Synthesising decades of research, the book integrates insights from soil science, hydrology, geotechnical engineering, and land management to establish consistent principles for diagnosis, prevention, and remediation. Each chapter translates mechanistic understanding into applied strategies that enhance structural resilience, support sustainable production, and safeguard environmental quality. The volume provides a rigorous conceptual and empirical basis for re-evaluating how dispersive landscapes are characterised and managed, and outlines priorities for future research to strengthen the stability and long-term sustainability of vulnerable soils.

Dr Ehsan Tavakkoliis an Associate Professor at the University of Adelaide. His research investigates how mineral reactivity, carbon cycling, and nutrient dynamics interact to control soil function and crop productivity, particularly under dispersive and salt-affected soils, and has advanced approaches for restoring degraded soils and strengthening the resilience of farming systems in Australia and beyond.

Amid the tumult of change that swept through French society in the wake of World War II, a trio of visionary filmmakers sought to make meaning of the chaos by revitalising a common method: montage. Revealing Nicole Vedres, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker as more than just groundbreaking auteurs, Ivan Cerecina shows how their collective infusion of montage with avant-garde aesthetics renewed the art of cinema while helping France reckon with its past and imagine its future.

Assembly Lines challenges a dominant story of postwar French film, championed by critics at important film journals like Cahiers du cinema, that has generally centred realist film aesthetics. Working against this tendency, Cerecina shows how Vedres, Resnais, and Marker revitalised montage as a technique in response to the crises of the times, using it to process the ravages of the recent past, expose hidden connections, and uncover signs of coming catastrophe. Wedding insightful analyses of films and French cultural history with writings from lesser-heard voices like Andre Malraux, Jacques Brunius, and Henri Langlois, Assembly Lines illuminates obscured networks of critics, filmmakers, and historians to reshape our conception of French film and documentary. Meanwhile, Cerecina's in-depth archival research unearths vital documents, including correspondence and production notes on Vedres's Paris 1900 and Resnais's Night and Fog.

More than a cinematic retrospective, Cerecina's investigation of montage is also a call to action today as contemporary crises prompt reevaluation of our cultural histories. Assembly Lines exemplifies a powerful, future-oriented practice of historical reflection with implications that go well beyond the study of film.

"Assembly Lines provides a generative theorization of montage in postwar France, exploring how the technique became a key method for reflecting on the past, agitating the present, and deciphering the future. Beautifully written and lucidly argued, this book is an absolute pleasure to think alongside and a valuable contribution to the field." James Leo Cahill, author of Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painleve

"Postwar French documentary has long been recognized as a high point in film history. Focusing on the work of Nicole Vedres, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker, Ivan Cerecina draws fresh and compelling connections between documentary film, art, and politics. The compilation film, he reveals, constitutes a powerful historiography, one that shaped our thinking about the Cold War, colonialism, and World War II." Kelley Conway, University of WisconsinMadison

Placing Shakespeare's works in the history of pacifist thought, Robert White argues that Shakespeare's plays consistently challenge appeals to heroism and revenge and reveal the brutal futility of war. White also examines Shakespeare's interest in the mental states of military officers when their ingrained training is tested in love relationships. In imagery and themes, war infiltrates love, with problematical consequences, reflected in Shakespeare's comedies, histories and tragedies alike. Challenging a critical orthodoxy that military engagement in war is an inevitable and necessary condition, White draws analogies with the experience of modern warfare, showing the continuing relevance of Shakespeare's plays which deal with basic issues of war and peace that are still evident.

After Australia witnessed a reinvigorated public interest in the revisionist history of European settlement and colonial violence, resulting in the dispossession of Indigenous people and damaged settlerIndigenous relations, Australian settler majority has experienced an unsettlement of their sense of belonging, or the so-called 'settler anxiety'. The book analyses how settler (un)belonging is narrativised in popular memoirs written by Australian public intellectuals, such as historians, artists, writers, and commentators, in the period after 2000.

