In Venezuelan Stick Fighting: The Civilizing Process in Martial Arts, Michael J. Ryan examines the modern and historical role of the secretive tradition of stick fighting within rural Venezuela. Despite profound political and economic changes from the early twentieth century to the modern day, traditional values, practices, and social imaginaries associated with older forms of masculinity and sociality are still valued. Stick, knife, and machete fighting are understood as key means of inst...

An essential guide to the basic concepts that comprise the study of sociology with contributions from an international range of leading expertsCore Concepts in Sociology is a comprehensive guide to the essential concepts relevant to the current study of the discipline and wider social science. The contributing authors cover a wide range of concepts that remain at the heart of sociology including those from its academic founding and others much more recent ...

The SARS-CoV-2 virus, and the associated COVID-19 pandemic, is perhaps the greatest threat to life, and lifestyles, the world has known in more than a century. The scholarship included here provides critical insights into the institutional responses, communal consequences, cultural adaptations, and social politics that lie at the heart of this pandemic. This volume maps out the ways in which the pandemic has impacted (most often disproportionately) societies, the successes and failures of ...

COVID-19: Surviving a Pandemic provides critical insights into survival strategies employed by communities and individuals around the world during the pandemic.A central question since this pandemic began has been how to survive it. That question has applied not just to staying alive, but also to staying healthy, both physically and mentally. Survival is certainly key, but surviving, and what that means, is also critical. The scholarship included in this volume will take a...

This volume seeks to explore contemporary trans lives in a world that is both global and increasingly globalizing, examining the nuances of the rights, identities, and politics that make up the varied spectrum of what has come to be included under the largely Western imposed label of "trans".Trans identities and rights have become increasingly prominent in the social imagination in recent years, and in a growing number of locales have also become hot button political issues. As tra...

Easily distinguished by the horns and frills on their skulls, ceratopsians were one of the most successful of all dinosaurs. This volume presents a broad range of cutting-edge research on the functional biology, behavior, systematics, paleoecology, and paleogeography of the horned dinosaurs, and includes descriptions of newly identified species.

"Jessie is well on her way to learning her new life and settling in.The tough alpha, Austin, has joined her team, and she has painstakingly learned to fly. At the moment, life couldn’t get any better. But it can get a whole lot…more irritating.Her parents have decided to visit. They don’t know anything about magic, about Jessie’s new digs, or about the crazy crew living in and around Jessie’s house. She must do everything in her power to keep the truth away from them. Which...

This handbook offers a comprehensive treatise on Grammatical Evolution (GE), a grammar-based Evolutionary Algorithm that employs a function to map binary strings into higher-level structures such as programs. GE's simplicity and modular nature make it a very flexible tool. Since its introduction almost twenty years ago, researchers have applied it to a vast range of problem domains, including financial modelling, parallel programming and genetics. Similarly, much work has been conducted to...

When a band of merciless, murdering thieves raise hell across the territory, three men committed to justice descend upon them like angels of death. And when the guns fall silent and the smoke clears, the Jackals are always the last men standing.Comanchero Cullen Brice has escaped from a Huntsville, Alabama, prison, where he was sentenced to hang. And he has sworn revenge against the man who killed his brother and put him behind bars, Texas Ranger Matt McCulloch. Freed from the hang...

“I’m proud to call George a mentor and a friend.” —Michael JordanOrphaned at just thirteen in a still-segregated Washington, D.C., George Raveling was introduced to a relatively unpopular sport—basketball—in high school. The rest, as they say, is history. Raveling went on to become one of the winningest coaches of all time, a mentor to legendary athletes, and a confidant of the sport’s greatest coaches, including Bob Knight and John Wooden. He convinced Michael Jor...

Literary and Visual Representations of HIV/AIDS: Forty Years Later depicts how film and literature about the HIV/AIDS crisis expand upon the issues generated by the epidemic. This collection fills an important gap in the scholarship on HIV/AIDS, by bringing together essays by both established and junior scholars on visual and literary representations of HIV/AIDS. Almost forty years after the first reported cases of what would later be defined as AIDS, this book looks back across t...

In this second volume of the groundbreaking survey, Michael J. Pfeifer edits a collection of essays that illuminates lynching and other extrajudicial "rough justice" as a transnational phenomenon responding to cultural and legal issues.The volume's European-themed topics explore why three communities of medieval people turned to mob violence, and the ways exclusion from formal institutions fueled peasant rough justice in Russia. Essays on Latin America examine how lynching in the U...