The Western idea of democracy, based on human opinions and the counting of votes, has become obsolete. The exclusively human form of democracy is being substituted by a new kind of contract which, through digital architecture, the internet of things and sensors, extends participation to all of the different entities that make up our habitat. Parliaments, citizen assemblies, parties and all kinds of the political architecture of interaction, inspired by the model of the polis, are giving way to platforms, blockchains and different network environments. In this interactive ecosystem, humans, data, viruses, the climate, sensors, biodiversity and informatic territories have begun to express collaborative policies and solutions through a dialogue with data. Today, the Western idea of society, founded on a contract between citizens and limited to the cohabitation of human subjects (just as the idea of citizenship is based on the fundamental rights of people) faced with the challenges of the pandemic, of climate change and those posed by the latest generation of intelligent networks, turns out to be inadequate. The digital citizenship of today is the research area in which to search for the overcoming of the Western political project and to begin a new culture of governance within complex networks characterized by interactions within an architecture that is no longer composed either of subjects nor objects.

In the year 2020, everything we used to think about our habits has been profoundly disrupted. Lockdown still represents an unprecedented experience for all those who went through it, radically affecting our freedom of movement and all those social interactions that used to make up our daily lives. Some people believe that once the pandemic ends, nothing will be the same. Others believe that once the virus becomes weaker or a vaccine is at our disposal and the fear is diminished, everything will go back to normal because the mechanism of habit is in many ways similar to the mechanisms of nature, reiterating the uniformity of its functioning. Which is correct? Both positions, perhaps. When philosophers addressed the issue of customs, namely collective habits, they have generally emphasized that caution us required when it comes to changing them - and indeed, if we look back at history… Could pandemics affect shared habits in specific territories, habits that were ultimately generated in reaction to other natural risks and threats?

The studies included in this edited volume explore discourses surrounding the ageing population, those who assist them, their families and the institutions/organisations that offer services to them. Qualitative and quantitative theoretical inputs from a variety of research domains – (socio)linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, cognitive science, as well as statistics and information technology – are employed to survey an array of themes that pay close attention to the linguistic, social, economic and ethical aspects regarding seniors. Different registers and genres are examined, which are produced by diverse diatopic distributions, diaphasic/diastratic variations and diamesic dimensions of the language. All this underlines the importance of integrating various strands of analysis and multidisciplinary perspectives to attend to the complexity of a changing discourse and complex issue which are being looked at closely by the international scientific community. The book is suitable for a wide readership, including scholars and neophyte readers with an interest in discourse and cultural studies, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics.

From Larry Kramer's New York to Roth's Newark and Colla's Baghdad, this collection of 15 essays explores how American contemporary literature tackles the issue of urban violence, its relationship with the forerunners of the genre, and how its main features evolved over time.

Central Asia is a diverse and complex region of the world often characterized in the West as being difficult to access. Central Asia: Contexts for Understanding offers the most comprehensive introduction to the region available. Combining thematic chapters with case studies, readers will learn to appreciate the interconnected aspects of life in Central Asia. These wide-ranging, easy-to-understand contributions from some of the leading scholars in the field provide the context needed to understand Central Asia and presents a launching-off point for further research.

In the late eighteenth century, enlightened politicians and upper-class women in Spain debated the right of women to join one of the country’s most prominent scientific institutions: the Madrid Economic Society of Friends of the Country. Societies such as these, as Elena Serrano describes in her book, were founded on the idea that laypeople could contribute to the advancement of their country by providing “useful knowledge,” and their fellows often referred to themselves as improvers, or friends of the country. After intense debates, the duchess of Benavente, along with nine distinguished ladies, claimed, won, and exercised the right of women to participate in shaping the future of their nation by inaugurating the Junta de Damas de Honor y Mérito, or the Committee of Ladies of Honor and Merit. Ten years later, the Junta established a network of over sixty correspondents extending from Tenerife to Asturias and Austria to Cuba.With this book, Serrano tells the unknown story of how the duchess and her peers - who succeeded in creating the only known female branch among some five hundred patriotic societies in the eighteenth century - shaped Spanish scientific culture. Her study reveals how the Junta, by stressing the value of their feminine nature in their efforts to reform education, rural economy, and the poor, produced and circulated useful knowledge and ultimately crystallized the European improvement movement in Spain within an otherwise all-male context.

