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  • ItemOpen Access
    The Unbearable Light(ness) of AI: Bright Promises and Hidden Shadows of Artificial Intelligence
    (Open Book Publishers, 2026-05-15) Pozza, Giuliano

    This volume examines one of the defining tensions of our era: how to harness the transformative power of artificial intelligence while preserving responsibility, sovereignty, and human judgement.

    Bringing together scholars and practitioners, this volume moves beyond hype and alarmism to explore AI across three interconnected levels: global systems, organisational governance, and personal ethics. It addresses digital sovereignty, cybersecurity, sustainability, inclusion, healthcare, education, and accessibility, highlighting both the environmental and social costs of AI and its potential to advance innovation within the Sustainable Development Goals.

    Rather than offering easy solutions, the book advocates embracing technological possibility while insisting on transparency, accountability, and public values. At stake is not only how AI functions, but how it reshapes institutions, knowledge, and everyday life.

    Balancing lightness with weight, this book invites readers to reflect critically on progress, power, and responsibility in the age of intelligent machines.

  • ItemOpen Access
    The Politics of Open Infrastructures: Power, Governance, and Justice in Digital Knowledge Practices
    (Open Book Publishers, 2026-05-27) Meyer, Katja; Mager, Astrid; Ridgway, Renée

    This volume examines how openness is designed, governed, contested and lived in contemporary digital knowledge infrastructures. From open source software and internet standards, to citizen science platforms, public sector data systems and alternative computing practices, the book shows that infrastructures are never neutral technical backbones. They are deeply political arrangements that embed values, distribute power and shape whose knowledge counts.

    Bringing together scholars from science and technology studies, critical data studies, media studies, organisation studies, arts-based research and political sociology, this edited volume explores openness as an ongoing socio-technical process rather than a fixed ideal. The book moves from the partial openness of early Internet standards and free and open source software, through contested practices of opening government data and public infrastructures, to struggles over inclusion and governance in scholarly and cultural knowledge infrastructures. This is followed by community-driven experiments in care, repair and alternative openness and concludes with forward-looking contributions on how to keep infrastructures open for research, how to fund infrastructures as digital commons and how to mobilise open infrastructures for democratic resilience and economic sovereignty.

    The contributions trace how principles such as accessibility, transparency, participation and collective stewardship are enacted in practice—and how they are challenged by commercial capture, asymmetries of expertise, cultural governance and geopolitical inequalities. Across theoretical chapters and rich empirical case studies, the book investigates the governance of open infrastructures, the politics of alternative technological arrangements and struggles for epistemic justice within knowledge systems.

    By foregrounding power relations, ethical tensions and questions of responsibility, this book rethinks openness as a site of political negotiation rather than a technical solution. The volume offers critical insights for researchers, policymakers, engineers and civil society actors concerned with digital commons, democratic governance and the future of open knowledge infrastructures in increasingly contested political and technical environments.

    A companion website, www.openinfrastructures.net , extends the volume through author interviews, supplementary materials and additional resources that document the making of the book and provide further insights into the debates on governing, sustaining, and contesting open digital knowledge infrastructures.

  • ItemOpen Access
    Colour Matters: Exploring Chromatic Materialities in the Long Nineteenth Century (1798-1914)
    (Open Book Publishers, 2026-05-11) Evangelista, Stefano; Ribeyrol, Charlotte; Winterbottom, Matthew

    Colour Matters provides a fresh investigation of colour in the long nineteenth century. Across fourteen richly researched essays, the book explores the materiality, politics, and sensory experience of colour—from synthetic dyes and chrome pigments to the role of colour in medicine, gender, empire, and identity. By weaving together art history, literature, anthropology, science, and conservation, the contributors reveal a dynamic world where chromatic experimentation shaped aesthetics, technology, and social life. Colour Matters offers an essential contribution to colour studies and the humanities’ material turn, showing how pigment and perception illuminate both past and present.

    This book will appeal to scholars and students of art history, literature, cultural studies, and the history of science in the long eighteenth-century, as well as curators, conservators, and readers fascinated by the histories of colour and material culture.

  • ItemOpen Access
    War Machine
    (punctum books, 2026-05-26) Carter, Richard A.

