Humanities & Social Sciences

This chapter examines the psychosocial impact of malpractices in transnational adoption. Recently, various initiatives have been undertaken to investigate malpractices in transnational adoption in countries such as the Netherlands (COIA, 2021) and Switzerland (Conseil fédéral, 2020). Following reports of malpractices in adoptions from countries including Ethiopia in 2019, a study was also commissioned by the Flemish government (Belgium) that same year to investigate malpractices in transnational adoption. This research was conducted by several Flemish universities (VUB, UGent, and UA) from ethical, historical-social, legal, and psychosocial perspectives. The authors of this chapter contributed to the psychosocial research from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. This chapter focuses on the aforementioned psychosocial consequences from the perspective of adoptees and is based on earlier work by Villanueva O’Driscoll et al. (2022). We delve further into the following questions: What malpractices did adoptees experience? What are the psychosocial consequences of the experienced malpractices? What needs do these adoptees have?

Die anthropologische Frage nach der Stellung des Menschen sucht durch die Digitalisierung nach Antworten – ist der Mensch als Homo digitalis neu zu begreifen und ist mit ihm anders pädagogisch umzugehen? Die Digitalisierung stellt eine besondere Form der Veränderung der Grundlagen von Erfahrung und Welterkenntnis dar. Die Art dieser Veränderungen und deren pädagogische Relevanz wird in den versammelten Beiträgen dieses Schwerpunktheftes untersucht. Es zeichnet sich ab, dass ein tiefgreifender Wandel in Kultur, Politik, Gesellschaft und Bildung stattfindet, der eine Neufassung des Menschen als Homo Digitalis erforderlich macht. Die Datafizierung, die Distribuierung von Informationen, die Technologien von Computer und Internet mit ihren Schnittstellen und Softwareanwendungen finden Ausdruck in pädagogischen Sachverhalten wie der Bildung und der Subjektivation oder der Sozialisation und der Organisation. Es erscheint eine sowohl medienpädagogisch wie pädagogisch-anthropologisch fundierte Betrachtung zwingend erforderlich, da erst in dieser Interdisziplinarität pädagogische Kontexte in den Zusammenhang zwischen menschlicher Verfasstheit und technischer Entwicklung gestellt werden können.

Originally published in 1912 by the Bright Printing Company, The Indian Steps belongs to Henry Shoemaker’s robust corpus of tales and legends based on the folklore of Pennsylvania. This early Shoemaker collection of literary folklore paints a colorful picture of the natural landscape, folklore, and society of Central Pennsylvania, which Henry Shoemaker held dear. Beginning with the notable legend of the Indian Steps near Stone Valley, this volume includes stories about fantastical fairies, mysterious hermits, serendipitous romance, Native American legends, ghosts, and hauntings. The volume places a special focus on familiar locations in Centre County, such as Tussey Mountain, Black Moshannon, and Stone Valley. The text, reproduced in facsimile for the first time since its original printing, includes period photographs by W. T. Clarke.

Following conflicting desires for an Aztec crown, this book explores the possibilities of repatriation. In The Contested Crown, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll meditates on the case of a spectacular feather headdress believed to have belonged to Montezuma, the last emperor of the Aztecs. This crown has long been the center of political and cultural power struggles, and it is one of the most contested museum claims between Europe and the Americas. Taken to Europe during the conquest of Mexico, it was placed at Ambras Castle, the Habsburg residence of the author’s ancestors, and is now in Vienna’s Welt Museum. Mexico has long requested to have it back, but the Welt Museum uses science to insist it is too fragile to travel. Both the biography of a cultural object and a history of collecting and colonizing, this book offers an artist’s perspective on the creative potentials of repatriation. Carroll compares Holocaust and colonial ethical claims, and she considers relationships between indigenous people, international law and the museums that amass global treasures, the significance of copies, and how conservation science shapes collections. Illustrated with diagrams and rare archival material, this book brings together global history, European history, and material culture around this fascinating object and the debates about repatriation.

