This volume is the first systematic scholarly study that analyses the complex relationship between history and religion. It considers religious groups as both producers of historical narratives and topics of historiography. From different disciplinary perspectives, the authors explore how religions are historicised. In so doing, they address the biases and elisions of current analytical and des…
This volume offers insights from modelling measures of parental involvement and their relationship with student reading literacy across countries, exploring and incorporating cultural differences. This is a significant contribution to a field where cross-cultural comparisons from a triangulated perspective are sparse. For readers interested in exploring the relationship between parental involve…
This volume reconsiders literacy and communication in pre-modern societies, focusing especially on how material form affects the way textual artefacts are understood and interpreted. By bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines such as archaeology, medieval studies, and Islamic studies, this volume provides the specialist and non-specialist with insights on how humans express themselv…
What are the influences that govern how people view their worlds? What are the embedded values and practices that underpin the ways people think and act? Discourses We Live By approaches these questions through narrative research, in a process that uses words, images, activities or artefacts to ask people – either individually or collectively within social groupings – to examine, discuss, p…
All books have long histories. The ideas and early versions of this book stretch back to my doctoral work at the University of Texas at Austin, to Kurt Heinzelman’s scholarship on William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and to Richard Sha’s unfailing friendship and encouragement through the years since we were students together. Librarians at t…
Screen Space Reconfigured is the first edited volume that critically and theoretically examines the many novel renderings of space brought to us by 21st century screens. Exploring key cases such as post-perspectival space, 3D, vertical framing, haptics, and layering, this volume takes stock of emerging forms of screen space and spatialities as they move from the margins to the centre of contemp…
The scientific field of leadership and followership is fast evolving and has seen several interesting developments over recent years. The early heroic views of leadership are slowly turning into more nuanced perspectives, including the understanding that leadership and followership are mutually dependent on each other. Likewise, there is a growing awareness that the focus on the positive side o…
Three decades of societal and cultural alignment of new media have yielded a host of innovations, trials, and problems, accompanied by versatile popular and academic discourse. New Media Studies crystallized internationally into an established academic discipline, and this begs the question: where do we stand now? Which new questions are emerging now that new media are being taken for granted, …
Few things make Japanese adults feel quite as anxious today as the phenomenon called the “child crisis.” Various media teem with intense debates about bullying in schools, child poverty, child suicides, violent crimes committed by children, the rise of socially withdrawn youngsters, and forceful moves by the government to introduce a more conservative educational curriculum. These issues ha…
The volume examines from a comparative perspective the phenomenon of aesthetic disruption within the various arts in contemporary culture. It assumes that the political potential of contemporary art is not solely derived from presenting its audiences with openly political content, but rather from creating a space of perception and interaction using formal means: a space that makes hegemonic str…
For many learners, assessment conjures up visions of red pens scrawling percentages in the top right-hand corner of exams and feelings of stress, inadequacy, and failure. Although learners sometimes respond negatively to evaluation, assessments have provided educational institutions with important information about learning outcomes and the quality of education for many decades. But how accurat…
“Musicians often pay a high price for sharing their art with us. Underneath the glow of success can often lie loneliness and exhaustion, not to mention the basic struggles of paying the rent or buying food. Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave raise important questions – and we need to listen to what the musicians have to tell us about their working conditions and their mental health.” Em…
This open access Springer Brief provides a systematic analysis of current trends and requirements in the areas of knowledge and competence in the context of the project “(A) Higher Education Digital (AHEAD)―International Horizon Scanning / Trend Analysis on Digital Higher Education.” It examines the latest developments in learning theory, didactics, and digital-education technology in con…
All books have long histories. The ideas and early versions of this book stretch back to my doctoral work at the University of Texas at Austin, to Kurt Heinzelman’s scholarship on William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and to Richard Sha’s unfailing friendship and encouragement through the years since we were students together. Librarians at t…
This open access book discusses how the involvement of citizens into scientific endeavors is expected to contribute to solve the big challenges of our time, such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity, growing inequalities within and between societies, and the sustainability turn. The field of citizen science has been growing in recent decades. Many different stakeholders from scientist…
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals initiative has the potential to set the direction for a future world that works for everyone. Approved by 193 United Nations member countries in September 2016 to help guide global and national development policies in the period to 2030, the 17 goals build on the successes of the Millennium Development Goals, but also include new priority areas,…
Which theoretical approaches of contemporary cultural criticism can Disability Studies employ? At the same time, what can Cultural Studies gain by incorporating disability more fully as a framework for critical analysis? This international collection of essays enriches the thriving discourse of Cultural Disability Studies by offering stimulating dialogues between British, Czech, German and US-A…
This research topic stems from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Multilingualism" conference, which was hosted by the Language Research Centre at the University of Calgary. It was the first conference of its kind, which brought together the work of researchers, educators, and policy makers in the areas of first and second language acquisition from psycholinguistic and pedagogical perspective…
"What do we do when we read? Reading can be an act of consumption or an act of creation. Our “work reading” overlaps with our “pleasure reading,” and yet these two modes of reading engage with different parts of the self. It is sometimes passive, sometimes active, and can even be an embodied form. The contributors to this volume share their own histories of reading in order to rev…
edited by Lia Kent, Joanne Wallis and Claire Cronin.