Epistola publishing house is a family-owned company founded in 2009. We seek to provide quality reading with variety of themes to enrich the lives of young readers. Our books have distinctively educational purpose, inspiring discussion with parents, teachers or other children. In order to provide the best possible reading and achieve quality, we collaborate with renowned domestic and foreign authors.
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Lisa Bjerke is the owner and director of Optima Communications. Optima Communications provides customized assessments, coaching, training, and workshops to meet the unique communication needs of each individual, group or organization. Training is facilitated onsite in the workplace or virtually. Lisa has a Master’s degree in Speech-Language Pathology. She is a corporate communication coach working with clients to enhance communication skills. These skills include: active listening, clear verbal expression, emotional intelligence, cultural diversity and communication, and managing difficult conversations. Lisa is a communication and professionalism coach with the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine and Post Graduate Medical Education Program. Lisa is a recognized expert in accent assessment and training. She is the author of Accent on Canadian English: a pronunciation program for speakers of English as a second language™, Accent on Canadian English™ e-book, Accent on Clear English™ International e-book and the Accent on Canadian English Pronunciation Assessment Kit™. She is also the creator of the Accent on Clear English™ eCourse https://acetraining.online
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The book offers a novel lens to situate Europeanisation as violence - through institutions and technologies of development, cultural heritage, and borders, among others - by bringing South and East within a relational frame. Through four inter-related sections, it foregrounds Europeanisation as infrastructural violence and colonial asymmetries, slow violence and the construction of stratified subalternities, epistemic dispossession, and border epistemologies.
In the wake of 9/11, the Asian crisis and the 2004 tsunami, traditional analytical frameworks are increasingly unable to explain how individuals and communities are rendered insecure, or advance individual, global or environmental security. In the Asia-Pacific, the accepted wisdom of realism has meant that analyses rarely move beyond the statist, militarist and exclusionary assumptions that underpin traditional realpolitik. This innovative new book challenges these limitations and addresses the missing problems, people and vulnerabilities of the Asia-Pacific region. It also turns a critical eye on traditional interstate strategic dynamics. Critical security in the Asia-Pacific applies both a critical theoretical approach that interrogates the deeper assumptions underpinning security discourses, and a human-centred policy approach that focuses on the security, welfare and emancipation of individuals and communities. Leading Asia-Pacific researchers combine to apply these frameworks to the most pressing issues in the region, from the Korean peninsula to environmental change, Indonesian conflict, the 'war on terror' and the plight of refugees. The result is a sophisticated and accessible account of often-neglected realities of marginalization in the region, and a compelling argument for the empowerment and security of the most vulnerable.
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— The seminal work reissued — A science and philosophy classic — On the occasion of the author's 80th birthday According to evolutionary epistemology, the fact that we can know the world is neither coincidence nor divine providence, but has a natural explanation. Thinking and cognition are achievements of the human brain. Our cognitive structures fit into our world because they have evolved in adaptation to this world. This fit is not ideal, but it is enough for survival under competition. Gerhard Vollmer was instrumental in developing evolutionary epistemology. In his standard work, he explains the achievements and failures of our cognitive apparatus.
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This book provides a powerful diagnosis of why the global governance of science struggles in the face of emerging powers. Through unpacking critical events in China and India over the past twenty years, it demonstrates that the 'subversiveness' assumed in the two countries' rise in the life sciences reflects many of the regulatory challenges that are shared worldwide. It points to a decolonial imperative for science governance to be responsive and effective in a cosmopolitan world. By highlighting epistemic injustice within contemporary science, the book extends theories of decolonisation.
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This book focuses on current policy discourse in Higher Education, with special reference to Europe. It discusses globalisation, Lifelong Learning, the EU's Higher Education discourse, this discourse's regional ramifications and alternative practices in Higher Education from both the minority and majority worlds with their different learning traditions and epistemologies. It argues that these alternative practices could well provide the germs for the shape of a public good oriented Higher Education for the future. It theoretically expounds on important elements to consider when engaging Higher Education and communities, discussing the nature of the term 'community' itself. Special reference is accorded to the difference that lies at the core of these ever-changing communities. It then provides an analysis of an 'on the ground project' in University community engagement, before suggesting signposts for further action at the level of policy and provision. This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4, Quality education
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This volume in the Critical Theory and Contemporary Society series explores the arguments between critical theory and epistemology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Focusing on the first and second generations of critical theorists and Luhmann's systems theory, the book examines how each approaches epistemology. It opens by looking at twentieth-century epistemology, particularly the concept of lifeworld (Lebenswelt). It then moves on to discuss structuralism, poststructuralism, critical realism, the epistemological problematics of Foucault's writings and the dialectics of systems theory. This unique work takes a comparative look at structuralism and post-structuralism's epistemological theory with special reference to scientific reason. It also investigates Luhmann's works in epistemology. The aim is to explore whether the focal point for epistemology and the sciences remain that social and political interests actually form a concrete point of concern for the sciences as well.
