Hands, Wrists, Fingers invites musicians to explore a new way of thinking about good health. The physical dimensions of hands are certainly important and merit close study, encompassing coordination, relaxation, dexterity, speed, accuracy, and freedom from pain. While acknowledging these dimensions, Hands, Wrists, Fingers focuses on a broader perspective that includes cultural dimensions both conscious and unconscious, involving language, symbol, ritual, curiosity, playfulness, and mindfulness. Through a wealth of original insights, anecdotes, exercises, and games, musicians will be able to transform their hands into sensitive and intelligent agents of joyful creativity, in which the linguistic and symbolic dimensions of hands become inseparable from their physical and material existence. Hands, Wrists, Fingers is organized in four parts: Culture, The Language of Hands, Sensitivity and Creativity, and Knowledge and Mystery. Behind the physical gestures and movements of your daily life and your music-making, there are the stories that you tell about your own hands—thoughts and feelings, memories, experiences, judgments, hopes, and fears. Hands, Wrists, Fingers argues that the way you use your hands is inseparable from these stories, in which you tell yourself “what you can and cannot do, what you should and should not do, what you’re allowed to do and what you’re prevented from doing.” If your inner stories aren’t healthy in themselves, it’s very difficult for your hands to behave in a healthy manner. Hands, Wrists, Fingers is a practical book brimming with exercises and suggestions. Every chapter is supported by video clips illustrating and demonstrating its exercises. Among other things, you’ll explore the skills of rotation and of spiral movements, the mastery of textures and gradations, the playful manipulation of objects, and the use of your hands as agents of expressive language. Your hands will become creative, intelligent, and sensitive, and you’ll develop a new understanding of the true meaning of good health.

Contestatory and Creative Poetics for a Time of Climate Catastrophe: Volume 1: Per Se is an extended narrative meditation upon the meaning of per se, which generally denotes the thing-in-itself, for its own sake – but that, upon closer examination, transpires to be a high tensile composite of the ‘thing’ (se) and a relationship (per) that always links it to something else – and indeed, in relations of internal complexity, to itself. Per se, in the book’s multiple parsings of the term, is a moniker for the infinite relationality of the world and the relationality of each thing in itself. Per se also denotes the endless fractal embedding of bundles of relationality at the successive levels of thing-ness from the infinitesimally minute nano-scale to the unimaginably distant outer reaches of the sideral. Per se becomes an exploration of the way commodities, cut loose from their context of production and floating on sea of oscillating (exchange) values, never cease to morph back into artefacts defined by the socially intensive use-values their fellow actants discover in them. The book thus focalises a politicised effort to revision the rampant multiscalar individualism, solipsism and apartheid-like segregation of our age. Instead, it searches for possibilities or community in every aspect of the world we have learnt to see through a relentlessly atomising and hypostatising filter. The volume claims that every act of perception is political, reestablishing obfuscated connections, thereby seeking to repair the shredded fabric of the ecosphere below the threshold of myopic common-sense. Yet it also celebrates the myriad acts of citizen defiance, visible and invisible, that constitute activist agendas around the world, sending signals – both practical and exemplary, symbolic and literary – that shore up communities of resistance everywhere. The book does not hesitate to interrogate the fractal responsiveness to its own nature, meditating repeatedly on the political character of writing, and more significantly, of the teaching of writing. Central to its concerns are various avatars of trees, from the pirogue that hangs above a bar in Lille, and one that is crafted as part of an Italian artist’s global collaboration on the periphery of this volume’s emergence, via the jacarandas of post-apartheid South Africa, to a wood-chipped pine forest that has become a memorial library in Oslo – to name only a few of the topics taken up by the book’s many silvan micro-fictions. Looming over all these concerns are two contemporary silvan catastrophes: the megablazes that destroyed forests in Amazonia, Australia, California, Siberia and the Mediterranean during the period when the book was being written and the deforestation that has allowed zoogenic diseases to jump from once secluded animal species to the humans that would never have been their neighbours if naturally occurring forest-barriers had been left intact.