Psychic Investigators examines British anthropology’s engagement with the modern spiritualist movement during the late Victorian era. Efram Sera-Shriar argues that debates over the existence of ghosts and psychical powers were at the center of anthropological discussions on human beliefs. He focuses on the importance of establishing credible witnesses of spirit and psychic phenomena in the writings of anthropologists such as Alfred Russel Wallace, Edward Burnett Tylor, Andrew Lang, and Edward Clodd. The book draws on major themes, such as the historical relationship between science and religion, the history of scientific observation, and the emergence of the subfield of anthropology of religion in the second half of the nineteenth century. For secularists such as Tylor and Clodd, spiritualism posed a major obstacle in establishing the legitimacy of the theory of animism: a core theoretical principle of anthropology founded in the belief of "primitive cultures" that spirits animated the world, and that this belief represented the foundation of all religious paradigms. What becomes clear through this nuanced examination of Victorian anthropology is that arguments involving spirits or psychic forces usually revolved around issues of evidence, or lack of it, rather than faith or beliefs or disbeliefs.

"Campbell takes the concept of regional identity and blows it up, showing that regional concerns were always mediated by national and international dynamics. This rich cultural history exposes the symbolic shorthand used to depict the Northeast and grants fresh insight into how actors constructed a regional identity with a variety of audiences in mind. The case studies presented here should interest students and tap into complex debates about representation and authenticity. Region Out of Place reveals that the local concerns of northeasterners in Brazil were far from provincial, and exposes how deeply modern Brazil, even in its farthest regions, remained integrated within larger world currents." --Anadelia Romo, Texas State University "Students of regionalism have long acknowledged the impossibility of analyzing a region's history, politics, and culture apart from the nation. What is strikingly new and significant in Courtney J. Campbell's fascinating study of the Brazilian Northeast is her emphasis on the way the world beyond the nation served as a site for regional identity formation and as a resource for regionalists eager to demonstrate the centrality of the Northeast to the Brazilian nation and its vibrant culture. With chapters that explore such intriguing topics as wartime romances, World Cup soccer matches, and Miss Universe Pageants, Region out of Place offers not just an innovative perspective on the Brazilian Northeast but on the very question of how to understand regional identity." --Barbara Weinstein, New York University

From the anti-segregation sit-ins of the 1960s to the protests in response to the killing of Breonna Taylor, the rest of the nation - and often the world - has watched as Kentuckians boldly fought against instances of injustice. In Resistance in the Bluegrass, Farrah Alexander outlines the ways in which Kentucky's citizens have been models in the fight against intersectional issues of racial injustice, economic inequality, education, climate change, immigration, political representation, LGBTQ+ rights, and women's rights, while exploring and celebrating decades of Kentucky's contributions to social justice movements and the names behind them. Resistance in the Bluegrass gives engaged citizens-or those wishing to become more engaged-both inspiration and guidance on how they too can make a difference across the commonwealth. Together with interviews and issue-by-issue action items, Alexander reminds her readers that at the heart of all social change are everyday citizens who step up to make a difference. Optimistic and accessible, this people's history and guide calls Kentuckians of all backgrounds to action.

Much of the American South, especially its small towns and rural areas, is connected not by interstate highways but through a web-like network of country roads, many of which appear only on the most detailed of maps. These are the backroads that most Southerners drive on every day. Unlike the interstates, whose roadsides have been largely scrubbed clean of regional character, these smaller roads travel through unplanned, vernacular landscapes that tell much about local life, both past and present, and suggest that we make connections between the two. David Wharton has been traveling throughout the American South since 1999, resulting in his first two books - Small Town South (2012) and The Power of Belief: Spiritual Landscapes from the Rural South (2016). As he journeyed, he often paused to make pictures of hamlets and the countryside he was driving through that did not fit the themes of those earlier books. These are scenes that speak to a sense of wonderment, or curiosity, about how those landscapes came to be and how they reflect a complex past with a modern-day world in which the urban competes with the rural in nearly every way. In Roadside South, the third book in Wharton's magical Trilogy of the American South, the photographer captures the quirky and the humorous, the sometimes sad and sometimes ironic scenes that are commonplace along the local, county, and state roads of the South. No artist has revealed the on-the-ground truth of the South as Wharton has, giving rise to a new understanding of and appreciation for a distinctive regional culture that all too frequently, and sometimes mistakenly, is imagined as a bastion of rural and small-town virtue.

The right to rebel against an authoritarian power is part of liberal and democratic culture. As early as the late seventeenth century, John Locke theorised that if a state abuses its citizens, they have the right to revolt. Nowadays, information and communication technologies can help the early stages of revolt. However, at the same time they also seem to offer the threatened autocrats powerful tools. Failed revolutions that have unfolded in our digital age in countries such as Myanmar, Ukraine, Iran, Egypt, Hong Kong and Belarus, bring to light the great and often successful efforts of authoritarian regimes to use new technologies for surveillance, oppression, propaganda, censorship, and the suppression of fundamental rights. The risk of a drift towards despotism, from which even long-established democracies are not immune, prompts us to ask what skills, rules and institutions might help citizens to defend their freedom when it is under threat, including in the digital sphere.

