As indicated by the diversity of the authors' physical locations, COVID and emergency-remote teaching affected Higher-Education-Institutions at a nearly global scale. Authors in this issue come from European countries (Switzerland, Germany), North America (the USA) as well as the southern hemisphere (South Africa). Given the breadth of COVID-related (change) experiences, the insights presented in this issue can be relevant to many HEIs across the globe, notwithstanding their cultural and institutional specificities. In addition, and of high relevance to us, the articles collected here focus both on different positions or roles (students, faculty, management) as well as on different levels of teaching and learning in higher education. While most contributions focus on the student experience during COVID, others investigate faculty/instructors' perspectives including faculty development. Yet another group takes a more systemic, institutional point of view. It could be argued that higher-education research takes up a multi-level perspective when exploring change and the new normal.

This book exposes the potential to advance a cultural approach to sustainable urban development. It explores urban "spaces of possibilities" and links them to the seized or missed opportunities for innovative forms of transversal partnerships throughout the city and of culturally sensitive urban policies. The call for sustainability brings with it challenges for which, in view of the urgency of social transformation, institutional innovations are necessary. Sustainable urban development will only succeed through creative impulses, experiments, trying out innovative ideas, and making alternatives visible, in particular through locally rooted urban initiatives, artistic actions, and social movements. Discussing many concrete examples from several years of empirical research in the cities of Hanover and Hamburg (Germany), Baltimore and Chicago (USA), Bangalore (India), St. Petersburg (Russia), Singapore, and Vancouver (Canada), the book connects urban spaces and their actors; looks at their guiding principles, strategies, and concrete practices; and identifies new levers, networks, and alliances. Readers will find in this book not only inspiring examples of culture in everyday life in the city but also explanations about the qualities that make local cultural initiatives especially full of potentials, and how they may translate into city-wide changes, engaging with the whole City as Space of Possibilities. The book will interest researchers and advanced students in the interdisciplinary fields of urban studies, sustainability science/sustainability research, cultural sciences, urban sociology, and sociology of the arts/cultural sociology; and those interested in the transdisciplinary collaborations between the arts, academia, and civil society.

Highlighting leadership from a social and relational perspective, this book has a particular emphasis on the innovative role that social networks play in systems change. The social systems engaged in this volume cut across a wide array of stakeholder groups, ranging from student learners, pre-service/in-service teachers, administrators, community leaders, and out to organizations and communities that reflect well beyond the education sector, showcasing diverse perspectives from multiple areas and international settings. Bringing together 32 distinguished scholars from Australia, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Taiwan, the UK and the USA, this book explores the use of social networks in education across different contexts and settings, connecting it with leadership practice that works at these settings for change. The contributors also examine online and virtual social behaviors and their connections to face to face networks. Ultimately, the volume showcases that leadership is social influence through examining a variety of social systems through social relationships. In addition to the breadth of studies connecting innovative leadership research to practice in this volume, the contributors also explore a new area of social networks and leadership by examining online and virtual social behaviors and their connections to face to face networks. Ultimately, the selected chapters in this volume make the point that “leadership is social influence” through examining a variety of social systems through social relationships.

Different from literary works (prose, drama etc.) with techniques like montage and contemporary media (film, documentaries, video games, internet) where time-lines are being questioned through flashbacks and flashwords, historiography seems to have resisted such challenges. Most historiographical works (biographies, scholarly studies) still adhere to chronological narratives, even though the boundaries between history and literary fiction have been blurred over the past decades. Responding to 20th/21st c. attempts like Walter Benjamin’s prophetic historian, this volume asks: How to write history without following the chronologically oriented trajectory of time? The interdisciplinary contributions from a broad range of history (medieval, modern, music, sciences), sociology, life sciences, genocide research go back to a symposium that responded to a publication of Markus Vinzent (Writing the History of Early Christianity. From Reception to Retrospection of 2019, Cambridge University Press). The scholars engage with the idea of retrospection as a method of critical historiography. Writing retrospectively is not simply a matter of presentism, reversing chronology, it disrupts continuities and teleologies and opens creative futures.

This two-volume Handbook provides a major thematic overview of global sexualities, spanning each of the continents, and its study, which is both reflective and prospective, and includes traditional approaches and emerging themes. The Handbook offers a robust theoretical underpinning and critical outlook on current global, glocal, and ‘new’ sexualities and practices, whilst offering an extensive reflection on current challenges and future directions of the field. The broad coverage of topics engages with a range of theories, and maintains a multi-disciplinary framework. PART ONE: Understanding Sexuality: Epistemologies/Conceptual and Methodological Challenges PART TWO: Enforcing and Challenging Sexual Norms PART THREE: Interrogating/Undoing Sexual Categories PART FOUR: Enhancement Practices and Sexual Markets/Industries PART FIVE: Sexual Rights and Citizenship (And the Governance of Sexuality) PART SIX: Sexuality and Social Movements PART SEVEN: Language and Cultural Representation

Mobility is a basic principle of modernity besides others like individuality, rationality, equality and globality. Taking its cue from this concept, this book presents a movement that begins with the macro-social transformations linked to mobility and ends with empirical discussions on the new forms of mobility and their implications for everyday life. The book opens with a study of the social changes unique to the second age of modernity, with contributions from Ulrich Beck, John Urry, Wolfgang Bonss and Sven Kesselring. It continues with a discussion of the implications of these changes for sociological research. Authors such as Vincent Kaufmann, Weert Canzler, Norbert Schneider, Beate Collet, Ruth Limmer and Gerlinde Vogl focus on a series of field examinations, both qualitative and quantitative, of emerging mobilities. The book is a foray into the exciting new field of interdisciplinary mobility research informed by theoretical reflection and empirical investigation.