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If you knew one of your child’s friends smoked pot with her mom, would that worry you? If you knew another one of your child’s friends spoke in tongues, would that worry you more or less?

The varying traditions, goals, paradigms, and discourses associated with English language arts (ELA) underscore the degree to which there is not one school subject English, but many “Englishes.” In a neoliberal context, where movements like standardization and accountability stake claims about what ELA should be and do in the world, teachers, especially beginning teachers, can struggle to navigate the tensions engendered by these many and contradictory “Englishes.” This chapter attends to this struggle and delineates a process by which English Educators might illustrate the field’s vast and ever-changing terrain and support beginning teachers as they locate themselves in ELA. In delineating this process, we argue that in order to see and navigate the field in a neoliberal era, ELA teachers should treat the field as a discursive construction, constantly re-constructed by the dynamic play of social, political, and economic discourses. We argue that in treating the field as a discursive construction and exploring and locating themselves within the terrain, ELA teachers, rather than feeling powerless in the face of neoliberal forces, can leverage these different discursive forces, and gain footing in their classrooms, schools, and extracurricular communities to navigate the coexistence of many “Englishes” and argue for their pedagogical choices.

In recent years, a growing number of libraries have canceled or unbundled their “Big Deal” journal subscriptions – those subscriptions that include a full package of digital journal titles for one discounted cost. This started as an affordability problem but has slowly morphed into a challenge from libraries demanding a new pricing structure that accommodates and spurs the growing open access movement.

The change has caused a variety of challenges for technical services units including the increased need for user data, increasingly complicated workflows as they manage partial subscriptions, new interactions with consortia, and ongoing campus conversations. Whether the library is seeking to simply unbundle due to budget constraints, or push for new models such as “read and publish”, there is a tremendous impact on the work of technical services units.

This chapter will explore the rationale and growth of the Big Deal, how it is breaking, four case studies on breaking Big Deals, a brief discussion of new transformative agreements, new challenges for consortia, and implications for technical services units moving forward.

Shang and Croson (2009) found that providing information about the donation decisions of others can have a positive impact on individual donations to public radio. In this study, we attempted to replicate their results, but found no evidence that social information affected donation decisions. However, most of our donors were renewing members, a group which Shang and Croson also found was not influenced by social information.

Cryptocurrencies are hidden monies that are specifically created to be used as digital currencies while assuming the characteristics of real money. Barring the divergent opinions on whether permitted in Islamic law (that is/are halal) or forbidden in Islamic law (that is/are haram), and for which the swing tends to be in favor of its blockchain underlying technology permissibility in Islam, cryptocurrencies are undoubtedly indicating potential for relevance in the global trade, investment, and other contract settlements in some years to come. The potential of the blockchain technology is phenomenal with recent estimates suggesting it will be worth more than $20 trillion in just two years, which is more than the entire American economy. Since fortunes are made by those entrepreneurs and indeed savvy investors who have discerned its future potential earlier on, there exists some great temptation for people to jump on the blockchain bandwagon. Apparently the growing acceptability of digital fiat money as a result of technology development on one hand, and the failure of the paper money to mitigate inflation and other economic disequilibria since the disappearance of the gold standard on the other, various forms of cryptocurrencies including Bitcoins (referred to as the king) appear to roar toward wider recognition. However, an emerging phenomenon associated with cryptocurrency revolution is an observed significant fluctuation (the tide) in its value and thus a subject of discussion within Islamic finance community and beyond. In the midst of this also is the current agitation founded on some of the Islamic law (Sharīʿa) view on the necessity of asset-backed money, to be extended to the current cryptocurrency innovation for its transformation into a Sharīʿa compliant precious metal backed currency. The big question now which this chapter sought to provide the answer is, what are the implications of these developments to a more established and widening global phenomenon of Islamic finance and its development in Muslim world vis-á-vis aspirations for sustained economic development. The work finds that cryptocurrencies would generate three advantages over all forms of money including gold through: establishing a unified financial system through its standard decentralization, being rarer than gold and its significant mitigation of inflation. It is also noted that the prevalent foreign exchange risk resulting from the underlying activities (rather than the currency itself) is free from speculation (Gharar). It is, therefore, recommended that stakeholders in the Islamic Finance world should not be passive but be proactive in commencing processes to develop technical notes, standards, and operational guidelines to partake in the inevitable migration to cryptocurrencies.

This chapter reviews the overall structure of the US financial aid system and the way in which students from underrepresented groups deal with the cost of participating in higher education. Case studies of students from underrepresented groups are used to illustrate the type of problems experienced, including financial loan guilt, economic divisions amongst undergraduates and balancing employment with full-time undergraduate study. It is noted that financial aid only factors in tuition and housing costs, but does not take account of the need to participate in the ‘student experience’. Restricted finances mean that some students are unable to take part fully in social activities or purchase books, all of which are thought to be part of the typical undergraduate experience. Thus, despite efforts to widen participation, the concept of ‘college for all’ can be considered an illusion (Glass & Nygreen, 2011) because universities fail to acknowledge the class and racial hierarchies that shape the culture, an aspect that financial aid alone cannot remove.

Originally developed by the Japanese firm Toyota in the 1950s, the core innovation of lean production is to reorient all organizational activity around continuous improvement and the elimination of waste. We use the case of lean production in two healthcare organizations to explore the process of translating management models into new environments (Czarniawska & Sevón, 1996; Mohr, 1998). We draw on insights from organizational sociology and social movement theory to understand the strategies of actors as they attempt to overcome opposition to model transfer (Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009; Friedland & Alford, 1991; Snow, Rochford, Worden, & Benford, 1986). We examine two attempts to export lean production to healthcare organizations: Riverside Hospital, a research and teaching institution, and Lakeview Associations, a managed health provider. We use these cases to illustrate two ways that management models can get lost in the process of institutional translation: model attenuation, and model decoupling.