Humanities & Social Sciences

Robert Walser, Franz Kafka, and Theodor Fontane pursue a precarious narration in the context of the problem of order in modernity. While Fontane’s Der Stechlin attempts to put the rampant ambivalence in its place by means of an orderly narration, Walser liberates narration: in a digressive and performative process, he cross-fades contradictory patterns. Finally, Kafka demonstrates in The Burrow how all differentiation collapses and how narrative, in a paradoxical way, represents its own impossibility. Precarious narration, the book argues, is not a deficit narrative but a genuine form of narration.

How were the concepts of the observer and user in architecture and urban planning transformed throughout the 20th and 21st centuries? Marianna Charitonidou explores how the mutations of the means of representation in architecture and urban planning relate to the significance of city's inhabitants. She investigates Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's fascination with perspective, Team Ten's interest in the humanisation of architecture and urbanism, Constantinos Doxiadis and Adriano Olivetti's role in reshaping the relationship between politics and urban planning during the postwar years, Giancarlo De Carlo's architecture of participation, Aldo Rossi's design methods, Denise Scott Brown's active socioplactics and Bernard Tschumi's conception praxis.

This open access volume provides an understanding of the different aspects of success, school continuity and social mobility among European Roma, including the motives justifying the high rates of school dropout and failure among this group. It offers a critical and reflexive perspective about social reality from a multidisciplinary and transversal point of view, sharing knowledge and practices in different countries about the articulations between Roma families, individuals, school and public policies. Over time, there has been an increase in the educational attainment of European citizens, but there are still persistent inequalities between Roma and non-Roma, including gender inequalities, which greatly affect Roma women. The volume explores the issue of Roma education and includes chapters from Western European, South and Central and Eastern European researchers using different theoretical and methodological perspectives. The intersection of this diversity and plurality of standpoints makes possible to obtain a comprehensive view on the education and schooling of European Roma.

This chapter will focus on didactic Audio Description (AD) and didactic free commentary. Firstly, it will provide the reader with an overview of the main types of didactic AD (DAD) and didactic free-commentary (DFC), differentiating between intersemiotic for both modes as well as intralingual, and interlingual for free commentary. Afterwards, it will present how didactic AD and didactic free commentary can foster communicative skills mainly in terms of audiovisual production and mediation, and audiovisual reception to a certain extent. Guidelines to implement DAD and DFC will be explained in detail together with a sample of assessment rubrics which can be adapted according to the learning contexts. Finally, sample lesson plans on both DAT modes will be presented.

The Taiwan Voter examines the critical role ethnic and national identities play in politics, utilizing the case of Taiwan. Although elections there often raise international tensions, and have led to military demonstrations by China, no scholarly books have examined how Taiwan’s voters make electoral choices in a dangerous environment. Critiquing the conventional interpretation of politics as an ideological battle between liberals and conservatives, The Taiwan Voter demonstrates in Taiwan the party system and voters’ responses are shaped by one powerful determinant of national identity—the China factor. Taiwan’s electoral politics draws international scholarly interest because of the prominent role of ethnic and national identification. While in most countries the many tangled strands of competing identities are daunting for scholarly analysis, in Taiwan the cleavages are powerful and limited in number, so the logic of interrelationships among issues, partisanship, and identity are particularly clear. The Taiwan Voter unites experts to investigate the ways in which social identities, policy views, and partisan preferences intersect and influence each other. These novel findings have wide applicability to other countries, and will be of interest to a broad range of social scientists interested in identity politics.

Bewerber mit bunten Lebensläufen werden im Auswahlverfahren schnell aussortiert. Die wechselnden Arbeitssituationen enthalten aber auch Chancen, die der Arbeitgeber nutzen kann. Um in diskontinuierlichen Lebensläufen Qualifikationen zu erkennen, entwickelten Wissenschaftler der Hochschule Niederrhein gemeinsam mit der Gesellschaft für Arbeit und Weiterbildung in Aachen die Software Continuo. Continuo ist ein im Internet zugängliches Profilinginstrument. Mit seiner Hilfe ermitteln Unternehmen die Schlüsselkompetenzen der Mitarbeiter und gleichen diese mit eigenen Anforderungen ab. Die Beiträge in diesem Band diskutieren den Zusammenhang zwischen wirtschaftlicher Dynamik und zunehmenden Brüchen in der Arbeitsbiografie. Dadurch verändert sich die Suche nach qualifizierten Mitarbeitern: Wie können vor allem kleine und mittlere Unternehmen geeignete Bewerber identifizieren und integrieren? Im Anschluss untersuchen die Autoren verschiedene Profilinginstrumente und evaluieren Continuo.

Knowing COVID-19 looks at how different kinds of knowledge and meaning have been created and communicated, and the repercussions this has had – and continues to have – for how COVID-19 is managed, experienced, understood and remembered. Knowledge-making, it suggests, took various forms, and these are reflected in the diversity of chapters this volume curates. In the first instance, it demonstrates a rich humanities tradition of constructive critique, as ‘official’ communications around ‘staying home’, ‘keeping distance’, safety on buses, lateral flow testing and vaccine hesitancy are tested and interrogated. Through this collective work, we see one of the clear, indisputable values of the humanities; their attentiveness to the human, and the clarifying or reflective power this might have had with greater embeddedness in policy and information design. In the second instance – and frequently both are accomplished in the same short chapter – this volume collects a series of interventions which set out specifically to create and sustain meaning, particularly when dominant cultural narratives about the pandemic rely on those meanings slipping away from political or popular memory. Thus, we have rich and detailed explorations of the experiences of museum workers, people told to ‘stay home’, older victims of gender-based violence, people with deafblindness and racialised nurses working in the NHS; as well as extensive reflection on what it was like to make the projects which formalised this knowledge work. Taken as a whole, this volume critiques and redefines pandemic epistemologies, assembling a partial blueprint for making future crises legible.

