Re Visioning Europe

Drawing on ethno-anthropological fieldwork, this book considers issues of identity and belonging in Europe from a consciously emic perspective. The book explores issues such as borders, migration, economic organization, heritage, and the politics and practice of developing cultural understanding.

Re-Visioning Terrorism: A Humanistic Perspective is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that aims to offer a plurality of visions on terrorism, expanding its meaning across time and space and raising new questions that explore its multifaceted occurrences. The different ideological, philosophical, and cultural perspectives emerging from the essays and the variety of humanistic disciplines involved intend to provide a complex and even contradictory picture that emphasizes the fact that there cannot be a univocal conception and response to terrorism, in either the practical or the intellectual domain. The editors borrow the concept of rack focus response from cinema to create an innovative and flexible interpretative approach to terrorism. Rack focus refers to the change of focus of a lens so that one image can come into focus while another moves out of focus. Though the focal distance changes, the reality has not changed. Both items and events coexist, but given the nature of optics we can only see clearly one or the other. This occurs not just with lenses, but also with human perceptions, be they emotional or intellectual. The rack focus response requires that we try to shift focus from the depth of field that is absolutely clear and familiar to the "other" that is unclear and unfamiliar. This exercise will lead us to reflect on terroristic events in a more nuanced, nondogmatic, and flexible manner. The essays featured in this volume range from philosophical interpretations of terrorism, to historical analysis of terror through the ages, to cinematic, artistic, and narrative representations of terroristic events that are not limited to 9/11.

Drawing on ethno-anthropological fieldwork, this book considers issues of identity and belonging in Europe from a consciously emic perspective. The book explores issues such as borders, migration, economic organization, heritage, and the politics and practice of developing cultural understanding.

Geography is a discipline with a profound interdisciplinary character focusing on studying the complex interactions between nature and society. Geography can advance the level of knowledge and awareness and provide important contributions to support the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals. This book explores some of these issues, while also disseminating and supporting the efforts of geographers worldwide to promote the implementation of the SDGs. It offers local and global perspectives to a variety of topics covered by the SDGs, such as: How do different actors such as universities, companies and education actors respond to Sustainable Development Goals, especially during the complex context of the COVID pandemic? What is the role of novel spatial technologies and open/big data in achieving SDGs and how can Geography assist? How are new eco-social challenges positioned in a post-pandemic global change? What are novel educational contexts and resources that can be used to transform society toward sustainability of socioecological systems? What conceptual frameworks and strategies can contribute to the construction of societies based on human welfare and the care of nature? This book is focused on innovative sustainability-oriented geographical research on the above (and more) topics that explore the diverse social, environmental, economic and cultural contexts at various spatial scales. It also includes chapters that report on geographical education initiatives in schools and universities, the implication of geographers in community-based learning and increasing community's awareness in terms of environment, climate change and sustainable development as well as chapters that make use of geospatial technologies (e.g., remote sensing, GIS, etc.) both in geographical research and education for sustainable development are particularly relevant for the book.

Publisher description

This collective volume examines the prevalence and variability of early modern discourses on Europe; it considers both Latin and vernacular texts from various fields of study in order to shed new light on how the concept of Europe evolved in its early days.

Europe’s borders have always been historically ambiguous and dynamic, whereby borders shift and change character and new borders replace older ones. By focusing upon the title question ‘where are Europe’s new borders’, this volume looks at the present state of European bordering and questions the often taken for granted relationships between borders, borderers and the bordered. While each chapter concentrates on a different (but overlapping) border issue or perspective, they are united through their focus on the level of everyday bordering practices and experiences, as well as the meaning that borders have upon all stakeholders and the relationships between them. To talk about border meaning (including the perspective of the researchers themselves), and how that meaning continually (re)creates and is (re)created by bordering practices, is to critically question where important borders lie, why and for whom do they matter and how are they imposed, maintained and resisted. As a result the chapters engage with issues of border violence, the power of maps and symbols (carto-politics), migrant mobility, gender and the rise of the far right in Europe. Taken together this edited collection will be of interest to border scholars as well as students of European politics more generally. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary European Studies.