President Rafael Correa (2007-2017) led the Ecuadoran Citizens’ Revolution that claimed to challenge the tenets of neoliberalism and the legacies of colonialism. The Correa administration promised to advance Indigenous and Afro-descendant rights and redistribute resources to the most vulnerable. In many cases, these promises proved to be hollow. Using two decades of ethnographic research, Undoing Multiculturalism examines why these intentions did not become a reality, and how the Correa administration undermined the progress of Indigenous people. A main complication was pursuing independence from multilateral organizations in the context of skyrocketing commodity prices, which caused a new reliance on natural resource extraction. Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and other organized groups resisted the expansion of extractive industries into their territories because they threatened their livelihoods and safety. As the Citizens’ Revolution and other “Pink Tide” governments struggled to finance budgets and maintain power, they watered down subnational forms of self-government, slowed down land redistribution, weakened the politicized cultural identities that gave strength to social movements, and reversed other fundamental gains of the multicultural era.

Alan Ward combines constitutional history and political science to compare all nine of Australia’s political systems: federal, state and territory. Guided by a model of parliamentary government drawn from comparative politics, he considers the selection of the government; the prime minister and cabinet; government control of the lower house; the primacy of the lower house in bicameral systems; the head of state, and the influence of Australian federalism on parliamentary government. He also considers the growth of executive democracy in Australia, with its dominant executive.

Many experts attribute the Nordic region’s high levels of happiness to factors such as greater relative national wealth, wellfunctioning institutions, or the welfare state model. Instead, economist Christian Bjørnskov argues that the true key to national happiness is social trust — the ability to trust other people one does not know personally. The populations in three of the five Nordic countries are also characterized by a very strong sense of personal freedom. These two factors contribute to a fuller and richer life. Bjørnskov ends by discussing to what extent these elements can be exported to other parts of the world.

"Smart cities" use surveillance, big data processing and interactive technologies to reshape urban life. Transit riders can see the bus coming on a map on their phones. Cities can measure and analyze the garbage collected from every household. Businesses can track individuals' movements and precisely target advertisements. Google's failed Sidewalk Labs proposal in Toronto, which drew sharp criticism over surveillance and privacy concerns, is just one of the many smart city projects which have been proposed or are underway in Canada. Iqaluit, Edmonton, Guelph, Montreal, Toronto and other cities and towns are all grappling with how to use these technologies. Some cities have quickly partnered with digital giants like Uber, Bell and IBM. Others have kept their distance. Big tech companies are hard at work recruiting customers and shaping – sometimes making – public policy on data collection and privacy. Smart Cities for Canada: Promise and Perils is the first book on smart cities in Canada. In this collection, experts from across the country investigate what this new approach means for the problems cities face, and expose the larger issues about urban planning and democracy raised by smart city technology. This is a valuable, timely, independent‐minded book for Canadians.

From Destiny's Child to Lemonade, Homecoming, and The Gift, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter has redefined global stardom, feminism, Black representation, and celebrity activism. This book brings together new work from sixteen international scholars to explore Beyonce's impact as an artist and public figure from the perspectives of critical race studies, gender and women's studies, queer and cultural studies, music, and fan studies. The authors explore Beyoncé's musical persona as one that builds upon the lineages of Black female cool, Black southern culture, and Black feminist cultural production. They explore Beyoncé's reception within and beyond North America, including how a range of performers - from YouTube gospel singers to Brazilian pop artists have drawn inspiration from her performances and image. The authors show how Beyoncé's music is a source of healing and kinship for many fans, particularly Black women and queer communities of color. Combining cutting edge research, vivid examples, and accessible writing, this collection provides multiple lenses onto the significance of Beyoncé in the United States and around the world.

This book explores the post-apocalyptic novel in American literature from the 1940s to the present as reflections of a growing anxiety about the decline of US hegemony. Post-apocalyptic novels imagine human responses to the aftermath of catastrophe. The shape of the future they imagine is defined by "the remainder," when what is left behind expresses itself in storytelling tropes. Since 1945 the portentous fate of the United States has shifted from the irradiated future of nuclear holocaust to the saltwater wash of global warming. Theorist Brent Ryan Bellamy illuminates the political unconscious of post-apocalyptic writing, drawing on a range of disciplinary fields, including science fiction studies, American studies, energy humanities research, and critical race theory. From George R. Stewart's Earth Abides to N.K. Jemisin'sRemainders of the American Century, Remainders of the American Century describes the tension between a reactionary impulse and the progressive impetus for a new world.

