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This open access volume showcases the intersection of geophysics and archaeology on a global scale, emphasising the evolution and application of geophysical methods in archaeological research and cultural heritage management. It compiles contributions from 74 experts based in 18 countries, with their research and case studies spanning across 24 different countries, focusing on the use of near-surface geophysical techniques and their integration with soil analyses and other methods to enrich archaeological interpretations. Prepared under the auspices of the collaborative network fostered by COST Action SAGA - CA17131, this work navigates through the successes and challenges encountered in the widespread adoption of archaeo-geophysical methods across diverse geographic and cultural landscapes. It offers a comprehensive chronicle of the genesis, maturation, and cutting-edge advancements in geophysical techniques, advocating for their amplified integration within the archaeological community. Incorporating an array of case studies and critical discussions on methodological and interpretive questions, the book underscores the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration, and defines perspectives for innovation and growth within the field. As an open-access work, 'WORLD ARCHAEO-GEOPHYSICS' aims to contribute to the democratisation of knowledge, fostering shared learning and cooperative engagement among professionals, academics, students and archaeology enthusiasts alike. Funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) and supported by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), this volume stands as a legacy of the resilient spirit of collaboration that defined the COST Action SAGA community, even in the face of pandemic challenges. It invites the academic and professional community to engage in new explorations and advancements, positioning itself as a reference for current and future endeavors in archaeo-geophysics.

In the first years of the 21st century, economic liberalisation began to transform telecommunications services throughout the Pacific Islands. Government regulators, corporate executives and everyday consumers hopefully imagined that opening mobile phone markets to competition would result in greater access, lower costs and accelerated development. Uneven Connections examines the ways in which liberalisation took hold in Papua New Guinea (PNG) when a unit of the Caribbean-based mobile network operator Digicel Group Ltd. seized the opportunity to compete with the state-sponsored incumbent. The book highlights how mobile phones entered the lives of urban and rural Papua New Guineans after Digicel's arrival in 2007. In so doing, it describes a moral economy in which companies, consumers and state agents continually negotiate who owes what to whom. In what ways have these various actors invented and negotiated new forms of both freedom and constraint? Uneven Connections advances understanding of how a so-called digital revolution in PNG unfolded, resulting in outcomes that often confounded the expectations of policy makers and ordinary citizens alike. It assesses the extent to which some of the promises of this revolution have been redeemed and identifies the challenges faced by companies, consumers and state agents in establishing and experiencing novel forms of uneven connectivity. The book provides a short and selective history of mobile phones in PNG, ending with the sale of Digicel’s Pacific operations to the Australian company Telstra in 2022.

Adaptation and resilience in the performing arts shares important insights into the effects of the pandemic on live performance in the UK. It features eight projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council between 2020 and 2022 to undertake research that would address the problems caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The researchers share what they discovered from working with practitioners and companies in the live performing arts (especially theatre and dance) who rapidly adapted their working practices and the spaces in which they were able to connect safely with audiences, whether digital or outdoors. Several chapters provide evidence of the impacts of digital innovations and telepresence technologies on artists and audiences and shed light on how government discourses and the support structures within the industry affected the mental health of creative practitioners. Addressing policymakers and practitioners, others demonstrate how artists and local government events managers approached programming community-based work outdoors. Throughout, the essays are infused with practical energy, inspired by the creativity and dedication of the practitioners, and mindful of how the pandemic exacerbated the structural and financial precariousness of the workforce in live performing arts. They offer evidence-based reflections on values-led practices in the creative sector that model more inclusive, accessible and sustainable ways of working. Adaptation and resilience thus contributes to shaping our understanding of the challenges faced by live performing arts at a time of crisis – and how these may be overcome.

Analysing Education Policy: Theory and Method provides a comprehensive overview of key approaches in critical education policy research. With chapters from internationally recognised and established scholars in the field, this book provides an authoritative account of how different questions may be approached and answered. Part 1 features chapters focused on text-based approaches to analysis, including critical discourse analysis, thinking with Foucault, Indigenist Policy Analysis, media analysis, the analysis of promotional texts in education, and the analysis of online networks. Part 2 features chapters focused on network ethnography, actor-network theory, materiality in policy, Institutional Ethnography, decolonising approaches to curriculum policy, working with children and young people, and working with education policy elites. These chapters are supported by an introduction to each section, as well as an overall introduction and conclusion chapter from the editors, drawing together key themes and ongoing considerations for the field. Critical education policy analysis takes many different forms, each of which works with distinctly different questions and fulfils different purposes. This book is the first to clearly map current common and influential approaches to answering these questions, providing important guidance for both new and established researchers.

Der Band befasst sich mit Zusammenhängen von Sprache, Interkulturalität und Digitalität. Die neun Kapitel untersuchen, wie sich Interkulturalität in verschiedenen Settings digitaler Kommunikation – von YouTube über Tripadvisor bis Twitter – manifestiert und wie sie mit kommunikativen Strategien und komplexen Identitätsdarstellungen verwoben wird. The contributions to this volume address the blending of language, interculturality and digitality. The nine chapters investigate how (inter)culturality is manifested in various settings of digital communication – from YouTube to Tripadvisor and Twitter – and how it becomes intertwined with sets of communicative strategies and complex displays of identity. .

