Books published by Palgrave MacMillan

This book explores the evolving world of drones through a multifaceted lens, revealing their profound impact on society and visual culture. The comprehensive collection bridges the gap between technology and aesthetics, dissecting the transformative role drones play in various domains, from cinema and art to surveillance and environmental sensing. Each chapter, penned by leading scholars, explores the unique ways drones are redefining our visual landscape, whether in capturing unprecedented cinematic shots, aiding in critical rescue missions, or offering new perspectives in artistic endeavours.The book is an essential read for academics, professionals, and enthusiasts alike, and is a key resource for anyone seeking to comprehend the full spectrum of drone capabilities and their implications for the future of visual communication and technology.

​This book offers a comprehensive analysis of infrastructure insecurity issues in the historic Niger Delta, drawing on empirical fieldwork involving host communities, regulators, and multinational oil and gas operators. It introduces innovative models and theories, such as a pipeline life cycle model focusing on community development, community neglect aggression displacement theory, social aggression theory, stakeholders' policy development model, contemporary poor governance cycle model, and an infrastructure insecurity nexus model, linking governance, socio-economic conditions, and infrastructure insecurity in resource-rich regions of the Global South. The book bridges gaps left by previous publications, providing depth and applicability of data. It employs the Frustration-Aggression Displacement theory to explain underlying triggers of violence and uses real-world case studies, diagrams, and charts to facilitate understanding. Suitable and engaging for individuals, communities, or regulators involved in oil and gas activities alike, this book offers valuable insights into onshore pipeline infrastructure insecurity in Nigeria, West Africa, and the broader Global South, addressing regulation, compliance, environmental concerns, social aspects, and technological innovations.

This book deals with the complex process of national identity formation in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic, during a crucial period characterized by transformative events that reshaped both the state and society. These events included revolutions, wars, mass migrations, ethnic cleansing, genocide, the empire's disintegration, territorial and demographic changes, and the emergence of new states. In the face of these events, a multitude of old and new formulations and imaginings of nation and national identity took shape and interacted with each other. This book focuses on highlighting the diversity of concepts and trajectories that existed during the period and how these played out within a complex web of inclusionary and exclusionary processes, and the various ways in which the nation was constituted and conceptualized.

​This book "resonates" the work of Chinese and Western philosophers, developing ontological ideas that are neither purely Chinese nor Western. In so doing, it argues that Deleuze's idea of "resonance" offers a model for a new way of doing comparative philosophy in which the comparison actualizes the virtual and counter-actualizes the actual in both compared traditions. More particularly, Neo-Confucian thinkers Zhang Zai (1020-1077), Zhu Xi (1130-1200), and Wang Yangming (1472-1529) are resonated with Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Husserlian phenomenology, and Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995). The three Chinese thinkers represent three distinct currents of Neo-Confucianism: the school of veins (li) of Zhu Xi, the school of energy (qi) of Zhang Zai, the school of mind (xin) of Wang Yangming. The method of resonance is used to discuss the following topics: dichotomy of veins and energy, temporality and subjectivity, self-cultivation, all-embracing energy, dichotomy of primary ability and primary knowledge.

​This book investigates how people living with late-stage dementia can engage in communication and social interaction. Based on empirical research, it explores the remaining communicative resources of people living with cognitive impairment (e.g., intercorporeal interaction, bodily gestures, gaze), presenting the agency of the person with dementia as an integral part of their relations with others. The book provides a comprehensive theoretical framework for analyzing, describing, and understanding communication in late-stage dementia, and explores the use of video ethnography to record and analyze non-verbal, bodily interaction. The authors skilfully bring together findings from their examinations of everyday interactions involving individuals living with late-stage dementia in nursing facilities, introducing the readers to the innovative theoretical and methodological approaches that undergird the fine-grained analyses at the heart of the book. The rich and nuanced case studies collected encompass embodied directives, habitual actions and objects, physical settings, assisted eating, and much more. An invaluable resource for graduate students and researchers at all levels in the fields of psychology, psychotherapy, social work, nursing, gerontology, and related disciplines, this volume makes an unparalleled contribution to current dementia research across the social sciences.

