Humanities & Social Sciences

Development Economics;Economic Policy;Asian Economics;Economics;Economy-wide Country Studies;Internal migration, urbanization and poverty in Asia;Poverty as an urban issue;Poverty measures in Asia;Rural-urban migration in Asia;Internal migration and employment in Asia;Urban economic growth;Income polarization in Asia;Open access;Development economics & emerging economies;Political economy

This open access volume collects emerging issues in Environmental and Civil Engineering, originating from outstanding doctoral dissertations discussed at Politecnico di Milano in 2021. The advanced innovative insights provided are presented with reference to the relevant sustainable development goals (SDGs), hoping that scientists, technicians and decision makers will find them as a valid support to face future sustainability challenges. Indeed, the fast evolution of our society often falls short in properly taking into consideration its relationship with the environment, which is not only the primary source of any resource and the sink of all the wastes we generate throughout our activities, but also the cause of most of the loading and constraints applied to structures and infrastructures. The lack of a proper consideration of the relationship between the needs of both the society and the environment may lead to strong disequilibria, generating a large amount of threats for a robust, resilient and continuous development. In this perspective, the SDGs set by the United Nations represent the criteria to revise our development model, towards the ability to conjugate different needs to build a safe relation between anthropic activities and the environment. Civil and Environmental Engineering plays a relevant role in providing methods, approaches, risk and impact assessments, as well as technologies, to fulfil the SDGs. Research in these fields may in fact provide technical knowledge and tools to support decision makers and technicians in: (i) planning mitigation and adaptation actions to climate change, extreme weather, earthquakes, drought, flooding and other natural disasters; (ii) designing efficient and sustainable strategies for resources exploitation, minimizing the impact and the unequal distributions; (iii) increasing the safety of structures and infrastructures under exceptional loadings and against the deterioration due to their lifecycle; (iv) adopting a holistic risk management approach and appropriate technologies to reduce pollution and environment deterioration, which increase vulnerability; (v) providing a safe drinking water and sanitation system to protect human health.

Although there have been many studies of childhood in Ancient Greece and Rome and in the Middle Ages in the West, there is no such study for the Byzantine world. To fill the gap, this bookreconstructs the most important factors in childhood in Byzantium from the 6th through the 11th century. The main sources are the lives of the saints, which are of central importance for the analysis of the social history and daily life of the population. They also provide an insight into family, social and economic structures, as well as patterns of behaviour. This material is supplemented by legal, medical, theological and other sources.

Education policy has a significant impact on how kindergartens, schools and other educational institutions are run. In working with these institutions, it is interesting to study how power is legitimized and managed. How to Study Education Policy: Texts, Theories and Approaches presents a range of academic and methodological strategies for studying this field. In addition to nuanced academic subject traditions, the authors present qualitative and comparative approaches to document studies and expert interviews. The anthology provides a number of examples of different ways of carrying out studies, including digital and practice-based analyses. It addresses questions about the role of theory and how research is best reported. A central theme is the importance of evidence and expertise in education policy and reform work, a field that the authors have explored through the POLNET project (Policy Knowledge and Lesson Drawing in Nordic School Reform in an Era of International Comparison). This book will be of interest to academics, experts in the field, education students, teacher educators and public sector employees.

In Paraguay’s Chaco region, cattle ranching drives some of the world’s fastest deforestation and most extreme inequality in land tenure, with grave impacts on Indigenous well-being. Disrupting the Patrón traces Enxet and Sanapaná struggles to reclaim their ancestral lands from the cattle ranches where they labored as peons—a decades-long resistance that led to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and back to the frontlines of Paraguay’s ranching frontier. The Indigenous communities at the heart of this story employ a dialectics of disruption by working with and against the law to unsettle enduring racial geographies and rebuild territorial relations, albeit with uncertain outcomes. Joel E. Correia shows that Enxet and Sanapaná peoples enact environmental justice otherwise: moving beyond juridical solutions to harm by maintaining collective lifeways and resistance amid radical social-ecological change. Correia’s ethnography advances debates about environmental racism, ethics of engaged research, and Indigenous resurgence on Latin America’s settler frontiers. “A crucial and incisive contribution to our understanding of racialized geographies, settler capitalism, and environmental and Indigenous justice.” — Gastón R. Gordillo, author of Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction “Focusing on the racial and cultural implications of land and labor in Indigenous struggles in Paraguay, Correia expands our focus on environmental concerns to include human rights, cultural rights, and the need for legal and political justice.” — Nancy Postero, author of The Indigenous State: Race, Politics, and Performance in Plurinational Bolivia ”A story of the underrepresented peoples of Paraguay, their endurance under multiple cycles of dispossession, and the various forms that their resistance takes.” — Gabriela Valdivia, coauthor of Oil, Revolution, and Indigenous Citizenship in Ecuadorian Amazonia