    War Machine is a speculative sounding of the myriad entanglements of technology, ecology, discourse, politics, and conflict shaping the contemporary environment. Taking the tools of geopolitical competition and control as its formal and conceptual basis—wargame simulations, artificial intelligence, weaponised drones, territorial enclosure, and extractivist economics—War Machine presents a series of digitally simulated conflicts over the most ecologically vulnerable areas of the Earth, using the data gathered to generate hybrid visual poems that stand in for the multitude of political, conceptual, and economic battles that are presently raging across the face of a profoundly endangered planet.A hybrid work of generative criticism and poetry, War Machine depicts the intensive complexities of the present moment through conducting an experimental textual performance, attempting to enfold and perform, rather than simply describe, challenging conjunctions of competing discourses and activities. The resulting stream of outputs and interpretive potentials preclude the ascendency of any “definitive” critical narrative, refusing any straightforward integration with existing canons of worldly diagnosis, but also illustrating opportunities for resistant play and critical-creative possibility within the uncertainty.The consciously unconventional gesture at the heart of War Machine is in attempt at modelling an adventurous, forward-facing approach, in both thought and practice, that refuses inaction when dealing with otherwise devastating scenarios. It is an approach that acknowledges head-on myriad worldly harms, seemingly insurmountable, while still contributing to the aesthetic, affective, and conceptual foundations from which alternative modes of knowing, being, and meaning are developed and justified.

  • ItemOpen Access
    The Sentencing of Jesus (Gzar-dina de-Yeshu): The 'Authentic' Jewish Protocols of the Trial of Jesus
    (Open Book Publishers, 2026-05-07) Bohak, Gideon

    This monograph offers a rich and insightful study of The Sentencing of Jesus, an ancient Jewish polemical narrative describing the trial and execution of Jesus, which is the earliest of all the Toledot Yeshu texts. The volume includes a substantial historical introduction, carefully edited synopses of the Aramaic, Judaeo-Arabic and Hebrew versions, detailed philological and exegetical notes on the text and its transmission history, and an English translation. In his comments, Bohak explores recurring themes in Late Antique literature—such as the apologetic and polemical uses of authentic or forged protocols of trials and executions, envisioning an enemy hanged on an unexpected tree, the humiliation of dragging a corpse through the streets for all to see, and the use of magical handbooks and of spells to heal or harm—shedding new light on the cultural and literary resonances of these motifs. Detailed linguistic analyses trace translations and mistranslations across Aramaic, Hebrew, and Judaeo-Arabic traditions.

    By reconstructing an ancient polemical text that has previously been known only in a fragmentary manner, and by situating it both within its Late Antique context and in the context of previous scholarship, this book makes a significant contribution to the study of Judaism, and of Jewish-Christian relations, in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

  • ItemOpen Access
    Benjamin Franklin, Orthoepist and Phonetician: Vol. 1: Language, Literacy and Social Mobility in Franklin’s World
    (Open Book Publishers, 2026-05-05) German, Gary D.

    Benjamin Franklin has been hailed as an inventor, scientist, printer, author, philosopher, diplomat, philanthropist and political activist and, especially, a founding father of the United States, but few are aware he was also a phonetician. This book offers a groundbreaking exploration of Franklin’s little-studied linguistic legacy—his Reformed Mode of Spelling (1768/1779). In this short treatise, Franklin outlined a plan for a radical, phonetically-based modernization of the English spelling system that would simultaneously serve as a pronunciation guide for what he envisaged to be 'correct' English as well as a practical scheme allowing the unlettered and foreigners to learn to read and write ‘within a week’. The social and sociolinguistic reasons for its inception as well as what that model entailed linguistically are the focus of this book.

    Moreover, while Franklin’s fascination with English orthographic reform is known among specialists, previous studies have rarely taken his reform seriously. This is the first comprehensive linguistic analysis of his phonetic system within the broader historical and sociolinguistic context of early American English, a study which also includes comparative analyses of 17th and 18th century English varieties. Drawing on an impressive array of archival and manuscript sources—some previously unknown—Gary German reconstructs Franklin’s linguistic environment and investigates how his proposed spelling reform functioned as both a phonetic guide as well as a political and cultural statement.

    The book employs a robust historical sociolinguistic methodology which, for the first time, distinguishes between Franklin’s native American pronunciation and that proposed in his RMS. The data presented offer a persuasive answer to the question of whether his model was ‘English’ or ‘American’ while also exploring speaker networks and personal correspondence to trace linguistic patterns.

