Cultural traditions transmitted within the primary and secondary migratory communities of the Caribbean are continually subject to loss, gain and reinterpretation. Communication practices play a role in these processes as they help to sustain and challenge the diasporic subjectivities of the Caribbean. Re-Constructing Place and Space: Media, Culture, Discourse and the Constitution of Caribbean Diasporas seeks to explore the influence of embodied, discursive and mediated communicative forms on the construction and maintenance of Caribbean diasporic communities. The volume emerged from the 2009 New Media and the Global Diaspora Symposium: Exploring Media in Caribbean Diasporas held at Roger Williams University in the United States. The event sought to encourage interdisciplinary academic discourse on Caribbean migratory populations, foregrounding the role of communicative practices in sustaining their traditions. In keeping with the spirit of the symposium, this volume applies a transdisciplinary lens to understanding the diversity and complexity of Caribbean peoples’ production of and engagement with communication practices. The objectives for the book are two-fold. The general objective is to contribute to discourse on diasporic identity and performativity. The more specific aim of the book is to present a more complex picture of peoples from the Caribbean region and their diasporic communities. —From the Introduction

New technologies have the power to augment many aspects of society, including public spaces and art. The impact of smart technology on urban design is vast and filled with opportunity and has profound implications on the everyday urban environment. Only by starting new conversations can we develop further contemporary insights that will affect how we move through the world. Reconstructing Urban Ambiance in Smart Public Places is a pivotal reference source that provides contemporary insights into a comprehensive interpretation of urban ambiances in smart places as it relates to the development of cities or to various levels of intervention in extant urban environments. The book also examines the impact of architectural design on the creation of urban ambience in artworks and how to reflect this technique in the fields of professional architectural practice. While covering a wide range of topics including wellbeing, quality-related artistry, and atmosphere, this publication combines smart technological innovation with creative design principles. This book is ideally designed for civil engineers, urban designers, architects, entrepreneurs, policymakers, researchers, academicians, and students.

Mental and material reconstruction was an ongoing process after World War II, and it still is. This volume combines a detailed treatment of post-war cultural reconstruction in Finnish Lapland – a region on the geographical and historical margins of its nation-state – with comparative case studies of silent post-war memory from other European countries The contributors shed light on key aspects of cultural reconstruction generally: disruptions of national narratives, difficulties of post-war cultural demobilisation, sites of memory, visual narratives of post-war reconstruction, and manifestations of trans-generational experiences of cultural reconstruction. Exploration of the less conspicuous aspects of mental reconstruction reveals various forms of post-war silence and silencing which have halted or hindered different groups of people in their mental return to peace. Rather than focusing on the “executive level” of material reconstruction, the volume turns its gaze towards those who experienced the return to peace in the mental, societal, and historical margins: members of ethnic, religious, and cultural minorities, women, and children. The chapters draw on archival and other original sources, personal memories, autobiographical interpretations, and academic debate. The volume is relevant for scholars and advanced students in the fields of cultural history, art history, and cultural studies.

In the practice of constructing the idea of home and the emotions surrounding it, sensory experiences and materiality intertwine to form layers of memory and affective atmospheres. People in different life stages and situations create continuity and a sense of home by engaging with materiality and objects in their own unique way. Reconstructing Homes takes on a multidisciplinary approach of sensory ethnography, visual methods and autoethnography methodologies to explore affective engagements with materiality in the context of home and the idea of belonging.

This book reconstructs the foundations of developmental and educational psychology and fills an important gap in the field by arguing for a specific spatial turn so that human growth, experience and development focus not only on time but space. This regards space not simply as place. Highlighting concrete cross-cultural relational spaces of concentric and diametric spatial systems, the book argues that transition between these systems offers a new paradigm for understanding agency and inclusion in developmental and educational psychology, and for relating experiential dimensions to causal explanations. The chapters examine key themes for developing concentric spatial systemic responses in education, including school climate, bullying, violence, early school leaving prevention and students’ voices. Moreover, the book proposes an innovative framework of agency as movement between concentric and diametric spatial relations for a reconstruction of resilience. This model addresses the vital neglected issue of resistance to sheer cultural conditioning and goes beyond the foundational ideas of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, as well as Vygotsky, Skinner, Freud, Massey, Bruner, Gestalt and postmodern psychology to reinterpret them in dynamic spatial systemic terms. Written by an internationally renowned expert, this book is a valuable resource for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the areas of educational and developmental psychology, as well as related areas such as personality theory, health psychology, social work, teacher education and anthropology.

Joseph Anténor Firmin (1850–1911) was the reigning public intellectual and political critic in Haiti in the nineteenth century. He was the first “Black anthropologist” and “Black Egyptologist” to deconstruct the Western interpretation of global history and challenge the ideological construction of human nature and theories of knowledge in the Western social sciences and the humanities. As an anti-racist intellectual and cosmopolitan thinker, Firmin’s writings challenge Western ideas of the colonial subject, race achievement, and modernity’s imagination of a linear narrative based on the false premises of social evolution and development, colonial history and epistemology, and the intellectual evolution of the Aryan-White race. Firmin articulated an alternative way to study global historical trajectories, the political life, human societies and interactions, and the diplomatic relations and dynamics between the nations and the races. Reconstructing the Social Sciences and Humanities is the first full-length book devoted to Joseph Anténor Firmin. It reexamines the importance of his thought and legacy, and its relevance for the twenty-first century’s culture of humanism, and the continuing challenge of race and racism.

This book examines the shifting portrayal of the nation in school textbooks in 14 countries during periods of rapid political, social, and economic change. Drawing on a range of analytic strategies, the authors examine history and civics textbooks, and the teaching of such texts, along with other prominent curricular materials—children’s readers, a required text penned by the head of state, a holocaust curriculum, etc.. The authors analyze the uses of history and pedagogy in building, reinforcing and/or redefining the nation and state especially in the light of challenges to its legitimacy. The primary focus is on countries in developing or transitional contexts. Issues include the teaching of democratic civics in a multiethnic state with little history of democratic governance; shifts in teaching about the Khmer Rouge in post-conflict Cambodia; children’s readers used to define national space in former republics of the Soviet Union; the development of Holocaust education in a context where citizens were both victims and perpetuators of violence; the creation of a national past in Turkmenistan; and so forth. The case studies are supplemented by commentary, an introduction and conclusion.