Climate and migration provide the organizational pillars, and the plural “climates” in the title accentuates the figurative non-literal sense to signify the atmosphere that is attached to anxiety, disinformation, fear and violence. Competing narratives and storytelling mechanisms conjointly operate over a longer history of colonial conquest and remain present in the mind-sets informing the afterlives of empire, as evidenced in debates on identity politics, nationalism, environmental, racial and social justice. The broad transregional (Africa, the Caribbean, Europe) and transdisciplinary framework privileges comparative analysis between various disciplines and fields, notably migration studies, environmental humanities, eco-feminism, nationalism, and decolonial and postcolonial studies, while adopting multigenre approaches that include a diversity of perspectives from literature, media discourse, art, propaganda, visual culture and new technologies. Together, these challenge the criminalizing, debasing and often dehumanizing logic associated with official policymaking and propose instead alternative forms of humanization and identification aimed at fostering modes of empathy. Climates of Migration explores various forms of environmental exploitation and degradation, especially in African literatures where the thematic transformations that have resulted from engagement with environmental ecocide have contributed to a revitalization of writing. Planetary climate change and the accompanying disruption to the global ecosystem is traced to European territorial conquest and expansion and subsequently mapped onto the contemporary institutional (European Union) and political discourses that are structuring our present, while also enabling unforeseen forms of planetary consciousness.

Opportunities to write our memoirs are many and varied. To meet emerging demands, the memoir genre continually is evolving, and it is possible for the memoirist to shape the memoirs, with varying themes, time and settings, to be brought to bear on school education at a senior level and for a range of teacher-development programs. Thus, the developing importance of an accompanying exegesis. For better or for worse, childhoods shape adult relationships and attachment styles, profoundly shaping who we are as teachers, teaching styles and generally the things we consider important and not so important. The shape of our childhood and adolescence has a profound impact on how relationships are formed in adulthood. It can affect our ability to trust, be vulnerable and create productive bonds, both at school and college and professionally, and also our general levels of motivation. Through the aforementioned theme and subthemes, my memoirs here reveal how childhood struggle has shaped my approach to teaching and my academic career – from an unskilled labourer from the country working class in the timber industry, deprived of a high school education and recruited into the workforce at 15 years of age, to a senior academic in one of Australia’s G8 universities, holding five PhDs. With strong historical backgrounding, a special appeal of this book is its drive to place childhood and adolescent events contained in the memoirs in a wider historical context, looking to transnational movements such as discussions on anachronisms and eugenics. In so doing, the exegesis – a fresh and exciting innovation – is in harmony with the memoirs. The memoir is so refashioned as a pedagogical tool.

What did Australians read? This book answers this question in terms of books rather than newspapers and considers the long nineteenth century, interpreted as running from 1788 to 1901. In the wake of this primary question, several others arise: how did Australians acquire the books they read, and how did readers in the outback overcome the handicaps of distance and remoteness? Did they read for pleasure, instruction, self-edification, or spiritual sustenance? More importantly, how did Australian readers respond to the books they read? The evidence is drawn from autobiographical sources, in which individual readers related their personal reading experiences and responses. At the same time, the book pursues a second and related question: What did Australians write? Reference is made here not to the kind of writing we know as ‘literature’, but to the non-literary writing which cultural historians call ‘ordinary writings’. These are the writings of everyday life, represented in this book by diaries, journals, hand-written newspapers and correspondence. The focus is wide enough to include the everyday cultural practices of people of low social status and little education. The writing practices of the partially literate, including writing delegated to a third party, have their place here. In this double investigation, the book draws on evidence from a cohort of 101 nineteenth-century readers and writers. They are a heterogeneous group of autobiographers, coming from Melbourne and Sydney to rural Queensland and Western Australia. They come from the city and the bush, from coastal towns and the interior, from sheep stations, gold diggings and city offices. They show us the perennial importance of Shakespeare and the Bible, the popularity of the English canon, the prestige of poetry and the importance of religious reading. Books held the Empire together but, as they travelled, their meanings changed according to the local cultural environment. This book registers such nuances in the Australian context. The writing of this group is represented by some prolific diarists and correspondents. In the late-nineteenth century, the eastern colonies became world leaders in sending letters. The postal environment which made this possible is also examined.

