Humanities & Social Sciences

Based on research in the BBC archives, this book examines the negotiation and establishment of a figure of the ideal listener and ideal listening in the context of BBC radio drama in the 1920s. Guided by the idea of itself as a public service, the BBC articulated a new space of aesthetic experience constituted by broadcasting as a public sphere from the very beginning and conceived of its listener as a citizen, characterized by a specifically trained listening and the capacity to imagine and concentrate. If this conception of the listener and his listening shows how the BBC resolutely positioned itself to shape society through education and training, the study exposes British broadcasting as both an aesthetic and a political order. This study turns to the radio drama as the location at which the listening and imaginative competencies required from the listener are short-circuited with strategies of radiophonic sound production and transmission. It illuminates how in theories and practices of BBC radio drama a new realm of possibilities of medial experience was being gauged. In using concrete radiodramatic strategies it shows how British broadcasting forms a specific order by attempting to position and orient the listener within this new radiophonic space. In doing so, the study states, a radiophonic drama conceived by the BBC performs a programmatic transfer of specific British values upheld by the public service into universal categories and blurs the traces of their production not least on the basis of a specifically conditioned listener.

Volume 19 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) contains concise biographies of individuals who died between 1991 and 1995. The first of two volumes for the 1990s, it presents a colourful montage of late twentieth-century Australian life, containing the biographies of significant and representative Australians. The volume is still in the shadow of World War II with servicemen and women who enlisted young appearing, but these influences are dimming and there are now increasing numbers of non-white, non-male, non-privileged and non-straight subjects. The 680 individuals recorded in volume 19 of the ADB include Wiradjuri midwife and Ngunnawal Elder Violet Bulger; Aboriginal rights activist, poet, playwright and artist Kevin Gilbert; and Torres Strait Islander community leader and land rights campaigner Eddie Mabo. HIV/AIDS child activists Tony Lovegrove and Eve Van Grafhorst have entries, as does conductor Stuart Challender, 'the first Australian celebrity to go public' about his HIV/AIDS condition in 1991. The arts are, as always, well-represented, including writers Frank Hardy, Mary Durack and Nene Gare, actors Frank Thring and Leonard Teale and arts patron Ian Potter. We are beginning to see the effects of the steep rise in postwar immigration flow through to the ADB. Artist Joseph Stanislaw Ostoja-Kotkowski was born in Poland. Pilar Moreno de Otaegui, co-founded the Spanish Club of Sydney. Chinese restaurateur and community leader Ming Poon (Dick) Low migrated to Victoria in 1953. Often we have a dearth of information about the domestic lives of our subjects; politician Olive Zakharov, however, bravely disclosed at the Victorian launch of the federal government’s campaign to Stop Violence Against Women in 1993 that she was a survivor of domestic violence in her second marriage. Take a dip into the many fascinating lives of the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

The AXMEDIS International Conference series aims to explore all subjects and topics related to cross-media and digital-media content production, processing, management, standards, representation, sharing, protection and rights management, to address the latest developments and future trends of the technologies and their applications, impacts and exploitation. The AXMEDIS events offer venues for exchanging concepts, requirements, prototypes, research ideas, and findings which could contribute to academic research and also benefit business and industrial communities. In the Internet as well as in the digital era, cross-media production and distribution represent key developments and innovations that are fostered by emergent technologies to ensure better value for money while optimising productivity and market coverage.

The global energy crisis has led to a growing debate on the need to expedite the phasing out of fossil fuels. Highlighting the advantages of adopting renewable energy solutions can act as a driving force for positive change in this field. Therefore, it is crucial to include educational aspects in policy development to encourage local decarbonisation. This study employs the diffusion of innovations theory as its research framework to determine the extent to which social learning can facilitate the adoption of renewable energy solutions by individual household residents. Furthermore, the study examines the extent to which social learning can impede the uptake of renewable energy solutions by individual household residents. The content presented in the chapters will be beneficial for educators who are developing interventions based on social learning mechanisms, as well as for engineers who are designing innovative solutions.

This open access book provides anthropological insights into the arduous yet rewarding journeys involved in selected TESOL teachers’ pedagogical transition to teaching English for Academic Purposes (EAP) at universities in Shanghai, the largest metropolitan area in China. Applying a unique combination of ethnography and phenomenology, the book offers innovative new perspectives on teacher education research. Drawing on the latest language education theory, it outlines a practitioner-friendly approach to EAP literacy. Teacher readers will especially benefit from the case studies presented here, which provide role models for teacher change in educational reform, as well as advice on their academic careers. In addition to addressing a timely and important research gap on EAP teachers in non-Western countries, the book is the ideal choice for readers interested in an update on English education in China.

