Humanities & Social Sciences

Spätestens seit den 1970er-Jahren hat sich in Deutschland eine hegemoniale Wissensordnung über den Islam etabliert, die Gewalt und Bedrohung betont. In der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft wird diese Deutungshoheit herausgefordert: Vereinseitigungen werden sichtbar und mehrheitsgesellschaftliche Sehgewohnheiten irritiert. Wie aber deuten die beteiligten Akteur*innen die neue Diskurskonstellation? In einer Verbindung postmigrantischer Gesellschaftsanalysen mit hegemonietheoretischen Ansätzen rekonstruiert Benedict Bazyar-Gudrich die Deutungen der Islamdiskurse durch diejenigen, die in ihnen als sprechend auftreten. Er zeigt den Islam als polarisiertes Diskursfeld, in dem »alte« und »neue« Akteur*innen intensiv um diskursive Hegemonie ringen.

Representing Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Literature includes a collection of essays exploring the ways in which recent literary representations of vulnerability may problematize its visibilization from an ethical and aesthetic perspective. Recent technological and scientific developments have accentuated human vulnerability in many and different ways at a cross-national, and even cross-species level. Disability, technological, and ecological vulnerabilities are new foci of interest that add up to gender, precarity and trauma, among others, as forms of vulnerability in this volume. The literary visualization of these vulnerabilities might help raise social awareness of one’s own vulnerabilities as well as those of others so as to bring about global solidarity based on affinity and affect. However, the literary representation of forms of vulnerability might also deepen stigmatization phenomena and trivialize the spectacularization of vulnerability by blunting readers’ affective response towards those products that strive to hold their attention and interest in an information-saturated, global entertainment market.

This innovative collection offers a pan-Southern rejoinder to hegemonies of Northern sociolinguistics. It showcases voices from the Global South that substitute alternative and complementary narrations of the link between language and society for canonical renditions of the field. Drawing on Southern epistemologies, the volume critically explores the entangled histories of racial colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy in perpetuating prejudice in and around language as a means of encouraging the conceptualization of alternative epistemological futures for sociolinguistics. The book features work by both established and emerging scholars, and is organized around four parts: The politics of the constitution of language, and its metalanguage, in the Global South; Who gets published in sociolinguistics? Language in the Global South and the social inscription of difference; and Learning and the quotidian experience of language in the Global South. This book will be of interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, critical race and ethnic studies, and philosophy of knowledge.

Advocating Social Change through International Law, edited by Professors Daniel Bradlow and David Hunter, explores the use of hard and soft international law in advocating for social change. Using case studies rooted in inter alia human rights, international crimes, environmental protection, public heath, and financial regulation, the book focuses on both state and non-state actors’ strategic choices regarding the use of hard and soft international law in advocating for social change. Looking through the social change lens provides new insights into the interplay between soft and hard international law, the perceived costs and benefits associated with hard and soft international law in different contexts, and the factors affecting the effectiveness of hard and soft approaches to international law.

Economics

The book explores the approaches taken by state institutions to deal with inequality in the 1970s and 1980s as forms of "globalization." These approaches were labeled "development aid" and "international solidarity." It focuses on the intercontinental migration between the two Germanys and countries like Cuba, Angola, Ethiopia, and Tanzania prompted by these development policies.

This book examines the design and evolution of European law from the perspective of economics. It draws on various branches of the economic sciences—including rational choice and game theory, and institutional and behavioural economics—to expand our understanding of EU law and its effects. It seeks to complement doctrinal research on EU law by generating insights that are typically ignored in discussions of legal doctrine—including why the EU Treaties are designed as they are, how the Treaties and secondary EU law should be crafted, and how EU rules should be interpreted. While legal scholars draw on a range of interpretive methods, economics furnishes an alternative set of tools for explaining core legal principles such as conferral, subsidiarity, and mutual recognition. The law considers the actions of EU institutions in terms of their competences and instruments; economics, by contrast, can shed light on underlying motive dynamics—that is, on why Union institutions behave as they do within existing legal frameworks. This book devotes attention to EU Treaties and secondary law, as well as their adjudicative interpretation. The aim of the book is not to correct or revise existing legal perspectives, but rather to offer additional descriptive and normative metrics that expand our understanding of various issues, including in particular the decision-making behaviour of EU institutions and Member States. The book vividly demonstrates the immense value of harnessing the multifarious tools and methods of economics to analyse various issues in EU law, not least in relation to current reform debates.

