Social Sciences

Despite China’s rise to the status of global power, many Chinese youths are anxious about their personal future, in large measure because the rapid changes have left them feeling adrift.  This book, available in open access, provides a manifesto of intellectual activism that counsels China’s young people to think by themselves and for themselves. Consisting of three conversations between Xiang Biao, a social anthropologist, and Wu Qi, a rising journalist, the book probes how China has reached its current stage and how young people can make changes. The conversations touch on issues of mobility, education, family, relations between the self and the authority, centers and margins, China, and the world. The Chinese version was named the “most impactful book of 2021” by Douban, China’s premier website for rating books, films, and music.  The English version is translated by David Ownby, who also penned an introduction. 

This volume addresses the rapid growth of China’s cultural industry and its significant cultural and economic impact on the country. It considers what exactly constitutes the cultural industry, defining the basis for discussions on issues as the internal tensions constraining China’s cultural industry development. It examines the place of culture and cultural industry in relation to China’s overall development, and what kinds of strategies, policies and concrete measures are most effective in promoting the industry’s growth, exploring the role of Government in Cultural Industrial Development.

China's urbanization has stunned the world in the past two decades- but as the authors of this book explain, the growth is only set to continue. The divide between urban and rural citizens in China implicates every aspect of Chinese life, from education to pollution to healthcare. In this book, one of China's most celebrated academic urbanists and a major urban planner collaborate in laying out and analyzing the problems of China's urban-rural divide, experiences of urbanization, and what the future holds. This book is a must read, not only for the accurate summaries of China's developmental experience it includes, but also for the insights it provides into the mentalities of the government officials and private developers who are creating realities on the ground in Chinese cities.

The Path to a Sustainable Civilisation shows that we have unwittingly fallen into an existential crisis of our own making. We have allowed large corporations, the military and other vested interests to capture governments and influence public opinion excessively. We have created a god called ‘the market’ and allowed our most important decisions to be made by this imaginary entity, which is in fact a human system controlled by vested interests. The result has been the exploitation of our life support system, our planet, and most of its inhabitants, to the point of collapse.

This book analyses the systematic and procedural issues that are faced by women in the Parliament and brings to light the systematic ignorance of certain issues supported by data on the Parliamentary Debates, Question Hours and functioning of Parliamentary Committees. Combining these technical issues with substantive legal arguments in favour of gender mainstreaming, this book acts as a tool of strategic advantage for policymakers, legislators, advocates and researchers. This work unearths not only the problem areas of the research theme, but also dedicates a solution which relies on effective monitoring techniques used globally, specifically to achieve the SDGs in the field of Nutrition, Family Planning and Sexual and Reproductive Health.

This book illuminates how science fiction studies can support diversity, equity, and inclusion in science and engineering. Shortly before science fiction got its name, a new paradigm connected whiteness and masculinity to the advancement of civilization. In order to show how science fiction authors supported the social construction of these gender and racial norms – and also challenged them – this study analyzes the impact of three major editors and the authors in their orbits: Hugo Gernsback; John W. Campbell, Jr.; and Judith Merril. Supported by a fresh look at archival sources and the author’s experience teaching Science and Technology Studies at universities on three continents, this study demonstrates the interconnections among discourses of imperialism, masculinity, and innovation. Readers gain insights into fighting prejudice, the importance of the community of authors and readers, and ideas about how to challenge racism, sexism, and xenophobia in new creative work. This stimulating book demonstrates how education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) can be enhanced by adding the liberal arts, such as historical and literary studies, to create STEAM.

This book focuses on the discourse of de-globalisation in Malaysia by looking at the implications of this process politically, economically, socially, and environmentally.

Since the emergence of this pandemic, Malaysia has been facing not only a change of government but also a rapid decline in its economy, a rise in unemployment and living costs, with the human rights situation deteriorating as the State of Emergency was imposed. All of these add up to a shift toward de-globalisation. Chapters in this book, therefore, engage with this issue from different perspectives, such as conventional warfare, bio-constitutional implications to the right to health, labour, migrants and refugees, digital education, indigenous people and so forth.

This book takes the contemporary moment of digital health infrastructuring in Ghana as a starting point to examine the genealogies of oral, paper-based and digital forms of knowledge production about health. In view of this multiplicity of forms, the chapters adopt a broad definition of health data that encompasses databases, statistics as well as oral and written records and reports about health. In addition to close historiographic insights into the interactions of indigenous and colonial ways of organising knowledge around health, the chapters explore contemporary ways in which medical professionals are mobilized or potentially demobilized by the standards, methods and calculative devices that accompany the increasing production of health data.

The authors show that the contemporary hype around the datafication of health is neither new nor exceptional, but instead needs to be read in broader historical perspective. Through its unique combination of historical, sociological and ethnographic methods, the book shows that the regulation and standardization of health produces both mobilizations and demobilizations, as well as appropriations and resistances.

