Humanities & Social Sciences

This book comprises ten works, including research and essays, conducted at various Chilean universities. They form a mosaic that ranges from student activism to institutional governance, from the music room to the science lab, from theoretical essays to systematic reviews. This plurality is not anecdotal; it reflects a central conviction of the Interdisciplinary Research Center on University Inclusion and Disability at the University of Chile (NIIIUD): university inclusion cannot be a self-contained compartment, the exclusive responsibility of specialized offices or support programs, but must permeate teaching, research, outreach, and, above all, the entire organizational culture. In this sense, the book is part of a tradition of critical disability studies that, in dialogue with feminisms, decolonial thought, and science and technology studies, questions the foundational dichotomies of Western modernity—normal/abnormal, able/inable, independent/dependent, productive/unproductive—and the power structures that these dichotomies uphold.

In 2015, students at the University of Cape Town demanded the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the imperialist, racist business magnate, from their campus. The battle cry '#RhodesMustFall' sparked an international movement calling for the decolonization of the world's universities. Today, as this movement grows, how will it radically transform the terms upon which universities exist? In this book, students, activists and scholars discuss the possibilities and the pitfalls of doing decolonial work in the home of the coloniser, in the heart of the establishment. Subverting curricula, enforcing diversity, and destroying old boundaries, this is a radical call for a new era of education. Offering resources for students and academics to challenge and resist coloniality inside and outside the classroom, Decolonising the University provides the tools for radical pedagogical, disciplinary and institutional change.

"The essays gathered in this volume present multifaceted considerations of the intersection of objects and gender within the cultural contexts of late medieval France and England. Some take a material view of objects, showing buildings, books, and pictures as sites of gender negotiation and resistance and as extensions of women’s bodies. Others reconsider the concept of objectification in the lives of fictional and historical medieval women by looking closely at their relation to gendered material objects, taken literally as women’s possessions and as figurative manifestations of their desires. The opening section looks at how medieval authors imagined fictional and legendary women using particular objects in ways that reinforce or challenge gender roles. These women bring objects into the orbit of gender identity, employing and relating to them in a literal sense, while also taking advantage of their symbolic meanings. The second section focuses on the use of texts both as objects in their own right and as mechanisms by which other objects are defined. The possessors of objects in these essays lived in the world, their lives documented by historical records, yet like their fictional and legendary counterparts, they too used objects for instrumental ends and with symbolic resonances. The final section considers the objectification of medieval women’s bodies as well as its limits. While this at times seems to allow for a trade in women, authorial attempts to give definitive shapes and boundaries to women’s bodies either complicate the gender boundaries they try to contain or reduce gender to an ideological abstraction. This volume contributes to the ongoing effort to calibrate female agency in the late Middle Ages, honoring the groundbreaking work of Carolyn P. Collette."

This book undertakes a fundamental review of the existing international regime for taxing business profit. It steps back from the current political debates on how to combat profit shifting and how taxing rights over the profits of the digitalized economy should be allocated. Instead, it starts from first principles to ask how we should evaluate a tax on business profit—and whether there is any good rationale for such a tax in the first place. It then goes on to evaluate the existing regime and a number of alternatives that have been proposed. It argues that the existing regime is fundamentally flawed, and that there is a need for radical reform. The key conclusion from the analysis is that there would be significant gains from a reform that moved the regime towards taxing profit in the country in which a business made its sales to third parties. That conclusion informs two proposals that are put forward in detail and evaluated: the Residual Profit Allocation by Income (RPAI) and the Destination-based Cash Flow Tax (DBCFT). The book is authored by group of economists and lawyers—the Oxford International Tax Group, chaired by Michael Devereux. It draws insights from both economics and law—including economic theory, empirical evidence on the impact of taxes, and a detailed examination of practical issues of implementation—to assess the existing system and to consider fundamental reforms. This book will be useful to tax policy makers, tax professionals, academics, and anyone interested in tax policy.

Traditional archaeological ideas about Neolithic societies were shaped by questionable premises. The modern concept of social and cultural coherence of residence groups as well as the ethnic interpretation of ‘archaeological cultures’ fostered ideas of static and homogeneous social entities with fixed borders. Farming – as the core of the Neolithic way of life – was associated with sedentariness rather than with spatial mobility and cross-regional social networks. Furthermore, the widely used (neo-)evolutionist thinking universally assumed a growing social complexity and hierarchisation during prehistory. After all, such ‘top-down'–perspectives deprived individuals and groups of genuine agency and creativity while underestimating the relational dynamic between the social and material worlds. In recent years, a wide array of empirical results on social practices related to material culture and settlement dynamics, (inter-)regional entanglements and spatial mobility were published. For the latter the adoption of the relatively new scientific methods in archaeology like Stable Isotope Analysis as well as aDNA played a crucial role. Yet the question of possible inferences regarding spatial and temporal differences in forms of social organisation has not been addressed sufficiently. The aim of this volume is therefore to rethink former top-down concepts of Neolithic societies by studying social practices and different forms of Neolithic social life by adopting bottom-up social archaeological perspectives. Furthermore, the validity and relevance of terms like ‘society’, ‘community’, ‘social group’ etc. will be discussed. The contributions reach from theoretical to empirical ones and thematize a variety of social theoretical approaches as well as methodological ways of combining different sorts of data. They show the potential of such bottom-up approaches to infer models of social practices and configurations which may live up to the potential social diversity and dynamism of Neolithic societies. The contribution shed light on spatial mobility, social complexity, the importance of (political) interests and factors of kinship etc. We hope that this volume, with its focus on the Neolithic of Europe, will contribute to the ongoing critical debates of theories and concepts as well as on our premises and perspectives on Neolithic societies in general – and the practices of social archaeology as such.

