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  • Educational leadership policies and practices: Voices from developing countries by Jan-e-Alam Khaki, Gulab Khan, Mola Dad Shafa, and Sadruddin Bahadur Qutoshi

    Educational leadership policies and practices: Voices from developing countries

    Jan-e-Alam Khaki, Gulab Khan, Mola Dad Shafa, and Sadruddin Bahadur Qutoshi

    Educational Leadership Policies and Practices highlights voices from different developing countries that echo the need for sustainable, enabling, and liberating educational leadership that will stimulate ideas and ideals to usher new ways of looking at old problems of educational leadership.
    The chapters, largely, are based on original empirical field research, learnings drawn from applied research, and study of organizational learning. In addition, they are based on policy analysis and analytical deconstruction of the mind-boggling nuances of pedagogical, transformational, or transforming leadership theories.
    In an area where so little has been written on school and system leaders, Educational Leadership Policies and Practices: Voices from the Developing Countries is a very welcome contribution to the field. The various authors do a great job of portraying how radically different the contexts are for making education progress as leaders. We see the familiar concepts: transformational, moral, pedagogical, capacity building, contingent, mobilizing community, and so on, but the contexts are so different that the findings and lessons generate new ideas about leadership. The six main leadership lessons for less developed countries examined in the final chapter are especially powerful.
    Michael Fullan, Professor Emeritus, OISE/University of Toronto, Canada

  • Volume 10: Muslim cultures of the Indian Ocean : diversity and pluralism, past and present by Stephane Pradines and Farouk Topan

    Volume 10: Muslim cultures of the Indian Ocean : diversity and pluralism, past and present

    Stephane Pradines and Farouk Topan

    Scholars are increasingly recognising the centrality of the Indian Ocean in the study of Muslim cultures.

    This volume explores the expanding and changing roles of these Muslim communities across the Indian Ocean World from the seventh century to the mediaeval period to the present day. The book goes beyond the usual focus on geographical sub-regions to highlight different aspects of interconnectivity in relation to Islam. By analysing textual and material evidence, the fifteen papers in this volume examine identities and diasporas, manuscripts and literature, as well as vernacular and religious architecture. It explores the networks and movements of peoples, ideas and ideologies, as well as art, culture, religion and heritage.

    Key Features:

    • Highlights the centrality of Muslim cultures in understanding interconnectivity across the Indian Ocean
    • Explores the role of Islam in forming and transforming global interactions and local agencies across the Indian Ocean
    • Offers intra-Muslim perceptions of beliefs, practices and activities, both religious and other
    • Presents 15 case studies across Ethiopia, Gujarat, Java, Kerala, the Malay-Indonesian archipelago, Maldives, Oman, Tanzania, Zanzibar and the Persianate cultural zone

  • Football as Soft Power: The Political Use of Football in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by Vitas Rafael Carosella

    Football as Soft Power: The Political Use of Football in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

    Vitas Rafael Carosella

    In November 2022 Qatar hosts the first Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region FIFA World Cup. This paper seeks to understand the use of football as a soft power political tool in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Based on culture, values and policies, soft power is power through attraction as opposed to coercion. The stronger one player’s values, culture and policies are, the more soft power that player has. Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, traditional fossil fuel-based states, suffer from a lack of attraction. By investing in football, each nation hopes to project a new image and ensure future relevance. Qatar uses football to increase its standing in the international community, helping to ensure its own protection in case of regional disputes. The UAE uses football to help convert itself into an international travel and business centre, while Saudi Arabia invests in football to help project a progressive image of itself to the world and ensure regime security

  • Signature pedagogies of teacher education in Pakistan by Ayesha Bashiruddin and Nusrat Fatima Rizvi