What should happen when doctors and parents disagree about what would be best for a child? When should courts become involved? Should life support be stopped against parents' wishes? The case of Charlie Gard, reached global attention in 2017. It led to widespread debate about the ethics of disagreements between doctors and parents, about the place of the law in such disputes, and about the variation in approach between different parts of the world. In this book, medical ethicists Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu critically examine the ethical questions at the heart of disputes about medical treatment for children. They use the Gard case as a springboard to a wider discussion about the rights of parents, the harms of treatment, and the vital issue of limited resources. They discuss other prominent UK and international cases of disagreement and conflict. From opposite sides of the debate Wilkinson and Savulescu provocatively outline the strongest arguments in favour of and against treatment. They analyse some of the distinctive and challenging features of treatment disputes in the 21st century and argue that disagreement about controversial ethical questions is both inevitable and desirable. They outline a series of lessons from the Gard case and propose a radical new “dissensus” framework for future cases of disagreement.

Artificial Earth: A Genealogy of Planetary Technicity offers an intellectual history of humanity as a geological force, focusing on a prevalent contradiction in the Anthropocene discourse on global environmental change: on the one hand, it has been argued that there are hardly any pristine environments anymore, to the degree that the concept of nature has lost its meaning; while on the other, that anthropogenic environmental change has become so prevailing that it ought to be conceived of as a force of nature, in the literal sense of the expression. Artificial Earth argues that to fully grasp the stakes of this discourse, we need not only understand the contemporary scientific and technological transformations behind the Anthropocene, but also explore the history of an ontological concern tied up with it. In order to do so, Artificial Earth examines reflections on the ontological dualism between nature and artifice within the history of earth science from the late eighteenth century onwards. Paying particular attention to its consequences for how human subjectivity has been conceptualized in the Anthropocene, it then enrolls these resources in an effort to problematize attempts since the 1980s to formalize earth science in systems theory terminology. In sum, the aim is to investigate the historical conditions for the possibility of conceiving human artifice as an integral part of the earth’s terrestrial environment, with the conviction that such an investigation may assist in resolving the aforementioned contradiction or at least to understand it better by tracing its historical lineage.

A developmental analysis of adolescents growing up in an inner-city, working class life What does it mean to be a teenager in an American city at the close of the twentieth century? How do urban surroundings affect the ways in which teens grow up, and what do their stories tell us about human development? In particular, how do the negative images of themselves on television and in the newspaper affect their perspectives about themselves? Psychologists typically have shown little interest in urban youth, preferring instead to generalize about adolescent development from studies of their middle-class, suburban counterparts. In Everyday Courage Niobe Way, a developmental psychologist, looks beyond the stereotypes to reveal how the personal worldviews of inner-city poor and working-class adolescents develop over time. In the process, she challenges much conventional wisdom about inner-city youth and about adolescents more generally. She introduces us to Malcolm, a sensitive and proud young man full of contradictions. We follow him as he makes the honor roll, becomes a teenage father, and falls into depression as his younger sister is dying of cancer. We meet Eva, an intelligent and confident young women full of questions, who grows increasingly alienated from her mother and comes to rely on her best friends for support. We watch her blossom as a ball player and a poet. We share her triumph when she receives a scholarship to the college of her choice. In these 24 adolescents, Way finds a cross-section of youngsters who want to make positive changes in their lives and communities while struggling with concerns about betrayal, trust, racism, violence, and death. Each adolescent wants most of all to "be somebody," to have her or his voice heard.

This book explores the complex histories and heritage of the Banda Islands in Indonesia. By interweaving oral traditions with colonial and archaeological records, it examines polyvocality in heritage interpretation and the central role of communities in shaping their cultural landscapes. The book provides a polyvocal approach to heritage studies, blending historical narratives, cultural landscape analysis, and postcolonial critique. It provides insights into the resilience of Bandanese traditions, the challenges of heritage management, and strategies for inclusive conservation. Through the case study of Fort Nassau on the Banda Islands, the book delivers a nuanced framework for understanding and preserving the complex polyvocal realities of postcolonial cultural landscapes. Navigating Polyvocal Heritage in a Postcolonial Cultural Landscape will be of value to researchers, and students in history, archaeology, heritage studies, area studies, and postcolonial studies. It is also relevant to heritage professionals, policymakers, and institutions involved in cultural heritage management and conservation, particularly those interested in working with community-based heritage approaches.

