Providing insights into the evolution of the global political economy, From Malaise to Meltdown: The International Origins of Financial Folly, 1844– identifies the main instigators behind the global financial crises we’ve seen in the last two hundred years. In this post, author Michael Lee details some of these cases and looks at what lessons we can learn from them. 

In the third and final installment of a three-part blog series on semiotics, Marcel Danesi, author of The Quest for Meaning: A Guide to Semiotic Theory and Practice, Second Edition looks at how semiotics is applied today.

Released this month, The Living Inca Town: Tourist Encounters in the Peruvian Andes presents a rich case study of tourism in Ollantaytambo, a rapidly developing destination in the southern Peruvian Andes and the starting point for many popular treks to Machu Picchu. Part of the Teaching Culture: UTP Ethnographies for the Classroom series, the book offers a rich ethnographic study of gender and other dimensions of tourism in a world heritage site. In this post, author Karoline Guelke looks at the impact COVID-19 has had on the region.

In the second installment of a three-part blog series on semiotics, Marcel Danesi, author of The Quest for Meaning: A Guide to Semiotic Theory and Practice, Second Edition explores the question, "what is meaning?" A word with many connotations, he investigates how meaning is created and how it is communicated.

Today is Global Recycling Day, an occasion marked every year on March 18 to create awareness around the globe about the rapid pace at which our natural resources are being used. Did you know that every year, the Earth yields billions of tons of natural resources and at some point, in the not too distant future, it will run out? If our planet is going to survive the climate crisis, we need to act rapidly. This is the premise of David Miller's book Solved: How the World’s Great Cities Are Fixing the Climate Crisis, which is a summons to every city to make small but significant changes that can drastically reduce our carbon footprint. In this post, we share an excerpt from chapter seven of the book on waste and look at San Francisco's efforts to have net-zero emissions by 2050.