    This study is a vital contribution to historical linguistics, American studies, and the growing field of World Englishes. With its detailed analysis and interdisciplinary appeal, it sheds new light on both Franklin’s intellectual world and the complex phonological landscape of early American-English. It is essential reading for linguists, historians, and anyone fascinated by the roots of American English.

  • ItemOpen Access
    Lifetimes: A Theory of Timescales and Life Forms
    (punctum books, 2026-05-21) Jordheim, Helge; Bjordal, Sine Halkjelsvik

    At the beginning of the 21st century, many of our most well-known and dependable forms of keeping, managing, and representing time are losing their grasp on the real. Clocks cannot measure how societies speed up, or come to a standstill during crisis, modern historiography is unable to come up with meaningful narratives about mankind as the sixth extinction event, and calendars are insufficient as tools for societal and political change. Lifetimes: A Theory of Timescales and Life Forms presents an alternative framework for studying lives and times, and the relationships between them.

    Building on post-war theories of history, as well as several historical sub-disciplines, such as cultural history, history of science, and medical history, Lifetimes integrates approaches from anthropology, game studies, cultural studies, literary studies, critical heritage studies, science & technology studies, and critical time studies. Times are understood as always existing in plural, as embodied and emergent—in things, in assemblages of things, and in the relations between things. Among them are the lives of humans, but also the lives of viruses, plants, animals, rocks, computers, nations, concepts, policies, technologies, infrastructures, etc.

    Lifetimes explores theoretical foundations while at the same time developing them through case studies in individual chapters. The result is a bottom-up theory of temporal multiplicity, conceptually and theoretically open enough to be productive across various academic disciplines. Rather than discussing how different disciplines relate to time, the authors in this edited collection present a theoretically sustained, empirically diverse range of cases, in which times in plural become politically and historically salient. Out of these case-studies a new theory emerges: a theory of lifetimes.

  • ItemOpen Access
    Distributing Knowledge: Openness, Equity, and Higher Education Transformation
    (Open Book Publishers, 2026-05-05) Heller, Richard F.

    Inequity is deeply embedded in higher education: in who can access learning, whose knowledge is created and valued, who gets published, and who ultimately benefits from universities’ work. Distributing Knowledge argues that the sector is falling short of its public mission—and that incremental reform is no longer enough.

    Drawing on research, policy analysis, and real-world examples from across the globe, Richard Heller presents a compelling case for a distributed model of higher education designed to promote knowledge equity. The book shows how corporatisation, managerialism, and commercial control of educational technology and academic publishing have narrowed participation, reinforced global inequalities, and weakened universities’ ethical foundations. At the same time, it highlights the opportunities offered by digital technologies, Open Education, and collaborative knowledge creation to reverse these trends.

    This volume introduces a practical framework for distributing knowledge more equitably—across its creation, publication, and delivery—grounded in core values of justice, autonomy, sustainability, and public good. It explores how open publishing, Open Educational Resources and Practices, distributed education structures, inclusive research practices, and supportive decentralised digital infrastructure can widen access, reduce carbon footprints, and amplify under-represented voices. Each chapter concludes with concrete steps to guide institutions, policymakers, and educators towards meaningful change.

    Ultimately, this book is both a critique and a call to action. It challenges universities to re-imagine their role in society and offers a realistic pathway for transforming higher education into a more ethical, inclusive, and sustainable system—one capable of distributing knowledge in ways that genuinely reduce inequity and respond to the urgent challenges of our time.

  • ItemOpen Access
    Benjamin Franklin, Orthoepist and Phonetician: Vol. 2: Colonial American Voices and London Norms: Franklin’s Quest for an Orthographic Reform
    (Open Book Publishers, 2026-05-05) German, Gary D.

    Benjamin Franklin has been hailed as an inventor, scientist, printer, author, philosopher, diplomat, philanthropist and political activist and, especially, a founding father of the United States, but few are aware he was also a phonetician. This volume offers a groundbreaking exploration of Franklin’s little-studied linguistic legacy—his Reformed Mode of Spelling (1768/1779). In this short treatise, Franklin outlined a plan for a radical, phonetically-based modernization of the English spelling system that would simultaneously serve as a pronunciation guide for what he envisaged to be 'correct' English as well as a practical scheme allowing the unlettered and foreigners to learn to read and write ‘within a week’. The social and sociolinguistic reasons for its inception as well as what that model entailed linguistically are the focus of this book.

