Humanities & Social Sciences

This volume explores how researchers made innovative use of online technologies to innovate, define, and transform research methodologies in light of the varying impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially those related to the ability to conduct qualitative research. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a radical shift in the way that people all over the world were/have been able to live, work, study, and conduct their daily lives. Academics and other professionals who routinely engage in research were no exception. The sudden, continued, and uneven need for health mandates calling for physical distancing added a particular layer of complexity for those who used research methods that typically required face-to-face interactions. Continued technological developments associated with the Internet had already given rise to ongoing debates on innovative methodological thinking and practices. The COVID-19 pandemic has further accentuated how indispensable the internet has become for the private and public lives of those with access to it, including for their employment, education, leisure, and social interactions. For those fortunate enough to have access to them, communication software such as Zoom and Google Meet have also become indispensable digital resources for researchers seeking to continue conducting research during lockdowns and quarantines, and beyond. More than ever, researchers are finding it useful, even necessary, to equip themselves with online research tools in order to be able to continue conducting their fieldwork. Drawing on research and case studies from around the world, this volume serves as a guidebook for those interested in attuning their own research methods to a world still struggling to grapple with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This publication provides a comprehensive compendium of the current state of Germany’s research infrastructure in the social, economic, and behavioural sciences. In addition, the book presents detailed discussions of the current needs of empirical researchers in these fields as well as of opportunities for future development. The importance of solid data for both public policy and the social and economic sciences is obvious. Today, empirical research is essential in finding solutions to many of the major challenges our society faces, such as environmental change, turbulent financial markets, and population growth. Based on 68 advisory reports by more than 100 internationally recognised authors from a wide range of fields, the book provides recommendations by the German Data Forum (RatSWD) on how to improve the research infrastructure so as to create conditions ideal for making Germany’s social, economic, and behavioural sciences more innovative and internationally competitive.

This volume collects the contributions of scholars who analyze mafia cultures and juvenile deviance generating a close comparison between different theoretical and research perspectives.

This open access book focuses on climate change, indigenous reindeer husbandry and the underlying concept of connecting the traditional knowledge of indigenous reindeer herders in the Arctic with the latest research findings of the world’s leading academics. The Arctic and sub-Arctic environment, climate and biodiversity are changing in ways unprecedented in the long histories of the north, challenging traditional ways of life, well-being, and food security with legitimate concerns for the future of traditional indigenous livelihoods. The book provides a clear and thorough overview of the potential problems caused by a warming climate on reindeer husbandry and how reindeer herders' knowledge should be brought to action. In particular, the predicted impacts of global warming on winter climate and the resilience reindeer of communities are thoroughly discussed.

While portrayals of immigrants and their descendants in France and throughout Europe often center on burning cars and radical Islam, Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France paints a different picture. Through fieldwork and interviews in Paris and its banlieues, Jean Beaman examines middle-class and upwardly mobile children of maghrébin, or North African immigrants. By showing how these individuals are denied cultural citizenship because of their North African origin, she puts to rest the notion of a French exceptionalism regarding cultural difference, race, and ethnicity and further centers race and ethnicity as crucial for understanding marginalization in French society.

Ageing populations pose some of the foremost global challenges of this century. Drawing on an international pool of scholars, this cutting-edge Handbook surveys the micro, macro and institutional aspects of the economics of ageing. Structured in seven parts, the volume addresses a broad range of themes, including health economics, labour economics, pensions and social security, generational accounting, wealth inequality and regional perspectives. Each chapter combines a succinct overview of the state of current research with a sketch of a promising future research agenda. This Handbook will be an essential resource for advanced students, researchers and policymakers looking at the economics of ageing across the disciplines of economics, demography, public policy, public health and beyond.

Durch die systematische Ermittlung der fremdsprachigen Quellen der ersten bulgarischen Geographielehrbücher ist für die Analyse ihres Wortguts eine völlig neue Grundlage geschaffen worden, und es besteht Anlaß zu der Hoffnung, daß die hier zutagetretende Vielfalt der Kontaktmöglichkeiten auch die Diskussion über die Herausbildung und Entwicklung der bulgarischen Lexik des 19. Jahrhunderts als Ganzes voranbringt.

