Global Shaping and its Alternatives offers a unique series of reflections on the connections between market capitalism, the politics of alternatives, and the cultural elaboration of social change. It argues that there is a need for an alternative explanatory framework on globalization - one that rejects fatalism and highlights the dynamic roles of states, NGOs, local fractions of capital, democrative movements and gendered social relations. Without understanding how global shaping is taking place and how it affects human life across the globe, there can be no transformational possibility for humanizing our conditions of existence.

This revised version of Kaela Jubas’ award winning dissertation focuses on contemporary shopping practices, analyzing the ways concerned shoppers think about globalization, consumption, and their personal effect on the status quo. By using numerous examples from modern advertising, interviews with self-described “radical” shoppers, and selected quotes from scholars and experts, Jubas delves into questions of social justice, environmental awareness, and consumer identity -- all demonstrated by individual choices made at the checkout counter. Employing a variety of qualitative research techniques and complex and counterintiuitive cultural theory, Jubas’s study will interest those in adult education, cultural studies, consumer research, and qualitative inquiry.

Every day, we are barraged by statistics, images, and emotional messages that present poverty as a problem to be quantified, managed, and solved. Global generations present the poor as a heterogeneous group and stress globalized solutions to the problem of poverty. Governing the Poor exposes the ways in which such generalized descriptions and quantifications marginalize the poor and their experiences.

Burron provides a critical analysis of Canadian and US democracy promotion in the Americas. He concentrates on Haiti, Peru, and Bolivia in particular but situates them within a larger analysis of Canadian and US foreign policy - bilateral and regional - in the areas of trade, investment, diplomacy, security and, for the United States, the war on drugs. His main argument is that democracy promotion is typically formulated to advance commercial, geopolitical and security objectives that conflict with a genuine commitment to democratic development. Given this broad scope, the book is well positioned to contribute to a number of debates in comparative Latin American politics and international political economy (IPE) with a focus on North-South relations in the hemisphere.

More than 15 years have passed since the end of the Cold War, but uncertainty persists in the political-economic shaping of the world economy and state system. Although many countries have institutionalized neoliberal policies since the mid-1970s, these policies have not taken hold to the same degree, nor have their effects been uniform across all countries. Nevertheless there has been widespread deepening of inequalities, and, therefore, scepticism towards the neoliberal project. Uncertainty prevails not only in the relations between states, but also in the relations between forces of capital, citizens, and political power within states. Moreover, there is conceptual confusion in our understanding of the events and processes of neoliberal global transformation. This collection of essays provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical examination of neoliberal restructuring as a complex political process. In an effort to penetrate and clarify this complexity, the book explores the connections between the economy, state, society, and citizens, while also offering current examples of resistance to neoliberalism. The book provides a forum for rethinking politics that represents a turn to societal forces as essential not only to the uncovering of this complexity but also to the formulation of democratic possibilities beyond global hegemonic projects. The book does not seek to produce a new model for social change, nor does it dwell on the spatial aspects of modernity's new form or the emergence of a new state hegemony (China) or new forms of rule (empire) in managing the world capitalist economy. Instead, the book argues that an understanding of hegemonic transformations requires the problematization of global power as embedded in historically specific social relations.

Global megatrends for the next 20 years and how they will affect the United States. This is the fifth installment in the National Intelligence Council’s series aimed at providing a framework for thinking about possible futures and their implications. The report is intended to stimulate strategic thinking about the rapid and vast geopolitical changes characterizing the world today and possible global trajectories during the next 15-20 years by identifying critical trends and potential discontinuities. The authors distinguish between megatrends, those factors that will likely occur under any scenario, and game-changers, critical variables whose trajectories are far less certain. NIC 2012-001. Appropriate for anyone, from business to banks, government to start-ups, technology to teachers and more, this publication hellps anticipate where the world will be socially, politically, technically and culturally over the next few decades. Several innovations are included in Global Trends 2030, including: a review of the four previous Global Trends reports, input from academic and other experts around the world, coverage of disruptive technologies, and a chapter on the potential trajectories for the US role in the international system and the possible the impact on future international relations.

This two-volume set LNCS 13192 – 13193 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Information for a Better World: Shaping the Global Future, held in February 2022. Due to COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held virtually. The 32 full papers and the 29 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 167 submissions. They cover topics such as: Library and Information Science; Information Governance and Ethics; Data Science; Human-Computer Interaction and Technology ̧ Information Behaviour and Retrieval ̧ Communities and Media ̧ Health Informatics.