Over the past fifty years, (financial) capitalism has brought about an enormous growth in wealth. Millions around the world have been lifted out of poverty. However, the downsides of the present global economic constitution are rapidly becoming evident as well. Rising inequality, soaring debt levels, and repeated cycles of boom and bust have proven to be some of its key characteristics. After the 2008 crisis brought the financial system to the brink of collapse, new regulations, stricter supe...

Today’s university lecturers are faced with the challenge of educating students to see beyond the limits of their own discipline and to come up with innovative solutions to societal challenges. Many lecturers would like to put more emphasis on teaching students how to integrate diverse forms of knowledge, work together in teams, critically reflect and become self-regulated learners. These lecturers are breaking down the silos of scientific disciplines as well as the barriers between academi...

Historians not only have knowledge of history, but by writing about it and engaging with other historians from the past and present, they make history themselves. This companion offers young historians clear guidelines for the different phases of historical research; how do you get a good historical question? How do you engage with the literature? How do you work with sources from the past, from archives to imagery and objects, art, or landscapes? What is the influence of digitalisation of th...

As the complex societal and technological challenges of the 21st century cannot be addressed by solutions from just one field of expertise, academics are increasingly expected to cross the disciplinary boundaries. Interdisciplinary Learning Activities contains concrete suggestions in the form of examples of learning activities that university teachers can use to teach and foster interdisciplinary skills in graduate and undergraduate students. These skills for interdisciplinary understanding i...

Making Media uncovers what it means and what it takes to make media, focusing on the lived experience of media professionals within the global media, including rich case studies of the main media industries and professions: television, journalism, social media entertainment, advertising and public relations, digital games, and music. This carefully edited volume features 35 authoritative essays by 53 researchers from 14 countries across 6 continents, all of whom are at the cutting edge of med...

We tend to think of ourselves as living in a time when nations, for the most part, obey the rule of law - and where they certainly don't engage in the violent grabs for territory that have characterised so much of human history. But as Rob de Wijk shows in this book, power politics very much remains a force on the international scene. Offering analyses of such actions as Putin's annexation of the Crimea and China's attempts to claim large parts of the South China Sea, de Wijk explains why pow...

This book is an introduction to political science. What is it that political scientists are actually studying? Or, to put it another way: What do we mean when we talk about politics?

The Handbook of Privacy Studies is the first book in the world that brings together several disciplinary perspectives on privacy, such as the legal, ethical, medical, informatics and anthropological perspective.

Privacy is in the news almost every day: mass surveillance by intelligence agencies, the use of social media data for commercial profit and political microtargeting, password hacks and identity theft, new data protection regimes, questionable reuse of medical data, and concerns about ...

The common saying is that people have a culture. This book argues that people live a culture – which may explain why they are so affectively attached to it. By considering cultural interactions on a global scale, this book investigates how cultures can be understood in terms of conflict and cooperation, in relation to the nationstate, a multiplicity of worlds, society, civilization and community. It considers how culture is at the basis of the construction of individual and collective selve...