Books published by Palgrave MacMillan

This creative writing textbook introduces students to ecofiction: narrative writing that focuses on the environment. Also known as 'climate fiction' or 'cli-fi', an increasing number of short story writers, novelists and pioneers of emerging forms such as interactive fiction are taking up the call to develop their own creative responses to the climate crisis. This guide explores a cross-section of genres and ways of writing about our world, as well as the ethical and technical challenges involved. It offers a discussion of classic and contemporary texts, literary criticism and creative writing exercises. The book covers a broad range of themes and styles of writing, from works that engage with nature and landscape writing to those that take a more activist approach to climate change. With an awareness of the Global South and the subaltern, the framing of the Anthropocene, wilderness and nature writing is challenged. Each chapter offers a new perspective on ecofiction for the creative writer, with reading suggestions and connections to other writers and texts, and writing activities. Designed for upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate writing modules on the environment, the book is also suitable for independent writers looking to expand their skillset.

Stanley Rice, born in London in 1905, began his autobiography by stating that his life was 'an ordinary average life with all its ups and downs'. Stanley may have described his life as ordinary, and yet he lived through a period of rapid social change, including two world wars. Despite this, Stanley assumed that his life story would be of little interest to most readers, as he had not achieved great fame or any notable accolades. This book argues that this is exactly why historians should focus on such life stories, as there is much to be gained by focusing on memories of 'ordinary average lives', as they can expand our knowledge of the past, often revealing firsthand experiences that have been excluded from the historical record. This book does not intend to be a general social history of the working class. Rather, it is a work of memory, drawing upon a microhistory methodology to examine how a sample of one hundred working-class autobiographers remembered and wrote about living through years that were punctuated by two worldwide conflicts and a global economic depression.

This interdisciplinary work explores creating more inclusive workplaces around neurodiversity. It focuses on how organizations can promote true inclusion for neurominorities, a large segment of the emerging workforce while underlining the difficulties as well as the strength-based characteristics faced by this population.Beyond social, learning or communication challenges, neurominorities are often highly intelligent, honest, authentic, hyper-focused, innovative, skilled in various forms of perception, reliable, and resilient. Discovering ways for true inclusion can add value to organizations, helping all employees to learn and develop as colleagues while also helping neurominorities fulfill the goals of achieving dignity, respect, independence, and flourishing through work. This volume connects neurodiversity to disability in the workplace and examines the factors that contribute to the successful employment and integration of neurodiverse workers, including the transition from school to the labor market. It also highlights barriers and challenges faced by neurominorities. This book will appeal to scholars across business and the social sciences looking to better understand how neurodiversity should be addressed in organizational contexts. The multidisciplinary approach will accelerate management research and practices by providing insights already captured across a wide variety of disciplines, rather than prompting management researchers to build upon what currently exists solely in the management literature

This edited collection reconnects the literary imagination to the early modern cognitive environment. Under the spell of post-romantic aesthetics, modernist criticism regarded the imagination as an autonomous driver of artistic production and severed its dense ties to the image, reducing the latter to a formalistic category emptied of psychological significance. But early modern writers and thinkers did not hold such views. They understood the literary image to issue from the embodied mental faculties of the author and, through its rhetorical inscription, to influence, in turn, the interiority of the reader. For both authors and readers, then, engaging with images was not a detached aesthetic experience; it was a psycho-physiological struggle fraught with ethical peril insofar as the imagination was known for its volatility and unruliness, susceptible to the dysfunction brought on by disease and bearing, at times, in Protestant England the taint of superstition and idolatry. This volume accordingly investigates the imagination's alliances, altercations, and betrayals with rival cognitive operations based upon premodern faculty psychology.

​This book offers a comprehensive analysis of social protection in Latin America, its origins, institutions, and outcomes. The chapters are organised in three groups. The earlier chapters discuss in turn appropriate methods, an analytical framework, and core institutions. The book advocates a causal inference approach to the study of the institutions that have dominated social protection in the region: occupational insurance, individual retirement savings, and social assistance. The middle chapters study social protection's main stratification effects, focussing on stratification effects on employment, protection, and worker incorporation. The later chapters then assess social protection outcomes and identify country groupings including their evolution over time. The book, and its approach and findings, contributes to the advancement of a theory of social protection amongst late industrialisers.This is an open access book.