2020 marks 75 years since the end of World War II, yet even as the war slips from living memory, its legacies continue to influence current political and military thinking. This anthology will analyse these legacies for a number of countries and regions including China, Russia, the United States, the Near East, and Germany illustrating in detail how World War II is not merely a historical event, but a defining moment for current military and political thinking around the globe. This book will therefore be of interest for those interested in history, but also political and military decision makers, and followers of current political and military affairs.

In these particularly stressful times, many people are struggling with their mental health. Some are caught up in their painful past, others are fretful about an uncertain future, and even more are anxious about their current circumstances. While the worries and concerns are real, practical steps can be taken to make them more manageable. In this insightful book, David Delaney draws on his own experiences to provide a welcome handbook on resilience and mindfulness. Becoming almost completely blind at eight years old, David struggled to fit in, and was hampered by his insecurities, doubts and low self-worth until he learned the skills to embark on a path to lasting confidence, health and happiness. For over twenty years David has researched resilience, meditation, Tai Chi, mindfulness, Yoga, Qi Gung movements and other techniques. He then studied modern scientific research on their efficacy and started applying their helpful practices and stories to his own life and in the meditation classes he taught. He now wants to share what he has learned. This step-by-step guide can set you free by breaking the chains of your past and helping you to embrace a bright new future. By making simple changes in your everyday world, you can make a huge difference to your life. So, here’s the question: what’s stopping you from taking the next step? It’s your life – why not get the most from it? Come join David on your own heroic journey of self-discovery.

Traumatologist Paul Valent believes that knowledge of human responses in disasters can help individuals and societies to better control catastrophic events, such as the present pandemic. This concise book will help the general reader to understand the very wide mental health effects of this pandemic, and thus to understand how distress may be better managed today and in the future. The author summarises disaster responses as they have manifested in this pandemic. These responses are biological, psychological and social, and they affect individuals, families, children and vulnerable groups. He also provides a framework which helps to the reader to understand, and thus be better informed to treat, the wide-ranging consequences of the pandemic.

Since the beginning of the last century Weber argued the indissoluble link between sociology and history. His approach saw the relationship between history and sociology as based on (a) mutual and essential support, and (b) logical priority, according to which, paraphrasing sociologist Alessandro Cavalli, “sociology without history is blind, history without sociology is mute.” The lesson of the «Annales» definitively confirmed the indissoluble link between history and social sciences, on the basis of a strongly and strategically interdisciplinary analysis. However, at present sociology and history continue to cooperate all too rarely in the context of interdisciplinary research. There is no question that social conflict – and social ambiguities – is a common ground of research both for sociology and history. Through the analysis of social conflict this book aims at providing argumentative issues concerning the above link, and showing meaningful convergences between the two disciplines. This in order to offer innovative spaces of discourse around the theory and methodology of research, and some areas of yesterday and today social conflicts.

A difficult relationship with food affects not only adolescents but also adults. It is often the symptom of a deep pain that rises from problems of control, low self-esteem, guilt and shame, which can derive from critical or traumatic events experienced in the course of life or at a young age. This book helps the reader to understand the difficult relationship with food and the original causes of the symptoms that maintain it. The author recommends the text as a basic tool kit with the essential elements to increase knowledge, awareness, motivation and shows the best path to find a definitive solution with EMDR psychotherapy. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a psychotherapeutic treatment authenticated by several researches. Mostly used for treating trauma, EMDR is a complex and global approach not only to work on past traumas but also to improve individual resources and self-esteem.