The financial markets have become more and more important in modern society. Their behaviour and impact relies crucially on the behaviour of market participants, aka the investors of different types. Although descriptions of the financial markets on the macro level have caught the attention of investors, regulators, and the ordinary people, how the market participants interact with each other in the financial market may provide deeper insights on how and why the financial markets behave. This book explores the micro level of financial market behaviour. The author has been undertaking financial research, especially on the micro level, during the past two decades. The academic research on this broad area has undergone a rapid growth, with new results, methods, theories, and even paradigms, emerging and burogeoning almost every year. As a financial researcher in one of China’s top universities, the author has kept monitoring, digesting, and synthesising the research articles in the area. This book is the outcome of this decades-long routine research work of the author, covering the fundamental economic theories of how different investors receive and interpret information. The empirical results of investors' behaviour are also discussed in depth, along with the basic academic techniques of modelling investors' behaviour.

Research on gender inequality uses limited and sectoral areas as a reference. A team of scholars, academics and researchers from fourteen different countries – Cuba, Haiti, India, Iraq, Iran, Italy, Ivory Coast, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, Poland, Tunisia, United States and Venezuela – bring out instead in a synchronous and transversal way the gender discrimination for women’s experiences at work, in family, for education. Results show that in the varied landscape of countries considered over 50 percent believe it is still difficult to be a woman in their own country today. Only one third of respondents believe women’s policies in their country are right and less than the majority believe there’s a possibility of having support to balance and reconcile family and work. At the same time, the tragedy of domestic violence – worsened in the Covid period – crosses borders and refers to that culture of machismo that still characterizes genderinequality. Why? For the atavistic presumption of superiority of one sex over the other so difficult to eradicate from culture, education and stereotypes still existing today. On the contrary, certainty is rather that “donnons le monde aux femmes, elles en feront un paradis!” (“Give the world to women, they will make it a paradise”), as an interviewee from Haiti wrote.

The City of McKeesport in southwestern Pennsylvania once had a population of more than fifty thousand people and a newspaper that dated back to the nineteenth century. Technology has caused massive disruption to American journalism, throwing thousands of reporters out of work, closing newsrooms, and leaving vast areas with few traditional news sources – including McKeesport. With the loss of their local paper in 2015, residents now struggle to make sense of what goes on in their community and to separate facts from gossip – often driven by social media. The changes taking place in this one Pennsylvania community are being repeated across the United States as hundreds of local newspapers close, creating news deserts and leaving citizens with little access to reliable local journalism. The obituary for local news, however, does not have to read all bad: Even in the bleakest places, citizens are discovering what happens in their communities and becoming gatekeepers to information for the people around them. In McKeesport, citizens are attempting to make sense of the news on their own, for better and worse. This experiment not only offers clues about what happens after a local newspaper dies, but also provides guidance to the way forward.

Mental health difficulties bring us face to face with our vulnerability as human beings, and after two years of struggling with the effects of Covid-19 concerns about mental health worldwide have never been higher. But our discussions are still fraught with issues of language and understanding. Are we all on a ‘spectrum’ of mental wellness? Is ‘well-being’ about ‘being well’ or about coping? Mental health problems can be frightening when we experience them ourselves, or see them in others. And despite all the talk, most of us find it hard to decide when or where to seek help. What is often missing from these discussions is the most valuable resource of all – the personal accounts of those with lived experience of mental health difficulties. Making Sense of Mental Health is centred on hours of in-depth interviews with adults coping with mental health issues. The author follows their journeys from the origin of their distress to their lowest moments to eventual recovery and a sense of moving on. These lived experiences show how in times of crisis people can move forward amidst the chaos, vulnerability and uncertainty brought on by mental health problems. There are no quick fixes or miracle cures to serious mental health issues. This book shows that ‘what works’ is whatever helps an individual make sense of what is happening to them. A problem entwined with the human condition, mental health difficulties can best be treated by understanding the experiences of those who have lived through them, and as a society by finding a way to ascribe meaning to the complex reality of mental health.

The volume consists of a collection of fifteen contributions to Political Theory, the focuses of which represent an interaction between different themes and perspectives. The collection brings together a series of philosophical, moral, political, psychological, medical, anthropological and mytho-symbolical issues, divided into three main sections. A first section concerns ethical, moral and jurisdictional constitutional issues of Political Theory, including contributions by Fabrizio Sciacca, Cassandra Basile, Andrea Germani and Paola Russo. A second section is devoted to the analysis of political myths and representations, including contributions by Giangiacomo Vale, Viviana Faschi, Giada Fiorese, Raffaella Sabra Palmisano, Alessandra Spano and Giuseppe d’Ambrosio. A third and final section focuses on the analysis of political dynamics specific to modernity, with contributions from Michele Lanna, Federica Rauso, Cornelia Stefan, Michele Olzi and Maria Rosaria Vitale.