These memoirs of settler belonging share one aspect: they all ask and seek answers to the implicit question, how to belong as a White settler who bears witness to the legacy of violent colonization vis--vis continuing Indigenous dispossession? How to justify the settler presence in and love of the land that was stolen from First Australians? The individual chapters examine historians' memoirs, White women's travel narratives, experimental place-writing, and eco- and landscape memoirs, tracing a gradual shift in literary representations of settler anxiety and detecting new perspectives on what can be called ethical settler belonging.

Throughout the 1980s, as the world was grappling with the escalating crisis of AIDS, Soviet Russia continued to deny there was a problem. Arguing that the disease was limited to foreigners and 'immoral' groups, the government failed to take meaningful action, long past the point other countries had begun to recognise the full scale of the threat.

In this ground-breaking book, Rustam Alexander tells the story of AIDS in Soviet Russia. Fixated on disinformation, censorship and the persecution of marginalised communities, the Soviet authorities wasted precious time, allowing the epidemic to strike at the very heart of the nation: its children. Yet, despite the government's failure, a number of brave journalists, doctors and nascent gay groups decided to take matters into their own hands and engage in full-fledged AIDS activism.

Tracing the political and social response to AIDS in the final years of the Soviet era, Alexander sheds light on the devastating consequences of government inaction. He draws on personal stories, media reports and archival materials to provide a riveting account of the Russian people's fight against AIDS amid the tumultuous transformations of Gorbachev's perestroika.

The book's primary goal is to propose local solutions for South African communities' peace and security challenges, emphasising peacebuilding approaches. It aims to publish lessons learned from the real-life experiences of scholars and practitioners regarding solutions for preventing violence in South African communities through transformative approaches to mediation.

Sokfa John is a researcher and practitioner in peace mediation, conflict transformation and digital peacebuilding. His research focuses on digital peacebuilding in Africa, localisation and ethnoreligious conflicts.

In belonging to an oppressed/colonised racial group in the West, where their voices, humanity, history, culture, reality, and subjectivity are perpetually under siege, distorted, and/or erased, African American writers since the 1960s have struggled to be heard and represented. Yet, despite the racism, terror, trauma, and dehumanisation, they, in revisiting, reclaiming, and reassessing their history and culture, used their decolonised imaginations and agency to reconfigure their history, subjectivity, and reality, and to invoke a more humane and just world, with love, despite all the odds.

Most students who register for a course on Genocide assume that it will focus, perhaps exclusively, on the Holocaust the case with which they are most familiar. Many of them have read Elie Wiesel's eloquent masterpiece Night in secondary school, and some may have read The Diary of Anne Frank. A few students might even know that a genocide occurred in Rwanda or Darfur. Like most people, however, they equate genocide simply with mass killing, and assume that genocide must by definition entail millions of deaths.

Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word 'genocide' meaning literally 'to kill a people' originally defined it 'a colonial crime of destroying the national patterns of the oppressed and imposing the national patterns of the oppressors'. This was a process, Lemkin said, deliberately intending to destroy a people's culture that could sometimes but not necessarily always result in mass murder. Students need to know that after World War II the great powers undermined and co-opted the process of writing the 1948 Genocide Convention at the UN because these nations did not want their own colonial crimes, oppression of minorities, and destructions of cultures to be included in the definition. Instead, they simply used the Holocaust as a template and succeeded in distorting what Lemkin originally meant by 'genocide' the murder of a people by destroying their social and cultural connections.

Thomas Earl Porter is Professor of Russian and Modern European History at North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC.

This edited volume explores the sociology of Lefebvre and its continuing relevance for the discipline today. Contributors explore the sociological Lefebvre across a number of topics, including the influence of Marxism, rural sociology, everyday life, the urban and violence, to name a few. The volume sets out a new agenda for Lefebvrian sociological inquiry which, inter alia, focuses on sociological perspectives on rhythm, embodiment and utopian thought in Lefebvre's work for sociological research. It brings together leading experts whose work on Lefebvre has shaped the discipline and is the first comprehensive volume outlining Lefebvre's relevance to sociology.

Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow with research interests in social theory and the history of sociology.

This unique anthology reflects the author's analyses and/or resolutions of some of the most perennially perplexing and widely discussed problems arising in rational choice theory, probability theory, and utility theory. It spans 25 years of his research and publications in these related fields. Part One features treatments of the Prisoner's Dilemma, illustrating why there is no objectively 'best strategy' in nature and nurture alike. Part Two treats Newcomb's problem, along with potential failures of misguided 'collective' rationality in non-cooperative multi-player games. Part Three examines pillars and pitfalls of the widely applied and often mis-applied Principle of Indifference, while resolving Bertrand's notorious random chord paradox, the Sleeping Beauty Problem, and the Two Envelopes Problem Part Four presents a thorny moral dilemma debated by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Kant, namely, the ethics of redeeming oneself from a highway robber via the expedient of lying. Part Four then introduces a 'reverse Turing test' that leads to a refutation of the Strong AI thesis. It concludes with a methodological comparison of solutions by an engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician to an old Cambridge challenge puzzle, while shedding new light on a humorous but ontologically impossible solution by Dirac.

While the mainstream debate on this problem in the philosophy of religion continues to focus on theodicies and 'defenses' seeking to justify or excuse God's allowing that there is apparently meaningless suffering (which, then, ceases to be meaningless when we understand God's reasons for allowing this), this introduction not only explains why an antitheodicist alternative is ethically superior to such attempts but also, perhaps more importantly, extends the antitheodicist approach from the philosophy of religion to broader ethical engagements with suffering. Sketching some of the historical milestones of antitheodicist thought as well as the most important contemporary versions of antitheodicism, the book argues that antitheodicy is the only decent account of suffering and that theodicies are incompatible with ethical seriousness. Theodicies tend to instrumentalise suffering in the service of some imagined overall good, or a metaphysical scheme failing to recognise the individual perspective of the victim of suffering. The significance of this essentially ethical argument against theodicies reaches far beyond the philosophy of religion, as the theodicy versus antitheodicy opposition can be shown to take interesting secular varieties.

Harpurhey is a suburban area in Manchester, located just three and a half miles northeast of the city centre. This book interrogates the everyday lives of people in Harpurhey ethnographically, placing their lives and agency at the centre of analysis. It explores the everyday lives of people who live with poverty and are rely upon state welfare support to make ends meet. Analytically, the arguments in this book begin by making a distinction between the production of poverty as a political, economic and ideological effect of capitalist processes and state activity, and the everyday, mundane choices and behaviours of the people who manage those effects (cf. Goode and Maskovsky 2001). Each chapter shows what may be concealed and revealed in interpersonal relationships between people living with poverty and in multiple interdependencies.

This book approaches the daily struggles of migrantised divorced motherhood through theories, discourses, and (in)visibilities of everyday violence. Building on ethnographically informed everyday violence theories, it offers a framework in which violence becomes everyday violence when it engages with the boundaries of ordinary lives by means of being disruptive, reproduced, absorbed, and expected.Taking neither the visibility nor the invisibility of violence for granted, it discusses how the same discourses of violence can visibly victimise certain daily struggles of migrantised divorced motherhood while obscuring certain others.

Analysing the individual narratives of divorced mothers living in Germany with immigration biographies from Turkey, the book tackles their struggles with poverty, dequalification, maternal guilt, time constraints, care, everyday racism and sexism, as well as the conceptualisations of violence itself. If there is a certain form of 'loneness' implied in the term lone parenting, these narratives reveal how such 'loneness' is structurally and discursively constructed within a relationality of the self to resources. With attention to various forms of victimisations, vulnerabilities, and resistances, the book delves into what it means to 'stand on one's own two feet' in the face of paternalistic conditions of intimate and structural support.