    Signature pedagogies of teacher education in Pakistan

    Ayesha Bashiruddin and Nusrat Fatima Rizvi

    This book presents signature pedagogies in teacher education. It presents a very comprehensive framework of creative and innovative pedagogies. The examples that it presents were conceptualized and implemented in the M.Ed. programme and other professional development programmes at the Aga Khan University, Institute for Educational Development (AKU-IED). Karachi, Pakistan. In this book, we have taken up the challenge of showcasing evolving and creative pedagogies used by faculty members at the AKU-IED in the teaching and learning processes. Each chapter is unique because each describes a pedagogy which is intricately linked to a subject area and is an example of a lived experienced of a faculty member teaching a course at the M.Ed. level and in other professional development programmes at the AKU-IED. The book is a pioneer in presenting a consolidated collection of signature pedagogies in teacher education. The hope is that these examples will be useful for other teachers and teacher educators not only in Pakistan but also in other developing country contexts and will contribute to the changing scenario of teacher education across the world.

  • Legal Translation in a Political Context: The Trick of Choosing between Alternatives in Translating Electoral Terms by Zakia Deeb

    Legal Translation in a Political Context: The Trick of Choosing between Alternatives in Translating Electoral Terms

    Zakia Deeb

    Legal electoral terminology is a specialist subject within the broader legal language discourse. When translating into Arabic, even basic electoral terms can be translated differently in different Arab countries for various reasons due to different sources of inspiration. Most legal electoral terms have a variety of alternative equivalents within the relevant linguistic field or semi-legal domain. This paper discusses such alternatives while presenting problems related to the existing resources in the field. Data collected from the 2012 election of members of the Libyan General National Congress are analysed to test the consistency in selecting from these alternatives. Furthermore, material presented in various recently compiled dictionaries, glossaries and manuals of electoral terms are used as examples. The hypothesis drawn from working on a large body of material translated from English into Arabic is that the consistency in selecting equivalents for electoral legal terms is only partial. Consistency is more apparent when terms are law proper but not otherwise. Also, material from different sources indicates problems concerning standardisation, abbreviations and acronyms as well as cultural and linguistic problems.

  • Touching Sound: Passion and Global Politics by Maria Frederika Malmström and Mark Levine

    Touching Sound: Passion and Global Politics

    Maria Frederika Malmström and Mark Levine

    How does sound shape and/or constrain the actions of individuals and groups? In what ways does 'touching sound' constitute important stimuli within everyday experiences and how/why does sound induce strong affective states? How does listening to noise as well as to silences, screeches and songs, clicks and pops, affect us? By focusing on the under-studied realm of sound we increase our understanding of the politics of the sonic. This text opens an interdisciplinary conduit that should enable cross-fertilizations between the disciplines of anthropology, ethnomusicology, history, cultural studies, religious studies and political sociology, bringing together studies of aesthetic production, the environment, sub- and counter-cultures and technologies and affective dimensions of state as well as societal power and contestation problems.

  • One Hundred Years of Family Law Reform in Parliament, in Court, and on Screen by Gianluca Parolin, Nadia Sonnevald, Nathalie Bernard- Maugiron, and Enas Lofti

    One Hundred Years of Family Law Reform in Parliament, in Court, and on Screen

    Gianluca Parolin, Nadia Sonnevald, Nathalie Bernard- Maugiron, and Enas Lofti

    This paper interrogates the very form of collective decision making that legislation signifies, its operationalisation in adjudication, and its interrelation with popular culture. Through the lens of the Egyptian legal system, the paper offers case-studies of collective decision making on matters of personal status, it focuses on the state's different approach towards the regulation of personal status for its Muslim and non-Muslim citizens; in the legal context of the ‘best interests of the child’ it looks at the multiple entanglements of legislation and its eventual actualisation in Egyptian courts; and it uses classical examples of Egyptian cinema popularly associated with changes in legislation – underlining how the big screen in Egypt has often been the place where some of the most contentious and divisive matters of personal status have been discussed.