    Moreover, while Franklin’s fascination with English orthographic reform is known among specialists, previous studies have rarely taken his reform seriously. This is the first comprehensive linguistic analysis of his phonetic system within the broader historical and sociolinguistic context of early American English, a study which also includes comparative analyses of 17th and 18th century English varieties. Drawing on an impressive array of archival and manuscript sources—some previously unknown—Gary German reconstructs Franklin’s linguistic environment and investigates how his proposed spelling reform functioned as both a phonetic guide as well as a political and cultural statement.

    The book employs a robust historical sociolinguistic methodology which, for the first time, distinguishes between Franklin’s native American pronunciation and that proposed in his RMS. The data presented offer a persuasive answer to the question of whether his model was ‘English’ or ‘American’ while also exploring speaker networks and personal correspondence to trace linguistic patterns.

    This study is a vital contribution to historical linguistics, American studies, and the growing field of World Englishes. With its detailed analysis and interdisciplinary appeal, it sheds new light on both Franklin’s intellectual world and the complex phonological landscape of early American-English. It is essential reading for linguists, historians, and anyone fascinated by the roots of American English.

  • ItemOpen Access
    A Multipolar Approach to Early Christian Arabic: Vatican Arabic Ms 13 in the Linguistic Landscape of Early Islam
    (Open Book Publishers, 2026-05-13) Stokes, Phillip W.

    This volume offers the most comprehensive linguistic analysis to date of Vatican Arabic MS 13, a late 9th/early 10th-century Arabic Gospel manuscript. Combining meticulous quantitative study with wide-ranging comparative evidence, this book provides an in-depth examination of the manuscript's orthography, phonology, morphology, morpho-syntax, and syntax. Through extensive charts, tables, and multiple interpretive frameworks, the author illuminates how linguistic features pattern across every dimension relevant to accurate analysis.

    Crucially, the study does not treat MS 13 in isolation. Its features are systematically compared with those of other Christian Arabic manuscripts, Quranic traditions, medieval Arabic registers, early poetry, and modern dialects. This contextualised approach situates the manuscript within the rich linguistic diversity of medieval Arabic and challenges long-standing assumptions about 'Middle Arabic' and 'Classical Arabic'. By demonstrating that many features of MS 13 align with broader scribal and linguistic practices of the period, the book makes a compelling case against the notion that scribes worked towards a single, unified register or variety. Rather, they drew creatively and pragmatically from a diverse repertoire of features and linguistic traditions, revealing a far more dynamic and multifaceted approach to written composition than previously recognised.

    An outstanding and field-shaping contribution, this volume provides an essential model for future work on Christian Arabic, medieval Arabic varieties, and the history of Arabic more broadly.

  • ItemOpen Access
    Pietro Giannone. Autobiography. The Tragedy of a Historian and the Inquisition: Translated with commentary by Thérèse Ridley
    (Open Book Publishers, 2026-04-09)

    This volume is the first English translation of 'Vita di Pietro Giannone scritta da lui medesimo', a powerful autobiographical account penned under the direst conditions—by a man persecuted, imprisoned, and ultimately destroyed by the Inquisition. Written on scraps of paper during his long incarceration, Giannone’s 'Vita' is a masterpiece of Enlightenment literature, detailing the meteoric rise of a most eminent eighteenth-century historian and jurist, and his descent into suffering for his unyielding commitment to reason, justice, and historical truth.

    This edition, translated and annotated by Therese Ridley, not only renders the full autobiography accessible to English readers for the first time, but contextualizes it within modern Italian scholarship. Each chapter is enriched with appendices that include critical sources, commentary, and related correspondence, illuminating the people, events, and philosophical struggles that defined Giannone’s world.

    Foreshadowing the prison writings of Silvio Pellico and Antonio Gramsci, Giannone’s Vita stands as both a literary achievement and a searing indictment of religious and political repression. This volume is essential reading for anyone interested in the Enlightenment, Italian history, or the enduring power of the written word under persecution.

  • ItemOpen Access
    The American Archipelago: A New Edition of Oscar Handlin’s Classic Anthology, 'This Was America'
    (Open Book Publishers, 2026-04-13) Handlin, Oscar; Weisbrode, Kenneth

    Oscar Handlin (1915–2011), one of the most influential historians of the twentieth century, reshaped the study of American history with a career spanning more than forty books. Best known for 'The Uprooted' (1951), his groundbreaking work on immigration, Handlin was equally a generalist whose insights reached nearly every corner of the American past.

