Humanities & Social Sciences

This essay takes its point of departure in images of the victims of the 2023 Turkish-Syrian earthquake. It examines their rhetoric, comparing them to those of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler who washed ashore on a Turkish beach in 2015, and contrasting with the narrative techniques employed by two contemporary novels. It combines cultural critique with an inquiry into the role of art as an agent of change to imagine new ways of doing citizenship and promoting social change in times of crisis, in line with Rosemarie Buikema’s mission to develop new and multilayered scenarios for change and transnational justice.

This is an open access book. Beside the fascination in the feasibility and the remarkable advances in the impressive development of transplantation medicine, it is beset with a considerable issues and concerns which still remain to be addressed to in a meaningful context: equity in organ allocation, the contradiction between a high acceptance of organ donation in the German society according to surveys and the low willingness to give consent, and deficit in reporting possible organ donors from the hospital. With informed consent as a useful legal frame, this likewise impels the next of kin to make a decision for or against organ donation during the grueling moments at the bedside of their beloved moribund relative. What layouts in the healthcare system as well as in legal and ethical structures can promote or obviate organ donation as an indispensable essential for a transplantation? Is xenotransplantation a hopeful alternative to human organ transplantation? With remarkable accuracy and elaborate knowledge, this book offers an interesting and absorbing yet provocative evidence-based avenue, of expounding into these questions. Although based on German experience, it will provide a valuable and updated governance to all those who, even in other countries, for private or professional interests, want to be informed and comprehensively reckon with the diverse medical, ethical, organizational, political and economic facets of an extraordinary field of medicine.

In 1883, the New South Wales Board for the Protection of Aborigines was tasked with assisting and supporting an Aboriginal population that had been devastated by a brutal dispossession. It began its tenure with little government direction – its initial approach was cautious and reactionary. However, by the turn of the century this Board, driven by some forceful individuals, was squarely focused on a legislative agenda that sought policies to control, segregate and expel Aboriginal people. Over time it acquired extraordinary powers to control Aboriginal movement, remove children from their communities and send them into domestic service, collect wages and hold them in trust, withhold rations, expel individuals from stations and reserves, authorise medical inspections, and prevent any Aboriginal person from leaving the state. Power and Dysfunction explores this Board and uncovers who were the major drivers of these policies, who were its most influential people, and how this body came to wield so much power. Paradoxically, despite its considerable influence, through its bravado, structural dysfunction, flawed policies and general indifference, it failed to manage core aspects of Aboriginal policy. In the 1930s, when the Board was finally challenged by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal groups seeking its abolition, it had become moribund, paranoid and secretive as it railed against all detractors. When it was finally disbanded in 1940, its 57-year legacy had touched every Aboriginal community in New South Wales with lasting consequences that still resonate today.

Pipeline is a low-income, high-rise-tenement settlement in Nairobi's marginalized East and one of sub-Saharan Africa's most densely populated estates. An aspirational place where fleeting forms of capitalist consumption reassure migrants of an upward trajectory, it is also a place where their ambitions of long-term economic success and stable romantic relationships are routinely thwarted. This book explores how men who migrate to Nairobi from Western Kenya navigate this tension that is generated by the contrast between their view of Pipeline as a launching pad for their personal and professional careers and the fact that they face constant economic, romantic, and personal backlashes. Drawing on over two years of fieldwork, the book reveals that many male migrants design their future on trajectories of personal and economic growth but have to adjust or indefinitely postpone their plans once they arrive in Kenya's capital. Under the pressure to succeed from romantic partners, spouses, rural kin, and children, they create and participate in homosocial spaces where a sense of brotherhood emerges and their experience of pressure is attenuated. Alongside a deep ethnographic exploration of how male migrants model their financial, physical, and mental well-being in three different masculine spaces - an ethnically homogenous investment group, an interethnic gym, and the semi-digital sphere of self-help books, workshops, and motivational trainings on man- and fatherhood - this book brings a new perspective to our understanding of urban African life and the nature of masculinity. This title is available under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND, with funding from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Open Access Fund and the German Research Foundation.