Thus, the author makes various strong arguments around the work of tackling everyday violence and the immunities secured against the attribution of violence within power relations. Underlining the ambivalent consequences of our everyday and scholarly discourses on violence, she carefully situates the concept in a context of migrantisation and culturalisation of gendered experiences. Overall, the research participants offer narratives of not only everyday violence but also everyday protests, which refuse the forced (in)visibilities of their daily struggles and analyse the labour they invest into their relations to resources. And it is the acknowledgment of these protests that is at stake when they narrate their daily struggles, name violence, and reject a passive victimhood.

Dorr (18661948) was a leading suffragette from Nebraska, studied at the University of Nebraska, before moving to New York as a journalist and first editor of The Suffragette. Living on the lower East Side, she became a socialist. She visited Russia during the first Russian revolution (19051907) and later covered the February Revolution of 1917 for the New York Evening Mail.

Her book Inside the Russian Revolution (1917) depicts the overthrow of the tsar as a positive, democratic move with hope of a Russia following the American path to constitutional democracy. The evolution of revolutionary Russia from February to October changed not only Dorr's perception of the Russian revolution as a phenomenon but her vision of socialism as well. In this sense, she was among the American radicals who contributed to American phenomenology of the 1917 Russian revolution but were not satisfied with its results. Being a prominent figure in the U.S. political and social life of her time, Rheta Dorr expanded the horizons of the Americans' identity.

Dorr is also known for other publications. In 1922, she assisted Anna Vyrubova, a lady-in-waiting, the best friend and the confidante of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, with the writing of Vyrubova's memoir, My Memories of the Russian Court. Thereafter, Dorr wrote her own memoir, A Woman of Fifty, published in 1924. Dorr moved from her autobiography to a biography of Susan B. Anthony, published in 1928, and completed her publishing activity in 1929 with a tome on the question of prohibition.

The growing presence of these cheap entertaining Victorian texts in contemporary popular culture through television series, musicals and literature signals that it is high time to bestow more systematic and comprehensive attention to these publications. To do so, Penny Dreadfuls: The Circulation Patterns of a Victorian Popular Genre conceptualises the notion of circulation as a tool for analysis.

This book considers different aspects of circulation. The weaponisation of the penny dreadfuls' successful circulation by its critics highlights tensions in the literary marketplace over the hegemonic discourse of what should and should not be read, which mirror the broader issue of contemporary changes on a social, cultural and political level. In addition, the penny dreadfuls' consumption patterns and behaviour within the literary marketplace and within society are also marked by their circulation between different historically popular genres: within the network of late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century literature and culture, they refuse to remain within clear boundaries and constantly reinvent themselves at the intersection of several trends that constituted the popular, such as oral storytelling, sensationalism and the Gothic.

Beyond the nineteenth century, their patterns of circulation develop diachronically, too, in the open-ended circulation of the penny dreadfuls across time through neo-Victorianism and the gradual transformation of the penny dreadfuls into a cultural reference.

Through the lens of the concept of circulation which pervades the penny dreadfuls' history and content, this book reassesses the impact of the penny dreadfuls on nineteenth-century print culture and entertainment, as well as on contemporary popular culture. This book demonstrates the importance of these publications to better understand broader notions of popular culture and to keep deconstructing such binaries as 'high' and 'low' culture. Further than sales numbers, circulation interweaves numerous aspects of popular culture and of this publishing phenomenon. An analysis of these patterns helps decode many aspects of the penny dreadfuls' life and afterlife, as it reveals how their material aspect is intimately interwoven with their seriality, their cultural significance, the reactions they provoked and their actual content. The resulting picture informs us about the nineteenth century's social history and culture, about class warfare and political change, and about the evolution of literature over the past two hundred and fifty years.

In Music Technology Panic Narratives Beyond Piracy: From Taping to Napster to TikTok, Dr. David Arditi examines how the major record labels single-out new technologies as if they will bring an end to recorded music. They use what he calls the 'piracy panic narrative' a narrative in which new technologies threaten the very existence of recorded music. The piracy panic narrative is a rhetorical construct that helps to hide the material reality of the recording industry by positioning major record labels and their recording artists as the victims of widespread crime in the form of piracy. Now, divorced from piracy, the recording industry continues to use the panic narrative to dissuade fans from specific practices and to lobby the government for particular policies. Each time, they use the narrative to change public sentiment, the law, and policy to strengthen their profits. At every moment what gets ignored is labels are the primary exploiter of musicians.