This timely and ambitious volume - a product of close research collaboration with the United Nations Multi-Country Office for Micronesia - is conceived as a holistic “journey” across various domains of progress in a region that, despite fundamental common traits, remains vast and diverse. Pacific island countries and territories (PICTs) have (too) often been identified with elements of vulnerability, whether these be social, economic, or environmental in nature. While these factors cannot be overlooked, this volume aims to showcase not only the long-standing and emerging challenges but, perhaps more importantly, the opportunities, the resilience, the resourcefulness, and the ambition that local socioeconomic development patterns in the Pacific already encompass. Beyond PICTs themselves, we hope that the analyses collected in this book will contribute to highlighting the global significance of the human–nature nexus in the current Anthropocene. Often captured in the concept of “small islands, big oceans”, the importance of the region and its islands and peoples transcends the geographical remoteness and small size of many PICTs.

The book is a collection of essays written by scholars/activists who are continuously concerned about the Fukushima catastrophe. The authors engagingly address the devastating environmental, economic, and social consequences of nuclear disasters, as well as recognize resistance of local communities through searching for alternative life and thought. The book offers a critique of nuclear energy and calls for collective action for social justice and ecological justice.

This book holds a distinguished promise of an intellectual understanding and complete account of that shifts in laying out resilient planning, development, and policy landscapes for the cities to come.

The approach offers a unique perspective on planning and development in the post-pandemic era, addressing the interconnectedness of diverse spatial, social, cultural, economic, demographic, and political aspects. It provides insights into the transformational behavior of cities and citizens, explores the influence of remote work on the real estate market, emphasizes the need for resilient infrastructure and adaptive planning, and reinforces the association between health infrastructure and planning for resilient cities.

The book provides a comprehensive account of the shifts and challenges faced in planning and development due to climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores transformational urban planning, sociocultural, and economic landscapes and addresses topics, including land use changes, transformational real estate market, urban recreational space, adaptive infrastructure, and the need for resilient planning. It offers valuable insights for urban designers, architects, geographers, city planners, policymakers, and pubic officials seeking to enhance city resilience in the post-pandemic era.

The intended readership of the book includes urban designers, architects, city planners, geographers, policy makers, and public officials. It caters to individuals interested in gaining a critical understanding of the interconnectedness between various spatial, social, cultural, economic, demographic, and political aspects. The content level is academic, offering scholarly insights and a unique post-pandemic perspective on enhancing city resilience.

This book provides an in-depth empirical analysis of six core strategies in China's grassroots social governance. These strategies represent the essence of grassroots social governance in China, spanning community management, public services, conflict mediation, and mass participation. They embody the innovative spirit and pragmatic approach of the Chinese government in social governance. By empirically analyzing these strategies, the book unveils the unique advantages of China's grassroots social governance and its significance for global governance. It is an indispensable textbook, especially for courses on Chinese politics, social governance in China, and East Asian politics.

This book systematically explores the lives and varied experiences of older people in South Africa. Though a relatively youthful country, the share of the population aged sixty and above in South Africa is increasing steadily and is projected to reach 10% of the population by 2025. Population ageing is having major and far-reaching implications for a country with widespread poverty, changing household structures, a heavy burden of communicable diseases, and inadequate health infrastructure. Pandemics, such as HIV/AIDS and COVID-19, exacerbate many of the challenges faced by older people. Drawing on original research from national surveys and case studies, this book explores the various experiences and challenges of older people in their daily lives, such as their healthcare, social and family lives, their socio-economic status, mental health, and what it means to be an older person in South Africa today.

This book introduces the ecological, low-carbon, and sustainable concept of ideal cities from different views. With beliefs and practices of scholars in the past in pursuit of ideal cities, it is written with historical events in the development of low-carbon cities. In this way, activities about carbon peaking and carbon neutrality happening worldwide at present can be shown, and efforts variety countries have paid off can be exhibited. Besides, as for the centralized and the distributed space structure in urban evolution, the book discusses their trends and comes up with an ideal model, the distributed city, to realize carbon neutrality based on the distributed structure. Therefore, with a practical example in planning, the feasibility of the distributed city is analyzed in several fields, including space, energy, traffic, water, waste disposal, etc. The book can be used as materials for professionals in city planning and construction, low-carbon development and other fields, as well as a way for ordinary people to learn about the complex city.