The here collected contributions relating to the 46th International Conference of the Representation Disciplines Teachers, organized jointly by Sapienza University of Rome, Roma Tre University, and San Raffaele Roma University, aim to offer the scientific community a reflection on the theoretical and methodological aspects related to the concept of èkphrasis, a term that, in the field of representation, concerns descriptive, analogical, and digital activities that generate new knowledge in several areas of application. The Conference aims to place at the center of the discussion an interpretation of the concept of research that, without neglecting an idea of study, protection, and enhancement of environmental and cultural heritage, focuses on the needs of contemporary society and its possible developments, making use of innovative theoretical, methodological, and operational activities, including those characterized by an interdisciplinary approach. According to this interpretation, research can also be seen as a foreshadowing of the definition and testing of experimental proposals aimed at exploring new areas of investigation: this opens up imaginative and utopian perspectives in the relationship between the sciences, the arts, and the disciplines that contribute to common goals, through the experimentation of methods, techniques, and languages for conceiving, prefiguring, designing, and representing.

Atari’s 1981 arcade hit Tempest was a “tube shooter” built around glowing, vector-based geometric shapes. Among its many important contributions to both game and cultural history, Tempest was one of the first commercial titles to allow players to choose the game’s initial play difficulty (a system Atari dubbed “SkillStep”), a feature that has since became standard for games of all types. Tempest was also one of the most aesthetically impactful games of the twentieth century, lending its crisp, vector aesthetic to many subsequent movies, television shows, and video games. In this book, Ruggill and McAllister enumerate and analyze Tempest’s landmark qualities, exploring the game’s aesthetics, development context, and connections to and impact on video game history and culture. By describing the game in technical, historical, and ludic detail, they unpack the game’s latent and manifest audio-visual iconography and the ideological meanings this iconography evokes.

Les Monuments d’art et d’histoire du canton de Genève V Genève, grandes demeures urbaines (1670-1790) Entre 1670 et 1790, la construction privée connaît à Genève un essor remarquable, porté par les ambitions de grandes fortunes marchandes et bancaires. Se référant aux modèles savants de l’architecture française, des riches particuliers modernisent leurs maisons ou érigent de vastes demeures. Ces édifices, lieux de représentation sociale, forment un cadre de vie marqué par des innovations en matière de confort et par un raffinement décoratif. Si l’hôtel entre cour et jardin jouit d’un prestige particulier grâce à ses connotations nobiliaires, le XVIIIe siècle nous a aussi légué de nombreuses résidences urbaines de qualité. À côté des typologies les plus novatrices, qui contribuent à transformer les façons d’habiter, on trouve des formules de compromis qui préservent la continuité entre les goûts ancien et moderne. L’ouvrage propose l’étude de treize demeures parmi les plus significatives de leur temps, le tout précédé d’une large synthèse qui les replace dans l’évolution de l’habitat bourgeois depuis l’extrême fin du XVIe siècle, et d’une introduction historique signée Barbara RothLochner.

The Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design (FMCAD) is an annual conference on the theory and applications of formal methods in hardware and system verification. FMCAD provides a leading forum to researchers in academia and industry for presenting and discussing groundbreaking methods, technologies, theoretical results, and tools for reasoning formally about computing systems. FMCAD covers formal aspects of computer-aided system design including verification, specification, synthesis, and testing.

