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EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This edited volume discusses the methodological and ethical challenges that researchers are currently facing whilst attempting to document the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities throughout Europe.

This original and interdisciplinary volume explores the contemporary semiotic dimensions of the face from both scientific and sociocultural perspectives, putting forward several traditions, aspects, and signs of the human utopia of creating a hybrid face.

The book semiotically delves into the multifaceted realm of the digital face, exploring its biological and social functions, the concept of masks, the impact of COVID-19, AI systems, digital portraiture, symbolic faces in films, viral communication, alien depictions, personhood in video games, online intimacy, and digital memorials. The human face is increasingly living a life that is not only that of the biological body but also that of its digital avatar, spread through a myriad of new channels and transformable through filters, post-productions, digital cosmetics, all the way to the creation of deepfakes. The digital face expresses new and largely unknown meanings, which this book explores and analyzes through an interdisciplinary but systematic approach.

The volume will interest researchers, scholars, and advanced students who are interested in digital humanities, communication studies, semiotics, visual studies, visual anthropology, cultural studies, and, broadly speaking, innovative approaches about the meaning of the face in present-day digital societies.

Considering Space demonstrates what has changed in the perception of space within the social sciences and how useful – indeed indispensable – this category is today.

While the seemingly deterritorializing effects of digitalization might suggest that space is a secondary consideration, this book proves such a presumption wrong, with territories, borders, distances, proximity, geographical ecologies, land use, physical infrastructures – as well as concepts of space – all being shown still to matter, perhaps more than ever before.

Seeking to show how society can and should be perceived as spatial, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, geography, architecture and urban studies.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Funded by the DeutscheForschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Projektnummer 290045248 – SFB 1265.

This volume explores and elucidates critical ancient world studies (CAWS), a new model for the study of the ancient world operating critically, setting itself against a long history of a discipline formulated to naturalise a hierarchical, white supremacist origin story for an imagined modern West.

CAWS is a methodology for the study of antiquity that shifts away from the assumptions and approaches of the discipline known as classical studies and/or classics. Although it seeks to reckon with the discipline's colonial history, it is not simply the application of decolonial theory or the search to uncover subaltern narratives in a subject that has special relevance to the privileged and powerful. Rather, it dismantles the structures of knowledge that have led to this privileging, and questions the categories, ideas, themes, narratives, and epistemological structures that have been deemed objective and essential within the inherited discipline of classics. The contributions in this book, by an international group of researchers, offer a variety of situated, embodied perspectives on the question of how to imagine a more critical discipline, rather than a unified single view. The volume is divided into four parts – "Critical Epistemologies", "Critical Philologies", "Critical Time and Critical Space", and "Critical Approaches" – and uses these as spaces to propose disciplinary transformation.

Critical Ancient World Studies: The Case for Forgetting Classics is a must-read for scholars and practitioners teaching in the field of classical studies, and the breadth of examples also makes it an invaluable resource for anyone working on the ancient world, or on confronting Eurocentrism, within other disciplines.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online. The higher education and research system faces a constant dilemma. On the one hand, research and higher education are run by autonomous, interrelated academic communities, often described as collegial governance. On the other hand, they are an instrument for the fulfillment of goals that are often external to the academic community. What, then, is the role of academics and academic knowledge in governance of higher education and research, and how does this reflect on and impact their aims and overall place in society? Fostered through joint workshops and an open dialogue, this double volume of Research in the Sociology of Organizations develops a deeper understanding of collegiality, examining through a unique comparative perspective how it is translated and practiced in different settings across the world. Considering ways in which collegiality can be revitalized, this second installment argues for reintroducing collegiality both in analyzing the development of higher education systems and research and in the actual governing of universities. Revealing the globalization, homogenization and variation that have come to characterize the collegiate system, Revitalizing Collegiality critically considers the state of and future of the higher education system, and how we can consciously shape it moving forward.

Socio-technical systems such as video conferencing, digital care work platforms, and electronic health records are taking an increasing role in mental health-related law, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic. Reflecting on these experiments can help navigate an increasingly digital future for mental health services and the laws that govern them. This chapter looks to England and Wales, where an explicit policy aim to 'digitise the Mental Health Act' has seen three key developments: (1) remote medical assessments of persons facing involuntary intervention, (2) the remote operation of tribunals that authorise involuntary interventions, and (3) and the rise of digital platforms for Mental Health Act assessment setup. The chapter argues that although courts appear responsive to the issues posed by the first two developments, there appear to be less obvious oversight of digital platforms used to setup mental health crisis work. The chapter considers legal issues raised by 'digitising mental health legislation' and draws in a political economy perspective to reflect on the role of the private sector in emerging configurations of digitised health and social services. It recommends attention to safeguards in both the procurement and commissioning of private sector practices concerning mental health crisis work and in the proliferation of digital platforms in health and social care services.