  • UK Think-Tanks, the War on Terror and the Radicalisation Debate by Hadi Enayat

    UK Think-Tanks, the War on Terror and the Radicalisation Debate

    Hadi Enayat

    This paper maps the discursive and ideological habitus in which UK think-tanks operate in connection with the ‘war on terror’. It discusses how UK think-tanks have both shaped and been shaped by this habitus and the impact their work has had on counter-terrorism policy in the UK. It begins by discussing the concept of think-tanks and their role and input into politics. It then sketches the rise of ‘terrorism’ as both an academic object of study, from the mid-1970s onwards, and as an increasingly vital policy area for governments and the military-security establishment, especially after 9/11. The paper then focuses on UK think-tanks dividing them into three broad categories: conservative-orthodox think-tanks, establishment think-tanks and alternative-radical think-tanks.

  • Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Syria, Iran and Pakistan by Maryam Ghadyani, Hinna Hussain, Wael Odeh, and Philip Wood

    Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Syria, Iran and Pakistan

    Maryam Ghadyani, Hinna Hussain, Wael Odeh, and Philip Wood

    This paper describes the reaction to the COVID-19 outbreak on social media in Iran, Syria and Pakistan. In particular, we focus on issues of the place of religion in society, on international relations and on trust between society and government, where these issues have been invoked in the discussion of the epidemic. We conclude with timelines for the early phases of the epidemic in the three countries.

  • Islamic and Middle East Area Studies Librarianship by Walid Ghali, Waseem Farooq, Paul Auchterlonie, and Arnoud Vrolijk

    Islamic and Middle East Area Studies Librarianship

    Walid Ghali, Waseem Farooq, Paul Auchterlonie, and Arnoud Vrolijk

    The three papers collected here are based on a seminar on Islamic Studies Librarianship held on 31 January 2019 at the Aga Khan Library (AKL), in conjunction with the Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (AKU-ISMC). Curators, area studies directors, and collection librarians, who are currently involved in this field, gathered to discuss common challenges and to identify strategic areas for collaboration.

  • Nairobi Noir by Peter Kimani

    Nairobi Noir

    Peter Kimani

    This short story anthology, released simultaneously in London and New York, provides an entire spectrum of generations of Kenyan writers—an unprecedented feat in Kenya’s literary history. The oldest writer in this anthology is 81, the youngest is only 24 capturing the entire spectrum of Kenyan writing: past, present, and future. Kimani also contributed an original story, Blood Sister.

  • Atlas of diagnostic and predictive histopathology by Shahid Pervez

    Atlas of diagnostic and predictive histopathology

    Shahid Pervez

    The second edition of this atlas covers the histopathology of all organ systems, supporting trainees and residents in the histopathological diagnosis of a wide range of inflammatory, neoplastic, degenerative, developmental and metabolic disorders. Though organ-specific books and atlases are increasingly available, there is a growing demand for a comprehensive guide to the histopathological diagnosis of each organ system, enabling histopathology trainees/residents and general pathologists to make reliable provisional or final diagnoses in routine practice. Each chapter covers a specific organ system and provides a better understanding of the microscopic pathology of common diseases and cancers, their interpretation, clinical presentation, epidemiology and demographics. The book also includes a chapter on ‘Predictive Pathology’ to help pathologists and other medical and healthcare professionals understand histopathology and report on it in keeping with standard international guidelines for individualized patient management.
    Intended as a concise and handy guide, this book offers a ready reference for trainees in histopathology, surgical pathology, anatomic pathology and cellular pathology, as well as practicing pathologists. It can also serve as a useful resource for biologists, biomedical scientists and physicians in general. The book features over 2200 illustrations with microscopic descriptions and interpretations. Besides H&E, special stains, IHC, FISH and radiology are included.

  • 40 Years On: Reflections on the Iranian Revolution by Sevgi Adak, Touraj Atabaki, Kamran Matin, and Valentine M. Moghadam

    40 Years On: Reflections on the Iranian Revolution

    Sevgi Adak, Touraj Atabaki, Kamran Matin, and Valentine M. Moghadam

    The three articles compiled here are based on a panel discussion held at the Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (AKU-ISMC) on 23 May 2019.