This Edition of Theodore Dreiser’s Plays reveals one of the foremost chroniclers of American modernity at his most “modernist” and formally experimental, while deepening and complicating our understanding of the realism for which he is renowned. It also helps to document the “Little Theater” movement of the nineteen-teens. From 1913 to 1920, Dreiser wrote a series of plays, in forms ranging from the penetrating realism for which his novels were already famous, to highly “experimental” modernism, to symbolist and expressionist dramas that were among the first of their kind in America. His one-act plays are often filled with mysticism, and characters often rely on “supernatural” and spiritual forces to guide their decisions and behaviors. Such theatre troupes as the Washington Square Players and the Provincetown Players staged Dreiser’s probingly realistic dramas, and for this they met with much critical controversy. His four-act tragedy, The Hand of the Potter, was regarded as shockingly lurid by some; for others it was a trail-blazing attempt to understand “deviancy” and the effects of sexual violence. Even though Dreiser is not particularly well known for his plays, his plays and expressionist vision had an enormous impact on playwrights who followed after him, including Thornton Wilder. For this volume in the Dreiser Edition, Keith Newlin and Frederick Rusch’s The Collected Plays of Theodore Dreiser (2000) has been revised and expanded. Newlin, Rusch and Davies present authoritative texts of the plays, supported by a full textual commentary and record of emendations. Their Introduction and Appendices delineate the compositional, artistic, personal, and historical contexts of the plays, drawing on extensive archival research. Further historical documentation, and many additional illustrations, provide an insight into the aesthetic and literary context of the plays, while a new appendix lists contemporary reviews.

This open access book provides cybersecurity practitioners with the knowledge needed to understand the risks of the increased availability of powerful large language models (LLMs) and how they can be mitigated. It attempts to outrun the malicious attackers by anticipating what they could do. It also alerts LLM developers to understand their work's risks for cybersecurity and provides them with tools to mitigate those risks. The book starts in Part I with a general introduction to LLMs and their main application areas. Part II collects a description of the most salient threats LLMs represent in cybersecurity, be they as tools for cybercriminals or as novel attack surfaces if integrated into existing software. Part III focuses on attempting to forecast the exposure and the development of technologies and science underpinning LLMs, as well as macro levers available to regulators to further cybersecurity in the age of LLMs. Eventually, in Part IV, mitigation techniques that should allow safe and secure development and deployment of LLMs are presented. The book concludes with two final chapters in Part V, one speculating what a secure design and integration of LLMs from first principles would look like and the other presenting a summary of the duality of LLMs in cyber-security. This book represents the second in a series published by the Technology Monitoring (TM) team of the Cyber-Defence Campus. The first book entitled "Trends in Data Protection and Encryption Technologies" appeared in 2023. This book series provides technology and trend anticipation for government, industry, and academic decision-makers as well as technical experts.

The various sociologies of life do not interpret life only as the object that is socially standardized, enhanced and recognized. They always see it as a subject of its norms, its knowledge and its changes as well. Life is not one-sided; instead its entanglements are analyzed: the immanence of nature and culture; the concurrence of being active and passive; the co-constitution of affect and cognition; the identity of normativity and standardization. Following authors such as Bataille, Bergson, Canguilhem, Deleuze, Driesch, Plessner, the pragmatists or Simmel, the contributions featured in this book unfold different perspectives on the sociology of life, re-vitalizing a discourse that is instructive for sociological theory in a variety of ways.

"The relational complexity of urban and rural landscapes in space and in time. The development of historical geographical information systems (HGIS) and other methods from the digital humanities have revolutionised historical research on cultural landscapes. Additionally, the opening up of increasingly diverse collections of source material, often incomplete and difficult to interpret, has led to methodologically innovative experiments. One of today’s major challenges, however, concerns the concepts and tools to be deployed for mapping processes of transformation—that is, interpreting and imagining the relational complexity of urban and rural landscapes, both in space and in time, at micro- and macro-scale. Mapping Landscapes in Transformation gathers experts from different disciplines, active in the fields of historical geography, urban and landscape history, archaeology and heritage conservation. They are specialised in a wide variety of space-time contexts, including regions within Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and periods from antiquity to the 21st century."

Acta Slavica Estonica is an international series of publications on current issues of Russian and other Slavic languages, literatures and cultures. This volume continues the tradition of publishing studies on the history and culture of the Old Believers in Estonia. It includes research papers on the topic, as well as transcripts of recorded texts from the Old Believers. The special focus of the volume is on the island Piirissaar, its history, architecture, people and their language, customs and traditions.


