Constructal Theory of Social Dynamics
Constructal Theory of Social Dynamics brings together for the first time social scientists and engineers to develop a predictive theory of social organization, as a conglomerate of mating flows that morph in time to flow more easily (people, goods, money, energy, information). These flows have objectives (e.g., minimization of effort, travel time, cost), and the objectives clash with global constraints (space, time, resources). The result is organization (flow architecture) derived from one principle of configuration evolution in time (the constructal law): "for a flow system to persist in time, its configuration must morph such that it provides easier access to its streams."
Co-Creativity and engaged scholarship : Transformative methods in social sustainability research
This book explores creative and collaborative research methods within the social sustainability sciences. The term co-creativity is used in reference to both individual methods and overarching research approaches that, through socially inclusive forms of action and reflection, stimulate alternative understandings of why and how things are, and how they could be. Supported by a wide-ranging series of in-depth—including chapters on militant research and guerrilla narrative, decolonial participative approaches, appreciate inquiry and care-ethics, deep-mapping, photo-voice, community-arts, digital participatory mapping, and living labs—the edited collection critically reviews the potential of creative, collaborative and transdisciplinary forms of research praxis to nurture just and transformative processes of change.
Material Agency : Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach
This book is a groundbreaking attempt to address questions of non-human and material agency from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines: archaeology, anthropology, sociology, cognitive science, philosophy, and economics. The editors and authors demostrate that a distributed, relational approach to agency, incorporating both humans and artifacts, has important ramifications for how we understand material culture.
Maritime Spatial Planning : past, present, future
This book is the first comprehensive overview of maritime spatial planning. Situated at the intersection between theory and practice, the volume draws together several strands of interdisciplinary research, reflecting on the history of MSP as well as examining current practice and looking towards the future. The authors and contributors examine MSP from disciplines as diverse as geography, urban planning, political science, natural science, sociology and education; reflecting the growing critical engagement with MSP in many academic fields. This innovative and pioneering volume will be of interest and value to students and scholars of maritime spatial planning, as well as planners and practitioners.
Managing Socio-ecological Production Landscapes and Seascapes for Sustainable Communities in Asia : Mapping and Navigating Stakeholders, Policy and Action
This book presents up-to-date analyses of community-based approaches to sustainable resource management of SEPLS (socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes) in areas where a harmonious relationship between the natural environment and the people who inhabit it is essential to ensure community and environmental well-being as well as to build resilience in the ecosystems that support this well-being.
Macrosocial Determinants of Population Health
Macrosocial Determinants of Population Health explores social factors such as culture, mass media, political systems, and migration that influence population health while systematically considering how we may best study these factors and use our knowledge from this study to guide public health interventions.Each section ends with Galea’s integrative chapters, bringing the observations and conclusions from the chapters into clear, usable focus. Macrosocial Determinants of Population Health is a work of major theoretical, empirical, and practical interest for disciplines as varied as public health, epidemiology, health promotion, sociology, and health policy. Its systematic field-building approach makes it as valuable to the public health provider as to the scholars and students studying the health of populations.
Los Angeles and the Summer Olympic Games : Planning Legacies
This book describes the three planning approaches and legacy impacts for the Olympic Games in one locale: the city of Los Angeles, USA.
Living Rivers : Trends and Challenges in Science and Management
All over the world, sustainable river basin management is a leading principle of policy plans and legal instruments for water management (e.g. the European Water Framework Directive). The evidence, however, to underpin the full scope of sustainability is rather scanty. In this book an integrative perspective on trends and challenges in river science and management is demonstrated. The three pillars underneath sustainable water management, ecology, economy and sociology, are elaborated by experts in their fields. A number of papers integrate the current knowledge on the structure, functioning and management of ‘living rivers’. The book includes data and experiences concerning the rivers Allier, Meuse, Rhine, Sava and Tagliamento in Europe and the river Illinois in the USA. Sustainable river basin management asks for un-orthodox rehabilitation programmes and ecosystem based and transboundary management approaches.
Learning through Community : Exploring Participatory Practices
A collection of case studies that explore the learning that people do through community engagement. Developed within a network of Canadian researchers and their community partners, it explores learning that is organized by the learners themselves, collectively, rather than as individuals. Reflecting the contributors’ political priorities, the volume begins with groups that are highly marginalized in our society: immigrant women, sex trade workers, senior citizens, garment workers, women doing community economic development, and people who identify with disability and anti-poverty movements.
Learners in a Changing Learning Landscape: Reflections from a Dialogue on New Roles and Expectations
Today's learners face constant change. Adaptive learner expertise is key to their survival on a learning journey that lasts a lifetime. This requires new thinking of all actors in the learning environment. The fundamental process through which this book was created is an extended in-depth dialogue among researchers, lifelong learners, educators, and thinkers.
Leading in a VUCA World : Integrating Leadership, Discernment and Spirituality
Brings together works by specialists from different disciplines and continents to reflect on the nexus between leadership, spirituality and discernment, particularly with regard to a world that is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). The book spells out, first of all, what our VUCA world entails, and how it affects businesses, organizations, and societies as a whole. Secondly, the book develops new perspectives on the processes of leadership, spirituality, and discernment, particularly in this VUCA context. These perspectives are interdisciplinary in nature, and are informed by e.g. management studies, leadership theory, philosophy, and theology.
