2154: The Cocoon


Book Description

After a tragic technological mishap, Sia, the ex-leader-in-waiting of Jambudesh, has started a new life in Verdemia as a humanoid. Sia now has everyone she had ever wished for¾her parents, her sister and her companion¾but she yearns for a life where the humans accept her without judgment. Meanwhile, the Non-Residential Earthlings from Mars return to Earth. Sharman, their wily leader, has an ulterior motive to harm the Earthling chosen by the Martians as their new leader. Two Martians hastily follow Sharman to stop him. Can they protect their chosen leader? How is their destiny connected to Sia and her future? Review for Around the World in 2153 The novel takes you for a time travel ride. In a future world distorted beyond recognition by technology and dystopian nation-system straight from 1984, the author grips you with a plot to find human sensibilities. A great read. Goodreads Reader Review Reviews for The Serpents of Kanakapuram The writing is very visual, you really see the natural beauty Kerala possesses in this book. The story is riveting and once you get into it, the book is hard to put down. The Times of India To interlink the world of mythological fiction and Nature is rare. Swapna Raghu Sanand, Financial Express Online




Liturgies from Below


Book Description

It’s been said that prayer is the vocabulary of faith. This book offers a wealth of resources from forgotten places to help us create a new vocabulary for worship and prayer, one that is located amidst the poor and the major issues of violence and destruction around the world today. It is a collection of prayers, songs, rituals, rites of healing, Eucharistic and baptismal prayers, meditations and art from four continents: Asia-Pacific Islands, Africa, Americas, and Europe. Liturgies from Below is the culmination of a project organized by the Council for World Mission (CWM) during 2018-2019. Approximately 100 people from four continents worked with CWM, collaborating to create indigenous prayers and liturgies expressing their own contexts, for sharing with their communities and the rest of the world. The project was called “Re-Imagining Worship as Acts of Defiance and Alternatives in the Context of Empire”. The author and others spent weeks living in each of four communities for several weeks/months, getting to know the people, and then facilitating the people’s own creation of prayers and liturgies. The author, other scholars, pastors, artists, activists and students all came from radically different ethnicities, races, sexualities, churches and Christian theologies. The people in each location were poor, living in very challenging communities, living in oppressive and seemingly hopeless situations. After some time, they wrote prayers and stories of their experience trying to live the Christian faith in utterly abandoned places. What we have here is an immensely rich and varied collection of liturgical sources from various communities dealing with issues of violence, immigration/refugees, drugs, land grabbing, war on the poor, attack on women, militarization, climate change, and so on.




The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication


Book Description

An up-to-date and comprehensive resource for scholars and students of critical intercultural communication studies In the newly revised second edition of The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, a lineup of outstanding critical researchers delivers a one-stop collection of contemporary and relevant readings that define, delineate, and inhabit what it means to ‘do critical intercultural communication.’ In this handbook, you will uncover the latest research and contributions from leading scholars in the field, covering core theoretical, methodological, and applied works that give shape to the arena of critical intercultural communication studies. The handbook's contents scaffold up from historical revisitings to theorizings to inquiry and methodologies and critical projects and applications. This work invites readers to deeply immerse themselves in and reflect upon the thematic threads shared within and across each chapter. Readers will also find: Newly included instructors' resources, including reading assignments, discussion guides, exercises, and syllabi Current and state-of-the-art essays introducing the book and delineating each section Brand-new sections on critical inquiry practices and methodologies and contemporary critical intercultural projects and topics such as settler colonialism, intersectionalities, queerness, race, identities, critical intercultural pedagogy, migration, ecologies, critical futures, and more Perfect for scholars, researchers, and students of intercultural communication, intercultural studies, critical communication, and critical cultural studies, The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, 2nd edition, stands as the premier resource for anyone interested in the dynamic and ever evolving field of study and praxis: critical intercultural communication studies.




Conflict Management and Intercultural Communication


Book Description

Conflict management and harmony building are two key issues of intercultural communication research and merit particular attention in the globally interconnected world. In the expanded second edition, the book explores the effective ways to manage intercultural conflict and develop intercultural harmony, and takes an interdisciplinary approach to address the two issues. The book begins with the theoretical perspectives on conflict management and harmony building. It examines intercultural communication ethics, diversity and inclusion, conflict resolution, conflict face negotiation, and intercultural competence. It presents both Western and non-Western perspectives. The book then addresses in its second section conflict management and harmony building in specific contexts. These include communication in intergenerational relationships, multinational corporations, and virtual spaces, and covers a range of national cultures including the USA, Japan, Germany, and China. Drawing on the current research findings, this book covers the major theoretical perspectives and provides for a wide range of discussions on intercultural conflict management. It is a crucial reference for teachers, students, researchers, and practitioners alike.