The word “papyrus” indicates both the plant and the resulting material used in ancient times for writing. The volume broadly traces the botanical and ecological characteristics of the plant, with notes on its technological use and its representation in art; it continues with references to writing, the history of the writing medium, papyrus plants and proto-papers, and ends with a reflection on the sustainable use of paper materials and on the differentiation of waste and recycling.

Dreamtime Superhighway presents a thorough and original contextualization of the rock art and archaeology of the Sydney Basin. By combining excavation results with rock art analysis it demonstrates that a true archaeology of rock art can provide insights into rock art image-making in people’s social and cultural lives. Based on a PhD dissertation, this monograph is a significantly revised and updated study which draws forcefully on rich and new data from extensive recent research—much of it by McDonald herself. McDonald has developed a model that suggests that visual culture—such as rock artmaking and its images and forms—could be understood as a system of communication, as a way of signaling group identifying behaviour. For the archaeologist of art, the anthropologist of art and those of us who try to think about past worlds… this monograph is a must read.

Das vorliegende Open-Access-Buch geht von der Prämisse aus, dass Lernen aus kognitiver und sozial-konstruktivistischer Sicht als individueller Aufbau von Wissens- und Denkstrukturen verstanden wird. Die Aufgabe der Lehrpersonen besteht dabei darin, mittels ko-konstruktiver Dialoge die Lernenden beim Aufbau und bei der Modifizierung ihrer Wissensstrukturen zu unterstützen. Die vorliegende Studie beschäftigt sich mit der interaktions- und aufgabenbezogenen Analyse von 38 Problemlösedialogen von je vier Lernenden auf der Sekundarstufe I, die in einem tutoriellen Setting eine Aufgabe gemeinsam lösen. Das Unterstützungsverhalten der Lehrpersonen beim Lösen einer mathematischen Textaufgabe und die Partizipation der Lernenden werden ganzheitlich-deskriptiv und in ihrem mikrostrukturellen Ablauf prozessbezogen untersucht. Wie gehen die Lehrpersonen konkret vor, um ihre Schüler und Schülerinnen im Verstehensprozess adaptiv anzuleiten? Gelingt es ihnen, dass die Lernenden an den Problemlösegesprächen entscheidend partizipieren können? Die Ergebnisse zeigen anhand von Fallanalysen auf, wie das auf unterschiedliche Arten gelingen kann.

This volume is the first to examine how this "enemy" was observed and perceived by the intelligence services by looking at various case studies from the GDR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia.

In the reform process that has characterised public administrations for years, simplification and transparency represent two innovative and important aspects for the organisational model of universities. A complex issue that involves multiple profiles and urges a deep reflection on still open questions of significant depth. In their interventions the speakers explore different aspects on the matter, highlighting the reasons for continuing towards an overall change of the administration aimed at making its action more efficient, rapid and economical.

The Edition of the Minutes of the Cabinet Meetings of the first government of Leopold Figl is an important contribution to the history of the early years of Austria’s Second Republic and its political components after World War II. Vol. 13 encompasses meetings No. 132 of November 9, 1948 to No. 138 of December 21, 1948 as well as the accompanying minutes of the Wirtschaftliches Ministerkomitee. The discussions cover matters of foreign, domestic and economic policy, reconstruction and relations between the Austrian government and the four great powers. Particularly prominent are the pervasive problem of securing basic levels of nutrition for the Austrian population, the ongoing State Treaty negotiations and measures to carry out the European Recovery Program.

This volume examines the economic, political, social and environmental challenges facing rural communities in the Asia-Pacific region, as global issues intersect with local contexts. Such challenges, from climatic change and volcanic eruption to population growth and violent civil unrest, have stimulated local resilience amongst communities and led to evolving regional institutions and environment management practices, changing social relationships and producing new forms of stratification. Bringing together case studies from across mainland Southeast Asia and the Island Pacific, an expert team of international contributors reveal how communities at the periphery take charge of their lives, champion the virtues of their own local systems of production and consumption, and engage in the complexities of new structures of development that demand a response to the vacillations of global politics, economy and society. Inherent in this is the recognition that 'development' as we have come to know it is far from over. Each chapter emphasizes the growing recognition that ecological and environmental issues are key to any understanding and analysis of structures of sustainable development. Providing diverse multidisciplinary theoretical and empirical perspectives, Environment, Development and Change in Rural Asia-Pacific makes an important contribution to the revitalization of development studies and as such will be essential reading for scholars in the field, as well as those with an interest in Asia-Pacific studies, economic geography and political economy.

Across Western Europe, the rise of atypical employment has deepened insider–outsider divides. This book asks why two structurally similar countries – Portugal and Spain – pursued different routes to reduce labour market segmentation following the conclusion of the sovereign debt crisis. It argues that the composition of the governing social bloc drives the orientation of reform, while the choice of decision‑making arena (parliamentary law-making versus tripartite social concertation) and the EU’s evolving social governance shape the breadth and depth of reform. Building on the distinction between competitive and inclusive solidarity, the book compares four domains: employment protection and collective bargaining; statutory minimum wages; regulation of ride‑hailing platforms in passenger transport; and the regularisation of precarious public sector work. The analysis covers Portugal’s progressive cycle (2015–2021) and Spain’s coalition years (2019–2025), drawing on elite interviews, content analysis of parliamentary debates and media coverage, and official documents. The findings reveal a targeted, outsider‑focused strategy in Portugal and a more universal re‑regulation in Spain. Governing Solidarity offers a fresh framework and rich evidence for scholars of political economy and industrial relations, as well as advanced students and policymakers confronting labour market segmentation. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.