Tom Rankin – författare

This stunning and inspiring book of photography and first-person narratives celebrates the remarkable people who, against staggering odds, are overcoming social, economic, and personal differences to improve their local communities and better people's lives. From volunteer crime patrols in Delray Beach, Florida, to marine conservation along the North Pacific Coast of Alaska, from migrant farm workers building homes in the Rio Grande Valley to youth empowerment on Chicago's Southwest Side, these encounters with real life and real people show us that we all have a role to play in our own communities. Each community represents examples of change, inviting reflection on our own values, beliefs, and commitment to the place we call home.Bill Burke, Lynn Davis, Lauren Greenfield, Reagan Louie, Danny Lyon, Sylvia Plachy, and Eli Reed are among the world-renowned photographers who have contributed to the book. The accompanying CD is narrated by the individuals featured in the book. Local Heroes Changing Lives is the centerpiece of the Indivisible Project (www.indivisible.org) funded by the Pew Charitable Trust.Photography exhibition will tour to: Chicago, Akron, San Antonio, Tuscon, Raleigh, San Diego, Sarasota, Philadelphia, and Anchorage.

The Sanctuary Issue reveals practices and places of sanctuary understood in its broadest form—as sanctified, sacred, and holy, and also as safety, refuge, haven, and relief. This issue honors survival and joy and imagines horizons toward which to reach. It asks how sanctuary is related to belonging and to unbelonging, and how each is constructed. How have we nurtured sanctuaries—religious, secular, and those that exceed that binary? The issue looks to the long history and future of southern peoples, and people who traverse southern US geographies, who continue to envision and construct sanctuary in permanence and impermanence.

From vanishing coastlines in the Carolinas to the toxic legacies of coal ash, and from reclamations of Indigenous histories in Louisiana to Black radical environmentalism in the Tidewater, meet the Human/Nature issue of Southern Cultures. As guest editor Andy Horowitz writes, this issue ""advocates for a humane vision of how people live in and with the world around them--a view of the environment as, at once, a material landscape that crunches under foot and burns on the skin, and an intellectual terrain, where ideas about place inform people's views of the world.

This issue of Southern Cultures frames its theme, Built/Unbuilt, not so much around the transformation of contemporary sites, but around landscapes and modernities left glaringly incomplete. While many of these sites have come to be viewed as parts of ordinary landscapes, the issue's theme allows us to identify and bring attention to how extraordinarily unfinished they remain.

Guest edited by T. Dionne Bailey and Garrett Felber, this issue of Southern Cultures makes visible a radical US South which has long envisioned a world without policing, prisons, or other forms of punishment. A region so often exceptionalized for its brutality and white supremacy is also the seedbed of freedom dreams and radical movement traditions.

Guest edited by Regina N. Bradley, the Sonic South Issue examines sound. From Deafness to silence to a tool of liberation, "Sound is where the South can be its most complicated and unapologetic," writes Bradley, "where it can boast its plurality and multiple communities.

Traditionally, there has been a disconnect between theoretical linguistics and pedagogical teacher training. This book seeks to bridge that gap. Using engaging examples from a wide variety of languages, it provides an innovative overview of linguistic theory and language acquisition research for readers with a background in education and teacher training, and without specialist knowledge of the field. The authors draw on a range of research to ground ideas about grammar pedagogy, presenting the notion of Virtual Grammar as an accessible label for unifying the complexity of linguistics. Organised thematically, the book includes helpful 'Case in point' examples throughout the text, to illustrate specific grammar points, and step-by-step training in linguistic methods, such as how to analyse examples, which educators can apply to their own teaching contexts. Through enriching language teachers' understanding of linguistic features, the book fosters a different perspective on grammar for educators.