    The collection at hand, Handlin’s classic anthology 'This Was America', first published in 1949, gathers Europeans’ travel accounts and perspectives on America from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Rather than presenting a single narrative, Handlin emphasizes variety: contrasting impressions of liberty and inequality, restlessness and rootedness, optimism and critique by people arriving from diverse European backgrounds. His free translations and selective introductions guide readers subtly but leave interpretation open. Over time, these essays shift meaning depending on context—once read as a celebration of American life, they now invite more critical reflection. This new edition reimagines America not as a singular whole but as an “archipelago”: a collection of diverse experiences, perceptions, and contradictions. The metaphor underscores the interplay between unity and multiplicity in American identity.

    Students, historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars alike will find in these essays a vivid, sometimes unsettling, mosaic of how America has been seen from abroad—raising as many questions as answers, and encouraging readers to reflect on the nation’s complexity anew.

  • ItemOpen Access
    Sonic Detection: Necessary Notes for Art and Performance
    (punctum books, 2026-04-17) Collins, Rebecca; Linsley, Johanna

    Sonic Detection is part sonic noir, part performance document, and part critical investigation of listening at the margins for readers interested in prospecting the boundaries of performance studies, sound studies, and interdisciplinary writing.The book opens with a group of sonic detectives (exact number unknown) who investigate the mystery of an as-yet-unidentified event that leaves traces only in the acoustic atmosphere. This hybrid fiction propels the reader up and down the UK coast and offers overheard fragments from a faded seaside resort, a container shipping port, a former coal-mining town, and the Scottish headquarters for North Sea oil. A heterogeneous collection of texts follows, from creative-critical essays, performance scores, engagement with the archives of earlier sonic detectives (including poet/performance artist Fiona Templeton and the sound art collective Bow Gamelan Ensemble), to a series of dispatches from expert witnesses with their ears to the ground. Sonic Detection is not so much a monograph as a polygraph, tongue-in-cheek associations with questionable forensic technologies firmly in place. The book emerges from a decade-long collaboration between artists Rebecca Collins and Johanna Linsley, who used eavesdropping as an expanded creative methodology. The project began as a series of hyper-local, community-based performance works in coastal locations in the UK (from Bournemouth to Aberdeen) and grew into an international, multi-disciplinary life work devoted to an ongoing, organized curiosity. Sonic detectives hold open a collective sonorous space. They are the embodiment of the phenomenophile, lingering longer in listening.

  • ItemOpen Access
    Gazing at the Puerto Rican Anthropological Landscape: The “Natives” Look Far and Wide
    (punctum books, 2026-04-25) Valdés Pizzini, Manuel

    Before World War II, most anthropological research in Puerto Rico was led by US anthropologists. The most famous project, The People of Puerto Rico, was directed by American anthropologist Julian Steward and launched the career of renowned scholars such as Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf. Gazing at the Puerto Rican Anthropological Landscape aims to delineate the development of the post-WWII anthropological field in Puerto Rico by Puerto Rican anthropologists, the so-called “native” anthropologists. The contributors to Gazing at the Puerto Rican Anthropological Landscape deploy the term “native” somewhat ironically, but they also know that who they are affects their positionality vis-à-vis their research subjects. Thus, they retain the term to spark a conversation addressing the complicated feelings that such labels still evoke among non-mainstream anthropologists.

    Gazing at the Puerto Rican Anthropological Landscape purposely avoids making Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans a problem to study and instead focuses on a wide variety of epistemological and methodological questions related to the study of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans by “native” anthropologists within local, regional, and global spheres. We posit that the Puerto Rican anthropological landscape transcends the confines of the island of Puerto Rico to encompass its connection and engagement with the larger world, and that it is not limited to the inhabitants of the island of Puerto Rico but embraces members of its diaspora, as well as other groups and ethnicities. On that note, this book seeks to reflect critically on how the academic field of anthropology (research and teaching) in Puerto Rico has evolved, post-WWII, in various engagements with the current debates of contemporary anthropology — theoretical, methodological, socio-cultural, political, and otherwise.

  • ItemOpen Access
    Beyond Popular Science
    (Open Book Publishers, 2026-04-08) Silver, David H.