This volume brings together 11 experts from a range of religious backgrounds, to consider how each tradition has interpreted matters of violence and peace in relation to its sacred text. The traditions covered are Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Sikhism. The role of religion in conflict, war, and the creation of peaceful settlements has attracted much academic attention, including considerations of the interpretation of violence in sacred texts. This collection breaks new ground by bringing multiple faiths into conversation with one another with specific regard to the handling of violence and peace in sacred texts. This combination of close attention to text and expansive scope of religious inclusion is the first of its kind.

This open access edited volume investigates children and youth's deep entanglement in today's major global, national, and local transformations and processes: wherein they are not mere spectators and objects of transformations but instead actively shape them through various social, economic, and political representations. International contributions illuminate the problems that arise when children's rights and participation become a site of contestation and power over who represents whom, what, when, and where. The authors do not provide simple solutions, instead offering an understanding of the fundamental nature of these problems as founded in the application of rights and the nature of representation in modern society. Together, the authors emphasize that child representation must take into account the local and spatial context of how representations of children are discussed, as well as possible discrepancies between local, regional, national, and global processes.

There is a prehistory of the adultery novel, which became a pan-European literary paradigm in the second half of the 19th century. In the wake of the French Revolution, secular marriage legislation emerges, producing a metaphorical surplus that is still effective today. Using legal history and canonical literary texts from Rousseau to Goethe and Manzoni to Hugo and Flaubert, this book traces how marriage around 1800 became a figure of reflection for the modern nation-state. In the process, original contributions to the philology of the individual texts emerge. At the same time, law and literature are made fruitful for a historical semantics of society and community.This book is a translation of an original German 1st edition "Ehe als Nationalfiktion" by Dagmar Stöferle, published by J.B. Metzler, imprint of Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). The author (with the support of Chris Owain Carter) has subsequently revised the text further in an endeavour to refine the work stylistically.

This book draws on an in-depth ethnographic study to explore the meanings of race and ethnicity in prisoner culture within two Finnish male prisons. Set within the context of Finnish immigration, it provides an excellent backdrop for studying how a rapid growth in the number of foreign national prisoners alters the social environment in prisons. It builds on the sociological attempts to comprehend the nature of the prisoner community from the perspective of ethnicity and race which has gained growing attention since the 2000s. It explores how ethnic categories are formed in the prison space alongside discussing daily practices, individuals, conflicts and conflict-solving, discrimination, prisoner culture and hierarchy, and prison officers. It captures the consequences that ethnicity and race have on daily practices, equality, and safety in prison. This book shows how ethnic and racial categories are formed in social action and impact everyday life in prison, with the power to prisoner culture radically. It provides comparisons to other countries and offers insights into its unique ethnographic methodology.

Roughly eight million years ago, a branch of hominids from the forests of East Africa started to adapt to the drier environment created by the East African Rift System. A host of physical developments culminated in the brains of early humans increasing dramatically in size and cognitive power. Aided by a unique social organisation, communication signals became conventionalized and passed on from generation to generation through imitation and learning. But language is not only used to interact with our fellow beings. It is also closely connected to our thoughts. This makes language a biological, social, cultural and cognitive phenomenon all at once. What precise role did each of these aspects play in the origin of language and how were they all coordinated to produce the most sophisticated communication system in the animal kingdom? This book aims to answer these questions and open up the fascinating world of evolutionary linguistics. It should not only appeal to students of linguisticsand related fields (e.g. psychology, anthropology, cognitive science) but also to anyone with an interest in language, language learning and communication. Also ideal for advanced students of English as a Foreign Language.

