The education sector and workforce each face significant challenges in adapting to the unprecedented pace of technological advancement. Integrating artificial intelligence (AI), big data analytics, and other disruptive technologies is reshaping job roles and even entire industries, creating a pressing need for individuals and institutions to keep pace with these transformations. However, understanding and harnessing these technologies' potential can be daunting, especially without comprehensive resources that provide insights into their multifaceted impacts. Disruptive Technologies in Education and Workforce Development offers a comprehensive solution by exploring the profound implications of disruptive and emerging technologies. This book provides a roadmap for educators, policymakers, and professionals seeking to navigate the complexities of the digital age. The book focuses on innovative teaching and learning approaches, equipping readers with the knowledge and strategies to leverage these technologies effectively.

This book presents several perspectives on the COVID-19 crisis as it impacted the United States, focusing on policies, practices, and patterns. It considers the relationship between government policies and neo-liberalism, (anti)federalism, economies of scale, and material culture. The COVID-19 crisis became the primary current event in the United States in March 2020 and continued for several years. In the early days of the crisis, the United States lacked a cohesive, comprehensive approach to combating its spread. As a result, the pandemic was experienced differently in different parts of the United States and at different scales. The chapters in this volume include both quantitative and qualitative explorations of the pandemic as it occurred in the United States. Collectively, they help the reader to better understand this geographically salient issue and provide lessons to learn from so as to improve upon responses to crises in the future. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of Geography, Sociology, Political Science, and Economics with an interest in United States and the socio-political effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Geographical Review.

During the first mandatory lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic, citizens worldwide turned to »pandemic fictions« or started to produce their own »Corona Fictions« across different media. These accounts of (previously) experienced or imagined health crises feature a great variety of protagonists and their (re)actions in response to the exceptional circumstances. The contributors to this volume take a closer look at different pandemic protagonists in fictional narratives relating to the Covid-19 pandemic as well as in existing pandemic fictions. Thereby they provide new insights into pandemic narratives from a cultural, literary, and media studies perspective from antiquity to today.

Communication in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic vastly changed the way in which the world interacts. This book is a collection of unique research, where each chapter is centered around a different topic related to changes in communication as a byproduct of the COVID-19 pandemic. Specific contexts include changes in our intimate relationships, family communication, television messaging, identity navigation, sports diplomacy, and how media outlets communicate to audiences. Scholars of communication, health, sociology, and psychology will find this book particularly interesting.

This book concentrates on the changing patterns of work and global social order as a result of COVID-19. It scrutinizes these changes in order to point out the possible reasons for these changes following COVID-19. It sheds light on the differences between the condition of underdeveloped and developed countries, focusing on how they struggle to find ways of coping. The pandemic has changed the global social order. It has an impact on every aspect of life around the globe, from individual relationships to institutional operations and international collaborations. Societies are endeavoring to protect themselves despite severe restrictions, while the pandemic continues to upset family relations and overturn governance. COVID-19 has made it clearer than ever before that where many strains on the social sector occur, the current global system, with its interconnectedness and vulnerabilities, is under threat. Due to the changing patterns of economic and societal elements caused by COVID-19, further research is urgently needed to analyze these changing trends. The book portrays what work and the global social order will look like in the future. It is essential reading for anyone interested in these changes and the pst-COVID-19 reality.

Why most Americans’ finances improved during the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression—and the policy choices that made this possible In March 2020, economic and social life across the United States came to an abrupt halt as the country tried to slow the spread of COVID-19. In the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression, twenty-two million people lost their jobs between mid-March and mid-April of 2020. And yet somehow the finances of most Americans improved during the pandemic—savings went up, debts went down, and fewer people had trouble paying their bills. In The Pandemic Paradox, economist Scott Fulford explains this seeming contradiction, describing how the pandemic reshaped the American economy. As Americans grappled with remote work, “essential” work, and closed schools, three massive pandemic relief bills, starting with the CARES Act on March 27, 2020, managed to protect many of America’s most vulnerable. Fulford draws from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's “Making Ends Meet” surveys—which he helped design—to interweave macroeconomic trends in spending, saving, and debt with stories of individual Americans’ economic lives during the pandemic. We meet Winona, who quit her job to take care of her children; Marvin, who retired early and worried that his savings wouldn’t last; Lisa, whose expenses went up after her grown kids (and their dog) moved back home; and many others. What the statistics and the stories show, Fulford argues, is that a better, fairer, more productive economy is still possible. The success of pandemic relief policy proves that Americans’ economic fragility is not an unsolvable problem. But we have to choose to solve it.

Join the resistance and save the world in this graphic novel from New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Maberry! War is brewing in America. A shadow government is preparing to launch "purity bombs" for ethnic cleansing, but there are things worse than death. Designer pandemics are colliding and mutating, pushing humanity to the edge of permanent darkness. One child holds the key to human survival, or extinction, and everyone is hunting for her, but a small group of scientists and former SpecOps shooters stand in their way.

This book takes a probing look at how Spanish poets of the twentieth century read objects of visual art, write poems that utilize the discursive strategy known as ekphrasis, and how, in turn, they are read by those texts. As a result of their reading practices, the artistic works "read" by the poets are inscribed in the poets' own texts, and in a variety of ways. This analysis sheds light on the poets' own distinctive stance toward many primary issues, such as textuality, representation, language, power, ideology, literature, and art.

A forceful critique of how and why states failed to protect marginalized communities in their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the implications of ignoring the existing emergencies that exacerbated the pandemic’s devastating effects. The COVID-19 pandemic inaugurated a state of emergency unprecedented for most Americans. Some could observe this emergency from the relative safety of their homes, but those in marginalized communities, without access to the same privileges, were forced to risk their health and well-being. In Emergency, sociologist Claire Laurier Decoteau documents and theorizes the emergencies of COVID-19 by looking at the experiences of Chicagoans and the policies that shaped their lives. She describes the uneven racial impact of COVID-19 on Black and Latinx Chicagoans as a crisis within a crisis, caused by a convergence of emergencies: a state of emergency that protected white supremacy and wealth, the slow emergencies racially marginalized populations have faced for decades due to the long-term gutting of care infrastructure and deindustrialization, and the sacrifice “essential workers” were asked to make to protect the United States economy. As Decoteau shows, the city’s “racial equity” project used data to determine which communities would be given scarce resources, but once positivity or death rates declined, resources were retracted and redistributed elsewhere. City officials thus attempted to manage these converging emergencies by manipulating epidemiological data and orchestrating systems for interpreting that data. Decoteau makes clear that the emergencies precipitated by COVID-19 long predated the pandemic, and that we will continue to live with their compounding crises if we do not tackle their structural underpinnings.