discourses, interpret social texts and recommend discursive change. Drawing on thematic discourse analysis, and in particular multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA), it examines how different communicative modes can be used to reinforce or challenge particular worldviews and social practices, such as the marginalisation of people with dementia. Key themes include the need for nuance when discussing dementia and the tensions between different types of understandings of dementia (particularly across medical professionals, the media, and people affected by dementia). The author examines how individuals with and otherwise affected by dementia differently reinforce, challenge and provide alternatives to dominant dementia discourses and how such experience-led debates might inform social discourses moving forward. In particular, this book advocates for more nuanced and normalising visual and linguistic representations of dementia that can better support the advocacy of people with (and otherwise affected by) dementia and address social stigma. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI.