Publisher Description

During the 1990s, there was a general consensus that Central Asia was witnessing an Islamic revival after independence, and that this occurrence would follow similar events throughout the Islamic world in the prior two decades, which had negative effects on both social and political development. Twenty years later, we are still struggling to fully understand the transformation of Islam in a region that's evolved through a complex and dynamic process, involving diversity in belief and practice, religious authority, and political intervention. This volume seeks to shed light on these crucial questions by bringing together an international group of scholars to offer a fresh perspective on Central Asian states and societies. The chapters provide analysis through four distinct categories: the everyday practice of Islam across local communities; state policies toward Islam, focusing on attempts to regulate public and private practice through cultural, legal, and political institutions and how these differ from Soviet policies; how religious actors influence communities in the practice of Islam, state policies towards the religion, and subsequent communal responses to state regulations; and how knowledge of and interaction with the larger Islamic world is shaping Central Asia's current Islamic revival and state responses. The contributors, a multidisciplinary and international group of leading scholars, develop fresh insights that both corroborate and contradict findings from previous research, while also highlighting the problem of making any generalizations about Islam in individual states or the region. As such, this volume provides new and impactful analysis for scholars, students, and policy makers concerned with Central Asia.

Taking a dialogic approach, this edited book engages in analysis and description of dialogic discourse in a number of different educational contexts, from early childhood to tertiary, with an international team of contributors from Australia, Finland, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The chapters focus mostly on dialogic face-to-face discourse, with some examples of online interactions, and feature insights from educational linguistics, particularly the work of Michael Halliday. While the contributors come from a range of theoretical backgrounds, they all share an interest in language in use and engage in close analysis of transcripts of naturally-occurring interaction. Taking inspiration from Alexander and other theorists, they employ a fine-grained and analytic approach to the exploration of their data. The authors make use of the linguistic tools and models of language in society, in order to examine the turn-by-turn unfolding of the interaction. The authors relate their insights from disparate forms of linguistic analysis to elements of Alexander’s (2020) dialogic framework, situating the discourse in its contexts and discussing the pedagogical implications of the linguistic choices at play. In presenting this work from a range of situations and perspectives, the authors strive to demonstrate how dialogic discourse plays out in educational contexts across the world. The book aims to foster further research in this direction and to inspire educators to explore dialogic discourse for themselves. It will be of interest to a wide audience, including literacy researchers, linguists, teachers and teacher educators, as well as graduate students.

This book makes two central claims: first, that mineral-rich states are cursed not by their wealth but, rather, by the ownership structure they choose to manage their mineral wealth and second, that weak institutions are not inevitable in mineral-rich states. Each represents a significant departure from the conventional resource curse literature, which has treated ownership structure as a constant across time and space and has presumed that mineral-rich countries are incapable of either building or sustaining strong institutions - particularly fiscal regimes. The experience of the five petroleum-rich Soviet successor states (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) provides a clear challenge to both of these assumptions. Their respective developmental trajectories since independence demonstrate not only that ownership structure can vary even across countries that share the same institutional legacy but also that this variation helps to explain the divergence in their subsequent fiscal regimes.

A Future Fairytale is a science fiction romantic comedy in which a troupe of traveling entertainers in an unarmed spaceship get caught up in a quest to go back in time to prevent a devastating war. However time travel has been outlawed for a thousand years and the ruthless Time Guardians will stop at nothing to protect the timeline. Our heroes must fight duels, juggle fire, cross deserts, bore people to sleep, and locate a working time machine, while keeping one step ahead of the dreaded Time Guardians. They're not rich and only one of them is good looking but the fate of half a billion people and the future of the galaxy hangs on their shoulders. Success could mean losing everything including their lives but they must not fail. A Future Fairytale is a fun filled adventure written in the traditional story telling medium. It can be enjoyed by the whole family. To find out about Pauline's upcoming novels please visit www.cozyread.com

Mandy is a ten-year-old deaf girl who struggles in a hearing world. Her exploits to prove herself land her in a strange world where she finds that to deny her destiny has serious consequences on herself and others. However, she befriends the King's Son and finds what life is all about. In Journey of Redemption, Mandy must save the land of Teriga and by saving the land, she saves herself. This is a story of an outward and inner journey of a young girl as she tries to find her way in the world and to make meaning of life and the circumstances she finds herself in. Pauline Jones lives in a country town in NSW Australia has been a teacher for over three decades. She has a passion for children to get to know Jesus and also how each and everyone is loved and valued in God's scheme of things. She is married with two sons and one grandson.

Language is at the heart of the learning process. We learn through language. Our knowledge about the world is constructed in language-the worlds of home and the community, the worlds of school subjects, the worlds of literature, the worlds of the workplace, and so on. It is through language that we interact with others and build our identities. Teachers' explanations, classroom discussions, assessment of student achievement, and students' understanding, composition, and evaluation of texts are all mediated through language. In this book, the authors explore how an explicit understanding of how language works enables students to make informed choices in their use and understanding of texts. Teaching Language in Context 2e is an introduction to the language that students encounter in the various curriculum areas as they move through the years of schooling and it will enable teachers to: - plan units of work that are sensitive to the language demands placed on students - design activities with a language focus - select texts for reading at an appropriate level - analyse texts to identify relevant language and visual features - create teaching materials that integrate an awareness of language - help students to access meanings created through a variety of media (written, spoken, visual, multimodal) - provide explicit support in developing students' writing and composing - assess students' written work - extend students' ability to articulate what they are learning. In this second edition, there is an increased emphasis on the multimodal nature of texts, particularly the relationship between image and language, and the place of visuals in supporting students to master the literacy demands of the curriculum. The book also recognises the increasingly elaborate texts found in the more complex literacy tasks of upper primary and lower secondary classrooms.