Drawing from empirically grounded studies, the volume Situated Mixedness sheds light on the state of migration-related “intimate diversity”, that is, the simultaneous formation and existence of various configurations of conjugal mixedness. It examines this phenomenon in Belgium, a country in the European Union with a long history of immigration and where an important percentage of registered marriages are international. Through the optic of “situated mixedness”, the volume pays attention to the (dis-)connections between intimate diversity and its surrounding environment. Bringing together mutually reinforcing or often contradicting emic and etic perspectives, it illuminates how specific context/s (socio-legal, cultural, temporal, etc.) not only can influence, stem from, or trigger a social phenomenon but also remain standstill without a particular impact on individual’s lived experiences. It brings out in subtle ways the agency and subjectivities of individuals, nuancing thereby common-held views on socially Othered couples. Focusing on the intimate sphere of individuals’ life at the crossroads of anthropology and sociology, the volume contributes fresh insights not only to the study of migration and intermarriage but also to the literature on super- and hyper-diversity. It will be of interest to scholars, students, and social actors working on family-related migration, state policies, and social cohesion.

Poet, novelist, translator, scholar, and critical essayist extraordinaire, Ammiel Alcalay’s intrepid work has always moved across geographic, chronological, political, and linguistic borders. “FOLLOW THE PERSON”: Archival Encounters gathers a dizzying array of texts by Alcalay written over the past fifteen years, all of them having something to do with archival materials. In Alcalay’s case, however, these archives range from more traditional, institutionally-held materials and personal collections to the use of his own experiences and memories as sources for redrawing cultural maps that have too long been divided along sectarian lines of one kind or another. Moving from the Beats and the Black Arts Movement to the Middle East, “FOLLOW THE PERSON” recalibrates our sense of living history while offering new possibilities for encounters that have been relegated to oblivion or never even imagined. Culled from a variety of eclectic sources and contexts, encountering these essays together offers a completely different experience of Alcalay’s essays, one that argues for a methodology based on minutely recorded events and historical contexts, and for necessary human and cultural encounters that provide models for a new, reinvigorated critical vocabulary. As Miriam Nichols writes in her Introduction, “Follow the tenuous threads in this collection of writings and you may end up at the looted National Museum in Baghdad during the American invasion, or in the Hoover Institute at Stanford University where most Iraqi state archives wound up. You may find yourself at Bashcharshiya, the market in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, or in Palestine, on May 14, 1948. Maybe, if you are keen, you will pick up the thread that leads to 17th-century colonial Massachusetts, or perhaps you will stay in New York, rummaging through garbage cans with Diane di Prima, looking for journals and letters tossed out by a lover.” Whichever path you take, you will find multiple worlds, all rendered by Alcalay with light and compassion.

Biobased biodegradable polymers are emerging as an alternative to fossil fuel-based plastics. Biodegradable Polymers, Blends and Biocomposites: Trends and Applications discusses trends in the development of microbial/other renewable source-based bioplastic products, their blends and biocomposites applications in various industrial fields. It covers biodegradable polymeric materials preparation, extraction, formulation, modification of properties, product development and applications and end-of-life options. Furthermore, the book discusses topics like bioplastic resources, isolation procedures, utilization at commercial level and markets and economy. Features: Explains emerging application possibilities of biobased biodegradable polymers. Provides detailed application notes on agricultural waste-based bioplastics. Covers microbial and agro-based biocomposites and their applications. Summarizes bioplastic degradation and blending research. Discusses application possibilities of biobased biodegradable polymers. The book is aimed at researchers and graduate students in polymers and composites.

This book contributes to the empirical literature on households’ participation in microfinancial services in developing countries. First, it estimates simultaneously the participation in microinsurance schemes and other financial services on household survey data from Ghana. Second, it analyzes the household’s cumulative participation in microfinancial services using household survey data from Sri Lanka. Next, the study focuses on the question whether household’s participation in micro life insurance in Sri Lanka is motivated by the desire to leave bequests. At last, it investigates different sequential steps of the household’s microinsurance participation decision and the joint analysis of micro life and health insurance enrolment in Sri Lanka.

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.

We began this book with the aim of providing the first global and comparative perspective on energy vulnerability, in order to advance debates on the systemic processes and conditions that (re)produce domestic energy deprivation. By bringing together 13 chapters that cover 14 countries in total, the volume provides the first instance where such divergent contexts are brought together to discuss energy vulnerability in one common space. In this concluding discussion, we look across the range of contributions and draw out some overarching lessons, policy implications and future research directions.