Humanities & Social Sciences

This open access book is about mismanagement of public agencies as a threat to life and limb. Collapsing bridges and buildings kill people and often leave many more injured. Such disasters do not happen out of the blue nor are they purely technical in nature since construction and maintenance are subject to safety regulation and enforcement by governmental agencies. This book analyses four relevant cases from Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Germany. Arguing that, while preventing disaster through public oversight is essentially easy, the difficult part for public officials and private contractors and consultants alike is to resist incentives that threaten professional skills and standards. Rather than stressing well-known pathologies of bureaucracy as a potential source of disaster, this book argues, learning for the sake of prevention should aim at neutralizing threats to integrity and strengthening a sense of responsibility among public officials.

This open access book describes the theoretical underpinnings and operational aspects of delivering longer-term inpatient psychiatric care to adolescents experiencing severe, unremitting mental illness. The authorship is drawn from the multidisciplinary team that supports the Walker Adolescent Unit, located in Sydney, Australia. The book begins with an account of the planning and development of the unit, an examination of the physical environment, and the adaptations that have been made to ensure its functionality. There follows a consideration of the therapeutic milieu. The book describes clinical processes such as admission and discharge planning, formulation and case review. There is information about the specific roles of professionals and the therapies that they provide. The book describes the steps taken to maintain and enhance the physical wellbeing of patients. There are chapters dedicated to governance, and to training and education. The final chapter describes how the unit responded to challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Starting from questions inspired by the tremendous changes taking place in the worlds of education and employment, this research focuses on the role of employability in the building of new skills in higher education contexts. This longitudinal survey conducted on a sample of 52 graduates from the Educational Science sector found certain key characteristics in the transitions to the world of work, allowing reflection on those educational activities whose impact is more favourable to develop job placement

What is a state? This volume approaches the question from an anthropological perspective, which means that the starting point of the analysis is not the concept of the state, but instead, what kinds of structures the state consists of, what kinds of effects these structures have, and how states are experienced by the people who inhabit, make, enact, and resist them. The volume introduces a contemporary anthropological approach to the study of the state for a Finnish-speaking audience. This new approach examines the state as a diverse, socially and culturally constructed phenomenon that varies in time and place. Additional aims of the volume are to introduce and translate concepts from political anthropology to the Finnish language, and to make anthropological analyses of the state known to other disciplines that study the state and to the general Finnish-speaking public. Covering a wide variety of ethnographic contexts examining both the effects of the state and the state-like effects of other institutions, the volume contains case studies from Brazil, Uganda, Papua New Guinea, Madagascar, Finland, Bolivia, Cuba, Egypt, Fiji, Solomon Islands, and Ghana. A theoretical introduction presents the development of anthropological thinking with regard to the state and state-like institutions. An afterword reflects on the contribution of the volume in light of the ethnographic context of Indonesia.

Eyetracking has become a powerful tool in scientific research and has finally found its way into disciplines such as applied linguistics and translation studies, paving the way for new insights and challenges in these fields. The aim of the first International Conference on Eyetracking and Applied Linguistics (ICEAL) was to bring together researchers who use eyetracking to empirically answer their research questions. It was intended to bridge the gaps between applied linguistics, translation studies, cognitive science and computational linguistics on the one hand and to further encourage innovative research methodologies and data triangulation on the other hand. These challenges are also addressed in this proceedings volume: While the studies described in the volume deal with a wide range of topics, they all agree on eyetracking as an appropriate methodology in empirical research.

Society and Social Sciences

Since the 1980s, neoliberals have openly contested the idea that the state should protect the socio-economic well-being of its citizens, making ‘privatization’ their mantra. Yet, as historians and social scientists have shown, welfare has always been a ‘mixed economy’, wherein private and public actors dynamically interacted, collaborating or competing with each other in the provision of welfare services. This book will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners of welfare by developing three innovative approaches. Firstly, it illuminates the productive nature of public/private entanglements. Far from amounting to a zero-sum game, the interactions between the two sectors have changed over time what welfare encompasses, its contents and targets, often engendering the creation of new fields of intervention. Secondly, this book departs from a well-established tradition of comparison between Western nation-states by using and mixing various scales of analysis (local, national, international and global) and by covering case studies from Spain to Poland and France to Greece in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thirdly, this book goes beyond state centrism in welfare studies by bringing back a host of public and private actors, from municipalities to international organizations, from older charities to modern NGOs.

Endangered Languages in the 21st Century provides research on endangered languages in the contemporary world, the challenges still to be faced, the work still to be done, and the methods and practices that have come to characterize efforts to revive and maintain disadvantaged indigenous languages around the world. With contributions from scholars across the field, the book brings fresh data and insights to this imperative, but still relatively young, field of linguistics. While the studies acknowledge the threat of losing languages in an unprecedented way, they focus on cases that show resilience and explore paths to sustainable progress. The articles are also intended as a celebration of the 25 years’ work of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, and as a parting gift to FEL’s founder and quarter-century chair, Nick Ostler. This book will be informative for researchers, instructors, and specialists in the field of endangered languages. The book can also be useful for university graduate or undergraduate students, and language activists.

