'Imagining the Balkans' examines how an innocent geographic appellation was transformed into a powerful and widespread pejorative designation. In a new afterword, Maria Todorova discusses the reaction to her dubbing of the term Balkanism and recent events in the Balkans.

This is the second volume in the series that documents the 19th edition of the biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. The volume contains contributions on the variety of musical genres from all over the world. Authors engage with the role of popular music in contemporary music education, as well as definitions and conceptualizations of the notion of ‘popular’ in different contexts. Other issues discussed in this volume include methodologies, the structure and interpretations of popular music scenes, genres and repertoires, approaches to education in this area, popular music studies outside the Anglophone world, as well as examinations of discursive and technological aspects of numerous popular music phenomena.

Labor regimes under communism in East-Central Europe were complex, shifting, and ambiguous. This collection of sixteen essays offers new conceptual and empirical ways to understand their history from the end of World War II to 1989, and to think about how their experiences relate to debates about labor history, both European and global. The authors reconsider the history of state socialism by re-examining the policies and problems of communist regimes and recovering the voices of the workers who built them. The contributors look at work and workers in Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. They explore the often contentious relationship between politics and labor policy, dealing with diverse topics including workers’ safety and risks; labor rights and protests; working women’s politics and professions; migrant workers and social welfare; attempts to control workers’ behavior and stem unemployment; and cases of incomplete, compromised, or even abandoned processes of proletarianization. Workers are presented as active agents in resisting and supporting changes in labor policies, in choosing allegiances, and in defining the very nature of work.

In this second book in the Pierce Reston series, Pierce and Kelly unite to unravel a sinister plot. When a Russian nuclear submarine surfaces in a US Naval base with no one aboard, tensions reach a boiling point. With the discovery of the scariest-yet mind control pandemic threatening to level the Earth as we know it, and a global puppet master who's reach is unlimited, Pierce is forced to go to extreme lengths. The US Vice President has been compromised, Russia begins to arm Iran, and Pierce must break every rule to stop a nuclear holocaust.The only problem is - they are very late to the game.