This book provides a uniquely detailed analysis of presidential elections in Nigeria's Fourth Republic. The authors explore the changing dynamics of voting patterns, religious politics, politicians' behaviour and the broader political system to offer new insights into presidential systems in Africa and beyond. In doing so, they address an often-neglected area of political science and cast light on the political challenges facing one of the world's largest democracies. The book's comprehensive coverage of Nigerian presidential elections - and the lessons they hold for developing countries across the globe - is a valuable resource for researchers, students, international institutions and non-governmental organisations.

This open access book considers how relationships to place and spatial ecologies more broadly are becoming redefined in light of intersecting climate, health, identity and care crises. Through an interdisciplinary, intersectional discourse it investigates how spaces of liminality frame contemporary human conditions in their interactional modes with both human and non-human ecologies. The interspace grounds the discussion, indicating states of flux and transience, where the in-between is the defining characteristic. This open access monograph, then, takes up the new complexity in one's relationship(s) to their surrounding spaces through a rigorous discussion of texts and performance contexts in cutting-edge contemporary British theatre on a national and international scale. It seeks to address how in-betweenness spatially, temporally, environmentally, geographically and socially conceived has been emerging as the primary state for the unmoored individual of our time - and how it might serve as catalyst for performing one's agency in modes more empathetic not only to other humans, but, also, and equally, to the non-human world.

Performative Representation of Working-Class Laborers: They Work Hard for the Money is a transdisciplinary anthology intersecting art theory praxis, comparative literature, film & media studies, performance art, ethnic studies, gender studies, age & aging, geography, and labor studies. The book investigates and analyzes artwork created by artists or collectives working within the dialogue of Postmodernism and current global arts production. The focus on performative aspect of labor as art and affect becomes more sensate and less about the exploited body of labourers, liberating the representation of waged bodies and further diversifying the field of Working-Class Studies.

This edited volume celebrates cutting-edge research in stylistics and, more specifically, recent work on sense and the senses. The title originated in the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) 2022 conference and marks the 40th onsite event by showcasing some of the excellent papers delivered on that occasion. The selected chapters fall into 4 parts each of which gives pride of place to how style makes sense and how senses make style. The chapters follow research in neuroscience and sociocognition, investigate how body and mind are inextricably linked through embodied meaning; how emotions are both conveyed and perceived; and how impressions, thoughts and worldviews can be induced by a certain style. The apprehension of the senses is carried through a variety of theories (cognitive linguistics and stylistics, ecostylistics, phenomenology, simulation theory, enactivism, metaphor theory, Text World Theory) and is applied to various genres (poetry, novels, short stories, detectivefiction, restaurant reviews) and media (the oral vs written tradition, ekphrasis, and semiotic transfers). This book will be of interest to students and academics in stylistics, cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, ecostylistics, and multimodality.

This volume, the first of a two volume set, addresses three major areas in response to the post-Anthropocene: childhood, environment and indigeneity. Each of these areas is broadly addressed in relation to the concerns that have arisen both theoretically and educationally. The author terms these to be encounters as each area presents a particular problematic when addressing the phase change that the planet is undergoing where the anthropogenic labour of global humanity is contributing to climate change, endangering our very existence. There has been a concerted effort to overcome the nature-culture divide in education. The author reviews this development in the first section where there has been a particular emphasis placed on childhood education. In the second section he turns to the pedagogical theories that are attempting to overcome this same divide in environmental and science education. The last section attempts to bring into the conversation the vast literature on Indigeneity and their attempts to revise traditional education to meet these extraordinary times.

This book provides an analysis of various sources and forms of systemic financial risk. It focuses on the most pressing research questions for both advanced and emerging market economies, including green finance, ESG agenda and related risks, international financial connectivity across countries and financial institutions, and catastrophic risks modeling. Part 1 considers emerging research issues in risk assessment and management, including new approaches to measuring financial development, trends and prospects of green finance, and cross-country financial spillovers. Part 2 casts a more nuanced look at the quantitative models and methods adopted in risk assessment and risk management, putting such issues as measuring catastrophic risks, liquidity mismatches as well as modeling probabilities of default and the impact of macroeconomic fundamentals on capital adequacy ratios in the Russian banking sector in the spotlight. Finally, Part 3 discusses the new regulatory challenges dealingwith risk assessment and risk management, such as macroprudential policies which have proved efficient to mitigate systemic risk are investigated. The book offers a comprehensive picture of the challenges which emerging market economies are facing in the field of financial risk assessment and management. Specifically, the challenges are discussed in the context of elaborated models and policy responses, which are based on the up-to-date theoretical contributions and empirical evidence from various fields, making the book relevant to professors, researchers, graduate students, and practitioners of risk management, international finance, and financial services.

