As the economic crisis of 2008/09 unfolded, it became apparent that the huge mountains of debt being built up by central governments were unsustainable and that savage cuts would be needed to balance budgets. It also became clear that the public sector would be one of the first in line when the axe started swinging. Yet, at the very same time, green advocates from business, academia and civil society were making calls for greater investment at the local level in the big sustainability issu...

A taboo-shattering book, How Local Resilience Creates Sustainable Societies sets out how visionary national and local leaders can transform unsustainable societies as they attempt to recover from an age of austerity. By eliminating the culture of dependency in a socially and environmentally progressive way, the book shows how to transcend the political and social spectrum and even unify people around a common purpose. It does this by examining how leaders can make smarter interventions wit...

The business case for sustainability or corporate responsibility will never be strong enough to support an isolated business in its competition against the unscrupulous. The progressive vanguard reaches a point where it can advance no further without rendering itself uncompetitive. That is, unless advocacy and public policy intervention change the rules and shift the bar for the allowable lowest common denominator. With the base reset, so is the bar of aspiration. New rules enable new beha...

This book, which takes the form of a graphic novel, looks at political activism in the public landscape. It has a particular focus on the UK activist group Led By Donkeys which has, since late 2018, been running a campaign to expose hypocrisy in the political classes. Their approach to activism involves the use of large posters and other forms of public display, which highlight the gap between the rhetoric and actions of politicians, and how language and communication is used to manipulate...

Writing good essays is one of the most challenging aspects of studying in the social sciences. This simple guide provides you with proven approaches and techniques to help turn you into a well-oiled, essay writing machine.Good Essay Writing demonstrates how to think critically and formulate your argument as well as offering water-tight structuring tips, referencing advice and a word on those all too familiar common worries – all brought to life through real student...

Design as Politics confronts the inadequacy of contemporary politics to deal with unsustainability. Current 'solutions' to unsustainability are analysed as utterly insufficient for dealing with the problems but, further than this, the book questions the very ability of democracy to deliver a sustainable future.Design as Politics argues that finding solutions to this problem, of which climate change is only one part, demands original and radical thinking. Rather th...

We are living through the consequences of a linguistic revolution. Dramatic linguistic change has left us at the beginning of a new era in the evolution of human language, with repercussions for many individual languages.In this book, David Crystal, one of the world's authorities on language, brings together for the first time the three major trends which he argues have fundamentally altered the world's linguistic ecology: first, the emergence of English as the world's first truly ...

The tsunami of information unleashed by digitization is threatening to overwhelm us, drowning us in a sea of frenzied communication and disrupting many spheres of social life, including politics. Election campaigns are now being waged as information wars with bots and troll armies, and democracy is degenerating into infocracy.In this new book, Byung-Chul Han argues that infocracy is the new form of rule characteristic of contemporary information capitalism. Whereas the disciplinary...

Human language has changed in the age of globalization: no longer tied to stable and resident communities, it moves across the globe, and it changes in the process. The world has become a complex 'web' of villages, towns, neighbourhoods and settlements connected by material and symbolic ties in often unpredictable ways. This phenomenon requires us to revise our understanding of linguistic communication. In The Sociolinguistics of Globalization Jan Blommaert constructs a theory of changing ...

WINNER of the 2015 ICA Outstanding Book AwardThis path-breaking book explores how solidarity towards vulnerable others is performed in our media environment. It argues that stories where famine is described through our own experience of dieting or or where solidarity with Africa translates into wearing a cool armband tell us about much more than the cause that they attempt to communicate. They tell us something about the ways in which we imagine the world outside o...

This volume brings together key writings since the 1992 publication of Linguistic Imperialism – Robert Phillipson’s controversial benchmark volume, which triggered a major re-thinking of the English teaching profession by connecting the field to wider political and economic forces. Analyzing how the global dominance of English in all domains of power is maintained, legitimized and persists in the twenty-first century, Linguistic Imperialism Continued reflects and contribu...

This text involves students in understanding and using the "tools" of critical social and literary theory from the first day of class. It is an ideal first introduction before students encounter more difficult readings from critical and postmodern perspectives.Nealon and Searls Giroux describe key concepts and illuminate each with an engaging inquiry that asks students to consider deeper and deeper questions. Written in students' own idiom, and drawing its examples from the social ...