Apolitique sur la scène internationale sportive, le sport devient dans les écoles un puissant outil de formation (et de contrôle) de la jeunesse au service des projets politiques des gouvernements de tous bords. Obligatoire à l’école depuis la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle en Europe, l’éducation physique (la « gymnastique » !) scolaire verra ses contenus définis par les États, mais surtout par les enseignants responsables de la branche. « Universitaires » depuis le début du XXe siècle à travers le continent, les formations des futurs maître·se·s d’éducation physique ont beaucoup évolué depuis la fin du XIXe siècle. Ces transformations sont les conséquences de dynamiques internes au champ académique, des dynamiques socio-politico-économiques que traverse l’Occident, mais aussi des transformations de l’espace du sport de haut niveau, où le besoin en savoirs scientifiques explose en marge d’une instrumentalisation politique persistante. Un tournant majeur est la période qui s’étend entre les années 1990 et 2000, entre la mise en oeuvre de nouvelles institutions para-universitaires de formation pédagogique, l’introduction des réformes dites « de Bologne » et l’amorce d’un développement du champ sportif, appelant de nouvelles compétences de la part de ses acteurs. Entre ces deux dates, les principales universités occidentales vont introduire des nouvelles formations en « sciences du sport », avec pour un abandon progressif d’une spécialisation exclusive en « éducation physique » au profit d’enseignements et de recherches dans les différentes sciences de base, définissant des orientations nouvelles de formation en activités physiques adaptées, en entraînement, ou en management du sport. Dans le cadre de ce projet collectif, notre ambition est de donner à lire la complexité des processus aboutissant aux formations contemporaines en sciences du sport. S’il ne s’agit pas de créer des liens arbitraires entre les pionniers de la gymnastique du début du XIXe siècle et les formations en management du sport qui font aujourd’hui le succès des instituts à travers l’Europe, force est de constater que l’éducation physique est un objet particulièrement stimulant qui appelle à de nouveaux travaux aux confins de dynamiques transnationales et de processus d’affirmation nationale.

Inca archaeology has traditionally been intimately tied to the study of the Spanish chronicles, but archaeologists are often asked to explain how Inca civilization relates to earlier states and empires in the Andean highlands-a time period with little coinciding documentary record. Until recently, few archaeologists working in and around the Inca heartland conducted archaeological research into the period between AD 1000 and AD 1400, leaving a great divide between pre-Inca archaeology and Inca studies. In How the Incas Built Their Heartland R. Alan Covey supplements an archaeological approach with the tools of a historian, forming an interdisciplinary study of how the Incas became sufficiently powerful to embark on an unprecedented campaign of territorial expansion and how such developments related to earlier patterns of Andean statecraft. In roughly a hundred years of military campaigns, Inca dominion spread like wildfire across the Andes, a process traditionally thought to have been set in motion by a single charismatic ruler, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui. Taking nearly a century of archaeological research in the region around the Inca capital as his point of departure, Covey offers an alternative description of Inca society in the centuries leading up to imperial expansion. To do so, Covey proposes a new reading of the Spanish chronicles, one that focuses on processes, rather than singular events, occurring throughout the region surrounding Cusco, the Inca capital. His focus on long-term regional changes, rather than heroic actions of Inca kings, allows the historical and archaeological evidence to be placed on equal interpretive footing. The result is a narrative of Inca political origins linking Inca statecraft to traditions of Andean power structures, long-term ecological changes, and internal social transformations. By reading the Inca histories in a compatible way, Covey shows that it is possible to construct a unified theory of how the Inca heartland was transformed after AD 1000.

This research work aims at the reconstruction of literary spaces created by four great female authors of the twentieth century. Analysed individually or from a comparative perspective, the texts solicit a reflection on the representation of space in literature produced by women. The focus of the investigation is the dynamic contrast that, at the moment of perception, is established between the ‘internal’, and therefore subjective, dimension and the ‘external’ dimension, regulated by the social context in which the subject moves. The work consists of three parts: the first part establishes the parameters within which the research is organised; the second part investigates the process of reappropriation of the city – a place of almost exclusive male prerogative – by the protagonists of the proposed novels and their “walking down the street” as a device of spatial organisation. In the third and last part, the female perception of the domestic space is analysed. A place of female confinement par excellence, it shows, even in literature, an ambivalent character, as an expression of abuse and affection at the same time. From the ‘spatial’ reinterpretation of the proposed works, therefore, both the intimate representation of space and the historical-social evaluation of the context in which the protagonists, and their own authors, move, emerge.

In Continuous Pasts , author Sakiru Adebayo claims that the post-conflict fiction of memory in Africa depicts the intricate ways in which the past is etched on bodies and topographies, resonant in silences and memorials, and continuous even in experiences as well as structures of migration. Adebayo argues that the post-conflict fiction of memory in Africa invites critical deliberations on the continuity of the past within the realm of positionality and the domain of subjectivity—that is to say, the past is not merely present; instead, it survives, lives on, and is mediated through the subject positions of victims, perpetrators, as well as secondary and transgenerational witnesses. The book also argues that post-conflict fiction of memory in Africa shows the unfinished business of the past produces fragile regimes of peace and asynchronous temporalities that challenge progressive historicism. It contends that, in most cases in Africa, the post-conflict present is beset with a tight political economy wherein the scramble for survival trumps the ability to imagine a just future among survivors—and that it is precisely this despairing disposition toward the future that some writers of post-conflict fiction attempt to confront in their works. On the whole, Continuous Pasts shows how post-conflict fictions of memory in Africa recalibrate discourses of futurity, solidarity, responsibility, justice, survival, and reconciliation. It also contends that post-conflict fictions of memory in Africa provide the tools for imagining and theorizing a collective African memory. Each text analyzed in the book provides, in very interesting ways, an imaginative possibility and template for how post-independence African countries can ‘remember together’ using what the author describes as an African transnational memory framework.

A significant portion of Tsushima Yūko’s body of work, particularly her early novels that brought her fame – Chōji (Child of Fortune, 1978), Hikari no ryōbun (Territory of Light, 1979), Yama o hashiru onna (The Woman Running on the Mountain, 1980), and Danmari ichi (The Silent Traders, 1984) -- while incorporating easily recognisable autobiographical elements, extends the discourse beyond the realm of the ‘private novel’. These works delve into an examination of the paths women (not only Japanese) are compelled to traverse when rejecting the conformity enforced by a social environment that still clings to models that not even the second wave of feminism of the 1970s and 1980s managed to overcome. The protagonists are predominantly solitary women, driven by a desire to break free from the ‘obligation’ of forming a family, which remains a deeply conditioning necessity. They are keenly aware of the unspoken disapproval directed at divorced women who do not conform to the confines of their original households. Overlapping with this is a resolute yearning for psychological and social independence, a pursuit fraught with challenges yet pursued tenaciously. Within these narratives, Tsushima Yūko not only draws inspiration from her personal experiences but also expands upon the image of that central ‘self’ – the core of the story. She diversifies their experiences beyond the foundational substance and, most importantly, leaves room for imagination in the dual dimensions of individual dreams and the collective fantasy expressed through myths and legends.

This Open Access book explores the emergence of mindfulness from Buddhist tradition and its incorporation into contemporary mental health and social care. Mindfulness is a powerful technique, but it needs to be applied mindfully. Buddhist thought has older links with psychiatry and mental health care, prior to the current embrace of mindfulness, and these have not been articulated clearly over recent decades. These links are intrinsically valuable and have added relevance in an era of mindfulness. This book seeks to bring these associations and connections back to light and contextualise recent enthusiasm for mindfulness-based interventions. This book is aimed at readers who are interested in mental health, psychiatry, Buddhism, and mindfulness. These are all growing areas of interest and inquiry. This book is distinctive owing to its focus on links between psychiatry, mental health care, and Buddhism that include, but also move beyond, mindfulness. This book is also distinctive by virtue of the fact that it is written by someone who is both a psychiatrist in clinical practice and a researcher, as well as being qualified in Buddhist Studies (MA, University of Sunderland, 2010) and Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MSc, University College Dublin, 2023), and publishes across all of these fields.