How can we make sense of the persistent political instability in Guinea-Bissau, a small country that has hosted extensive international interventions and made world news headlines over several decades? This book tackles this question, arguing for the need to understand politics in Guinea-Bissau as intricately linked to and deeply embedded in transnational, regional and trans-regional dynamics. Taking a multidimensional approach, the book brings together international scholars who have studied politics in Guinea-Bissau and Africa for many years, at different levels and from diverse perspectives. Together, the contributors provide an up-to-date analysis of crucial actors and processes, whilst also putting them in historical perspective. The volume connects the study of politics in Guinea-Bissau to a range of empirical phenomena and theoretical debates that have wider relevance far beyond its borders. In this way, it enables a better understanding of regional and international politics, demonstrating how apparently marginal cases are not marginal at all, but are actively entangled in broader multi-dimensional politics. With important new perspectives and insights both on Guinea-Bissau, and wider regional dynamics, this book will be an important read for researchers and policy makers involved in African politics and security issues.

The analyzes carried out in the marine sediments sampled in the port and coastal areas of Reunion show, for certain metallic trace elements, significant variations in their contents and regular overruns of the regulatory thresholds for the management of dredged sediments. Several studies show that the volcanic nature of Reunion Island is the cause of high concentrations of metals in the soil. The objective of this study is to define, whether the observed exceedances of the management thresholds for dredged sediments are due to the geology of the island or to contributions of anthropogenic origin.

This open access book seeks answers to a series of questions about the little studied subject of prologues or theatrical presentations in American movie theaters from the late 1910s to the mid-1920s. How did prologues emerge out of prior practices? Who were the exhibitors most involved? What characteristics would come to define prologues? How widespread did they become not only in metropolitan palace cinemas but also in movie theaters in mid-sized cities and even small towns? If they generally created an atmosphere that complimented or harmonized with the feature films, could they also be what at the time was called “contrastive“? Who were the performers in these theatrical presentations? Were prologues ever described, in ads and audience responses, as a program’s main attraction and to what effect? The book comprises five chapters and up to a hundred photographs of prologue stage settings. Moreover, supplementing each chapter is one or more relevant trade press documents. Overall, the chapters construct a set of practices and typologies that came to define the theatrical presentations that typically preceded the feature films. They also advance this argument: the variety format of combined stage and screen performance in movie theaters has a longer and unexpectedly revealing history than usually assumed. In short, an exhibitor would have a certain degree of creativity in his/her programming, which in turn could strongly impact an audience’s movie-going experience.

This book examines how literary fiction depicts multilingual practices and incorporates them on the level of the text. Multiple languages surround us today, rendered more visible in the digital and globalized age. In literature, too, languages intermingle, often to striking effect. The early twenty-first century has seen a new fascination with the age-old phenomena of literary multilingualism and translation on the part of writers and readers alike. In case studies of contemporary novels by Rabih Alameddine, Olga Grushin, Olga Grjasnowa, Michael Idov, Zinaida Lindén, Andreï Makine, and Eugene Vodolazkin, as well as a new look at Leo Tolstoy’s nineteenth-century classic War and Peace, this book shows how reading can become a translingual process.

The following text deals with the general principles and legal rules regarding evidence and evidence taking in the Portuguese legal system. Based on the rules foreseen in legal texts, as well as court decisions and national literature, the authors approach the general theory behind the current rules and notions in force while also referencing the specifications of the means of proof in use in legal practice.

This open access book is based on work from the COST Action “RESTORE - REthinking Sustainability TOwards a Regenerative Economy'', and highlights how sustainability in buildings, facilities and urban governance is crucial for a future that is socially just, ecologically restorative, and economically viable, for Europe and the whole planet. In light of the search for fair solutions to the climate crisis, the authors outline the urgency for the built environment sector to implement adaptation and mitigation strategies, as well as a just transition. As shown in the chapters, this can be done by applying a broader framework that enriches places, people, ecology, culture, and climate, at the core of the design task - with a particular emphasis on the benefits towards health and resilient business practices. This book is one step on the way to a paradigm shift towards restorative sustainability for new and existing buildings. The authors want to promote forward thinking and multidisciplinary knowledge, leading to solutions that celebrate the richness of design creativity. In this vision, cities of the future will enhance users’ experience, health and wellbeing inside and outside of buildings, while reconciling anthropic ecosystems and nature. A valuable resource for scientists and students in environmental sciences and architecture, as well as policy makers, practitioners and investors in urban and regional development.