This book investigates the entangled relations between people’s daily worship practices and their umwelt in South India. Focusing on the practices of spirit (būta) worship in the coastal area of Karnataka, it examines the relationship between people and deities. Based on extensive fieldwork, this book links important anthropological theories on personhood, perspectives, transactions, and gift-exchanges together with the Gestaltkreis theory of Viktor von Weizsäcker. First, it examines the relations between būta worship and land tenure, matriliny, and hierarchy in the society. It then explores the reflexive relationship between modern law and current practices based on conventional law, before examining new developments in būta worship with the rise of mega-industries and environmental movements. Furthermore, this book sheds light on the struggles and endeavours of the people who create and recreate their relations with the realm of sacred wildness, as well as the formations and transformations of the umwelt in perpetual social-political transition. Modernity and Spirit Worship in India will be of interest to academics in the field of anthropology, religious studies and the dynamics of religion, and South Asian Culture and Society.

Forced Migrants in Nordic Histories sheds light on the often-overlooked histories of forced migrants in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden during the 20th and 21st centuries. It offers the first comparative, region-wide volume focused specifically on the histories of refugees and other groups of forced migrants across the Nordic countries. Nordic historiographies have long tended to marginalise or omit the presence of these migrants, producing a perception of forced migration as something ‘new’ or ‘exceptional’. This volume challenges that notion by uncovering the long and varied histories of forced migration within, between, to, and from the Nordic region. In doing so, it repositions forced migrants as integral to the shaping of Nordic societies. The volume includes contributions from and about all the five Nordic countries. It examines both national specificities and shared regional patterns, offering insights into how forced migration has been regulated, remembered, and represented in public discourses across borders. The chapters engage with a wide range of forced migrant groups, such as wartime evacuees, refugees, deportees, Holocaust survivors, and more recent asylum-seekers. Central to the volume is the recognition of forced migrants as historical actors. Drawing on oral histories, personal testimonies, and archival research, the book foregrounds the agency of forced migrants themselves, countering their frequent portrayal as passive or voiceless. By tracing historiographical trends and shifting discourses, regulatory frameworks, and memory practices, Forced Migrants in Nordic Histories contributes a vital historical dimension to contemporary debates on forced migration.

It’s a platitude – which only a philosopher would dream of denying – that whereas words are connected to what they represent merely by arbitrary conventions, pictures are connected to what they represent by resemblance. The most important difference between my portrait and my name, for example, is that whereas my portrait and I are connected by my portrait’s resemblance to me, my name and I are connected merely by an arbitrary convention. The first aim of this book is to defend this platitude from the apparently compelling objections raised against it, by analysing depiction in a way which reveals how it is mediated by resemblance. It’s natural to contrast the platitude that depiction is mediated by resemblance, which emphasises the differences between depictive and descriptive representation, with an extremely close analogy between depiction and description, which emphasises the similarities between depictive and descriptive representation. Whereas the platitude emphasises that the connection between my portrait and me is natural in a way the connection between my name and me is not, the analogy emphasises the contingency of the connection between my portrait and me. Nevertheless, the second aim of this book is to defend an extremely close analogy between depiction and description. The strategy of the book is to argue that the apparently compelling objections raised against the platitude that depiction is mediated by resemblance are manifestations of more general problems, which are familiar from the philosophy of language. These problems, it argues, can be resolved by answers analogous to their counterparts in the philosophy of language, without rejecting the platitude. So the combination of the platitude that depiction is mediated by resemblance with a close analogy between depiction and description turns out to be a compelling theory of depiction, which combines the virtues of common sense with the insights of its detractors.

The book presents a study about synergies between urban regeneration and welfare policies, created in an important municipality of Trentino (Italy), to answer the social challenges of the territory. The text reviews the literature on regeneration, welfare, and youth policies and presents the survey techniques used for the study of the Smart Lab youth center in Rovereto. It addresses the issue of culture as a vehicle for innovation that leads to social and economic results that are difficult to recognize, even for the direct users. The research helped to encapsulate this development action and to construct a definition of the center by the users themselves.