Around 100 central banks currently research or develop their own central bank digital currency (further CBDC). Two projects recently moved into the production phase. The introduction of CBDC by at least one major central bank in the coming years seems unavoidable, which would form a tipping point. CBDC would then enter the mainstream of the banking sector. This trend requires assessing CBDC projects broader than the central banks do. This chapter considers concerns regarding the introduction of CBDC and its design criteria. Addressing those issues at an early stage allows us to mitigate them. The most obvious concern concerns the central bank money's public security in the era of growing cyber threats. The other evident concern concerns privacy. However, one particular angle of discussions on CBDC does not get enough attention – sustainability. This chapter assesses whether and how current CBDC projects include sustainability, public security, and privacy. It then addresses areas worth further development to increase the implementation of sustainability by the central banks. Finally, this chapter reconstructs a design of CBDC that would be most desired from the perspective of sustainability, public security, and privacy, showing how taking those perspectives into consideration influences social acceptance of CBDC.

While institutional critique has long been an important part of artistic practice and theoretical debate in the visual arts, it has long escaped attention in the field of music. This open access volume assembles for the first time an array of theoretical approaches and practical examples dealing with New Music's institutions, their critique, and their transformations. For scholars, leaders, and practitioners alike, it offers an important overview of current developments as well as theoretical reflections about New Music and its institutions today. In this way, it provides a major contribution to the debate about the present and future of contemporary music.

The introductory chapter—"A Global Humanities Approach to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)"—first establishes the theoretical foundations of A Global Humanities Approach to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals: Understanding Planet, People, and Prosperity by outlining the origin, evolution, and current state of three fields: the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), and the Global Humanities. The Introduction then goes on to explain the methodological approach and organizational structure employed throughout the textbook. Next, it summarizes the twelve global humanities texts featured in Chapters 1-12 and includes details on the intersection of each text with the SDG framework. Finally, the opening chapter concludes with detailed guidelines for instructors on how to best use this textbook.

'Am I Less British?' focuses on the children of refugees and immigrants in North London, whose parents migrated from Turkey.

Providing a rich ethnography of the lives of the children, the book studies their sense of identity, belonging and their transnational experiences. It aims to understand how the children position themselves within a range of locations (London, North London and Turkey), where they face class hierarchy, racism and discrimination, and explores how they think about their sense of belonging within the contemporary political context in Britain and Turkey. De-identifying themselves from national identities and holding onto the oppressed identities appear as new forms of resistance in response to racism and exclusion.

The experiences of the young people reflect the complexity of their lives in changing political and social circumstances across the borders of nation-states, and the importance of other categories of identity, including local identities. Overall, the book argues that the intersections of local, national and transnational approaches, the political context through which the lives of young people are framed, and their sophisticated engagement with ideas of race, class, ethnicity and gender, are crucial in understanding their identity formation.

Praise for 'Am I Less British?'

'This is a nuanced and deeply researched study of the changing meaning of identity, citizenship and belonging in today's Britain. Drawing on her research in London among the children of Turkish migrants and Kurdish refugees, Şimşek makes an important intervention in the conversations on Britishness that are helping to shape our society.'

John Solomos, University of Warwick

"Am I Less British?" is a beautifully crafted ethnography of young Londoners whose parents are Kurdish and Turkish. Their voices sing out from its pages and question what it means to be British and the exclusions that block an equal access to belonging and full citizenship. A brilliant, stunning and urgent analysis of young multicultural lives.'

Les Back, University of Glasgow

'This is a wonderful addition to our understanding of conviviality in a postcolonial city. Here we learn from new generations of Londoners as they contend with what it means to feel at home, in any place, at any time.'

Vron Ware, author of Who Cares about Britishness? (2007)

The early twentieth century was awash in revolutionary scientific discourse, and its uptake in the public imaginary through popular scientific writings touched every area of human experience, from politics and governance to social mores and culture. Feeling Strangely argues that these shifting scientific understandings and their integration into Hispanic and Lusophone society reshaped the experience of gender. The book analyzes gender as a felt experience and explores how that experience is shaped by popular scientific discourse by examining the "strange" femininity of young protagonists in four novels written by women in Spanish and Portuguese: Rosa Chacel's Memorias de Leticia Valle (published in Argentina in 1945); Norah Lange's Personas en la sala (Argentina, 1950); Carmen Laforet's Nada (Spain, 1945); and Clarice Lispector's Perto do coração selvagem (Brazil, 1943). It pairs each novel with a broad scientific theme selected from those that captured the contemporary popular imagination to argue that the young female protagonists in these novels all put forth visions of young womanhood as an experience of strangeness. Building on Carmen Martín Gaite's term chicas raras, Rankin proposes this strangeness as constitutive of a gendered experience inextricable from affective and material engagements with the world.