Dwelling is both an action and a location; it combines the spatial idea of habitation (dwelling in) with the temporal idea of lingering (dwelling on). We live not only in bricks and mortar, a tent, a hut or a spaceship, but also in that most changeful of forms, our body, or in a remembered or virtual home. Especially since COVID-19 we have seen changes in the topography of everyday life. In this multi-disciplinary collection, a complex of meanings is approached from a variety of specific, often personal angles.Framed by two longer essays which theorise how the psychology of home may change under sudden pressure and how social relations are embodied in windows, doors, walls and stairs, the book includes 18 further essays. Part I, 'Informal settlements', shows how a slum, urban development or nomadic life may create a self-sustaining identity; in Part II, 'Huts and bridges', impermanence shapes the state of dwelling, while Part III, 'Liminal bodies', presents bodies suspended at thresholds of change. Movement in time and space characterises the last three sections: Part IV, 'Moving home', depicts transitions and arrivals, Part V, 'Dwelling in Memory', focuses on recollections of past places and Part VI, 'Are we there yet?', points the way to a future in which the consulting-room changes to 2D, a family is exiled onto the small screen or we imagine breaking away altogether into outer space.

This Open Access volume assembles experts from the United States and India to examine six issues essential to the safety and security of nuclear facilities, technologies, and materials: insider threats, organizational culture, emergency response, physical protection, control of radioactive sources, and cyber security. Each chapter includes papers by an Indian expert and by an American counterpart. This unique structure contrasts the countries' diverse perspectives on nuclear security, situates technical problems within larger socio-political contexts, and identifies cooperative opportunities for the U.S. and India.

There is a lot of recent excitement about blockchain but the debate is often not conceptually grounded. Blockchain's innovation is more organizational than technical, and this Pivot discusses its conceptual elements to better evaluate its potential applications in the real world. Rooted in the basic technical concepts of blockchains, this book focuses on blockchain's potential and limitations from a social science perspective, drawing on areas such as economics, business, and law to discuss what types of applications can make sense for blockchains and which probably do not. It begins with a review of earlier attempts to create similar uses, then discusses Bitcoin and how it differed from other attempts at a decentralized currency. It also outlines the mechanisms of blockchain, its economic and legal connections, the role of smart contracts, and critical issues affecting the technology. It will be of interest to researchers, students, and policymakers of financial technology, economic innovation, regulation, and computer science.

This book investigates the problematisation in Adam Smith's moral philosophy of a classical question: what makes us human beings from a moral standpoint? To do this, Riccardo Bonfiglioli explores the relationship between the concepts of 'human nature', 'mind' and 'the self' in order to reconstruct Smith's theory of subjectivity. After providing a systematic reconstruction of Adam Smith's conceptions of 'human nature', 'mind' and 'the self' - exploring some aspects of Smith's philosophy (nature, philosophy of history, sympathy and imagination) and their empirical expressions (education, conduct and character) - Bonfiglioli argues that, in Adam Smith's work, the meaning of 'moral human beings' would depend on the human being's effort to live in harmony with oneself and the others. According to Bonfiglioli, in Smith's moral theory, this 'harmony with oneself and the others' would be achieved in relation to a certain kind of awareness that can be possible when human beings try to judge the conduct and try to act according to the impartial spectator. Specifically, this impartial spectator is reinterpreted by the author in the light of the concept of immediacy.

This open access book aims to promote ecological and emotional research and education for sustainability by cultivating values and behaviours consistent with how nature makes us feel connected and nurtured. Built upon the intersection of ecological literacy and socio-emotional learning, grounded in sustainability and relational thinking, the research developed in the book covers a wide range of themes connected to the Agenda 2030.