This book examines the profound impact of Liberty University, church planting networks, and grassroots mobilization on shaping U.S. policy toward Israel. It explores how Dr. Jerry Falwell, through his leadership at Liberty University and the Moral Majority, built a vast evangelical network that successfully influenced Congress and the White House. The book delves into the political power of Liberty alumni, who established churches across the United States, integrating Christian Zionism into their teachings and mobilizing congregations to support pro-Israel policies. Through archival research, interviews, and policy analysis, the study traces the evolution of evangelical involvement in U.S. politics, highlighting the unique relationship between Falwell and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. It examines how Falwell positioned himself as an advocate for Israel, lobbying for policies such as the relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. The book also explores the role of church planting as a political strategy, showing how local religious communities became conduits for mobilizing grassroots support for Israel. By shedding light on the intersection of faith, politics, and diplomacy, this book provides a compelling analysis of how evangelical activism continues to shape U.S.-Israel relations and the broader conservative agenda in America.

All is not well with the law on rape. It is rarely reported and even when it is, it is rarely prosecuted. Victims are deterred for a range of reasons, but these include a fear that it will never be possible to prove the rape has occurred and that the trial will be traumatic. Even when the case proceeds to trial, victims perceive that it is they, rather than the perpetrator, who is the one on trial. The past sexual behaviour of the victim,; the clothes she was wearing,; the people she socialised with and the places she visited are all used as tools to claim that in fact the victim consented to the rape. Reforms are needed. In this book, we explore how changing the definition of rape will help tackle some of these problems. We argue there needs to be a shift in the focus of the rape trial: away from asking whether the victim consented, to focus on whether the defendant. Rather than focusing on the way the victim dresses, behaviour in response to the rape, the focus will be on what the defendant believed justified him engaging in a sexual behaviour. At the heart of our proposal is the claim that having sex comes with responsibilities. In particular, a responsibility to ensure you have reasonable grounds to believe the other consents. Without that consent, a very serious wrong is being done. The central legal focus should therefore be on whether the defendant had sufficiently good reasons to proceed with having sex.

Cricket, Fiction and Nation traces the historic arc of fiction dealing with cricket from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to its emergence in the early twentieth century as a form of serious literature, its subsequent decline into genre writing and its rejuvenation in the global world of the twenty-first century. The writers discussed include Mary Russell Mitford, Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells, P.G. Wodehouse, James Joyce, E.M. Forster, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Dorothy L. Sayers, C. Day Lewis writing as Nicholas Blake, L.P. Hartley, Simon Raven, J.L. Carr, Mike Marqusee, Nancy Spain, Caryl Phillips, Romesh Gunesekera, Anthony Quinn and Shehan Karunatilaka. It also considers how cricket has featured in the TV series Inspector Morse and Midsomer Murders.

The Elite Quality Index 2025: The Sustainable Value Creation of Nations (EQx2025), the leading global political economy index, is a comparative ranking measuring the sustainability of nations that assesses whether elites create value and expand a nation’s knowledge capabilities or use their power to rent seek and maximize their own profits by transferring value from their stakeholders. The EQx2025 uses 149 indicators to analyze 151 countries and measures conceptual elements such as Power, Creative Destruction, and Unearned Income to determine whether the elites of a given country create or extract value from their nation. Elites are defined as those that lead a society’s most important business models and range from technology giants to labor unions, with members including business, political, and knowledge elites. Their collective coordination capacity helps them to leverage their power and influence over institutions. A nation’s elite system and its most powerful business models are essential for value creation and economic and human development. The report describes high-quality elites as those that can increase or grow the overall size of the economic pie, while low-quality elites use their power advantages to grow their own slice at the cost of others.

This invaluable anthology examines histories of esotericism, mysticism and occultism in modern Asia, understood here as the period roughly stretching from the late-nineteenth through the twentieth century, and paving eventually the way for the so-called ‘New Age’. The idea of ‘histories’, in plural, has to do with the complexities of their lineages, the many pathways through which their affinities, encounters and entanglements flowed and/or developed during the period under review. The contributors hail from different disciplines – history, literature and religious studies, for instance and, in what accounts for a cutting edge of the book, provide truly multidisciplinary insights on the subject in one single volume. Their select case studies illuminate key aspects of contemporaneous socio-religious processes. They explicate how aspects of mysticism, esotericism and occultism were closely tied to wider socio-political and intellectual processes of the period that were at once transregional, even global, and frequently transcultural and/or cosmopolitan in character. Postgraduate students, research scholars and academics in general working in the fields of religious studies and/or Asian religions in modern times will find this collection to be of great interest.