The book presents a multi-case study approach, featuring organisations such as Tzoumakers, Open Food Network, CoopCycle, and Circles UBI. These cases exemplify how platform cooperativism, cosmolocalism, and open cooperativism redefine traditional business structures, emphasising sustainability, fairness, and democratic ownership. The discussion extends to blockchain-enabled DAOs and their impact on labour, governance, and wealth distribution.

Through theoretical and empirical insights, The Model of Open Cooperativism bridges political economy and digital innovation, providing practical strategies for policymakers, activists, and scholars. It highlights the success and challenges of grassroots-driven initiatives, offering a roadmap for transitioning toward a commons-based, post-capitalist economy.

This short book takes the view that the proposed reforms are wrongheaded and would be deleterious to the coherence of the Scottish legal framework. To that end, it examines the taxonomy of obligations pioneered by Stair, indicates that the application of that taxonomy to situations such as the process of contracting by distance suggests that there is in fact no 'postal acceptance rule' in this jurisdiction and suggests, in light of this, that reform of 'contracts' and the formation of, in Scotland, is better left to the courts and jurists than to the Scottish Parliament (or, for that matter, Westminster).

Based on the artist's works from the last six decades, the publication shows how human life can be permanently shaped and informed. This book focuses on art as an interface between man and a reality that is continually updating itself shift of time in present times.

Text in English and German.

Known for her figurines and porcelain, and the interplay between body and material, her art is presented in a way that interweaves the personal, the artistic, and the historical. My Hands Keep Getting Bigger invites readers to reflect deeply on her creative journey up to her largest solo exhibition at Kunsthall Grenland in 2024.

The dialogue between Irene Nordli and Gjertrud Steinsvag forms the core of the text, highlighting pivotal moments and reflections that have shaped her work. Photographer Thomas Ekstroem adds a compelling visual layer by capturing the extraordinary in the everyday, while designer Martin Egge Lundell fuses text and image with an experimental approach, challenging the conventional art monograph.

Well into the 18th century, it was not unusual for people to bring their own cutlery-quite often peculiar, valuable one-of-a-kind pieces. In the Baroque period, matching dinner services came into vogue and, in the wake of industrialisation, became mass-produced commodities. Trading with faraway countries, conquests, and migration augmented people's menus with 'exotic' fruit and spices and contributed to a change in customs and traditions.

In an exceptional exhibition on the mores of dining, the Jewellery Museum in Pforzheim presents historical goldsmithing and contemporary design, jewellery 'to eat', and treasures from across the globe. In addition, the accompanying publication will entice you with its special aspects of food culture-after all, the way to one's cultural heart is also through the stomach.

Text in German.

With the support of his second wife, the architect Rahel Weissbach, he moved to Berlin in 1933, where his studio became a well-known meeting place for artists. Despite having been arrested by the National Socialists and his daughter Cato executed, he could not endure the GDR's Socialist Unity Party regime either and stepped down from a teaching post at the East Berlin Weissensee art school in 1950. He broke into teaching in West Berlin and, finally, in Hamburg continued his ceramic work, which provided the free thinker with a firm footing.

Like no other, he emphasised materiality in form and dynamism in colour. During tumultuous times, he sought out the perfect balance for his vessels, and ultimately for himself.

Text in English and German.

Moving beyond the traditional view of coasts as simple boundaries between land and water, this book reveals the coast as a diverse, networked landscape shaped by intertidal ecologies, sprawling infrastructures, and everyday practices that reach far beyond the shore. By uncovering the 'coastalisation' of society, the book highlights the growing significance of shores in understanding contemporary life and environmental change. Drawing on rich ethnographic research, the volume challenges traditional notions of the coast as simply a physical object or maritime boundary. Instead, it closely examines the diverse material forms and infrastructural connections that define coastal spaces, envisioning new futures for these vital zones.

