First published in 2001, Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor was written to bring together both the previously unpublished and published results of fieldwork in the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan and to put them into an historical, political, and theoretical context. The book presents Chinese popular religion as a distinctive institution and describes its content as an ‘imperial metaphor’. In doing so, it explores a wide range of topics, including both official and local cults, local festivals, Daoism, Ang Gong, the politics of religion, and political ritual.
First published in 2001, Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor was written to bring together both the previously unpublished and published results of fieldwork in the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan and to put them into an historical, political, and theoretical context. The book presents Chinese popular religion as a distinctive institution and describes its content as an ‘imperial metaphor’. In doing so, it explores a wide range of topics, including both official and local cults, local festivals, Daoism, Ang Gong, the politics of religion, and political ritual.
The Global Perspective of Urban Labor in Mexico City, 1910–1929 examines the global entanglement of the Mexican labor movement during the Mexican Revolution. It describes how global influences made their entry into labor culture through the cinema, the theater, and labor festivals as well as into the development of consumption patterns and advertisement. It further shows how the young labor movement constituted its discourse and invented its tradition at meetings and in the columns of newspapers.The local conditions constitute the framework for the examination of Mexican labor’s perspectives on and engagement with contemporary events of global significance. Thereby, this book demonstrates how workers turned to the global context in search of guidance and role models, embracing global developments and narratives. It also reveals the differentiations from this context in order to create a unique local identity.This approach allows new perspectives on the role of a neglected revolutionary actor and on the influence of global developments in a revolution that has been predominantly interpreted from a national point of view. It shows the way global ideas were brought to life in the framework of revolutionary Mexico City – providing new insights into the grand-narratives of Globalization and Revolution.
Is it impossible to assess dignity, which is the faculty or agency of autonomy and equality of rights under the current rule of law, when we are met by global challenges like climate change, financial crisis, food crisis, natural disasters, inequality, violent conflicts and trade disputes?Drawing on European philosophical enlightenment to rethink dominant theories of contemporary Western Human Rights, Stephan P. Leher explores the philosophical foundation of the concept of “dignity” and Human Rights. Using specific examples from Africa and Latin America to explain these concepts as social realizations in the world, Leher demonstrates the link between justice and peace and contends that dignity, freedom and Human Rights law rule are social realizations and claims by all people. With the help of language philosophy, he argues that sentences and propositions about social choices and realizations of real life expressed in ordinary language constitute the basic elements of the foundation and protection of human dignity and Human Rights. The social choice to claim one’s freedom and rights can be considered the dignity agency of the individual.Dignity and Human Rights sheds new light on the academic assessment of dignity, the agency of autonomy and the equality of rights under the rule of law, in a time of changes and challenges to Human Rights policies and politics.
Healthcare Informatics: Improving Efficiency through Technology, Analytics, and Management supplies an understanding of the different types of healthcare service providers, corresponding information technologies, analytic methods, and data issues that play a vital role in transforming the healthcare industry. All of these elements are reshaping the various activities such as workflow and processes of hospitals, healthcare systems, ACOs, and patient analytics, including hot spotting, risk stratification, and treatment effectiveness.A follow-up to Healthcare Informatics: Improving Efficiency and Productivity, this latest book includes new content that examines the evolution of Big Data and how it is revolutionizing the healthcare industry. It presents strategies for achieving national goals for the meaningful use of health information technology and includes sound project management principles and case illustrations for technology roll-out, such as Computer Physician Order Entry (CPOE) for optimal utilization.The book describes how to enhance process efficiency by linking technologies, data, and analytics with strategic initiatives to achieve success. It explains how to leverage data resources with analytics to enhance decision support for care providers through in-depth descriptions of the array of analytic methods that are used to create actionable information, including Business Intelligence, Six Sigma, Data, and Text Mining.
This book is about the soul of the city, embodied in its spaces and people. It traces dynamics in inner city neighbourhoods of South Africa’s post-apartheid capital, Pretoria. Viewing the city through its most vulnerable people and places, it recognizes that urban space is never neutral and shaped by competing value frameworks.The first part of the book invites planners, city-makers, and ordinary urban citizens, to consider a new self-understanding, reclaiming their agency in the city-making process. Through the metaphor of "becoming like children", planning practice is deconstructed and re-imagined. A praxis-based methodology is presented, cultivating four distinct moments of entering, reading, imagining and co-constructing the city. After deconstructing urban spaces and discourses, the second part of the book explores a concrete spirituality and ethic of urban space. It argues for a shift from planning as technocracy, to planning as immersed, participatory artistry: opening up to the "genius" of space, responsive to urban cries, and joining to construct new, soul-full spaces. Local communities and interconnected movements become embodiments of urban alternatives – through resistance and reconstruction; building on local assets; animating local reclamations; and weaving nets of hope that will span the entire city. Providing a concrete methodology for city-making that is rooted in a community-based urban praxis, this book will be of interest to urban planning researchers, professional planners and designers and also grass-root community developers or activists.