There is little doubt that urban planning has historically failed women. To liberate the profession from patriarchal influences, it is necessary to revisit the preconceptions that shaped early efforts to design new cities or improve existing ones. This book critiques the work of twenty male planning luminaries who proposed urban models, interventions, and approaches on both sides of the North Atlantic during the Second Industrial Revolution. These early visions, often presented as emancipatory or utopian, set European and North American cities (as well as their colonial counterparts) on an inexorable masculinist path. The grand urban plans and projects of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were largely bankrolled by wealth extracted from colonial enterprises in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. A reverence for geometry, order, and standardization, alongside a monumental scale, reflected a hegemonic and monolithic vision of the city, with little tolerance for cultural or physical difference. Limitless urban growth and the rapid, effortless movement of people were valorised, and for the first time in history, roads became more important than homes. Many of these same planners, indifferent to cultural and physical differences, readily accepted the continuation of class divisions in cities. Comprehensive plans for both small and large settlements were hierarchical, with the wealthiest or most powerful occupying central positions of power. Functional segregation, later institutionalized as “zoning,” enforced spatial divisions between the public (male) and private (female) spheres. Even as the planning agenda prioritized “men’s issues” related to industry and commerce, domestic ideology was promoted during this period. The book also highlights the work of several female activists and reformers from the same era. Although these women rarely envisioned full-blown urban utopias or produced extensive writings on planning, they worked to improve built environments for all. Female reformers were more attuned to the lived experiences of city dwellers than male planners, architects, and engineers. While men focused on structures and infrastructure, women were concerned with the human condition. Rather than expanding or clearing out the existing urban fabric, women sought to restore it. Practically, women extended their reproductive duties from the home to the entire city, envisioning it as a collective living space where everyone shared responsibility for one another’s daily welfare. This book calls for a return to that planning philosophy, at a time when numerous techno utopias are being imagined and built, often backed by major private corporations or individual male billionaires.

The future of urban cities and towns will be influenced by the ability of communities to develop meaningful planning and design strategies founded on the interplay of viable priorities and opportunities. Numerous priorities have been articulated by communities, including specific outcomes that address the broader vision for livable urban contexts. All are envisioned as opportunities for effective planning and design outcomes within urban landscape contexts. Urban Landscape Priorities, Opportunities and Prospect presents current priorities and strategies for producing sustainable urban landscapes in street hierarchies, connections and places.

Insurgent Play: Social worlds of urban disruption explores play as a transgressive expression that counters the existing urban order (neoliberal, authoritarian, militarised). Insurgent play is disruptive, yet through disruption it brings social worlds into being, undergirds global subcultures and overcomes hostile urban environments characterised by ever-diminishing spaces for free expression. Acts of insurgent play are claims on space lasting from brief moments to years, animating patches of the city designed for commercial, industrial and logistical imperatives. Even in public spaces designed for leisure and play, insurgent play brings different expressions at different speeds, transgressing designated uses and bodily expectations. Through insurgent play people find belonging in the city, especially for those excluded from other spaces based on race, class, sexuality and citizenship. As such, stories of insurgent play are stories of alternative ways of inhabiting cities stemming from the widespread human desire and need for play, for joy and for sociality. Insurgent Play draws upon examples from street skateboarding. Street skateboarding disrupts the city in the pursuit of play, enlivens patches of space through temporary claims, and initiates encounters with authorisers, property owners and citizens gravid with hostility with instants of wonder. Insurgence is a way of being, and the desire for insurgent play cannot be placated by better urban planning or formal expertise. Nor will multiplying designated play spaces, creative precincts and ‘flexible’ public spaces stop people seeking out space to create their own worlds of disruption. The book makes four arguments. First, insurgent play is bodily expression that can challenge, disrupt and transgresses dominant ways of city-making. Second, insurgent play takes us to parts of the urban landscape that we might not otherwise go, politics we might not otherwise recognise and encounters we might otherwise overlook. Third, claims on the city made through insurgent play enliven urban space through transformative power. In this way, these claims territorialise patches of the built environment intended for other uses. Last, insurgent play space is generated from below, never above. Insurgent play shapes, and is shaped by, identities that position adherents in opposition to prevailing urban orders.