The volume, dedicated to the 44th International Conference of the Italian Union for Drawing, investigates the theme of ‘Transitions’, which particularly effectively represents our time and the current condition of the discipline of Drawing. The term, beyond its generic meaning of an intermediate stage in a process in which a condition changes from one state to another, has always been used in various fields, from music to geophysics. In fact, the disciplines of drawing have always been confronted with themes and issues relating to transitions from one condition to another. The history of representation tells us of transformations, even epochal ones, relating to ‘drawing’, with all that such transitions entail: suffice it to think of the evolution of forms of representation, of instrumental apparatuses, of the mutability of supports, of the analogical-digital transition underway, of the new modes of communication on platforms, of the hypertrophic offer of images also on the net that confirms Guy Debord’s intuitions relating to the new spectacularisation of society. Similarly, representation triggers transitions in the prefiguration and communication of design, the anticipation and foreshadowing of future events.The challenges posed by the digital pose open questions whose scope can only be glimpsed, such as the relationship between drawing and the act of modelling, and the construction of new paradigms of visual language and communication. ‘Transitions’, almost implicitly, points to possible futures, the evolution of technique and the search for new modes of expression; at the same time, however, it can suggest silences and reflections in a process of connection between history, theory, criticism and construction.

The Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition (1886–1889), directed by Frank Hamilton Cushing, was the first privately funded expedition to the American Southwest. This volume examines the expedition through the diaries of two participants who fell in love on the expedition: the field secretary, Fred Hodge, and the expedition artist, Margaret Magill—who was also Cushing’s sister-in-law. It also presents the first biographical treatment of Hodge, who became a major figure in early twentieth-century anthropology. The book’s first two sections chronicle the field operations of the expedition, while the third describes the long anthropological career of Hodge after the end of the expedition. Through deep research in primary and secondary sources and archival materials, the book details both the daily operations of the expedition and the growing romantic relationship between Hodge and Magill. For those interested in settlements in early Arizona and Zuni Pueblo, the book provides rare insights into the lives of both men and women, offering an intimate view of an enterprise that is now considered a foundation of Hohokam archaeology—even as it reveals deep love and persistent personal conflicts.

Rethinking Environmental Governance brings to light the pluralistic views, diverse forces, and multiple realities (re)shaping formal and informal decision-making structures, processes, and power interplay in environmental governance. Linking socio-economic drivers with the evolution of cultural norms, the (re)shaping of institutional arrangements, and ever-changing power relations, the book looks at processes of institutional emergence across spatio-temporal scales. Through case study illustrations from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, it illustrates how actors and institutions (co)produced political spaces of engagement as an integral part of their livelihood (re)making.

This book analyses the interconnection of space and experience in Roman antiquity, Byzantium, and the Middle Ages, ca. 100 BCE–1500 CE. The joint analysis of these two conceptual spearheads enables a novel analysis of how space affected social frameworks and how experiences built communities and shaped individual lives over the longue durée . The volume manifests the richness and innovativeness of analysing individual and shared experiences together with space as cultural, political, and social constructions, bridging micro and macro levels. Ten high-quality case studies explore experiencing domestic, urban, political, and sacred space. An in-depth introduction explains the main concepts, and an epilogue binds the themes and chapters together. The volume utilizes a wide array of source material and has comprehensive coverage chronologically, geographically, and disciplinarily, including several branches of classical, Byzantine, and medieval studies. The volume serves graduate students and scholars of several disciplines and fields: classics and ancient history, medieval history, Byzantine studies, archaeology, and art history. It will also be fruitful to scholars of the modern period whose work touches upon the field of the history of experiences. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

This open access book delves into the responses of EU actors, such as member states, institutions, and political groups in the European Parliament, to the fragmentation of the liberal international order (LIO). The analytical framework adopted in this volume explores the diverse interpretations of this phenomenon and the various political initiatives associated with them. Among these interpretations is the concept of strategic autonomy, which has emerged as a key feature of debates surrounding the EU's adaptation to a fragmented LIO. The contributors examine these dynamics across different issue areas and dimensions of EU foreign policy, encompassing the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), external relations, and the externalization of internal policies. They use the term fragmentation to refer to a bundle of processes affecting the LIO that range from challenges to the universality of human rights to the crisis of global governance instruments, from the bifurcation of tech to protectionist tendencies in trade policies.