This open access book, comprising thirty-nine chapters divided into social, cultural, economic, and political spheres, offers a unique opportunity to dive into the complex, dynamic, and sometimes contradictory transformation of Gulf societies in the last few decades. Whilst the Gulf region has at times been seen as impervious to this natural phenomenon of transformation—timeless, never changing, deeply rooted in its ancient tribal customs and traditions and able to blend past and present seamlessly without suffering the wrenching trauma of change—this is clearly not the case, and the region is not immune to the inevitable forces of social change. There is no doubt today that the social change sweeping the Gulf has been profound, affecting almost every aspect of life in the Gulf societies. This volume has an encyclopedic value as the chapters collectively offer multifaceted and multidisciplinary perspectives to understand social change inthe Gulf region. Through these chapters, the role of economic and educational transformation, and the impact of social media, migration, and urbanization have in driving social change in the Gulf societies is examined in detail with a focus on their directions, magnitudes, and relevant policy options. It also considers how COVID-19 is affecting the lives of the people in the Gulf. This book bridges gaps in the understanding of the rapid pace of social change in the Gulf, offering practical solutions for policy interventions. It is of interest to scholars and students in Middle Eastern studies, specifically, as well as sociology, media studies, migration studies, and educational policy.

This book attempts to develop a novel way of conceptualizing regionalism under hyper-globalization. Until recently, regionalism has been often framed in terms of economic interdependence and security connectivity in which sovereign states are the key navigators within the liberal world order. Under hyper-globalization in the third millennium, hyper-globalization forces us to capture global politics at two more levels of measurement at the state level and both there below and there above. First, how 29 Asian sovereign states join multilateral treaty participation to develop their global quasi-legislative types and how citizens' satisfaction with quality of life in 29 civil societies shapes their societal types. Second, relating these two features above and below sovereign states, the book attempts to measure the features and speculate on the futures of four Asian regionalisms (Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia) and their prospect of the demographically largest continent called Asia in the twenty-first century. Regionalism is measured by the proclivity of 600 multilateral treaty participation in terms of speed (cautious versus agile), angle (global commons versus individual interests) and strategy (aspirational bonding versus mutual binding), whereas quality of life is measured by citizens' satisfaction with 16 domains, aspects and styles of individual daily life in terms of survival (or materialism), social relations (post-materialism) and public policy preponderance. The book opens an innovative vista to better understand tumultuous global politics.

This ambitious volume leverages original survey data on citizen satisfaction and country-level data on treaty accessions to characterize the trajectories of countries in four regions of Asia as they adapt -- or fail to adapt -- to the challenges of globalization in the 21st century and beyond. Readers will learn much about politics from the basic level of the individual citizen to the most comprehensive level of the global system - and about the interactions of politics at all levels.

-- Andrew J. Nathan, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science, Columbia University 

A wonderful attempt to link a country’s domestic development and its adaptation to the global politics. It is truly eye-opening and the findings are likely to significantly shape our understanding of life and global politics.

-- Zhengxu Wang, Ph.D. Distinguished Professor, Department of Political Science, Fudan University

This open access book approaches the history of tribes and their role in the formation of the modern states of Kuwait and Qatar by blending historical, political, and sociological perspectives. Traditionally, this subject has been approached from single perspective, often picturing the tribe as a political and social entity that is opposed to the modern state. In the Gulf context, presenting and discussing the case studies of Kuwait and Qatar aims at revealing that the tribe played a salient role in the formation of the modern state in these two countries as well as in nation building, both before the oil era and even after independence. Moreover, the book bridges an important gap that is often overlooked in GCC studies which explains how the tribe suddenly became a controversial factor in Gulf states and societies. The book elaborates on tracing the roots of this transformation and in evaluating the role played by the state as it attempted to manipulate tribes to achieve political and other advantages, only to trigger the rise of tribalism as a social and at times political force that undermines the legitimacy of the state. The book also highlights the impacts of this transformation, not only on the state, but also on society as a whole, with special emphasis on women in Kuwait and Qatar. It is relevant to scholars and advanced students in areas of political sociology, identify and gender, comparative politics, and for social scientists more broadly with a specific interest in the Middle East.

This handbook adopts a transdisciplinary approach to primary healthcare, incorporating a wide scope of perspectives and case studies from Hong Kong in China. It consists of four sections that explore the foundations, practices, development aspects of primary healthcare and systems. The book also pays particular attention to the psychosocial and humanistic contexts of primary healthcare, exploring dimensions such as misinformation in the age of social media in health communication and aspects of resilience in primary healthcare. With contributions from scholars and practitioners in areas that include family medicine, psychology, nutrition, health policy, health education, dentistry, social work, as well as Chinese medicine, it is an expansive presentation of current knowledge on healthcare in the community setting. It is an indispensable reference for policymakers, researchers, advanced students, primary healthcare professionals, community health practitioners, and health managers and educators seeking to collate the practical and philosophical aspects of healthcare, in Hong Kong particularly, but also in Greater China and Asia more broadly. Beyond its relevance to the immediate medical community, it is also a valuable text for researchers in medical law, social sciences, quality of life studies, public policy, business administration, and information technology and health communication.