This open access book is intended as an original contribution to the conversation on the role and challenges of education in Central Asia to promote social cohesion by looking at Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Examining education challenges within the countries’ wider historical, social, political, and cultural context, the contributions explore existing discourses concerning national…
This Open Access book explains the philosophy, design principles, and community organization of Decidim and provides essential insights into how the platform works. Decidim is the world leading digital infrastructure for participatory democracy, built entirely and collaboratively as free software, and used by more than 500 institutions with over three million users worldwide. The platform al…
This open access book explores different landscapes of Lifelong Learning policies (LLP), producing case-based examinations of their institutional, discursive, and relational dimensions. Across Europe, young people develop their life courses amidst diverse living conditions and are confronted with a variety of institutional and structural arrangements that impact on their opportunities in educat…
This open access book examines the rural school improvement programs implemented in four developing countries, including China, Myanmar, Uganda, and Kenya. It analyzes research questions such as problems faced by rural schools in these countries, approaches or models adopted to improve these rural schools, specific interventions to address the problems and their effectiveness, and lessons learn…
This open access book provides the first in-depth study of the development of federal gender equality politics and policy in Australia from the 1970s to the present day. Australia has a history of gender equality innovation, including granting women's suffrage long before equivalent countries. From the 1970s on, it became the first country to introduce a women's adviser, femocrats (feminist bur…
This open access book shows how the #MeToo movement and revelations of sexual harassment and bullying have spurred on reform of the parliamentary workplace in four Westminster countries – Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. Long-standing conventions included extreme power imbalances between parliamentarians and staff and a lack of professionalised employment practices. Codes of conduc…
This open access book discusses the relationship between periodicals, tourism, and nation-building in Mexico. It enquires into how magazines, a staple form of the promotional apparatus of tourism since its inception, articulated an imaginative geography of Mexico at a time when that industry became a critical means of economic recovery and political stability after the Revolution. Notwithstandi…
This open access book carefully explores the relationship between social democracy and its working-class electorate in Western Europe. Relying on different indicators, it demonstrates an important transformation in the class basis of social democracy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the working-class vote is strongly fragmented and social democratic parties face competition on mul…
Across the country, our children are beginning life from very different starting points. Some have aspirations and believe they can be achieved. For too many others, aspirations are tempered, if not dashed, by the sobering realities of everyday life. These different starting points place children on distinctly different trajectories of growth and development, ultimately leading to vastly differ…
This open access book explores common critiques in the literature of hybrid peacebuilding, especially the lack of connection between hybridity in theory and practice. Through using a complexity-informed framework, the foundation for introducing the mid-space actor typology is established. Mid-space actors as insider-partial mediators are perceived to be vital agents for peace processes in confl…