This open access book examines regulating an environment that has no jurisdiction, is fully anonymous and infinitely vast? Welcome to the Metaverse, an online virtual reality that is expected to add billions to the global economy. The Metaverse offers a new type of virtual economy with practically endless business opportunities. The question is how to prevent these opportunities from being abused to commit money laundering and finance terrorism (MLFT). This book explores the current European Union legislation designed to prevent MLFT in connection with the Metaverse. It analyses the legislation in relation to the three traditional stages of MLFT: placement, layering and integration. Furthermore, some additional risks specific to the Metaverse are discussed, such as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and the high level of anonymity. The book concludes that the current legislation is not suitable for facing the new challenges of the Metaverse. In turn, the book puts forward a novel approach to regulating and enforcing MLFT legislation: using a system of smart assets equipped with AI to prevent and detect MLFT. In addition, it makes recommendations on how to improve the legal framework with regard to the new challenges arising from the Metaverse. Particular attention is given to creating a legal framework that incorporates the use of smart assets and the Internet of Things, in order to provide a safe environment for potential users and society. With a solid background in financial law and technology, the author successfully creates a novel system of regulation and enforcement that is based on the use of automatic enforcement, whilst keeping sufficient legal safeguards in place for potential Metaverse users. This book will be of interest to anyone interested in the Metaverse. Whether you want to regulate it or open your own virtual business, it's a must-read!

This open access book from the world's first 6G Flagship research program at the University of Oulu, Finland, provides a multi-disciplinary and insightful overview of the subject, with contributions from experts in the field. Today's fourth generation of mobile connectivity services (4G) are available everywhere, and adoption of fifth generation (5G) networks is well underway. Compared to 4G, 5G has already brought about new business opportunities and enabled seamless virtual and augmented reality services, but also raised serious concerns on data privacy and security and the use of artificial intelligence. The sixth generation (6G) networks are already in R&D phase aiming at deployment in 2030. We need to understand today what 5G evolution and 6G may bring for the future of service delivery and how they will influence us. The contributions answer what 5G, its evolution, and 6G will be about; what kind of impacts 5G and 6G will have on future digital services, businesses, and society; how we could benefit from 5G and 6G innovations; and how 5G and 6G should be regulated in the future. Future 5G evolution and 6G are not only about moving toward faster, better, and more secure networks providing the basis for innovative digital services, they are also going to bring about a huge digital disruption that will affect all levels of society. This book will be of great interest to academics and students of management, telecommunications and digital innovation, as well practitioners and policymakers looking to the future of business.

The open access book covers a large class of nonlinear systems with many practical engineering applications. The approach is based on the extension of linear systems theory using the Volterra series. In contrast to the few existing treatments, our approach highlights the algebraic structure underlying such systems and is based on Schwartz's distributions (rather than functions). The use of distributions leads naturally to the convolution algebras of linear time-invariant systems and the ones suitable for weakly nonlinear systems emerge as simple extensions to higher order distributions, without having to resort to ad hoc operators. The result is a much-simplified notation, free of multiple integrals, a conceptual simplification, and the ability to solve the associated nonlinear differential equations in a purely algebraic way. The representation based on distributions not only becomes manifestly power series alike, but it includes power series as the description of the subclass of memory-less, time-invariant, weakly nonlinear systems. With this connection, many results from the theory of power series can be extended to the larger class of weakly nonlinear systems with memory. As a specific application, the theory is specialised to weakly nonlinear electric networks. The authors show how they can be described by a set of linear equivalent circuits which can be manipulated in the usual way. The authors include many real-world examples that occur in the design of RF and mmW analogue integrated circuits for telecommunications. The examples show how the theory can elucidate many nonlinear phenomena and suggest solutions that an approach entirely based on numerical simulations can hardly suggest. The theory is extended to weakly nonlinear time-varying systems, and the authors show examples of how time-varying electric networks allow implementing functions unfeasible with time-invariant ones. The book is primarily intended for engineering students in upper semesters and in particular for electrical engineers. Practising engineers wanting to deepen their understanding of nonlinear systems should also find it useful. The book also serves as an introduction to distributions for undergraduate students of mathematics.

This chapter sets out an overall vision and architecture for political staffing and why it is needed. It discusses the privilege of service in political staffing, notes the current crisis in political staffing human resource management but also argues strongly for the potential for positive human resource management. It provides guidance for practitioners by outlining best practice guidance for political staffers, their managers, and reformers. This makes clear the key approaches and tools they need to be aware of and use to improve political offices. Political staffers and advisers need to be properly trained, supported and developed. Not only will this benefit the individuals in the roles, it will provide significant benefit to the politicians they work for and in turn the voters who elect the politicians. Higher quality human resource management for political staffers and advisers will generate multiple long term dividends. It will create higher calibre, more experienced and diverse political staffers who are up and running in their role sooner, perform at a higher level and are retained for longer, preserving institutional knowledge. This will lead to higher functioning offers, generating better outputs, more effectively supported politicians, more strategic decisions, increased delivery of election promises.