The UN human rights treaty bodies are still in need of reform, since past initiatives were not as successful as hoped. Therefore, to secure the effective dischargement of their various mandates, particularly under the reporting procedure, the Committees need to be reformers on their own. Nils-Hendrik Grohmann delineates the Committees' powers from both a practical and theoretical perspective and demonstrates how far their legal mandates can reach. Effectiveness-orientated interpretation of procedural provisions that already endow the Committees with certain powers, allows for the extension of mandates. Thereby, the Committees can introduce new powers without State consent. In doing so, they are well-advised to approach the reporting procedure holistically, to develop coherent procedural approaches and to take into consideration the considerable overlap in terms of substantive provisions under the nine UN human rights treaties. Another key factor for reform is cooperation itself among the Committees, which increased in recent years through the Meeting of Chairpersons. 

 
This publication was supported by funds from the Publication Fund for Open Access Monographs of the Federal State of Brandenburg, Germany. 

How do the things we see shape values, beliefs, and actions? Why do viewers come to different conclusions when looking at the same thing? Why do people assume that “seeing is believing” in the age of AI-generated imagery? On Visual Rhetoric responds to these questions, helping readers and viewers consider how the visual intervenes in the world in ordinary and extraordinary ways. Looking at a wide array of pictures, habits, processes, and contexts, Christa J. Olson and Brandee Easter make the case for defining “the visual” broadly so that it includes not only visual objects, but also intangible images, visual technologies, and the cognitive-physical act of seeing. On Visual Rhetoric provides a robust, flexible heuristic for studying visual rhetoricity that not only draws together the vast array of existing case studies and concepts but also raises new questions and concerns for scholars.

This open access book examines the work of the 17th-century Baroque painter, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1618-1682) – a figure who barely left the city of Seville – as a way of understanding globalization, its consequences, and its limits. Full of saints, friars, virgins, and Christs, or poor people and cheerful pícaros oblivious to social injustice, Murillo's painting has been considered representative of the Counter-Reformation and the exponent of an immobile, even introverted, society that regressed with the ‘crisis of the 17th century’. Spanish Globalization through Murillo's Eyes introduces a global perspective by considering the Atlantic art market and developing comparisons with Protestant paintings and an analysis of Murillo’s iconography alongside the social and political theory of his time. Such comparisons and analyses illuminate a different image, emphasizing the idea of a common European path towards modernity, individualism, emotional self-control and social change. The book also examines how Murillo’s contemporaries interpreted his iconography. The result is a new and sharper understanding of the tensions created by globalization in the field of art, in the construction of imagined communities, and in social relations in the early modern era. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Postkoloniale Konstellationen lassen sich nicht (mehr) in das Eigene und das Andere, in das Originäre und das Nachgeahmte, in ein Hier und Dort auseinanderdividierenden. Sie sind geprägt von Verflechtungen, Hybri-disierungen und wechselseitigen Aneignungsprozessen. In diesem Band analysiert die Autorin Texte von Jurij Brězan, Irena Brežná, Mascha Dabić, Róža Domašcyna, Olga Grjasnowa, Barbi Marković, Olga Martynova und Aleksandar Tišma. Sie zeigt auf, dass alle Werke sich mit multiplen Zuge-hörigkeiten, Mehrsprachigkeit und Übersetzung auseinandersetzen. Die Texte dekonstruieren Grenzen sprachlicher und kultureller Zugehörigkeit, thematisieren aber auch Diskriminierung, Rassismus und Antisemitismus. Damit beschreiben sie mehrsprachige Welten jenseits von hegemonialer Einsprachigkeit.

As lands burn, oceans boil, species go extinct and cultural conflicts multiply, Our Multispecies Futures urgently calls for a paradigm-shift in humanity’s relationship to life on Earth. This timely volume argues that the delusion of human exceptionalism stokes colonial and hierarchical relationships with our animal, plant, fungal, and microbial companions. It undertakes multi-scalar explorations of life, ranging from vast oceanic currents down to intricate psychic mechanisms that fuel our personal fears, desires and fantasies to reveal both the damage of this delusion and the rewards of overcoming it. We discover how multispecies harm is amplified by the digital revolution which has rapidly accelerated opportunities to control life (both human and non) for profit. The book proposes the Cybercene as a new framework to study this moment, where digital ‘realities’ and representations are rapidly transforming identities and substituting the value of actual bodies and living habitats. Rather than focusing on doomsday scenarios, however, readers are invited to explore pragmatic alternative pathways for ecocultural care and kinship. We embark on a global journey, mapping diverse entangled lives—from mini-foxes and mysterious underground fungal networks to seemingly sentient chatbots and the American Bison. Through these stories, the book suggests ways to jam and ‘glitch’ capture-and-control practices, and how to care differently for our multispecies kin. Accessible to a broad audience, Our Multispecies Futures serves as both an introduction to the young field of Multispecies Studies and a manual showcasing new interdisciplinary research methods like multispecies thick-mapping and naturalcultural discourse analysis. It offers a vital guide for reimagining a shared future.