This open access book presents recent advances in the pure sciences that are of significance in the quest for alternatives to the use of animals in research and describes a variety of practical applications of the three key guiding principles for the more ethical use of animals in experiments – replacement, reduction, and refinement, collectively known as the 3Rs. Important examples from across the world of implementation of the 3Rs in the testing of cosmetics, chemicals, pesticides, and biologics, including vaccines, are described, with additional information on relevant regulations. The coverage also encompasses emerging approaches to alternative tests and the 3Rs. The book is based on the most informative contributions delivered at the Asian Congress 2016 on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences. It will be of value for those working in R&D, for graduate students, and for educators in various fields, including the pharmaceutical and cosmetic sciences, pharmacology, toxicology, and animal welfare. The free, open access distribution of Alternatives to Animal Testing is enabled by the Creative Commons Attribution license in International version 4: CC BY 4.0.

Was ist das Tier? Auf Grundlage panentheistischer Denkmodelle gelingt die Eröffnung neuer systematisch-theologischer Perspektiven auf das Tier. Eine dogmatische (Neu-) Bestimmung und Verortung des Tieres wird hierbei nicht aus einem Vergleich mit dem Menschen abgeleitet, sondern vom Gottesgedanken her entfaltet. Damit kann ein Anthropozentrismus überwunden werden, der dem Tier eine Gottesbeziehung abspricht. Die Arbeit beginnt mit einer gründlichen Bestandsaufnahme tierdogmatischer Aussagen in den Werken von Karl Barth, Gerhard Ebeling, Paul Tillich und Wolfhart Pannenberg. Das Herzstück der Dissertation von Cynthia Helbling widmet sich Albert Schweitzer, Jürgen Moltmann und Rainer Hagencord. Ihre panentheistischen Entwürfe erweisen sich als tragfähig für eine theologische Rede vom Tier, die über die bisherigen Grenzen des Sagbaren hinausgeht. Der Band empfiehlt sich für alle, die sich der Frage nach dem Tier stellen wollen und leistet einen Beitrag zur theologischen Fundierung des tierethischen Diskurses.

Why is there a history of photography but no history of the photogram? The publication pursues this question by approaching the specific materiality, the scientific and artistic qualities of the photogram on the basis of a historiographic, semiotic and gender-theoretical analysis. Thereby a still outstanding media history of the photogram is realized and the historical relevance of this so far neglected medium is worked out.

Small and medium-sized firms play a key role in the European economy. This paper uses statistical methods to estimate the effects of EIB financial support on European companies between 2008 and 2015. It shows that the effects of EIB supported lending on job creation and investments were larger for smaller and younger firms, and that longer maturities and more advantageous loan pricing are associated with larger employment and investment effects. The results suggest that benefits of the EIB support are more noticeable on an intensive margin, instead of on an extensive one.

In den letzten Jahren haben die Verkaufsfunktionen im Marketing wieder eine zunehmende Bedeutung erlangt. Dabei tritt die Frage nach der Vorteilhaftigkeit von Handelsvertretern und Reisenden im Vertrieb erneut in den Vordergrund. Die vorliegende Arbeit unternimmt eine vergleichende Analyse der Leistungen und Funktionen der Absatzformen aus Hersteller- und Kundensicht. Auf der Basis einer Befragung von insgesamt über 1000 leitenden Unternehmensangestellten und Selbständigen aller Branchen und Betriebsformen liegt erstmals für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland eine umfassende Untersuchung zur Beurteilung von Handelsvertretern und Reisenden vor.

Berechenbare und prozesssichere Fügeverfahren sind ein Schlüsselfaktor für die Fertigung maßgeschneiderter Multimaterialbauteile aus Kunststoff und Metall für Leichtbauanwendungen. Nach dem aktuellen Stand der Technik und Forschung besteht vor allem für das Kleben von Kunststoff-Metall-Verbunde Forschungsbedarf. In dieser Arbeit wird deshalb das industriell noch nicht etablierte Verfahren des laserbasierten Schmelzklebens von Thermoplasten mit Metallen erforscht. Bisherige Studien thematisieren vor allem die Haftungsoptimierung durch Oberflächenvorbehandlung. Die vorliegende Forschungsarbeit vermittelt ein grundlegendes Prozessverständnis für das laserbasierte Schmelzkleben ohne oberflächenvergrößernde Metallvorbehandlung unter Berücksichtigung der unterschiedlichen Fügeteileigenschaften. Es wurden berechnungsgestützte und experimentelle Untersuchungen zur Analyse von Prozess-, Werkstoff-, Oberflächen- und Umwelteinflüssen auf die Klebfestigkeit durchgeführt und prozessrelevante Bedingungen festgelegt. Darüber hinaus wurde eine allgemeingültige Methodik zur berechnungsgestützten Prozessauslegung und -optimierung für das laserbasierte Schmelzkleben erarbeitet. Prozessfenster können nun mit minimiertem experimentellem Aufwand ermittelt werden, so dass zukünftig maßgeschneiderte Thermoplast-Metall-Verbunde mittels Laserstrahlung prozesssicher sowie effizient gefügt werden können.