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This collection sets out a range of perspectives on the challenges that the Caribbean is facing today, showing how the arts hold a crucial role in forging a more sustainable Caribbean community. It forcefully attests to the view that visual art in particular has a specific contribution to make and that this in turn means striving to foster a sustainable arts community that can contend with an environment of uneven infrastructure, opportunity and public awareness. Spanning the scholarly, artistic and professional fields of arts and heritage, this book compares two of the Caribbean's key linguistic regions - the Anglophone and the Dutch - to address the themes of global-local relations, capital, patronage, morality, contestation, sustainability and knowledge exchange. The result is a milestone of collaboration from diverse global settings of the Caribbean and its diaspora, including Jamaica, the Bahamas, Barbados, Suriname, Curaçao, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Germany and the United States.
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This volume brings together insights which look at the intersection of governance, culture and conflict resolution in India and the European Union. Two very different but connected epistemic, cultural and institutional settings, which have been divided by distance, colonialism and culture; yet have recently been brought closer together by ideas and practices of what is known as liberal peace, neoliberal state and development projects. The differences are obvious in terms of geography, culture, the nature and shape of institutions, and historical forces: and yet the commonalities between the two are surprising. This is the first book to compare contemporary Indian and European Union approaches to peace and is based on strong case studies and rigorous analysis. Postgraduate students, peace and conflict researchers, policy-makers and practitioners will benefit immensely from insights provided in this book. ;
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Developing the concept of 'disobedient knowledge', this book provides new perspectives on activism and everyday struggles against racism and bordering. Drawing on empirical material from distinct contexts in Northern, Western and Southern Europe, the chapters explore how different kinds of (b)orders are challenged and possibly also maintained in everyday antiracism, activism and struggles against borders. The book examines resistance and disobedience in relation to borders, social orders, conventional practices and hegemonic discourses. It underscores the importance of studying racism and bordering as intertwined phenomena. With a focus on the historical layers of resistance, disobedient practices and ways of building shared struggles, the book provides invaluable knowledge about postcolonial Europe and its future possibilities.
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Tensions in the struggle for sexual minority rights in Europe, newly available in paperback, is the first queer and poststructuralist reading of political rights concepts in the specific European transnational context. In the last thirty years Europe has seen the rise of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender movements fighting nationally and transnationally for participation rights in society. In addition academic theorists have increasingly paid attention to the epistemological and ontological roles gender and sexuality play in modern politics. However, in the political process of arguing for rights the centrality of those roles is mostly hidden from view in official institutional and movement discourses. This book investigates the conceptual themes of lesbian, gay and transgender rights and lobby politics in Europe and their open and hidden relations to binary and hierarchical orders of dominance. It contributes to an understanding of the conditions upon which politics of inclusion, participation, social justice and equality rest and why struggles for sexual minority rights have been so difficult and slow. It illuminates how the paradigms of political discourse constitute, consolidate and contest the meaning and cultural significance of gender and sexuality on modern, democratic, capitalist European societies. ;
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In the new world order mapped out by Japanese and Western imperialism in East Asia after the mid-nineteenth century opium wars, communities of merchants and settlers took root in China and Korea. New identities were constructed, new modes of collaboration formed and new boundaries between the indigenous and foreign communities were literally and figuratively established. Newly available in paperback, this pioneering and comparative study of Western and Japanese imperialism examines European, American and Japanese communities in China and Korea, and challenges received notions of agency and collaboration by also looking at the roles in China of British and Japanese colonial subjects from Korea, Taiwan and India, and at Chinese Christians and White Russian refugees. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars of the history and anthropology of imperialism, colonialism's culture and East Asian history, as well as contemporary Asian affairs.
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This book offers a comprehensive study of racialisation of Romani communities in Europe (and beyond). Drawing on the idea of unbelonging it demonstrates how Romani communities are placed in a position of visceral visibility by local, national and international institutions as well as public media discourses. It shows how such positionality impacts the ability of Roma to self-represent politically and build capacity for change. From the position of unbelonging the book offers an account of Romani agency which both challenges the mainstream representations of Roma but also develops an alternative none-nation-state sense of belonging. In doing so the book outlines an account of Romani alternative expressions in order to take control of their relationship with their own history, future, knowledge, and identity, and the rest of the society.
