Electricity is a quirky commodity: more often than not, it cannot be stored, easily transported, or imported from overseas. Before lighting up our homes, it changes hands through specialized electricity markets that rely on engineering expertise to trade competitively while respecting the physical requirements of the electric grid. The Current Economy is an ethnography of electricity markets in the United States that shows the heterogenous and technologically inflected nature of economic expertise today. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among market data analysts, electric grid engineers, and citizen activists, this book provides a deep dive into the convoluted economy of electricity and its reverberations throughout daily life. Canay Özden-Schilling argues that many of the economic formations in everyday life come from work cultures rarely suspected of doing economic work: cultures of science, technology, and engineering that often do not have a claim to economic theory or practice, yet nonetheless dictate forms of economic activity. Contributing to economic anthropology, science and technology studies, energy studies, and the anthropology of expertise, this book is a map of the everyday infrastructures of economy and energy into which we are plugged as denizens of a technological world.

This is an open access book. 2023 2nd International Conference on Public Service, Economic Management and Sustainable Development (PESD 2023) will be held from Oct. 27 to 29 in Xiamen, China. It dedicates to create a platform for academic communications between specialists and scholars in the fields of Public Service, Economic Management and Sustainable Development. PESD 2023 is the Public Service, Economic Management and Sustainable Development conference aimed at presenting current research being carried out. Economic development provides the basic material basis for public services, and public services create a good social foundation for economic development. At the same time, social and economic aspects need to jointly promote sustainable development. The idea of the conference is for the scientists, scholars, engineers, and students from Universities all around the world and the industry to present ongoing research activities, and hence to foster research relations between the Universities and the industry. This conference provides opportunities for the delegates to exchange new ideas and application experiences face to face, establish business or research relations, and find global partners for future collaboration.

This open access Regional Reader describes population movement circulating within the Mediterranean area, for any reason or from any region, be them European, African, Asian or originating from any of the Mediterranean shores. It showcases a plurality of approaches to and applications of Mediterranean migration, contributing to a regional approach to migration, thereby defending this regional approach by scaling Mediterranean migration issues. This book covers a large set of questions related to the migration research agenda, such as: market and economy, politics and policies, super-diversity and intersectionality, media, society, welfare and the environment through five main parts: Geo-political Mediterranean Relations, Governance, Policies and Politics, Mobility drivers and Agency, Cities, History and Social Transformations, and Economy and Labour Markets. This Regional Reader provides an interesting read to scholars, researchers, but also policy makers and civil society organizations’ high representatives, international foundations and institutions interested in linking the Mediterranean and migration.

Introduction to International Disaster Management, Fourth Edition, offers an unbiased, global perspective for students and practitioners alike. It provides a comprehensive understanding of the disaster management profession, covering the varied sources of risk and vulnerability, the systems that exist to manage hazard risk, and the many different stakeholders involved, from individuals to global organizations. This text also serves as a reference on scores of disaster management topics, including various technological and intentional hazards, on international disaster management structures and systems, on global humanitarian spending and support, and much more. Taking a real-world approach with considerable illustration through case studies and recent and historical disaster events, this book prepares students interested in joining the disaster management community to understand the work they will be doing. In addition, it assists those who already work with the disaster management community by helping them better navigate this complex environment. Includes sections on the Ebola epidemic, the Nepal Earthquake, the 2015/2016 Western U.S. Wildfires, the Indonesia Palm Oil Fires, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, the Mexico City Earthquake, emerging hazards like trash avalanches, and more Provides a valuable introduction on the groundbreaking Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015-2030) signed in March of 2015, along with an explanation of the relationship of this effort to Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement Explores the importance of global disaster risk reduction Covers key terms and chapter summaries, as well as instructor resources, support learning and instruction

The Irish Civil War and Society sheds new light on the social currents shaping the Irish Civil War, from the 'politics of respectability' behind animosities and discourses; to the intersection of social conflicts with political violence; to the social dimensions of the war's messy aftermath.

The story of globalization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as experienced by ordinary people in the Chinese river town of Zhenjiang. Fear swept Zhenjiang as British soldiers gathered outside the city walls in the summer of 1842. Already suspicious of foreigners, locals had also heard of the suffering the British inflicted two months earlier, in Zhapu. A wave of suicides and mercy killings ensued: rather than leave their families to the invaders, hundreds of women killed themselves and their children or died at the hands of male family members. British observers decried an “Asian culture” of ritual suicide. In reality, the event was sui generis—a tragic result of colliding local and global forces in nineteenth-century China. Xin Zhang’s groundbreaking history examines the intense negotiations between local societies and global changes that created modern China. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, world-historic political, economic, and technological developments transformed the textures of everyday life in places like Zhenjiang, a midsize river town in China’s prosperous Lower Yangzi region. Drawing on rare primary sources, including handwritten diaries and other personal writings, Zhang offers a ground-level view of globalization in the city. We see civilians coping with the traumatic international encounters of the Opium War; Zhenjiang brokers bankrolling Shanghai’s ascendance as a cosmopolitan commercial hub; and merchants shipping goods to market, for the first time, on steamships. Far from passive recipients, the Chinese leveraged, resisted, and made change for themselves. Indeed, The Global in the Local argues that globalization is inevitably refracted through local particularities.

New ideas, new interconnections, new problems. Liam Fox analyses crucial world issues. The world has changed more and faster than any of us could have imagined. While that may be accepted in terms of global business and financial markets, and to some degree the worldwide web, people including their political leaders may have been slower at grasping what these new interconnections mean for the way we operate in this new era. Liam Fox begins by questioning what decision-makers fear as the threats to world stability and peace, and draws on his own experience to illuminate world events, past and present. In conversation with those responsible for keeping the world afloat - such as Tony Blair, Condoleezza Rice, Malcolm Rifkind and Donald Rumsfeld - he examines both triumph and disaster and explains how to meet the challenge of the new global reality.