What will happen to the university when knowledge is no longer scarce, but ubiquitously available and even produced by machines? In The University as a Mirror of Society, Paul van Geest, Emile Aarts, and Ronald de Jong show how artificial intelligence reaches into the very heart of academia, thus impacting education, research, governance, and our understanding of what it means to be human. This book is a journey taking the reader from the medieval university to the contemporary campus, demonstrating how universities have continuously been challenged to respond to major societal shifts. However, the current AI revolution is different. AI is not merely a tool; it is transforming the very conditions under which knowledge is created, evaluated, and trusted. In doing so, it places the university’s traditional role as gatekeeper under increasing existential pressure. The authors provide a clear analysis of AI as a system technology and discuss its implications for scientific integrity, the transformation of academia, and the future of work at large. At the same time, they pose a fundamental question: how will AI-technologies shape our conception of humankind and how does this inflict the university as a space for reflection and critical inquiry? This book is a powerful plea for a university that strives not only to be faster and more efficient, but above all wiser, more careful, and more humane.

This handbook comprises essays by leading scholars and practitioners on the topic of U.S. counterterrorism and irregular warfare campaigns and operations around the globe. Terrorist groups have evolved substantially since 9/11, with the Islamic State often described as a pseudo-state, a terrorist group, and insurgency all at the same time. While researchers', analysts', and policymakers’ understanding of terrorism has grown immensely over the past two decades, similar advancements in the understanding of counterterrorism lag. As such, this handbook explains why it is necessary to take a broader view of counterterrorism which can, and often does, include irregular warfare. The volume is divided into three thematic sections: Part I examines modern terrorism in the Islamic world and gives an overview of the major terrorist groups from the past three decades; Part II provides a wide variety of case studies of counterterrorism and irregular warfare operations, spanning from the 1980s to the irregular warfare campaign against the Islamic State in northern Syria in 2018; Part III examines the government instruments used to combat terrorism and wage irregular warfare, such as drones, Theater Special Operations Commands, and Theater Commands. The handbook fills a gap in the traditional counterterrorism literature by its inclusion of irregular warfare and by providing analyses from academic experts as well as practitioners. It will be of much interest to students of counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, U.S. national security, military affairs, and International Relations. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-US-Counterterrorism-and-Irregular-Warfare-Operations/Sheehan-Marquardt-Collins/p/book/9780367758363, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Life sciences: general issues

The book is based on the view that the present trajectory of modern development cannot continue as it is now because it is ecologically unsustainable, it continues to enlarge the gap between rich and poor, and the decolonialisation movement has drawn our attention again to the specific role of religion, culture and value in human affairs and the need for a robust element of indigenisation and contextualisation. This book is strongly focused on the context of Africa, with two chapters that are written by authors from the Netherlands, for the purpose of presenting a North-South dialogue. The book contains reflection on approaches followed in building sustainable human communities in general and reflection on specific efforts to solve sustainability issues. It seeks to integrate academic reflection and insights gained from practical involvement with sustainability issues in local communities and low-income households, with contributions from Theology and Natural and Social Sciences.

'Pathways to the Present' is a thoroughly researched and concisely argued account of economic and environmental change in the postwar "American" Pacific, covering interactions among native Hawaiian, developmental, military, and environmental issues in in Hawai'i; land- and water-use problems that have intersected with more nebulous quality-of-life concerns to generate policy controversies in the Seattle and San Francisco Bay areas; and economic expansion and environmentalism in Alaska. From there the study considers Hiroshima after its destruction by the atomic bomb in 1945, looking at residents’ desire to combine urban-planning concepts, the effort to remake Hiroshima as a high-tech city in the 1990s, and postwar planning on Okinawa, where American influences were particularly strong. The final chapter examines the growth of tourism on Guam and the use of the island for military purposes and links these to developments in the Philippines and American Sâmoa.

The monograph on improving the response of first responders to domestic violence in Europe aims to identify gaps in the cooperation of first-line responders and deliver recommendations, toolkits and collaborative training for European police organizations and medical and social work professionals. The goal is to improve integrate institutional response to domestic violence. Shared training and adequate risk assessment tools will create a positive feedback loop, increasing reporting rates of domestic violence to police, the medical profession, and community and social work practitioners.

This open access book describes the differences in US census coverage, also referred to as “differential undercount”, by showing which groups have the highest net undercounts and which groups have the greatest undercount differentials, and discusses why such undercounts occur. In addition to focusing on measuring census coverage for several demographic characteristics, including age, gender, race, Hispanic origin status, and tenure, it also considers several of the main hard-to-count populations, such as immigrants, the homeless, the LBGT community, children in foster care, and the disabled. However, given the dearth of accurate undercount data for these groups, they are covered less comprehensively than those demographic groups for which there is reliable undercount data from the Census Bureau. This book is of interest to demographers, statisticians, survey methodologists, and all those interested in census coverage.