Der Sammelband bietet einen interdisziplinären Überblick über die Darstellung von Geschwisterbeziehungen und die Verwendung geschwisterbezogener Termini innerhalb abendländischer sowie antiker nahöstlicher Kulturtraditionen. Zum einen erörtern die Autoren spezifische Darstellungsformen, Prämissen und Funktionen exemplarischer Geschwisterpaare in Literatur, Bildender Kunst, Musik, Philosophie und historischer, gesellschaftspolitischer sowie religiöser Tradition. Zum anderen befassen sie sich mit den jeweiligen metaphorischen Rezeptionen und Adaptionen geschwisterlicher Termini, Motive und Zuschreibungen.

This open access book includes methods for retrieval, semantic representation, and analysis of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), geovisualization and user interactions related to VGI, and discusses selected topics in active participation, social context, and privacy awareness. It presents the results of the DFG-funded priority program "VGI: Interpretation, Visualization, and Social Computing" (2016-2023). The book includes three parts representing the principal research pillars within the program. Part I "Representation and Analysis of VGI" discusses recent approaches to enhance the representation and analysis of VGI. It includes semantic representation of VGI data in knowledge graphs; machine-learning approaches to VGI mining, completion, and enrichment as well as to the improvement of data quality and fitness for purpose. Part II "Geovisualization and User Interactions related to VGI" book explores geovisualizations and user interactions supporting the analysis and presentation of VGI data. When designing these visualizations and user interactions, the specific properties of VGI data, the knowledge and abilities of different target users, and technical viability of solutions need to be considered. Part III "Active Participation, Social Context and Privacy Awareness" of the book addresses the human impact associated with VGI. It includes chapters on the use of wearable sensors worn by volunteers to record their exposure to environmental stressors on their daily journeys, on the collective behavior of people using location-based social media and movement data from football matches, and on the motivation of volunteers who provide important support in information gathering, filtering and analysis of social media in disaster situations. The book is of interest to researchers and advanced professionals in geoinformation, cartography, visual analytics, data science and machine learning.

The Handbook of Leaving Religion introduces a neglected field of research with the aim to outline previous and contemporary research, and suggest how the topic of leaving religion should be studied in the future. Readership: All interested in conversion, deconversion and apostasy processes, and anyone concerned with methodological and theoretical questions related to leaving or changing religion.

The essay reviews the publishing projects and major new books produced to commemorate the 700th anniversary of Marco Polo’s death, focusing on Marco Polo and Venice. It is divided into three sections: a brief presentation of the Marco Polo’s Diplomatic Codex, a project coordinated by the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, which aims to publish, both in print and in an open-access online edition, all known documentation concerning Marco Polo; the analysis of some new documents discovered by recent research; the presentation of studies on Marco Polo published in the last two years.

Češskaja Biblija perestupila očen' rano predely sobstvenno-češskoj zemli i okazala svoe vlijanie i daleko vne ee. Češskaja Biblija okazala svoe vlijanie i sredi vostočnych slavjan, sredi russkich, kak odno iz važnych i nužnych posobij pri redaktirovanii biblejskich tekstov dlja potrebnostej russkich, pravoslavnych čitatelej. Isključitel'noe v istorii vostočno-slavjanskoj kul'tury javlenie Fr. Skoriny i ego "Russkoj Biblii", izdannoj v Prage, zastavljaet s osobym vnimaniem otnestis' k teme, namečennoj dlja nastojaščego očerka, i podskazyvaet neobchodimost' ustanovit' formy i obstojatel'stva vlijanija češskoj Biblii v razvitii russkoj kul'tury i pis'mennosti. Literaturverz. S. 249 - 258.