    Marking the 40th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution, its aim was to revisit the debate on the causes and impact of the revolution for Iran and beyond.

    Three questions in particular guided the interdisciplinary dialogue and political reflections on this world historical event: How should we analyse the conditions underpinning the revolutionary dynamics in Iran in the global context of the 1970s? How should the Iranian Revolution be analysed in an historical-comparative perspective? And, what is the legacy, or rather, the multiple legacies, of the revolution for the political struggles in Iran and the Middle East today

  • Delusional states: Feeling rule and development in Pakistan's Northern Frontier by Nosheen Ali

    Delusional states: Feeling rule and development in Pakistan's Northern Frontier

    Nosheen Ali

    Delusional States: Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan's Northern Frontier is the first in-depth study of state power and social struggle in Gilgit-Baltistan - the only Shia-majority region of Sunni-dominated Pakistan and a contested border zone that forms part of disputed Kashmir. For seven decades, the political conflict over Kashmir has locked India and Pakistan in brutal wars and hate-centered nationalisms. This book illuminates how within this story of hate lie other stories - of love and betrayal, loyalty and suspicion, and beauty and terror. Placing these emotionalities at the centre of its analysis, Delusional States rethinks the state–citizen relation in deeply felt and intimate terms, offering a fine-grained ethnographic analysis of power and subjection in contemporary Pakistan. A powerful contribution to studies of state-making and Muslim sociality in South Asia, the book additionally offers distinct theoretical insights in the fields of social movements, political ecology, education, and global development studies.

  • Education in Tanzania in the era of globalisation: Challenges and opportunities by Joe Lugalla and Marriote Ngwaru

    Education in Tanzania in the era of globalisation: Challenges and opportunities

    Joe Lugalla and Marriote Ngwaru

    Education in Tanzania in the Era of Globalisation Challenges and Opportunities is a product of papers presented at a National Education Conference held in Dodoma, Tanzania in November 2016 and organised by the Aga Khan University-Institute for Educational Development, East Africa (AKU-IED-EA). The individual chapters in this publication, and their collective thrust, discuss the challenges in the education system in good faith and in the spirit of cooperation and collaboration guided by the belief that it is not the responsibility of the Government alone to see how these can be addressed. The various authors of Education in Tanzania in the Era of Globalisation Challenges and Opportunities discuss issues within the context of the Tanzanian political economy against the effects of globalization and seek to initiate a new kind of debate that is long overdue; a debate aimed at charting out appropriate strategies whose objective is to improve the quality of education in Tanzania so that it becomes a useful vehicle in enhancing processes of social change, transformation and development.

  • Political kinship in Pakistan: Descent, marriage and government stability by Stephen M. Lyon

    Political kinship in Pakistan: Descent, marriage and government stability

    Stephen M. Lyon

    In Political Kinship in Pakistan, Stephen M. Lyon illustrates how contemporary politics in Pakistan are built on complex kinship networks created through marriage and descent relations. Lyon points to kinship as a critical mechanism for understanding both Pakistan’s continued inability to develop strong and stable governments, and its incredible durability in the face of pressures that have led to the collapse and failure of other states around the world.

  • Determinants and outcome of esophageal caustic stricture interventions by Dunya Moghul‬, Mohammad Tareq Rahimi, and Tazeen Saeed Ali

    Determinants and outcome of esophageal caustic stricture interventions

    Dunya Moghul‬, Mohammad Tareq Rahimi, and Tazeen Saeed Ali

    This book is based on the research which is done by one the first female pediatric surgeons of a war torn country and her tireless struggles in giving hope of life to the society specially the children and trying to provide high stranded treatment in-spite of limited resources provided. Children makes one third our populations today, and our all future.Thinking about health of children today, will give us a healthy population tomorrow. Afghanistan has been in 40 years of unwanted wars, and counts as one of five young developing countries, beside researching the conflicts and outcomes of war, we need to study silent killers such as caustic ingestion. As we know,we can prevent from mortality and morbidity of caustic ingestion by taking very ordinary measures but unfortunately no such measures are being taking care of, and the incidence are significant, so we are hoping this study be the first step for start to work in such area and create general awareness.*