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This book offers important new insights into the history and culture of the Gaelic-speaking world from the mid-fifteenth century through to the reign of James VI and I. Throughout this period, the reach of the English and Scottish crowns within these western regions was limited. The initiative lay with local communities and royal power was contingent upon negotiating with well-established and largely autonomous aristocratic lineages. Moreover, events within this western world could exert a powerful, often unpredictable, influence upon the affairs of the wider archipelago. Using a series of case studies, this collection examines the evolving relationship between Ireland and Scotland in rich detail. It demonstrates how this world interacted with the encroaching English and Scottish states and underlines the importance of paying closer attention to this neglected area of Irish and British history.
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This volume collects and revises the key essays of Gunther Teubner, one of the world's leading sociologists of law. Written over the past twenty years, these essays examine the 'dark side' of functional differentiation and the prospects of societal constitutionalism as a possible remedy. Teubner's claim is that critical accounts of law and society require reformulation in the light of the sophisticated diagnoses of late modernity in the writings of Niklas Luhmann, Jacques Derrida and select examples of modernist literature. Autopoiesis, deconstruction and other post-foundational epistemological and political realities compel us to confront the fact that fundamental democratic concepts such as law and justice can no longer be based on theories of stringent argumentation or analytical philosophy. We must now approach law in terms of contingency and self-subversion rather than in terms of logical consistency and rational coherence.
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Rethinking settler colonialism focuses on the long history of contact between indigenous peoples and the white colonial communities who settled in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. It interrogates how histories of colonial settlement have been mythologised, narrated and embodied in public culture in the twentieth century (through monuments, exhibitions and images) and charts some of the vociferous challenges to such histories that have emerged over recent years. Despite a shared familiarity with cultural and political institutions, practices and policies amongst the white settler communities, the distinctiveness which marked these constituencies as variously, 'Australian', 'South African', 'Canadian' or 'New Zealander', was fundamentally contingent upon their relationship to and with the various indigenous communities they encountered. In each of these countries these communities were displaced, marginalised and sometimes subjected to attempted genocide through the colonial process. Recently these groups have renewed their claims for greater political representation and autonomy. The essays and artwork in this book insist that an understanding of the political and cultural institutions and practices which shaped settler-colonial societies in the past can provide important insights into how this legacy of unequal rights can be contested in the present. It will be of interest to those studying the effects of colonial powers on indigenous populations, and the legacies of imperial rule in postcolonial societies.
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Critical theory and Independent Living explores intersections between contemporary critical theory and disabled people's struggle for self-determination. The book highlights the affinities between the Independent Living movement and studies of epistemic injustice, biopower, and psychopower. It discusses in depth the activists' critical engagement with welfare-state paternalism, neoliberal marketisation, and familialism. This helps develop a pioneering comparison between various welfare regimes grounded in Independent Living advocacy. The book draws on the activism of disabled people from the European Network on Independent Living (ENIL) by developing case studies of the ENIL's campaigning for deinstitutionalisation and personal assistance. It is argued that this work helps rethink independence as a form of interdependence, and that this reframing is pivotal for critical theorising in the twenty-first century.
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This highly original book constitutes one of the first attempts to examine the problem of distributive justice in the European Union in a systematic manner. João Labareda argues that the set of shared political institutions at EU level, including the European Parliament and the Court of Justice of the EU, generate democratic duties of redistribution among EU citizens. Furthermore, the economic structure of the EU, comprising a common market, a common currency and a free-movement area, triggers duties of reciprocity among member states. The responsibilities to fulfil these duties, Labareda argues, should be shared by the local, national and supranational levels of government. Not only should the EU act as a safety net to the national welfare systems, applying the principle of subsidiarity, but common market and Eurozone regulations should balance their efficiency targets with fair cooperation terms. The concrete policy proposals presented in this book include a threshold of basic goods for all EU citizens, an EU labour code, a minimum EU corporate tax rate and an EU fund for competitiveness. Labarada argues that his proposals match the political culture of the member states, are economically feasible, can be translated into functioning institutions and policies and are consistent with the limited degree of social solidarity in Europe. This book is a major contribution to the understanding of what a just Europe would look like and what it might take to get us there. This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 10, Reduced inequalities