The first multidisciplinary analysis of one of the most impactful and popular contemporary artworks of recent years. In 1999, a short video of a solitary boy kicking an empty bottle up a hill in Mexico City became the first instalment of Children’s Games, a series of works by artist Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959). The ongoing project, which now numbers around thirty-five works, has gradually given shape to an extensive collection of videos of children at play. For almost twenty-five years, Alÿs and his collaborators Félix Blume, Julien Devaux, and Rafael Ortega have been travelling around the world to document the distinctive ways in which children interact with each other and their physical environment. They have gone from remote villages in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Venezuela, and Nepal to the mountains of Switzerland and metropoles like Hong Kong and Paris, but have also visited the war-torn city of Mosul in Iraq, the border between Mexico and the United States, and the strait of Gibraltar that divides Africa and Europe. The resulting images are standing proof of the seriousness of play and of children’s stunning powers of resilience in the face of conflict. This volume provides a multidisciplinary perspective to the many layers of Children’s Games. It includes an interview with Francis Alÿs and Rafael Ortega, a series of essays by well-known scholars and art critics, curatorial statements, and a logbook related to the presentation of Children’s Games at the Venice Biennale of 2022. Contributors: Francis Alÿs (artist), Gerard-Jan Claes (filmmaker, artistic director of Sabzian), Tim Ingold (anthropologist, University of Aberdeen), Zeynep Kubat (art historian, curator and writer), Karen Lang (art historian, Royal Society of Arts), Rafael Ortega (artist), Rodrigo Perez de Arce (architect, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), Juan Martín Pérez García (Network for the Rights of Children in Mexico (REDIM)), Giulio Piovesan (journalist and photographer), John Potter (media education, University College London), Virginia Roy (curator at the University Museum of Contemporary Art of the National Autonomous University of Mexico), Stéphane Symons (professor of philosophy, KU Leuven), Hilde Teerlinck (Han Nefkens Foundation /curator of the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale 2022). Ebook available in Open Access. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

An expansive volume presenting crip approaches to writing, research, and publishing. Crip Authorship: Disability as Method is an expansive volume presenting the multidisciplinary methods brought into being by disability studies and activism. Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez have convened leading scholars, artists, and activists to explore the ways disability shapes authorship, transforming cultural production, aesthetics, and media. Starting from the premise that disability is plural and authorship spans composition, affect, and publishing, this collection of thirty-five compact essays asks how knowledge about disability is produced and shared in disability studies. Disability alters, generates, and dismantles method. Crip authorship takes place within and beyond the commodity version of authorship, in books, on social media, and in creative works that will never be published. The chapters draw on the expertise of international researchers and activists in the humanities, social sciences, education, arts, and design. Across five sections—Writing, Research, Genre/Form, Publishing, Media—contributors consider disability as method for creative work: practices of writing and other forms of composition; research methods and collaboration; crip aesthetics; media formats and hacks; and the capital, access, legal standing, and care networks required to publish. Designed to be accessible and engaging for students, Crip Authorship also provides theoretically sophisticated arguments in a condensed form that will make the text a key resource for disability studies scholars. Essays include Mel Y Chen on the temporality of writing with chronic illness; Remi Yergeau on perseveration; La Marr Jurelle Bruce on mad Black writing; Alison Kafer on the reliance of the manifesto genre on disability; Jaipreet Virdi on public scholarship for disability justice; Ellen Samuels on the importance of disability and illness to autotheory; Xuan Thuy Nguyen on decolonial research methods for disability studies; Emily Lim Rogers on virtual ethnography; Cameron Awkward-Rich on depression and trans reading methods; Robert McRuer on crip theory in translation; Kelsie Acton on plain language writing; and Georgina Kleege on description as an access and aesthetic technique.

In 1698 a treatise called The Eternal Gospel of the Universal Return of All Creatures appeared anonymously in Germany. Its contents were in a certain way quite radical and problematic. The text supported the idea of universal salvation at the end of time, the apokatastasis, an idea which cannot go unnoticed if one considers the condemnation of such a position in the article 17 of the Confessio Augustana.