The Internet has penetrated material reality to such an extent that it is now often impossible to disentangle the material from the virtual. In this postdigital scenario, the encounter with ›newness‹ becomes accessible at the touch of a button, 24/7. Learning becomes a lifewide experience which allows for the emergence of new culturalities. The contributors to this volume engage with cultural changes brought about by an intensified digitalization process in the context of formal education but also shed light on unexpected contexts in which informal learning experiences take place every day, strengthening diasporas, creating new connections and transforming ourselves and our societies.

This open access book presents three future consumption trends—technology, sustainability, and wellbeing—and discusses what impact those trends will have on the ways we shop. What will be important to the consumers of the future? And how will their retail experiences look and feel? Will technology, sustainability, and wellbeing trends fundamentally change how we consume? And how should retail managers respond to these trends in order to provide the customer experiences of the future? Blending academic perspectives with reflections from innovative retailers, this book explores all these questions and more. Essential reading for retail managers who want to know how future consumption trends will affect the industry, this book also benefits students and researchers of retail and consumption who want to better understand how these interdependent fields are linked.

Conspiracy Theories in the Time of Covid-19 provides a wide-ranging analysis of the emergence and development of conspiracy theories during the Covid-19 pandemic, with a focus on the US and the UK. The book combines digital methods analysis of large datasets assembled from social media with politically and culturally contextualised close readings informed by cultural studies. In contrast to other studies which often have an alarmist take on the "infodemic," it places Covid-19 conspiracy theories in a longer historical perspective. It also argues against the tendency to view conspiracy theories as merely evidence of a fringe or pathological way of thinking. Instead, the starting assumption is that conspiracy theories, including Covid-19 conspiracy theories, often reflect genuine and legitimate concerns, even if their factual claims are wide of the mark. The authors examine the nature and origins of the conspiracy theories that have emerged; the identity and rationale of those drawn to Covid-19 conspiracism; how these conspiracy theories fit within the wider political, economic and technological landscape of the online information environment; and proposed interventions from social media platforms and regulatory agencies. This book will appeal to anyone interested in conspiracy theories, misinformation, culture wars, social media and contemporary society.

Since the so-called Arab Spring, citizens of African countries have continued to use digital tools in creative ways to ensure that marginalised voices are heard, and to demand for the rights they are entitled to in law: to freely associate, to form opinions, and to express them online without fear of violence or arrest. The authors of this compelling open access volume have brought to life this dramatic struggle for the digital realm between citizens and governments; documenting in vivid detail how citizens are using mobile and internet tools in powerful viral global campaigns to hold governments accountable and force policy change. With contributions from scholars across the continent, Digital Citizenship in Africa illustrates how citizens have been using VPNs, encryption, and privacy-protecting browsers to resist limits on their rights to privacy and political speech. This book dramatically expands our understanding of the vast and growing arsenal of tech tools, tactics, and techniques now being deployed by repressive governments to limit the ability of citizens to safely and openly express opposition to government and corporate actions. AI-enabled surveillance, covertly deployed disinformation, and internet shutdowns are documented in ten countries, concluding with recommendations on how to curb government and corporate power, and how to re-invigorate digital citizenship across Africa. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Technology is quickly becoming an integral part of care systems across the world and is frequently cited in policy discourse as pivotal for solving the ‘crisis’ in care and delivering positive outcomes. Exploring the role of technology in Europe, Canada, Australia and Japan, this book examines how technology contributes effectively to the sustainability of these different care systems, which are facing similar emergent pressures, including increased longevity, falling fertility and the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. It considers the challenges and opportunities of embedding technologies in care systems and the subsequent outcomes for older and disabled service users, carers and the care workforce.

This book traces the experience of digital economic transformation in seven developing countries, providing insights for policymakers and practitioners in similar situations as well as lessons for outsiders trying to support government reform efforts more broadly. In one country, the prime minister pushes for the liberalization of digital finance as a central pillar of the country’s national strategy, while the central bank almost makes it a criminal offence. In another, the digital minister tries to scupper the very process to support digital transformation that the president has asked them to co-lead. This book gives a ringside seat on seven developing countries’ tumultuous early steps on the path to a reform of the economy and the government using technology. Written by a group of academics and practitioners from Oxford at the heart of the process, but foregrounding the voices of the policymakers and participants, this book documents and critically assesses efforts to assist a set of governments to kick-start digital transformation. In doing so, it offers lessons for policymakers in other countries. But beyond that, it is an exposition of the process of policymaking more generally in the 2020s, and offers a broader insight as to how outsiders can play a sensible role in other reform processes in developing and emerging countries., illustrator

A timely examination of the use of emerging technologies in the arts in recent decades, from the first wave of Virtual Reality through to the current use of Mixed, Augmented and Extended Realities. It highlights the necessity of understanding technological experiences through the assumption that all experience is embodied. An explosion of digital culture and experience has most certainly given artists and creative practitioners new ways of exploring a hybridisation of creative practices with access to technological tools only previously dreamt of. Further, there are a number of threads around digital embodiment and its centrality to the digital experience.The book is divided into 3: Section 1 explores the whole notion of embodied experience through a study of space and virtuality, imagination, and technology. Section 2 lays the ground for a more explicit understanding of the role the body has in our engagement with the digital technologies focussing on three distinct bodies: the gravitational body, the virtual body, and finally the hybrid body. Section 3 is split into three chronological chapters in terms of technological developments, that of VR, Virtual Worlds, and Augmented, Mixed, and Extended Realities. While individual aspects and themes covered here can be found in some recent books, there is little that places digital embodiment within the arts in the way this book does. A unique synthesis.