This book offers stories and tools for designing and facilitating transformative sustainability pedagogy and explores how educators can intentionally design and facilitate eco-spiritual learning that promotes healing and wholeness. In these times of accelerating climate change and systemic injustice, we need learning spaces that both challenge our unsustainable dominant paradigms and support us in re-learning how to live in relational and regenerative ways. Rooted in the paradigm of interconnection and relationality, this book offers practical ways to design and facilitate learning toward more just, ecological, and spiritual ways of being. The author weaves together a variety of personal stories of teaching and learning, an exploration of how new science can be applied to transformative sustainability pedagogy, and eco-spiritual practices to help educators nurture wholeness and connection in themselves and in learning spaces.

Should religion and politics be kept apart? What should be the relationship between the church and the state? M.Y. Ciftci answers these questions by studying the most important event in the recent history of the Catholic Church: The Second Vatican Council (1962-65). The book provides a new interpretation of the Council's teaching on church-state relations to better appreciate its flaws and need for reform. By paying attention to the (often overlooked) importance given by the Council to the lay apostolate, it reveals how the Council did not reform, as is often thought, but retained a flawed conception of the laity's role in politics. It then proposes a new framework for understanding church-state relations using the ressourcement method of returning to scripture and tradition, and by a critical dialogue with Oliver O'Donovan and various Protestant biblical scholars of the Powers in the New Testament. Ciftci shows how fruitful an self-consciously ecumenical approach can be for political theology. As most ressourcement theologians have overlooked political issues, and since ecumenical theology rarely touches on issues of church-state relations, this work makes an original contribution to the ressourcement project and to ecumenism.

This book critically engages with the development-security nexus in contemporary Africa, coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of the African Union (AU). Despite widespread discourse on the 'Africa Rising' narrative, many African states grapple with persistent economic challenges, violent conflicts, Afrophobia, and democratic setbacks. The AU's efforts, alongside those of other regional actors, to leverage regionalism for driving socio-economic and political development while ensuring peace and security have yielded limited results. Consequently, this edited volume takes an incisive approach to unpack the complex and vexed issues obstructing sustainable advancements in security and development in Africa. While existing studies have predominantly centered on conventional conflict and development concerns, this book sheds light on the emerging realities and evolving dynamics shaping the region's trajectory. Utilising a comprehensive case study approach, the book places Africa's challenges within both historical and contemporary contexts, aiming to present sustainable policy options to bridge the myriad gaps in the continent's peace, security, and governance architecture. By addressing the intricacies of balancing individual state interests with collective regional advancement, this volume offers a pathway toward unlocking Africa's potential for development and fostering a prosperous and harmonious 'Africa We Want'.

Acts of terrorism and forms of counter-terrorism have been evolving for quite a long time. Although we have been living with these phenomena for centuries, they have only recently become part of the daily lives of many in the West since the dawn of the millennium. In some countries, they have become so prevalent that they shape the daily lives and habits of citizens. For these reasons, it is of utmost importance for all of us to understand the root causes, the drives and the motives behind terrorist activities, preferably even before they can materialize. In this challenge, counter-terrorism activities play a crucial role. In this book, contributors from various disciplines discuss terrorism and counter-terrorism on the African continent through case studies from Nigeria, Kenya, Cameroon, Ghana, or Mozambique and the Sahel region. In addition to analysis, they offer possible steps for improving the situation.

This book offers an entertaining study of the facts and fantasies associated with the vacuum cleaner as it evolved from a luxury gimmick to a household necessity. The iconic appliance of twentieth-century domestic revolution, the vacuum cleaner stands at the forefront of radical changes in technology, automation, finance, marketing, hygiene, infrastructure, time-management, domestic labour, and the history of dirt. This appliance also insinuates itself into the dominant phobias of the period, including totalitarianism and nuclear war. Maud Ellmann shows how modern literature, art, and other media have transformed this humble domestic mod con into a curmudgeon, windbag, cannibal, vampire, dictator, infanticidal mother, freedom fighter, mantrap, and lothario.