  • Enhancing primary science teaching through school-based mentors: A study from Pakistan by Nelofer Halai

    Enhancing primary science teaching through school-based mentors: A study from Pakistan

    Nelofer Halai

    Aiming to develop a model in understanding key strategies, the author indicates existing gaps and exposes the readers to logistical components of workshops, while at the same time, places special emphasis on conceptualization of ideas for preparing and using appropriate materials to teach science to adult teachers. In addition to this, the book also provides teachers’ insights on how to develop themselves into mentors or teacher educators and thus enhance their impact in schools by not only teaching students, but also other teachers. Halai aims at aiding teachers away from conventional and towards new tutoring techniques by providing a broad context of study.

  • AKU-IED reflecting on the past journeying into the future by Anil Khamis and Sadia Muzaffar Bhutta

    AKU-IED reflecting on the past journeying into the future

    Anil Khamis and Sadia Muzaffar Bhutta

    This Commemorative Edition, with its 12 engaging chapters written by AKU-IED graduates, exemplifies the depth and scale of the educational challenges to be confronted. The chapters provide insights into how different discourses and educational practices are envisaged by the students themselves, which in turn is a reflection of their experiences as post-graduate students at the Institute, leading to changes they chart — both of themselves in developing their research capabilities and the impact of their studies in each of the particular projects. The chapters provide compelling insight and evidence of the AKU-IED Master of Education programme effect, with its two specialisation strands of teacher education and educational leadership and management, and the influence of the MEd on its graduates' personal and professional lives, their enhanced capabilities and capacities as pedagogues and critical thinkers, their vision for real and potential change to impact their home institutions and more broadly in the educational arenas they study. The graduates' biographical snapshots presented along with their chapters convey a powerful perennial message: the journey and creation and re-creation of individuals and institutions is a personal and public narrative that needs to be acknowledged, critically examined, and recast in the pursuit of producing new knowledge and sustainable approaches particularly for the Global South.

  • Mobile technologies and socio-economic development in emerging nations by Fredrick Mtenzi, George Oreku, Dennis Lupiana, and Jim Yonazi

    Mobile technologies and socio-economic development in emerging nations

    Fredrick Mtenzi, George Oreku, Dennis Lupiana, and Jim Yonazi

    As technology advances, mobile devices have become more affordable and useful to countries around the world. As a result, mobile evolution has become an essential part of economic and social advancement. This book provides emerging research on the role of mobile devices as an important aspect of social and economic growth in developing countries. While highlighting topics, such as device authentication, mobile data management, and sensor services, this book explores how mobile devices have evolved to become an extremely useful tool. This book is a vital resource for academicians, researchers, students, practitioners, politicians, and professionals seeking current research on the uses, applications, and advantages of mobile services in increasing economic growth.

  • Education and extremisms: Rethinking liberal pedagogies in the contemporary world by Farid Panjwani, Lynn Revell, Reza Gholami, and Mike Diboll

    Education and extremisms: Rethinking liberal pedagogies in the contemporary world