    Beyond Popular Science is not a popular science book. It is not a textbook. It is not an academic monograph. Instead, it occupies a rare and deliberately unconventional space: a work for readers who enjoy scientific storytelling but are no longer satisfied with simplifications that smooth away the real substance of modern science.

    Unlike typical popular science books, this work does not shy away from technical depth. Each chapter begins with clear, accessible explanations, then gradually descends into the rigorous frameworks—mathematical, physical, and conceptual—that underlie our best understanding of the universe. Readers encounter ideas they may have heard before, but rarely explored with this level of honesty: why relativistic time dilation, rather than spatial curvature alone, governs gravity on Earth; how quantum tunneling makes stellar fusion possible; and even how relativistic effects give gold its distinctive yellow hue.

    The intended audience is curious, scientifically literate readers—those with undergraduate exposure to mathematics and physics—who wish for in-depth scientific investigations.

    Richly illustrated with sophisticated, thought-provoking visuals, Beyond Popular Science rewards both careful reading and contemplative browsing. It is a book to be revisited, puzzled over, and enjoyed—one that treats its readers not as passive consumers, but as capable thinkers eager to engage with science as it truly is: beautiful, demanding, and unfinished.

  • ItemOpen Access
    From the Margins: Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity
    (Open Book Publishers, 2026-04-29) Rahbari, Ladan; Burlyuk, Olga

    From the Margins: Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity is the much-anticipated second volume following Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe published in 2023, and available at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0331. This new collection deepens and expands the conversation on the lived experiences of migrant academics navigating global academia.

    Maintaining the autoethnographic and narrative approach of the first volume, From the Margins brings together diverse voices that challenge the Eurocentric framing of academic mobility by extending the focus beyond Europe to contexts such as the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Africa, and the Middle East. Through deeply personal, creative, and reflexive narratives, the contributors delve deep into the notions of privilege, migration, and precarity, revealing how academic hierarchies and colonial legacies shape everyday experiences of belonging, vulnerability, and resilience.

    Bridging scholarship and storytelling, this volume offers an intellectually rich and emotionally resonant exploration of academia’s margins, inviting readers to rethink what knowledge, care, and solidarity mean within and beyond institutional borders. This volume appeals to scholars and students across migration, sociology, postcolonial, gender, race, and border studies, as well as to university leaders and diversity officers. Its interdisciplinary and creative format—including poetry and prose—makes it both accessible and engaging for academic and general audiences alike.

  • ItemOpen Access
    Kayfabe Nation: Professional Wrestling, Donald Trump, and the New Cynicism
    (punctum books, 2026-04-07) Hebert, Neal; Cogburn, Jon

    What do a pudgy, orange autocrat, and pumped-up men in tights have in common? The connections, while profound, all rest on specific strategies employed by World Wrestling Entertainment during the early 2000s (known as WWE’s “Attitude Era”) when Donald Trump was centrally involved with the promotion of WWE. These are: (1) universally breaking kayfabe, the code of people in the industry not to reveal or admit fakery; (2) Vince McMahon (WWE’s CEO at that time) playing a fictional version of himself as someone constantly humiliated in storylines; (3) the vicious affirmation of traditional gender roles through parables of male domination; and (4) telling stories that encourage viewers to ignore the actual material conditions of WWE “superstars” in favor of conspiratorial fictions involving powerful individual actors. In Kayfabe Nation: Professional Wrestling, Donald Trump, and the New Cynicism, Hebert and Cogburn present a trenchant analysis of Attitude Era WWE, showing the extent to which MAGA is just is a function, or symptom, of Trump’s internalization of WWE’s most objectionable tropes.

    Neal Hebert and Jon Cogburn’s goal is not to use WWE merely to understand Trumpism and the related autocratic turn in countries as diverse as El-Sisi’s Egypt, Putin’s Russia, Erdogan’s Turkey, Modi’s India, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Orbán’s Hungary, Netanyahu’s Israel, and of course Trump’s own America. Beyond that, Kayfabe Nation is a defense of truth against the lie that culminates in the widespread adoption of self-defeating conspiracy theories among the constituency of the right, as well as against the idea, popular in corrupted center-left parties across the planet that political success comes down to adopting better rhetorical strategies, strategies that exist in part to cover over their abandonment of New Deal and socialist ideologies where the material conditions of their constituencies would actually improve.