This book is a scholarly anthology that proposes a deep discussion about the multiple ways in which narrative journalism has portrayed nature, human interactions with nature, the global actions and the consequences of activities that have either attempted to explore it, exploit it, harness it, dominate it, and protect it. This essay collection offers an academic framework for literary journalistic narratives about nature and includes the study of long form journalism originated in different corners of the world, all exploring human-non human-nature interactions in all their power, finitude, peril and urgency.

​William Gibson's Neuromancer: A Critical Companion presents Gibson's rise as an influential figure within and beyond the science fiction field. Gibson's success with Neuromancer, the first novel to win the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, and Philip K. Dick Award, is in part a direct result of the rising popularity of cyberpunk in the early- to mid-1980s, although it could just as easily be said cyberpunk's success was in no small part a direct result of Neuromancer's explosion onto the science fiction scene.Neuromancer's ongoing relevance remains undiminished because we are effectively living in a technocultural age that is increasingly difficult to distinguish from Gibson's novel. As Graham J. Murphy demonstrates in this companion, the novel remains instrumental in thinking through the ongoing explorations of the posthuman: transhumanism, the Utopia/Anti-Utopia dynamic, and capitalist realism, to name a few of themore significant critical vehicles with which to better understand and contextualize our technocultural age and Neuromancer's role in both shaping it and responding to it. This book provides a critical introduction to Neuromancer and cyberpunk culture.

How can we work towards ensuring that organisations are robust and highly productive and avoid issues such as tiredness, burnout, high employee turnover, motivational issues, or problems with the emotional climate? Bringing together the fields of process management and organisational behaviour for the first time, this book provides sorely needed practical guidance on how organisations can diagnose, anticipate, and address psychological issues in their workforces as well as process vulnerabilities in their operations. Advocating for a human-centred approach to process management, the authors help discover and prevent negative psychological issues related to emotional exhaustion. This book offers a step-by-step toolkit for burnout recognition and systematic prevention using established process management tools. Thus, the book offers a deep look into psychological aspects far beyond classical process management.

This book is concerned with the varying responses of South American countries to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Since Beijing launched the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, 3/4 of countries in the world have engaged with China's arrangement of promoting global physical and digital connectivity. This still leaves a quarter of them that have refused China's offer so far or withdrawn. How do we account for why countries chose to join the BRI while others do not? Research on South American countries' responses to the BRI is scant, but the topic is pertinent. While the great-power competition and systemic rivalry have spoiled the appetite of European countries to intensify their ties with China, many developing countries seem to be rather interested. This book will interest scholars of international political economy, geopolitics, foreign policy and international development.

This book aims to delve into the application of feminist ethnography by engaging with the lived experiences of vulnerable workers, occupied by India's informal workforce, across its deeply stratified labour-market landscape. Set up and organized in a diverse spatial trajectory through identified case studies from across India, the book, in a post pandemic context, aims to study, critically reflect on the vulnerable state of India's workforce, capturing the daily emergencies, livelihood of marginalized communities. Case studies in the book feature the pandemic-crisis narratives of farmers, fisherfolk, factory workers, artisans, small scale entertainment providers, sanitation, and waste workers, to name a few.By understanding the intersectional dimensions of social structures like caste, gender, and class our case studies in the book also attempt to unpack the 'dualities' present in the contemporary understanding of India's labour market. Reflective discussions with field ethnographers through first-person narratives help documenting their own observations from different case studies, while focusing on interactions on how to work through power dynamics and varied positionalities across dynamic field sites marked with different spatial characteristics. The text is primarily aimed at students and peer scholars of development studies, or for those who interested in learning about the application of ethnographic methods to studying/understanding the governing dynamics of informality across India and South Asia.