    Farid Panjwani, Lynn Revell, Reza Gholami, and Mike Diboll

    Education and Extremisms addresses one of the most pressing questions facing societies today: how is education to respond to the challenge of extremism? It argues that the implementation of new teaching techniques, curricular reforms or top-down changes to education policy alone cannot solve the problem of extremism in educational establishments across the world. Instead, the authors of this thought-provoking volume argue that there is a need for those concerned with radicalisation to reconsider the relationship between instrumentalist ideologies shaping education and the multiple forms of extremisms that exist. Beginning with a detailed discussion of the complicated and contested nature of different forms of extremism, including extremism of both a religious and secular nature, the authors show that common assumptions in contemporary discourses on education and extremism are problematic. Chapters in the book provide a careful selection of pertinent and topical case studies, policy analysis and insightful critique of extremist discourses. Taken together, the chapters in the book make a powerful case for re-engaging with liberal education in order to foster values of individual and social enrichment, intellectual freedom, criticality, open-mindedness, flexibility and reflection as antidotes to extremist ideologies. Recognising recent criticisms of liberalism and liberal education, the authors argue for a new understanding of liberal education that is suitable for multicultural societies in a rapidly globalising world. This book is essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students with an interest in religion, citizenship education, liberalism, secularism, counter-terrorism, social policy, Muslim education, youth studies and extremism. It is also relevant to teacher educators, teachers and policymakers.

  • Lessons from implementation of educational reforms in Pakistan: Implications for policy and practice by Takbir Ali and Sarfaroz Niyozov

    Lessons from implementation of educational reforms in Pakistan: Implications for policy and practice

    Takbir Ali and Sarfaroz Niyozov

    A resourceful insight for stakeholders and reformers on the future of education in Pakistan, Lessons from Implementation of Educational Reforms in Pakistan: Implications for Policy and Practice offers challenging research-grounded accounts from a selection of distinct research studies, carried out by AKU-IED faculty. These studies originated from two major multi-year international and donor-funded education improvement projects in Pakistan—the Strengthening Teacher Education in Pakistan (STEP), and the Educational Development and Improvement Programme (EDIP).

    Providing a blend of qualitative and quantitative accounts of practices, attitudes, and challenges of integrating local and international experiences and ideas around educational reform and professional development at micro-levels, and these projects’ promising implications at macro-levels, the book provides a distinct understanding of the processes of educational reforms in Pakistan. It delves into issues involved in understanding the nexus of theory and practice in the context of large-scale education reforms. While providing a conceptual base for reflections, it raises such critical questions on how local and global successful practices and experiences can be merged into new quality and sustainable projects and frameworks for educational change in Pakistan and other developing countries.

  • Educational policies in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan: Contested terrain in the twenty-first century by Dilshad Ashraf, Mir Afzal Tajik, and Sarfaroz Niyozov

    Educational policies in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan: Contested terrain in the twenty-first century

    Dilshad Ashraf, Mir Afzal Tajik, and Sarfaroz Niyozov

    In the mountains of the Northern Pakistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan School and schooling are both symbolic of wider ranging cultural and political battles over morals, modernity, development, gender and the rule of law. Educational Policies in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan: Contested Terrain in the Twenty-First Century is about both the normative battles over the purpose of education, as well as about the structural impediments to providing instruction in those remote and challenging locations where it is attempted. The analytical frames in this collection come primarily from the social sciences and comparative education. Contributors examine education, policy, processes and structures in the broader socio-cultural, religious and economic context of three countries sharing somewhat similar colonial and post- colonial legacy and current uprising of extreme religious positions and a drive to social-cohesion.

  • Dance of the Jakaranda by Peter Kimani

    Dance of the Jakaranda

    Peter Kimani

    "This funny, perceptive and ambitious work of historical fiction by a Kenyan poet and novelist explores his country’s colonial past and its legacy through the stories of three men involved with the building of a railroad linking Lake Victoria and the Indian Ocean--what the Kikuyu called the 'Iron Snake' and the British called the 'Lunatic Express.'"
    --New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

    "Kimani has done a game job managing the carpentry of this ambitious novel, bringing great skill to the task of deploying multiple story lines, huge leaps back and forth in time and the withholding and distribution of information...Once Kimani has his plotlines all set, his writing relaxes, and it’s here that you can see his raw talent...I have never read a novel about [Kenya] that’s so funny, so perceptive, so subversive and so sly."
    --New York Times Book Review

