Filling a gap in the literature on communities, this innovative and critical volume proposes the concept of Cocoon Communities. Cocoon communities are highly significant for its members and yet not binding. Membership is voluntary and informal. Weaving together interdisciplinary perspectives, the contributors offer theoretical perspectives and research findings on communities of international students, online mourners, farmworkers, expatriates, and ‘Westerners’ in India. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and students in anthropology, education, social psychology and sociology.

Fifteen years before the start of the Earth’s third Christian millennium, after a five-thousand-year absence, Antarean space travelers have returned to Earth. After the destruction by the impact of an asteroid, a few islands were all that remained of the continent above the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Before the asteroid’s impact destroyed Antares Quad-Three, they had cocooned and secreted a diplomatic army for future use on Earth. They believed these soldiers and commanders, numbering 941, were secure and safe in a state of suspended animation beneath the sea floor. But, sadly, the Antareans discovered that pollution and ultraviolet radiation had adversely affected the cocoons, making the life they held partially damaged and dangerously vulnerable. On arrival to the destroyed planet, the Antarean presence was discovered by a small group of retired humans. Once discovered, the seniors offered to help the Antareans reseal their damaged cocoons and return them to their underwater chamber, saving the diplomatic army to be revived and awakened in the future. To show their gratitude, the Antarean leaders invited their aged helpers to join them on their Mothership, and thus become Earth’s first deep space travelers. They called themselves the Geriatric Brigade. Cocoon, which was a New York Times bestseller upon its release (and an Academy Award–winning film of the same name), is the amazing beginning of the Cocoon trilogy, which spans twenty years and was a pioneering science fiction novel by David Saperstein that still resonates with audiences today. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History presents a cutting-edge overview of the dynamic and ever-expanding field of environmental history. It addresses recent transformations in the field and responses to shifting scholarly, political, and environmental landscapes. The handbook fully and critically engages with recent exciting changes, contextualizes them within longer-term shifts in the field, and charts potential new directions for study. It focuses on five key areas: Theories and concepts related to changing considerations of social justice, including postcolonial, antiracist, and feminist approaches, and the field’s growing emphasis on multiple human voices and agencies. The roles of non-humans and the more-than-human in the telling of environmental histories, from animals and plants to insects as vectors of disease and the influences of water and ice, the changing theoretical approaches and the influence of concepts in related areas such as animal and discard studies. How changes in theories and concepts are shaping methods in environmental history and shifting approaches to traditional sources like archives and oral histories as well as experiments by practitioners with new methods and sources. Responses to a range of current complex problems, such as climate change, and how environmental historians can best help mitigate and resolve these problems. Diverse ways in which environmental historians disseminate their research within and beyond academia, including new modes of research dissemination, teaching, and engagements with stakeholders and the policy arena. This is an important resource for environmental historians, researchers and students in the related fields of political ecology, environmental studies, natural resources management and environmental planning. Chapters 9, 10 and 26 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The book offers a critical perspective, challenging positivistic, essentialist definitions of lifestyle migration. We follow the journeys of retired working class British women as they seek, recreate and construct community in a new context.

Cocoon demonstrates, in easy-to-understand language, that ethics is about trust, and happiness. Trust is the essential ingredient to mutally-supportive and durable relationships, focused on reducing life's imperfections. Such relationships are the key to happiness. But we cannot live deep inside protective cocoons and still build trust and relationships. Instead, we must develop all the dimensions of what makes us human--intellectual (truth), spiritual (unity), moral (goodness), and aesthetic (beauty). Above all, we have to know ourselves, and be able to pass the "mirror test" every day. Our most important relationship, after all, being with ourself, and we don't discover our spiritual unity without a Personal Strategic Plan. Nor can we become ethically fit without enthusiasm, equanimity and a commitment to excellence--traits not found in cocoons. Only ethical fitness can help us find the resolution to the fundamental ethical dilemmas we all face--truth versus loyalty, short-term versus long-term, individual versus community, and justice versus mercy. This book suggests we use a variety of lenses to look at the world today--power, wealth, prestige, status. We use the lenses of economics, politics, and technology. We do not use nearly enough the lens of ethics--relationships, happiness, decency, and the golden mean. Once we're ethically fit--the result of continuous practice--we're able to recognize ethical dilemmas, approach them skillfully, and resolve them successfully. This book shows the way to such fitness, which is useful in any context or relationship, personal, local or global. Cocoon is a self-improvement book of the first order, with real-life macro-illustrations of the ethical dilemmas we face in a complex and crowded world in which too many of us pursue the dictates of false gods. It includes over 500 practice questions, and was developed as a textbook in the ethics courses the author taught to seniors at Ramapo College from 2002 th

Using international perspectives and case studies, this book discusses the relationships between community development and populism in the context of today’s widespread crisis of democracy. It investigates the development, meanings and manifestations of contemporary forms of populism and explores the synergies and contradictions between the values and practices of populism and community development. Contributors examine the ways that the ascendancy of right-wing populist politics is influencing the landscapes within which community development is located and they offer new insights on how the field can understand and respond to the challenges of populism.

This Handbook provides the requisite theoretical and methodological guidelines for undertaking social research addressing relevant contemporary social issues.

In a world grappling with refugee crisis, political unrest and economies on the verge of collapse, temporary migration has become an increasingly common phenomenon. This volume presents a comprehensive picture of the transformative and development potential of temporary transnational migration in political, legal, economic, social and cultural aspects. This book: analyses how temporary migration is distinct from more permanent and circular forms of migration; brings together case studies from five Asian countries (China, India, the Philippines, Thailand and Turkey) and six European countries (Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands and Ukraine); is based on exhaustive interviews of over 800 migrants, returnees and migrants’ family members, along with about 300 field experts, politicians, authorities and actors in civil society; illustrates the diverse nature of temporary migration, the continuing globalisation of the labour market and the interrelated changes to immigration, integration and emigration policies on local, national and international scales. This volume will be indispensable to scholars and researchers of development studies, international politics, international relations, migration and diaspora studies, public policy, sociology and social anthropology. It will also be of importance to government think tanks and non-governmental organisations working in these areas.