  • ItemOpen Access
    Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education: A Phenomenological View
    (Open Book Publishers, 2026-04-27) Aka, Philip; Derek Baker; Azra Branković; Eka Gegeshidze; Laura Ancona Lee; Christos Michalakelis; Mbulaheni Nthangeni; Efthymia Staiou; Yeralan, Sencer

    Artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded in the everyday practices of higher education, shaping assessment, governance, labor, and institutional legitimacy. Rather than presenting a technical guide or policy checklist, this volume instead offers a reflective, multi-voiced examination of what AI means for higher education’s purpose, identity, and future. Its phenomenological grounding shifts the focus from operational questions of implementation to deeper inquiries into how AI reshapes institutions, knowledge, and the academic self.

    Drawing on historical and critical perspectives, the book interrogates AI as both mirror and accelerant of long-standing challenges: inequity, market-driven logics, and the erosion of slow, critical learning. Spanning geopolitical contexts and institutional types, it embraces pluralism over consensus, showing that AI will not transform all universities in the same way. Narrative interludes humanize these themes, revealing the anxieties, ambiguities, and hopes of those living through this transition.

    Building on the work of Richard Heller on the distributed university and knowledge equity, the book situates AI within broader structural issues such as corporatised knowledge economies, managerialism, and unequal access to educational and research opportunities. At the same time, it highlights emerging possibilities―from open educational resources and equitable research practices to decentralised digital infrastructures―that can contribute to more ethical and resilient institutional arrangements.

    Neither prescriptive nor simplistic, this book is intended as a catalyst for leaders, policymakers, and reflective practitioners seeking to navigate AI with wisdom rather than haste. It argues that the future of higher education will be shaped less by technological sophistication than by the clarity with which institutions articulate their values, responsibilities, and commitments to the public good.

  • ItemOpen Access
    Harvesting the Sea in Southeastern Arabia: Volume 2: Comparative Lexicon of Fish and Other Marine Species
    (Open Book Publishers, 2026-04-23) Morris, Miranda J.; Erik Anonby; Watson, Janet C.E.; Anonby, Erik

    Along the shores of southeastern Arabia, traditional marine knowledge is fading as languages and ecosystems come under increasing pressure. This second volume of Harvesting the Sea in Southeastern Arabia brings together marine species terminology and associated knowledge in the five coastal Modern South Arabian languages (MSAL) and the Kumzari language of the Musandam Peninsula in eastern Arabia. The materials, collected by the authors in periods between the 1970s and the present, are a testament to communities’ longstanding intimacy with the sea and their resilient livelihoods in the face of often difficult conditions.

    Over 2000 marine species names are inventoried, featuring many bony fish and cartilaginous fish, but also including mammals, reptiles, invertebrates, and plants. Terms for fish at various life stages and vocabulary associated with marine species are also provided. The lists are organised in the format of a comparative lexicon, where individual species are compared across the six languages, and as an annotated alphabetical lexicon with a searchable companion file, presenting additional insights collected over the course of fieldwork.

    Along with its relevance for communities where this knowledge is being lost as species die out and livelihoods change, this book is an essential resource for anyone interested in learning from the languages, cultures, and ecosystems of Arabia.

  • ItemOpen Access
    Spaces for Action: A Repository of Tools and Methods for a Socially Situated Architectural Education
    (Open Book Publishers, 2026-03-13) Cimadomo, Guido; Vargas Díaz, Ingrid C.

    'Spaces for Action' provides a hands-on guide for teachers and students looking to make architectural learning more engaging, collaborative, and socially meaningful.

    The book brings together over 80 creative tools that can be adapted to different classrooms, communities, and design challenges. The tools are grouped by teaching approaches—like cooperative teamwork, experiential learning, and transformative practices—and by the stages of the design process: identifying challenges, generating ideas, and putting them into action. Each entry gives a clear overview of what the tool is for, how it works, and what you need to make it happen. You’ll also find tips on group sizes, resources, and possible collaborators, making it easy to bring these methods straight into practice.

    What makes this toolkit unique is its strong link between theory and real-world application. Alongside detailed instructions, you’ll discover case studies from projects such as Service-Learning and “Live Projects,” which connect design directly to community needs. Open and adaptable, this repository is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to foster creativity, collaboration, and social impact in architecture education.