Peter Winch (1926–1997) was one of the most important philosophers of his generation. Although best known for his work in social science and the interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein, he had a long-standing interest in ethics and political philosophy and was writing a book on political philosophy at the time of his death. This volume collects together Winch’s previously unpublished manuscripts on political philosophy, alongside an editorial introduction which outlines the development of his thought over the course of his life. It demonstrates the originality and enduring relevance of Winch's philosophical work to perennial issues concerning the nature and justification of political authority.

This book considers the presence of the supernatural and Gothic elements of the Western on screen. These dark and sinister undertones often exist in Western narratives to draw attention to the ever-present issue of death and its haunting resonance which characters encounter. This book examines this through key historic moments in Western film and its contemporary incarnations. The book detects imposing correlations in themes and currents between the Gothic and the Western relating to existential crisis and a loss of faith in ideologies and institutions. These themes represent the tensions between the old and the new, the deranged insistence on civility and order in a chaotic landscape, disillusionment and the shattering of faith in the natural order, and even nature and order themselves. The Western, just like the Gothic tale, reminds us that new frontiers are mired in the past, and optimism and survival are hunted down and haunted by guilt-ridden past and passed anxieties and traumas

Women poets of the late Victorian period created much fascinating verse from the standpoint of the independent and advanced New Woman, a profoundly important figure with her iconoclastic perceptions of public and private matters. The New Woman sought to improve women’s lives on a variety of fronts, bringing this individual both approbation and disdain. This anthology features a broad range of crucial subjects addressed by these poets, including marriage, motherhood, female desire, and social problems. Although the iconoclastic New Women have garnered much interest in recent decades, relatively little attention has been devoted to the valuable poetry these authors produced. Many of the New Woman poets are barely known today, if at all, but their writings offer an exceptional lens onto contemporary conditions that provide inestimable value for Victorian studies. Although much of the work has languished in obscurity, this expansive anthology brings the fascinating poetry to the fore. This volume provides an invaluable aid by uncovering poetry that has been long neglected or infrequently explored. Several of the poets developed extensive oeuvres investigating matters of special interest at the fin de siècle. It is not an easy task in the twenty-first century to identify, obtain, and review the nineteenth-century books containing these poems. This anthology provides a ready resource to access the poetry, which has had limited exposure in other modern collections.

Covid-19 has created trauma, death and destruction as well as challenged us for transformation of our existing society, economy and polity. The book engages with the challenges of transformations as a consequence of this. It brings reflections from several disciplines and thought practitioners from around the world. It explores challenges of transformations in economics, politics, self, science and society for living meaningfully in a post-pandemic world. It also explores pathways of creative planetary futures that we need to cultivate with and beyond Covid-19.

This book is about the Cannes Medical Conference of April 1919 and its long-lasting impacts in the humanitarian space. In the aftermath of the First World War, as the world order was being redesigned, this conference served to shift the Red Cross movement towards peacetime and public health work. The book examines the origins, course and consequences of the Cannes Medical Conference, and its wider legacy within the Red Cross movement: a legacy which is very significant yet almost completely undocumented. The book demonstrates that this medical conference was a watershed moment that served to pivot the Red Cross movement across the world, from war and conflict-related activities to peacetime programs such as relief, disease and disaster management.

This book deals with the morality, self-conception and honour of states, something that goes well beyond the narrow, rationalist defence of national interests, which dominates most IR studies. The volume pursues this line of thinking by focussing on three different but interconnected thematics: political moralism, the honour of states and the peace/war-problematic. The moral self-conception of states – which comes most clearly to the fore in situations of war – rests on the ideal conception of ‘all of us’, which includes all citizens, all classes and all generations, set against their opposite numbers outside of ‘our’ immediate sphere of domination. This state-based image of itself and its existential teleology constitutes its very essence, notwithstanding that it is often seen as a deviation (‘exception’) from the normal state of affairs, where the state is ‘just ‘ there to serve and support the economy and its principal actors. All three chapters thus revolve around issues that relate to the interaction of war and democracy and the underlying morality that both legitimates and underpins the actions of politicians as well as citizens.