The metaverse is undergoing rapid and transformative changes, yet it has thus far lacked a comprehensive scholarly examination from a global and comparative standpoint. The publication addresses existing gaps by introducing fresh perspectives and frameworks across various domains within the metaverse, including law, economics, and finance. Drawing upon the expertise of an international cohort of scholars and practitioners, this volume illuminates emerging interdisciplinary insights with global relevance, facilitating a comparative analysis of diverse aspects of the metaverse. Timely and essential, this book contributes significantly to the metaverse literature, addressing urgent issues in this evolving landscape.

This book sheds light on the untold stories of individual student activists at Queens College, New York City, during the 1960s. Against the backdrop of the ongoing Vietnam War and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, some Americans began to lose faith in their government. Based on injustices that students saw in their campuses, in the country, and in the world at large, they began to question their political leaders. Students organized their discontents over three major issues: civil rights, free speech, and anti-war sentiments. Their protests involved direct actions such as sit-ins, marches, picketing, and boycotts. At Queens College (QC), as the students moved away from the repressive McCarthy era of the 1950s, they began to confront and challenge those in power at the college in the 1960s. The defining characteristic of this break from the past was a student strike in 1961 in objection to the ban of controversial speakers who had been invited to campus by student clubs. The student strike of 1961 gave the activists among them a direct and immediate way to fight power on campus and to fight racism and discrimination. The author argues that student movements cannot be attributed to a single explanation, and therefore, he focuses on individual historical contexts, presenting first-person narratives from the actual participants, and tells their stories in their own voices, from their own records, and from the documents they left behind. The book identifies the QC student activists of the 1960s, exploring how and why they became activists; their activities; their achievement as activists; and what motivated them to think that they could make history themselves by confronting racism. It provides an intimate look at the students' lives and their social justice journey, beginning at Queens College and as they moved into their careers.

As a follow up to Pedagogical Encounters in the Post-Anthropocene, Volume I, this book addresses three major areas in response to the post-Anthropocene: Technology, Neurology, Quantum. Each of these areas is broadly addressed in relation to the concerns that have arisen both theoretically and educationally. As in Volume I, the author terms these to be encounters as each area presents a particular problematic when addressing the phase change that the planet is undergoing where the anthropogenic labour of global humanity is contributing to climate change, endangering our very existence. Technology in education has been a significant development. There is a concerted effort to review this development placing stress on the rise of learning machines and algorithms. In the second encounter the vast literature on neurology is addressed, especially neurodiversity and the various symptoms that have emerged in the post-Anthropocene era. The last section reviews issues related to quantum theory as this is fundamental to tensions between physics and metaphysics. The volume concludes with the author¿s own pedagogical proposal for the future.

This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the different ways in which the past remains present in Western popular culture in the twenty-first century. It combines theoretical analyses with case study-based chapters focusing on examples from Britain, the US, and Germany, among other countries. In doing so, it pushes beyond a simplistic and monolithic conception of what 'nostalgia' is to allow for a more nuanced and varied conceptualisation of this phenomenon, and to also incorporate other ways of understanding the invoking or inclusion of different histories within cultural objects, formats, and practices.