This book is about the soul of the city, embodied in its spaces and people. It traces dynamics in inner city neighbourhoods of South Africa’s post-apartheid capital, Pretoria. Viewing the city through its most vulnerable people and places, it recognizes that urban space is never neutral and shaped by competing value frameworks.The first part of the book invites planners, city-makers, and ordinary urban citizens, to consider a new self-understanding, reclaiming their agency in the city-making process. Through the metaphor of "becoming like children", planning practice is deconstructed and re-imagined. A praxis-based methodology is presented, cultivating four distinct moments of entering, reading, imagining and co-constructing the city. After deconstructing urban spaces and discourses, the second part of the book explores a concrete spirituality and ethic of urban space. It argues for a shift from planning as technocracy, to planning as immersed, participatory artistry: opening up to the "genius" of space, responsive to urban cries, and joining to construct new, soul-full spaces. Local communities and interconnected movements become embodiments of urban alternatives – through resistance and reconstruction; building on local assets; animating local reclamations; and weaving nets of hope that will span the entire city. Providing a concrete methodology for city-making that is rooted in a community-based urban praxis, this book will be of interest to urban planning researchers, professional planners and designers and also grass-root community developers or activists.
The History of English: An Introduction provides a chronological analysis of the linguistic, social, and cultural development of the English language from before its establishment in Britain around the year 450 to the present. Each chapter represents a new stage in the evolution of the language, all illustrated with a rich and diverse selection of primary texts. The book also explores the wider global course of the language, including a historical review of English in its pidgin and creole varieties and as a native and/or second language in the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and Australasia.The third edition, carefully revised and updated throughout, includes:? chapter introductions and conclusions to assist in orientation plus additional marginal references throughout;? the addition of 21 timelines often running from Old English to Present-Day English and focusing on a variety of features;? a new focus on the relevance of change for and in Present-Day English;? discussions on the role and image of women, the (in-)visibility of social classes, and regional variation in English;? material on bilingualism, code-switching, and borrowing, and on the effects of the social media on language use;? over 90 textual examples demonstrating linguistic change and over 100 figures, tables, and maps, including 31 colour images, to support and illuminate the text;? updated online support material including brief introductions to Old and to Middle English, further articles on linguistic, historical, and cultural phenomena which go beyond the scope of the book, additional sample texts, exercises, and audio clips.With study questions as well as recommendations for further reading and topics for further study, The History of English is essential reading for any student of the English language and will be of relevance to any course addressing the origins and development of the English language.
The History of English: An Introduction provides a chronological analysis of the linguistic, social, and cultural development of the English language from before its establishment in Britain around the year 450 to the present. Each chapter represents a new stage in the evolution of the language, all illustrated with a rich and diverse selection of primary texts. The book also explores the wider global course of the language, including a historical review of English in its pidgin and creole varieties and as a native and/or second language in the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and Australasia.The third edition, carefully revised and updated throughout, includes:? chapter introductions and conclusions to assist in orientation plus additional marginal references throughout;? the addition of 21 timelines often running from Old English to Present-Day English and focusing on a variety of features;? a new focus on the relevance of change for and in Present-Day English;? discussions on the role and image of women, the (in-)visibility of social classes, and regional variation in English;? material on bilingualism, code-switching, and borrowing, and on the effects of the social media on language use;? over 90 textual examples demonstrating linguistic change and over 100 figures, tables, and maps, including 31 colour images, to support and illuminate the text;? updated online support material including brief introductions to Old and to Middle English, further articles on linguistic, historical, and cultural phenomena which go beyond the scope of the book, additional sample texts, exercises, and audio clips.With study questions as well as recommendations for further reading and topics for further study, The History of English is essential reading for any student of the English language and will be of relevance to any course addressing the origins and development of the English language.
Introduction to Chemical Graph Theory is a concise introduction to the main topics and techniques in chemical graph theory, specifically the theory of topological indices. These include distance-based, degree-based, and counting-based indices. The book covers some of the most commonly used mathematical approaches in the subject. It is also written with the knowledge that chemical graph theory has many connections to different branches of graph theory (such as extremal graph theory, spectral graph theory).The authors wrote the book in an appealing way that attracts people to chemical graph theory. In doing so, the book is an excellent playground and general reference text on the subject, especially for young mathematicians with a special interest in graph theory. Key Features: A concise introduction to topological indices of graph theory Appealing to specialists and non-specialists alike Provides many techniques from current research About the Authors:Stephan Wagner grew up in Graz (Austria), where he also received his PhD from Graz University of Technology in 2006. Shortly afterwards, he moved to South Africa, where he started his career at Stellenbosch University as a lecturer in January 2007. His research interests lie mostly in combinatorics and related areas, including connections to other scientific fields such as physics, chemistry and computer science. Hua Wang received his PhD from University of South Carolina in 2005. He held a Visiting Research Assistant Professor position at University of Florida before joining Georgia Southern University in 2008. His research interests include combinatorics and graph theory, elementary number theory, and related problems