This book provides an insider's overview of the emerging Chinese biopharma sector, its dynamics and trends, first bust and boom cycle, long-term perspectives, and how as a foreign company or investor to tap into this. China has gone from a country with no innovation in drug discovery, to a country which starts to out-license its biopharma technology to the rest of the world. The Chinese biopharma sector is only a decade old, but it already has become a new driver of growth and value. The book takes a closer look at what drives Chinese innovation in the biopharma sector, how to deal with this innovation, and what opportunities and challenges this provides for foreign companies. The book also takes a deep dive into its first biopharma boom and bust cycle, and what it means for the sector. It also explains what deals Chinese biopharma companies and investors are looking for, what works and what doesn't, and how as a foreign company can tap into the world's second largest healthcare market.

This book focuses on how Burmanization created and reinforced ethnic divides since the 1962 coup d'etat. when General Ne Win concentrated all authority in the Burmese speaking army. Background research for the book includes Burmese language materials from the Burmese Socialist Party (BSP) and others that describe with what the BSP believed in their own terms. This is unique from previous works on the topic which either simply pointed out that the policies "didn't work" and therefore are uninteresting, or to claim that they were "necessary" given the chaos of the previous regime. The authors agree that Ne Win's policies "didn't work." However, the book goes further by elaborating why Burmanization policies developed in the 1960s are important for understanding Burmese society today. Most importantly, Ne Win's ideology reflects how patterns of interethnic relationships in Myanmar lead to the "intractability" of the battles in early twenty-first century Myanmar.

Thirty years of developments in deliberative democracy (DD) have consolidated this subfield of democratic theory. The acquired disciplinary prestige has made theorist and practitioners very confident about the ability of DD to address the legitimacy crisis experienced by liberal democracies at present at both theoretical and practical levels. The book advance a critical analysis of these developments that casts doubts on those certainties -- current theoretical debates are reproposing old methodological divisions, and are afraid to move beyond the minimalist model of democracy advocated by liberal thinkers; democratic experimentation at the micro-level seems to have no impact at the macro-level, and remain sets of isolated experiences. The book indicates that those defects are mainly due to the liberal minimalist frame of reference within which reflection in democratic theory and practice takes place. Consequently, it suggests to move beyond liberal understandings of democracy as a game in need of external rules, and adopt instead a vision of democracy as a self-correcting metagame.

This textbook is an introduction to thinking ethically about global issues. Unlike existing books in this area, this book is truly interdisciplinary and includes a range of voices from both the Global South and the Global North. Rather than simply applying Western theories to case studies, Prof. Stephen Minister shows readers how to consider context and complexity, while respecting the agency of people elsewhere. It weaves together the work of thinkers and writers from the Global South with philosophical work on global ethics, relevant scholarship from other academic fields, and stories from fieldwork studying global issues on four continents. The textbook explores a variety of topics, including: cultural difference, gender, population, poverty, natural disasters, and development. It then encourages students to build on these ideas and think more deeply about topics such as foreign aid, inequality, immigration, international trade, climate change, human rights, and war and terrorism. Because the book's style is accessible and engaging, it will be an excellent text for ethics and global studies courses, as well as being of interest to general readers who want to think better about global issues.

This book argues that a critical understanding of dark academe is vital to the futures of democracy and education. Drawing upon contemporary literary and cultural theory, particularly, affect theory, queer epistemology, and critical race theory as well as critiques of capitalism and accounts of the death drive, it builds a case for identifying dark academe as anything that prohibits the pursuit of democratic education and critical citizenship. It also argues that dark times require a reassessment of the ways theory and knowledge are approached in the humanities. This is necessary if the aim is to truly understand the darkness at the heart of the higher education today. Dark academe works to negate education and learning by continuously telling us that the quest for knowledge is empty, and the pursuit of critique is blind. In this educational darkness, the death drive of neoliberal academe becomes a force that works against intellectual transformation and the deepening of critical sights.