This book is one of two volumes that examines the successes and failures of the Ghanaian Fourth Republic from a political, public administration and public policy viewpoint. Published to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the Fourth Republic, these volumes bring together leading scholars to consider the political achievements and failures that have taken place in the country since the early 1990s, and what these tell us about the state of politics and democracy in twenty-first century Ghana and beyond. This volume focuses on party politics, political communication and public policy. It assesses themes such as interest groups, electoral politics, democratization, constitutionalism, the role of the media, and gender and politics. The volume also places Ghana in a global context, demonstrating how lessons learnt from the country can be applied elsewhere around the world, and what is unique about the Ghanaian political experience. It will appeal to all those interested in public policy, public administration and African politics.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of municipal amalgamation reforms in Europe. Adopting the analytical and methodological tools of comparative historical analysis, it examines how the history of local government systems has conditioned the adoption of municipal amalgamation reforms across time and space. Beginning with Sweden's early amalgamation reforms during the late 1940s and early 1950s, it assesses how the evolution of the Welfare State, decentralization, urbanization, and economic growth have all impacted amalgamation reforms in ten other European countries. The book challenges the prevailing theory that amalgamations are implemented by rational design to improve the efficiency and capacity of local governments. Instead, it argues that state sovereignty, regime changes, centralization of authority and diffusion effects are more likely causes of the adoption of municipal amalgamation reforms. It will appeal to all those interested in public administration, public policy, European politics, and local governance studies.

This book addresses the most suggestive themes of transhumanism and critical posthumanism by placing them in dialogue with classic problems of metaphysics, and with some great thinkers of the past (Bruno, Spinoza, and above all Leibniz). The main purpose of this comparison is to invite transhumanists and critical posthumanists to consider a highly complex problematic tradition rooted in the history of philosophy. This study also makes use of examples drawn from the history of mythology, angelology, and mysticism. At the same time, the book promotes dialogue between scholars of classical metaphysics and philosophy of religion, and the potential metaphysical/spiritual theories developed independently by transhumanist and posthumanist thinkers within an anti-dualist and naturalistic philosophical framework. The goal is to 'enhance' contemporary transhumanism and posthumanism by promoting the need to safeguard intelligence as a principle, without falling into the trap of a violent and egotistic metaphysics.

​This book demystifies the notion of living consciousness and aims to show that, far from being a mere accompaniment to brain functions, living consciousness defines the features of both physical objects and human artifacts. The distinction is between living consciousness, which includes subjective experiences 'here and now' (e.g., perceptions, feelings, imagination, and creative thinking) and conforms to the laws of magic, versus objectified consciousness that comprises physical (e.g., computers) and symbolic (e.g., languages and concepts) human artifacts and conforms to the laws of nature and formal logic.The magnificent success of science in the modern world has plunged many scientists into the illusion that magical events are ancient history and exist today only in art and night dreams. The illusion reached its pinnacle in the middle of the 20th century, when nuclear power stations, flights to the Moon, early computers, genetic engineering and other wonders of science made some scientists believe that there is nothing in the world that cannot be explained by science. But there was a price to pay for this scientific optimism - the scientists became blind to their living consciousness. They began looking at the world as if nature and objectified consciousness were the only things that mattered, with living consciousness being viewed as a mundane thing that accompanies brain processes but has no causal powers.This book examines how our living consciousness works, and how our understanding of this work helps in solving key problems of modern life, such as facilitating creativity, protecting from magical manipulation with minds, fighting certain kinds of crime, managing fake reality, preventing misuses in psychotherapy and other psychological practices, comprehending controversial issues in science, and tracing origins of totalitarian media narratives that trigger hatred and wars.

This book details how British Catholic communities view abortion, highlighting the diversity of positions which often contrast with the official line of Catholic Church doctrine. The authors' extensive qualitative investigation involving various Catholic constituents demonstrates the complex ways attitudes are formed. Based on interviews with priests, Catholic parishioners, anti-abortion activists and Catholics living in close proximity to activism, this book takes a lived religion approach to argue that attitudes and approaches to abortion are nuanced and contextual, with the Catholic concept of individual conscience playing a fundamental role in navigating abortion issues. Ultimately, this investigation helps to explore in much greater depth the increased liberalisation in attitudes among Catholics towards abortion, at a time when Catholic activism opposing abortion is growing, and therefore shines a light on the conflicts that are apparent at the heart of Catholic parishes. Thisbook will be of interest to scholars in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Sociology, Theology and Religious Studies.