Law, surveillance and the humanities
Explores key issues such as the use and legitimacy of surveillance to address a global health crisis, the role of surveillance in the experience of indigenous peoples in post-colonial societies, how surveillance interacts with gender, race, ethnicity, and social class, and the interaction between technology, surveillance, and changing attitudes to expression. how philosophy and sociology can help to correct biases and law and politics can offer new approaches to the legitimacy, use and implications of surveillance.
Knowledge and Institutions
Bridges the disciplinary boundaries within the social sciences to explore the role of social institutions in shaping geographical contexts, and in creating new knowledge. It includes theorizations as well as original empirical case studies on the emergence, maintenance and change of institutions as well as on their constraining and enabling effects on innovation, entrepreneurship, art and cultural heritage, often at regional scales across Europe and North America. Rooted in the disciplines of management and organization studies, sociology, geography, political science, and economics the contributors all take comprehensive approaches to carve out the specific contextuality of institutions as well as their impact on societal outcomes. Not only does this book offer detailed insights into current debates in institutional theory, it also provides background for scholars, students, and professionals at the intersection between regional development, policy-making, and regulation.
Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy : An Introduction
Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction takes scholars through a critical review of the issues facing researchers and educators in the last years of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Refusing to assume the reader’s familiarity with such issues but concurrently rebuffing the tendency to dumb down such complex issues, the book serves as an excellent introduction to one of the most important and complicated issues of our time.
Knowing the Salween River : Resource Politics of a Contested Transboundary River
Focuses on the Salween River, shared by China, Myanmar, and Thailand, that is increasingly at the heart of pressing regional development debates. The basin supports the livelihoods of over 10 million people, and within it there is great socio-economic, cultural and political diversity. The basin is witnessing intensifying dynamics of resource extraction, alongside large dam construction, conservation and development intervention, that is unfolding within a complex terrain of local, national and transnational governance. With a focus on the contested politics of water and associated resources in the Salween basin, this book offers a collection of empirical case studies that highlights local knowledge and perspectives. Given the paucity of grounded social science studies in this contested basin, this book provides conceptual insights at the intersection of resource governance, development, and politics of knowledge relevant to researchers, policy-makers and practitioners at a time when rapid change is underway.
Comparative Third Sector Governance in Asia : Structure, Process, and Political Economy
The book – the first of its kind – establishes new theory and knowledge in the area of third sector organizations (TSOs) in Asia. The main purpose of this book is to draw the attention of Asia's TSOs on the importance of good governance. It documents variety of approaches, and identifies socio-cultural, economic, and political dynamics and impacts of different models of TSO governance. The combined information from the contributions in this work will ensure the sustainability of TSOs throughout Asia.
Comparative Perspectives on Work-Life Balance and Gender Equality : Fathers on Leave Alone
This book portrays men’s experiences of home alone leave and how it affects their lives and family gender roles in different policy contexts and explores how this unique parental leave design is implemented in these contrasting policy regimes. The book brings together three major theoretical strands: social policy, in particular the literature on comparative leave policy developments; family and gender studies, in particular the analysis of gendered divisions of work and care and recent shifts in parenting and work-family balance; critical studies of men and masculinities, with a specific focus on fathers and fathering in contemporary western societies and life-courses. Drawing on empirical data from in-depth interviews with fathers across eleven countries, the book shows that the experiences and social processes associated with fathers’ home alone leave involve a diversity of trends, revealing both innovations and absence of change, including pluralization as well as the constraining influence of policy, gender, and social context.
Comparative and Global Pedagogies : Equity, Access and Democracy in Education
This book critically examines equality, equity and democracy in education, globally as well as from various perspectives. Globally, there are increasing arguments both for the democratization of education and for the use of education to promote a democratic society. It is argued that democratic schools would better prepare for active citizenship and for a strong civil society which are seen to be the foundation of a democratic state. The book further argues that while there are inspiring examples of schools that engage in peace education or emancipatory pedagogy that work across various ethnic or religious divides, on balance, the forms, structures, ideologies and purposes of formal education interact to make national and international conflict more likely.
Communicating Science in Social Contexts : New models, new practices
Science communication, as a multidisciplinary field, has developed remarkably in recent years. It is now a distinct and exceedingly dynamic science that melds theoretical approaches with practical experience. Formerly well-established theoretical models now seem out of step with the social reality of the sciences, and the previously clear-cut delineations and interacting domains between cultural fields have blurred. Communicating Science in Social Contexts examines that shift, which itself depicts a profound recomposition of knowledge fields, activities and dissemination practices, and the value accorded to science and technology.
Communicating science and technology in society
Addresses the engagement between science and society from multiple viewpoints. At a time when trust in experts is being questioned, misinformation is rife and scientific and technological development show growing social impact, the volume examines the challenges in involving the public in scientific debates and decisions. It takes into account societal needs and concerns in research, and analyses the interface between the roles of institutions and individuals. From environmental challenges to science communication, participatory technological design to animal experimentation, and transdisciplinarity to norms and values in science, the volume brings together research on areas in which scientists and citizens interact, across diverse, often understudied, socio-cultural contexts in Europe.



