This book reinvents aspects of the rhetorical tradition as part of a philosophical pluralism oriented to "All-in-Allness." Its chapters unfold some of the ethical and intellectual responsibilities they share, their commitments toward literature broadly conceived, the limited authority of their interpretations, and the kinds of judgments they issue in. Part One, drawing chiefly on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Richard McKeon, leverages a central line of argument regarding "Rationality" in the pragmatism of Robert Brandom. Part Two pivots to specific instances of the range of rhetorical argument found in surprising places and in sophisticated arrangements. The book as a whole culminates in Part Three, where the author demonstrates how "ordinary language criticism" fruitfully bears on cultural models--film, drama, the novel, poetry--belonging to "American Low Modernism."

This transdisciplinary book investigates the profound repercussions of living in a post-truth world in which 'alternative facts' and post-truth knowledge claims, often bordering on the absurd, have replaced the real in the collective imagination of millions of people around the planet. Through discussions on climate change denial, the anti-vaccination movement, the January 6th Insurrection and the Russia-Ukraine War, this study explores the gravity of the current 'infodemic, ' or the increasing inability of a large segment of the population to distinguish between reality and misrepresentation, and the destabilizing impact this infodemic has on democratic models of governance around the globe, coinciding with the rise of autocratic forms of populism.

In this book, Juli Gittinger argues that America's fascination (obsession?) with the apocalypse is a synthesis of religion, popular culture, and politics in a way that is particular to the US and consonant with mythological-historical narratives of America. As a result, we can identify American apocalypticism as a sort of religion in itself that is closely tied to "civil religion," that has a worldview and rituals that create identifiable communities and connects American mythology to apocalyptic anxieties. Gittinger discusses how various cultures and groups form as a result of this obsession, and that these communities form their own rituals and responses in various forms of "prepping" or survivalist practices. She lays out an argument for a broad eschatology prevalent in the US that extends beyond traditional religious designations to form an apocalyptic worldview that is built into our narrative as a country, as well as furthered by popular culture and media's contributionto apocalyptic anxieties. Subsequently, Gittinger uses case studies of apocalyptic events--current or speculative--that reveal how our anxieties about the end of the world (as we know it) inform our culture, as well as religious narratives that emerge from such crises.

As global supply chains become more complex, the need for expertise in their financial aspects grows. This book aims to equip students and professionals with the knowledge to navigate these complexities, ensuring efficient and resilient financial supply chain operations. It provides an in-depth exploration into the intricate and constantly evolving realm of supply chain finance. By merging key concepts, major mechanisms, hands-on risk analytics, and the latest technology trends, this book offers a seamless and comprehensive examination of the topic, grounded in the author's twenty years of academic research and hands-on experience. Students in supply chain management will gain a thorough understanding of the financial elements that are integral to modern supply chains, including the importance of liquidity, the role of financial institutions, and the optimization of cash flows within the supply chain ecosystem. Definitions will be used throughout the text to elucidate financial terminology that may be unfamiliar to management students. The instructor's manual will include PowerPoint slides, exercises, and quizzes to assess student comprehension and progress. This textbook will serve as the primary resource for understanding the financial dimensions of supply chains.

This book explores the significant textual relationship between Mary and Percy Shelley and the early works of the Brontë siblings. Through a detailed examination of the Shelleyan narrative accessible to the Brontës from their childhood to their final novels, this study argues for a fresh perspective on the Brontës' engagement with the Shelleys in both their juvenilia and later seven novels. In this respect, the book considers the Brontës as readers rather than exclusively as writers, viewing them as a product of the early nineteenth-century literary marketplace which maintained affinities to Romanticism. Reading, rewriting, and appropriating the textual Shelleys was a fundamental vein stemming the Brontës' writing from childhood, with Mary epitomising the model for what the sisters would eventually become: the female novelist.