This book is based on findings from the Horizon2020 Project “Participation. Analysing and Preventing Extremism via Participation” (Grant Agreement 962547) funded by the European Commission. Its main goal is to provide an updated, well-informed and nuanced picture of the contemporary research into the factors influencing pathways of radicalization towards violent extremism in the European landscape. Different kinds of extremism are taken into consideration (far-right, far-left, separatist and religious extremism) through a mixed approach that combined a qualitative study with textual-statistical analyses. One of the most relevant outcomes of our research on current radicalization studies is that, for all types of extremisms analyzed, the process of radicalization is understood as an event that occurs at the intersection between a personal trajectory and a permissive, or enabling, environment. Cumulative extremism dynamics and new places of radicalization are also noted as further trends to be monitored.

The discovery of radium by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898 eventually led to a craze for radium products in the 1920s until their widespread use proved lethal for consumers, patients, and medical practitioners alike. Radium infiltrated American culture, Maria Rentetzi reveals, not only because of its potential to treat cancer but because it was transformed from a scientific object into a familiar, desirable commodity. She explores how Standard Chemical Company in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania - the first successful commercial producer of radium in the United States - aggressively promoted the benefits of radium therapy and its curative properties as part of a lucrative business strategy. Over-the-counter products, from fertilizers to paints and cosmetics to tonics and suppositories, inspired the same level of trust in consumers as a revolutionary pharmaceutical. The radium industry in the United States marketed commodities like Liquid Sunshine and Elixir of Youth at a time when using this new chemical element in the laboratory, in the hospital, in private clinics, and in commercial settings remained largely free of regulation. Rentetzi shows us how marketing campaigns targeted individually to men and women affected not only how they consumed these products of science but also how that science was understood and how it contributed to the formation of ideas about gender. Seduced by Radium ultimately reveals how innovative advertising techniques and seductive, state-of-the-art packaging made radium a routine part of American life, shaping scientific knowledge about it and the identities of those who consumed it.

Continuing in the tradition of its acclaimed predecessors, the sixth edition of The World Food Problem reflects “a boldly multidisciplinary approach that captures all the complexity of the causes of, and solutions to, hunger ..

The organisation and characteristics of early and ancient states have become the focus of a renewed interest from archaeologists, ancient historians and anthropologists in recent years. On the one hand, neo-evolutionary schemas of political transformation find it difficult to define some of their most basic concepts, such as ‘chiefdom’, ‘complex chiefdom’ and ‘state’, not to mention the transition between them. On the other hand, teleological interpretations based on linear dynamics, from less to increasingly more complex political structures, in successive steps, impose biased and too rigid views on the available evidence. In fact, recent research stresses the existence of other forms of socio-political organisation, less vertically integrated and more heterarchical, that proved highly successful and resilient in the long term in tying together social groups. What is more, such forms quite often represented the basic blocks on which states were built and that managed to survive once states collapsed. Finally, nomadic, maritime and mountain populations provide fascinating examples of societies that experienced alternative forms of political organisation, sometimes on a seasonal basis. In other cases, their consideration as ‘marginal’ populations that cultivated specialised skills ensured them a certain degree of autonomy when living either within or at the borders of states. This book explores such small-scale socio-political organisations, their potential and the historical trajectories they stimulated. A selection of historical case studies from different regions of the world may help rethink current concepts and views about the emergence and organisation of political complexity and the mechanisms that prevented, occasionally, the emergence of solid polities. They may also cast some light over trajectories of historical transformation, still poorly understood as are the limits of effective state power. This book explores the importance of comparative research and long-term historical perspectives to avoid simplistic interpretations, based on the characteristics of modern Western states abusively used retrospectively.

Technocratic Visions examines the context and societal consequences of technologies, technocratic governance, and development in Mexico, home of the first professional engineering school in the Americas. Contributors focus on the influential role of engineers, especially civil engineers, but also mining engineers, military engineers, architects, and other infrastructural and mechanical technicians. During the mid-nineteenth century, a period of immense upheaval and change domestically and globally, troubled governments attempted to expand and modernize Mexico’s engineering programs while resisting foreign invasion and adapting new Western technologies to existing precolonial and colonial foundations. The Mexican Revolution in 1910 greatly expanded technocratic practices as state agents attempted to control popular unrest and unify disparate communities via science, education, and infrastructure. Within this backdrop of political unrest, Technocratic Visions describes engineering sites as places both praised and protested, where personal, local, national, and global interests combined into new forms of societal creation; and as places that became centers of contests over representation, health, identity, and power. With an eye on contextualizing current problems stemming from Mexico’s historical development, this volume reveals how these transformations were uniquely Mexican and thoroughly global.