Coastal Futures argues that a scientific inquiry into the dynamic interplay of society and coastlines is both urgent and essential, encouraging more responsible and imaginative ways of living with and on the coast. Ultimately, the book redeems the coast as a geo-ontological force one that shapes, enables, and constrains the transformative energies of global assemblages, rather than serving as a passive backdrop to human activity.

Lukas Ley is an environmental anthropologist and head of the research group S.AND at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

Highlighting the creative work of four women and one nonbinary individual, this book reveals that architectural production extended beyond men, even when only men could be officially certified as architects. Drawing on diverse materials, including poetry, photography, archaeological artifacts, literary fiction, theater sets, and journalism, Beyond Building brings to light the contributions of those long excluded from architectural scholarship due to their gender. This book advocates for a more expansive understanding of architecture's history by including overlooked makers and works. It examines figures such as Jane Dieulafoy, whose gender-fluid life as an archeologist in Iran is captured in colonial-era writings; Marie Krysinska, the only woman in the free-verse poetry movement; photographer Genevieve-lisabeth Disderi and the Countess de Castiglione, who linked architecture and early photography; the hidden career of journalist Laure Labrouste; and the American Julia Morgan, the first woman certified as an architect in France.

Through these case studies, Beyond Building demonstrates how considering gender alongside architecture opens new perspectives on artistic innovation, imperialism, and cultural change in nineteenth-century France.

While examining the cultural productions that emerge from the Mediterranean and Caribbean, modern languages scholars Jessica R. Boll, Marilen Loyola, and Sharon Meilahn Bartlett adopt a decentralised approach that moves beyond the influence of the United States and Europe. They further challenge traditional narratives by centering the experiences of individuals from historically repressed groups. Through analyses of visual art, puppet shows, songs, graphic fiction, and television, this volume shifts the focus away from the canonical to foreground accessible and popular forms of expression.

By highlighting these places, perspectives, and productions, Sea Change underscores the reciprocal influence between the mainstream and the marginalised. It strives to dismantle (post)colonial hegemonies and demonstrate that those often relegated to the periphery can be agents rather than mere subjects of change.

Marilen Loyola is an assistant professor of Spanish at Lake Forest College.

Jessica R. Boll is a professor of Spanish at Carroll University.

With over 140 pieces of insightful wisdom from expert supervisors representing 45 institutions across eight countries, this book provides diverse perspectives to address themes of 'Fostering Relationships', 'Seeking Balance', and 'Focusing on Growth', among others. The advice points to attainable goals for any graduate student with concrete strategies to help achieve them. These lessons are taken a step further through dozens of detailed exercises that help graduate students apply the book's principles and better their lives.

The Prosperous PhD encompasses the gamut of graduate student experiences, tribulations, dilemmas, and decisions from choosing a supervisor and a topic to writing up a dissertation to finding life balance, navigating departmental politics, and becoming an autonomous, happy researcher. Readers can study the book from start to finish to gain a holistic picture of the doctoral journey or select individual chapters to find the perfect piece of advice for their particular stage or challenge.

Created by a team with extensive experience on both sides of the doctoral journey as PhD students and supervisors this book is a student-friendly, practical guide that will propel readers towards a more prosperous PhD.

Christopher DeLuca holds a PhD in education from Queen's University where he now serves as a professor and director of the Assessment and Evaluation Group in the Faculty of Education.

Stephen MacGregor is an assistant professor of educational leadership, policy, and governance and the director of experiential learning at the University of Calgary's Werklund School of Education.

Fabian Jonietz is a scholar at the Central Institute for Art History, Munich.

Romana Sammern is a permanent postdoctoral scholar at the interuniversity organisation 'Arts & Knowledges' of the University of Salzburg/Mozarteum University.

Ruth Craggs is Reader in Political and Historical Geography at King's College London.

Fiona McConnell is Professor of Political Geography at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow at St Catherine's College.