This book is a comprehensive guide to the application of Python in accounting, finance, and other business disciplines. This book is more than a Python tutorial; it is an integrative approach to using Python for practical research in these fields. The book begins with an introduction to Python and its key libraries. It then covers real-world applications of Python, covering data acquisition, cleaning, exploratory data analysis, visualization, and advanced topics like natural language processing, machine learning, predictive analytics, and deep learning. What sets this book apart is its unique blend of theoretical knowledge and real-world examples, supplemented with ready-to-use code. It doesn't stop at the syntax; it shows how to apply Python to tackle actual analytical problems. The book uses case studies to illustrate how Python can enhance traditional research methods in accounting and finance, not only allowing the reader to gain a firm understanding of Python programming but also equipping them with the skills to apply Python to accounting, finance, and broader business research. Whether you are a PhD student, a professor, an industry professional, or a financial researcher, this book provides the key to unlocking the full potential of Python in research.

This book delves into Trinidad and Tobago's development with a fresh lens. It stands as the inaugural empirical exploration of the country's unique attributes, including its diversity, ex-British colony status, small-state categorization by population size, and its dependence on hydrocarbons.Through meticulous empirical analysis, this book scrutinizes the nation's economic, social, and political outcomes within the context of these four distinctive parameters, offering fresh insights into the country's development trajectory.What sets this book apart is its unwavering commitment to a data-driven approach. Drawing upon a vast array of databases from both international and national sources, it provides a thorough examination of development indicators, household welfare metrics, firm-level performance, and individual perspectives on a wide range of political, economic, and social issues.For scholars, policymakers, and anyone with an interest in understanding how unique contextual factors shape a Trinidad and Tobago's development, this book offers an enlightening and data-rich perspective on the nation's journey towards progress and prosperity.

This book provides a practical, detailed, and well-documented guide that takes students and market researchers through all phases of developing and conducting global marketing research. This book not only accounts for the recent developments in the scope and extent of global marketing research, but also examines advances in both quantitative and qualitative research techniques, and the impact of the Internet on research in the global environment.It includes coverage of all phases involved in designing and executing global marketing research -- from analyzing the nature and scope of the research to the preliminary stages, gathering data, designing the questionnaires, sampling, and presenting the data. Numerous country-specific examples and case studies will add to the understanding of the concepts laid out in the book. This edition features updates related to leveraging the power of AI, Internet of Things, machine learning, blockchain, robotics, the metaverse, and otheremerging technologies that are impacting the way in which marketing research is performed. With an instructor's manual as well as PPT slides covering major topics within the chapters, in addition to numerous cases, this text provides the most current and relevant information about the global marketing research industry and outlines the necessary techniques that can guide researchers in their work.

This book investigates the contemporary practices surrounding the international prosecution of sitting heads of states by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Through a specific focus on five contemporary case studies, the author reflects on the following: firstly, how the ICC itself has shaped the contemporary practices surrounding the prosecution of sitting heads of states; and secondly, the domestic and international "problematics" that have ensued from these practices. In doing so, Cacciatori argues that the international prosecution of sitting heads of states before the ICC constitutes "an imprudent exercise of Western humanitarianism". This, in turn, has not only worsened the domestic conditions of the countries subject to the ICC's investigations but in addition, it has also served to undermine the "very idea of cosmopolitan justice" in international politics.

This volume explores the family formation and life course of Polish people in Ireland, who make up the largest immigrant group in Ireland. Chapters address key dimensions of the life course in three parts focusing on childhood and youth, adulthood and parenting, and mid-life and futures. Contributions investigate the experiences of children and youth attending school and understanding their identities, the changing nature of families and family support, how families might engage with welfare institutions, and more. Through the life course approach, the book moves beyond the paradigm of studying the Polish population as economic migrants and instead analyzes and illustrates the lives of Polish families living in Ireland since EU enlargement.