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.

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.

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 O.J. Simpson trial. The Lindbergh kidnapping. The death of Marilyn Monroe. The assassination of the Romanovs. The Atlanta child murders. All controversial cases. All investigated with the latest techniques in forensic science. Nationally respected investigators Joe Nickell and John Fischer explain the science behind the criminal investigations that have captured the nation's attention. Crime Science is a comprehensive guide to forensics. Without being overly technical or treating scientific techniques superficially, the authors introduce readers to the work of firearms experts, document examiners, fingerprint technicians, medical examiners, and forensic anthropologists. Each topic is treated in a separate chapter, in a clear and understandable style. Nickell and Fisher describe fingerprint classification and autopsies, explain how fibers link victims to their killers, and examine the science underlying DNA profiling and toxicological analysis. From weapons analysis to handwriting samples to shoe and tire impressions, Crime Science outlines the indispensable tools and techniques that investigators use to make sense of a crime scene. Each chapter closes with a study of a well-known case, revealing how the principles of forensic science work in practice.

#NiUnaMenos#Aufschrei#LoSHA Before #MeToo became the massive global movement we know today, these were the hashtags that represented mobilisations from Ukraine to Latin America that demanded accountability for the intersecting experiences of sexual violence and racism, xenophobia, and misogyny inflicted on women, transgender people, and girls. Lead by activists such as Tarana Burke, who coined the phrase "me too," the movement provided a call to action for survivors across the world to speak out about their experiences. In #MeToo and Beyond, M. Cristina Alcalde and Paula-Irene Villa bring together scholars and activists from various backgrounds to approach #MeToo from multiple spaces, positionalities, and areas of expertise, many from regions and contexts often overlooked and understudied in the mediascapes of the Global North. This volume includes perspectives from around the world and covers research spanning masculinity, to trans issues, to Jewish communities. The editors and contributors heed Tarana Burke's call to center marginalised voices and experiences so that instead of becoming a footnote, these experiences guide activists to frame polyphony as central to understanding past, current, and future forms of gendered violence and resistance. The goal of #MeToo and Beyond is to examine both the profoundly universal and familiar experiences of sexual violence, and the specificity of these forms of violence and mobilisation against them across place, space, and experiences of participants. Activists and scholars will find this an important and necessary contribution to current and future discussions on sexual violence and global movements.

More than 2.7 million post-9/11 veterans served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their homecomings didn't include parades or national celebrations, but civilians regard them with reverence and pride. Veterans' benefits are comprehensive. The phrase "thank you for your service" is ubiquitous. Yet, one in ten post-9/11 veterans struggle with substance abuse. Fifteen to twenty veterans die by suicide every day, with 18-34-year-olds dying at the highest rates. These veterans carry intractable mental and physical wounds, leading advocates to focus on concepts like moral injury and collective belonging. In War and Homecoming: Veteran Identity and the Post-9/11 Generation, Travis Martin, a scholar, teacher, and former veteran himself, argues that post-9/11 veterans struggle with homecoming because of decades of stereotyping and a lack of healthy models of veteran identity. In the American unconscious, veterans are the superficially praised ‘hero’, the victimised ‘wounded warrior’, forever defined by past accomplishments. They are appropriated as symbols in competing narratives of national identity. War and Homecoming explores past and current stereotypes often found in patriotic rhetoric, popular media, literature, and veterans' lives. Luckily, a third type of post-9/11 veteran has emerged, the veteran ‘storyteller’ who recognises stereotypes, claims their symbolic authority, and defines who they are through literature, art, and service. This identity allows for continued growth, and these ‘storytellers’ provide examples of identity rooted in agency, individuality, and resilience for other veterans to model. New creative communities, service organisations, and the growing academic field of Veterans Studies suggest post-9/11 veterans are redefining what it means to be a veteran.

What do we mean when we say "the people"? In a Nordic context, the word "people" was historically associated not with members of a sovereign nation but of a household, church, or state. The term remains a battlefield of mixed or even opposing interests and has developed at least three different meanings: a political unit, a cultural entity, and a social multitude. Modern historian Ove Korsgaard focuses on the crucial struggles over who has (or has not) belonged to the people over the past 175 years, and elucidates their implications for state and nation building in Denmark and other Nordic countries.