The spread of cuneiform writing from its Mesopotamian heartland to the peripheries during the second half of the third, and especially in the second millennium BC, represents an important historical and cultural phenomenon. From the beginning of the second millennium BC cuneiform writing became the privileged means through which the administrations of these "peripheral" centers recorded economic transactions. These documents (taxes, rations, sales, etc. ) shed a fascinating light on the economic system in these regions. Thousands of administrative documents allow us to follow the process of the development of economic thought that, starting from Mesopotamia, was taken and adapted to specific administrative realities throughout the wider regions of the Ancient Near East. The 19 essays collected here elucidate the emergence, transmission, and interaction of economic structures and the management of resources in time and space. Through a diachronic study, the volume identifies similarities, differences, and adaptations in the economic management of resources and taxation in the Ancient Near East (third - second millennium BC).

Food policy and practices varied widely in Nicaragua during the last decades of the twentieth century. In the 1970s and ‘80s, food scarcity contributed to the demise of the Somoza dictatorship and the Sandinista revolution. Although faced with widespread scarcity and political restrictions, Nicaraguan consumers still carved out spaces for defining their food choices. Despite economic crises, rationing, and war limiting peoples’ food selection, consumers responded with improvisation in daily cooking practices and organizing food exchanges through three distinct periods. First, the Somoza dictatorship (1936-1979) promoted culture and food practices from the United States, which was an option only for a minority of citizens. Second, the 1979 Sandinista revolution tried to steer Nicaraguans away from mass consumption by introducing an austere, frugal consumption that favored local products. Third, the transition to democracy between 1988 and 1993, marked by extreme scarcity and economic crisis, witnessed the re-introduction of market mechanisms, mass advertising, and imported goods. Despite the erosion of food policy during transition, the Nicaraguan revolution contributed to recognizing food security as a basic right and the rise of peasant movements for food sovereignty.

Objects of adornment have been a subject of archaeological, historical, and ethnographic study for well over a century. Within archaeology, personal ornaments have traditionally been viewed as decorative embellishments associated with status and wealth, materializations of power relations and social strategies, or markers of underlying social categories such as those related to gender, class, and ethnic affiliation. Personal Adornment and the Construction of Identity seeks to understand these artefacts not as signals of steady, pre-existing cultural units and relations, but as important components in the active and contingent constitution of identities. Drawing on contemporary scholarship on materiality and relationality in archaeological and social theory, this book uses one genre of material culture - items of bodily adornment - to illustrate how humans and objects construct one another. Providing case studies spanning 10 countries, three continents, and more than 9,000 years of human history, the authors demonstrate the myriad and dynamic ways personal ornaments were intertwined with embodied practice and identity performativity, the creation and remaking of social memories, and relational collections of persons, materials, and practices in the past. The authors’ careful analyses of production methods and composition, curation/heirlooming and reworking, decorative attributes and iconography, position within assemblages, and depositional context illuminate the varied material and relational axes along which objects of adornment contained social value and meaning. When paired with the broad temporal and geographic scope collectively represented by these studies, we gain a deeper appreciation for the subtle but vital roles these items played in human lives.

On 24 September 2019 the 17-year-old activist Greta Thunberg addressed the United Nations Climate Action Summit saying, ‘People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction’. A day earlier, however, the climate policy foundation Climate Intelligence (CLINTEL) sent the UN their World Climate Declaration, signed by 800 prominent scientists including Nobel Laureate Professor Ivar Giaever and Greenpeace co-founder Dr Patrick Moore, stating that there is no climate emergency: ‘You’re tired of alarmism and failed predictions of climate models that can’t predict the past, let alone the future. You distrust the business leaders, politicians and scientists of the climate industrial complex – you just want The Facts.’ This book contains original research and new theories of climate and will arm you with these facts. Leading scientists are contributors, including former Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Center Dr Roy Spencer, and lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Third Assessment Report Professor Emeritus of Meteorology Richard Lindzen of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and many more.

The story of Magna Carta is the essential prologue to the story of Western democracy. It is a foundation stone in the political culture and legal system of Australia and other countries that share a common law heritage. This book combines a most readable general history of the influence of Magna Carta in the emergence of Western democracy since 1215 with beginning and concluding observations on the Great Charter’s relevance to Australia, the European settlement of which began as that of a penal colony. Magna Carta was soon, however, to provide a sound basis for the ‘British right’ to colonial self-government. This is the tale of the importance of history and culture in securing rights, and how the Great Charter is far more pivotal to our present freedom than a face-value reading of the document would allow.