In 1857, following the publication of Madame Bovary, Flaubert was charged with having committed an "outrage to public morality and religion." Dominick LaCapra, an intellectual historian with wide-ranging literary interests, here examines this remarkable trial. LaCapra draws on material from Flaubert’s correspondence, the work of literary critics, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of Flaubert. LaCapra maintains that Madame Bovary is at the intersection of the traditional and the modern novel, simultaneously invoking conventional expectations and subverting them.

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When “The Clarion of Syria” was penned, between September 1860 and April 1861, its anonymous author—identified only as “a patriot”—had just witnessed his homeland undergo unprecedented violence in what many today consider Lebanon’s first civil war. Butrus al-Bustani, the author, wrote a series of pamphlets to his fellow Syrians that became a key text of the nineteenth-century literary revival movement known as the Nahda. They addressed an array of universally resonant and locally relevant themes that render the pamphlets pertinent beyond their immediate context. With a style oscillating between Paulinian sermon and Socratic dialogue, the author ponders the meaning of civil war in relation to religion, politics, morality, society, and civilization. Above all, the text was an anti-sectarian clarion call to build a cohesive and “civilized” Syrian society in place of what the author considered a community gripped by the most pernicious of conflicts, violent fanaticism and factionalism. Rereading the pamphlets in the context of today’s political violence in war-torn Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world helps us gain a critical and historical perspective on (anti-)sectarianism, conflict resolution, Western interventionism, and national reconciliation. This translation thereby makes an important historical document accessible for the first time to an English audience.

This collection of essays offers a critical assessment of Labour in a Single Shot, a groundbreaking documentary video workshop. From 2011 to 2014, curator Antje Ehmann and film- and videomaker Harun Farocki produced an art project of truly global proportions. They travelled to fifteen cities around the world to conduct workshops inspired by cinema history’s first film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, shot in 1895 by the Lumière brothers in France. While the workshop videos are in colour and the camera was not required to remain static, Ehmann and Farocki’s students were tasked with honouring the original Lumière film’s basic parameters of theme and style. The fascinating result is a collection of more than 550 short videos that have appeared in international exhibitions and on an open-access website, offering the widest possible audience the opportunity to ponder contemporary labour in multiple contexts around the world.

The concept of ‘Palaeolithic art’ and its study have changed considerably in recent decades. The modern notion of ‘art’ is cross-culturally and diachronically problematic. The phenomenon cannot be reduced to material visual culture, but also has acoustic, haptic and other dynamic aspects. It must be understood as a variety of processes that can encompass both the everyday and the extraordinary. In this volume, archaeologists, philosophers and anthropologists approach ‘Palaeolithic art’ from different perspectives, including its conceptualisation, aesthetics, relations to art history and art brut. The contributions deal with the challenge of materiality, evolutionary aspects, physical re-enactment by actors, digital technologies as a means of interpreting art objects, and the protection of cultural heritage. The volume offers innovative insights into past practices and contemporary ideas and approaches related to Palaeolithic art, based on careful empirical research combined with reflective and sophisticated theoretical approaches.

The digital transformation is affecting all areas of life, including teaching and learning. Foreign language teaching in schools is changing: hybrid learning environments, new text types and ephemeral information on social media are a matter of course. This requires new skills from teachers and learners. In a multilingual, multimodal and digital world, it is not only media literacy that is crucial, but rather the expansion of reading skills. This volume includes (empirical) research findings on digital (reading) culture and digital reading, learning and teaching as well as tried and tested examples from teaching practice. In their contributions, the authors combine philosophical, theoretical and practical approaches as well as concepts from schools and universities. In doing so, they cleverly weigh up the challenges and potentials. The result is both a stimulus to rethink traditional concepts and an invitation to break new ground in foreign language didactics.

The volume asks about the role of the body in law. Representatives of philosophy, theology, and jurisprudence examine the physical, material, or natural (pre-)conditions of law, which law does not cover or covers only to a degree.

The study’s subject is the assistance for the victims of World War I in Austria. It explains the numerous measures taken in favour of disabled veterans and war widows during the war and in the post-war period and describes the powerful organisations of the invalids. The assistance for war victims expressed very early social policy as supported by the state.