Brazilian Elites and their Philanthropy


Book Description

This book explores the philanthropy of Brazilian elites during a key period in recent Brazilian history, from Workers Party president Lula’s last term in office through to the election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. Against this backdrop of political upheaval, the book asks what philanthropy can reveal about the role of corporate and wealth elites in upholding the structures of socioeconomic inequality that continue to define Brazilian society. The book argues that around the world the private sector’s growing engagement in international development has led to the emergence of a global philanthropic project centred on practices of "philanthrocapitalism" and "social finance," which ultimately seeks to legitimise global capitalism and the elite interests it serves. Drawing on an in-depth and wide-ranging ethnographic study among philanthropists and their advisors in over 30 Brazilian foundations and intermediary organisations, the book combines a structural critique of the capitalist ideologies underlying philanthropic practice with a robust exploration into the ways in which wealthy Brazilians appropriate philanthropy directly to legitimise elite reproduction and the accumulation of wealth. Researchers across Latin American studies, development studies and the anthropology of development will find this book a timely contribution to the under-researched areas of elite studies and the study of philanthropy.




SMART Futures for a Flourishing World


Book Description

Has the COVID-19 pandemic derailed the global community’s commitment to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030? Are we heading for environmental collapse? Can we avert a climate catastrophe and enable peace, justice, and shared futures for humanity? These questions call for transformational change. This book explores the root causes of today’s failures and lays out a plan for real-world innovation labs using a SMART future design paradigm to achieve the UN’s 17 sustainability goals and 169 targets. SMART futures is a ‘systems literacy’ approach to problem solving that allows us to address challenges of our VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world as an integrated whole. This new paradigm shifts us from silo thinking to systems thinking. With lively storytelling and thought-provoking analysis, Dr. Claire Nelson opens a doorway to the future, and a vision of what success might look like. Her stories from the future present worldviews of the feminine and from the global South, which are often absent from contemporary global futures discourse.




Praying with Every Heart


Book Description

This book develops an understanding of prayer from a liberation-theological perspective. “Praying with” offers a distinctive way of praying that can help orient our prayers around the “where” we pray and “with whom” we pray as the locus of the body’s and heart’s theological praxis. The book helps create language to pray with people and in situations we are not used to praying with; it insists on praying amidst racism, poverty, violence, and suffering; it calls us to pray at night and at the end of the world when we are overcome by fear, hurt, climate disaster, or economic impoverishment; it ventures into interfaith prayer settings; and it claims a sense of “self” that is not discrete, encapsulated in its own thinking or feeling—rather, it understands the notion of the self as entangled with the whole earth and each sentient and nonsentient being. Thus, to “pray with” in this book is to take the location of one’s prayer more seriously and, individually and collectively, to gain an awareness of our grounding and positionality, therefore creating a theological structure that assumes both the listening of our own heart and the voices of everything around us.




Aftershocks


Book Description

Two of America's leading national security experts offer a definitive account of the global impact of COVID-19 and the political shock waves it will have on the United States and the world order in the 21st Century. “Informed by history, reporting, and a truly global perspective, this is an indispensable first draft of history and blueprint for how we can move forward.” —Ben Rhodes The COVID-19 pandemic killed millions, infected hundreds of millions, and laid bare the deep vulnerabilities and inequalities of our interconnected world. The accompanying economic crash was the worst since the Great Depression, with the International Monetary Fund estimating that it will cost over $22 trillion in global wealth over the next few years. Over two decades of progress in reducing extreme poverty was erased, just in the space of a few months. Already fragile states in every corner of the globe were further hollowed out. The brewing clash between the United States and China boiled over and the worldwide contest between democracy and authoritarianism deepened. It was a truly global crisis necessitating a collective response—and yet international cooperation almost entirely broke down, with key world leaders hardly on speaking terms. Colin Kahl and Thomas Wright's Aftershocks offers a riveting and comprehensive account of one of the strangest and most consequential years on record. Drawing on interviews with officials from around the world and extensive research, the authors tell the story of how nationalism and major power rivalries constrained the response to the worst pandemic in a century. They demonstrate the myriad ways in which the crisis exposed the limits of the old international order and how the reverberations from COVID-19 will be felt for years to come.




From Rulership to Leadership in the Arab World


Book Description

This brief memoir recounts the journey of a man and lessons he accumulated on leadership by observing and questioning the status quo, and asking the penultimate question of why, from his childhood home in the small island of Bahrain, to his formative years as a student and professional in England, to his adulthood as a business leader, philanthropist, influencer and family man. The book’s key observation is that there is an excess of rulership while leadership is almost always in deficit. The book questions how we can move from one to the other, which examples can we rely on in every sphere of our lives and how transformative more leadership would be.




Understanding Personalisation


Book Description

Understanding Personalization: New Aspects of Design and Consumption addresses the global phenomenon of personalization that affects many aspects of everyday life. The book identifies the dimensions of personalization and its typologies. Issues of privacy, the ethics of design, and the designer/maker's control versus the consumer's freedom are covered, along with sections on digital personalization, advances in new media technologies and software development, the way we communicate, our personal devices, and the way personal data is stored and used. Other sections cover the principles of personalization and changing patterns of consumption and development in marketing that facilitate individualized products and services. The book also assesses the convergence of both producers and consumers towards the co-creation of goods and services and the challenges surrounding personalization, customization, and bespoke marketing in the context of ownership and consumption. - Offers multiple perspectives on personalization, a pervasive and complex issue - Presents expertise and practical examples to help users understand personalization and its application to a variety of disciplines - Breaks new ground in defining and explaining personalization in the context of individualized and micro-marketing




Recent Books