    "Destined to become one of the greats...This is not hyperbole: it’s a masterpiece."
    --The Gazette

    "A multi-racial nation-building tale that begins during the construction of the railway from Mombasa to Nairobi. There are three men at its heart: two white, a British administrator known as 'Master' and an Anglican minister; one brown, an Indian technician who sires a male child, a birth that will reverberate down through the years."
    --Toronto Star

    "A fascinating part of Kenya’s history, real and imagined, is revealed and reclaimed by one of its own."
    --Minneapolis Star Tribune

    "But the novel has way more strengths than I can describe here, including the beauty of lyrical narration that combines irony, flashback, humour, allusions and inter-textual references, all of which are expertly manipulated to give the reader a gem of a story populated by composite characters, a story that, though revisiting old themes and times, does so with the freshness that one would expect of established literary geniuses."
    --Daily Nation

    "The author has built here not only, on these pages, not only a railroad, but the singular triumph of a highly diverting novel. Besides weaving an excellent plot-line, he offers the reader a classic, understated writing style that haunts much of this book, turns it into a minor masterpiece."
    --RALPH Magazine, Starred review

    "Peter Kimani, an acclaimed writer and poet, has brilliantly constructed this novel’s plot...[His] lyrical prose, such as portraying the train as ‘a massive snakelike creature,’ and his breathtaking descriptions of ‘God’s country’ bring the beauty of the land before our eyes."
    --Historical Novels Review

    Set in the shadow of Kenya's independence from Great Britain, Dance of the Jakaranda reimagines the special circumstances that brought black, brown and white men together to lay the railroad that heralded the birth of the nation.

    The novel traces the lives and loves of three men--preacher Richard Turnbull, the colonial administrator Ian McDonald, and Indian technician Babu Salim--whose lives intersect when they are implicated in the controversial birth of a child. Years later, when Babu's grandson Rajan--who ekes out a living by singing Babu's epic tales of the railway's construction--accidentally kisses a mysterious stranger in a dark nightclub, the encounter provides the spark to illuminate the three men's shared, murky past.

    With its riveting multiracial, multicultural cast and diverse literary allusions, Dance of the Jakaranda could well be a story of globalization. Yet the novel is firmly anchored in the African oral storytelling tradition, its language a dreamy, exalted, and earthy mix that creates new thresholds of identity, providing a fresh metaphor for race in contemporary Africa.

  • Being a Surgeon: The Ten Commandments by Asad Raja

    Being a Surgeon: The Ten Commandments

    Asad Raja

    ‘Being a Surgeon' is a heartfelt exploration of surgical discipline. It is intended to help surgeons and other stakeholders around the world make a difference in the care of surgical patients. It would serve trainees and training programs, and help improve the culture and practices of surgery. The book invites surgical trainees and preceptors to fight the onslaught of institutionalized dehumanization in medicine. It calls to delve into the full, holistic complexity of the surgical discipline by exploring and cultivating every facet of the surgeon's role. It centers round author's experiences as a surgeon battling to salvage patient life, dignity, and wellbeing in difficult and challenging environments. These experiences are held up as examples for surgeon's young and old to learn from, providing key principles. The Ten Commandments are based on cardinal, ethical and surgical maxims that invite surgeons, to discuss triangle of medical professionalism, primacy of patient welfare, the duty of care, reflective practice, value judgments, conflict of interest, patient advocacy, justice, and much more. This book will guide new surgeons and practitioners as they develop and refine their sense of professionalism and ethics. It will be invaluable to preceptors as they create methods of mentorship that nurture and support young practitioners by teaching them to cultivate their moral sense. Surgery is a union of science and compassion. The book will inspire anyone dreaming of becoming a surgeon and providing compassionate, quality surgical care. Being a Surgeon will help you gain valuable insights to the true holistic approach to patient care.

 
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