Humanities & Social Sciences

Poverty and inequality persist in many regions of the developing world. This may be due mainly to an ineffective targeting of policies to address the root causes of poverty. Sustainable policy interventions are in need of reliable concepts of poverty and of a thorough understanding of the underlying mechanism that lead to such deprivation. The three essays of this book add to the debate concerning appropriate statistical tools in empirical development economics. The work proposes specific methodologies to analyze the extent of poverty and its underlying factors based on recent household surveys. The first chapter deals with a concept of poverty comparisons when panel data is at hand. The second chapter studies the determinants of spatial inequality using multilevel modelling. The third chapter analyzes the relation between a child’s nutritional status and its survival probability.

This book offers an innovative defense of Wilfrid Sellars’s notion of ideal truth. Sellars adopts two attractive ideas about truth: the pragmatist idea that the concept of truth cannot be understood independently from the norms and practices we find ourselves with and the realist idea that there is one ultimate truth about how the world is. Sellars is thus committed both to an immanent notion of truth and an ideal notion of truth. This book discusses these countervailing tendencies and tries to reconcile them. The author’s defense of Sellars’s notion of truth minimizes problematic commitments while still being recognizably rooted in Sellars’s texts. Additionally, the author defends several innovative claims with respect to Sellars’s thinking, for example, about the relative unimportance of his controversial concept of pictorial adequacy and about the neglected significance of considerations concerning context-sensitive expressions in his thought. "Wilfrid Sellars on Truth ;will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Wilfrid Sellars, pragmatism, and questions about truth, naturalism, and scientific realism.

In 1980, Jacques Derrida published La carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà. At the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the English translation, Going Postcard: The Letter(s) of Jacques Derrida revisits this seminal work in Derrida’s oeuvre. Derrida himself described The Post Card in his preface as “the remainders of a destroyed correspondence,” stretching from 1977 to 1979. A cryptic text, it is riddled with gaps, word plays, and a meandering analysis of the interface between philosophy and psychoanalysis. The contributors who offered the fourteen essays gathered in Going Postcard were each provided with a deceptively simple task: to write a gloss to a fragment from the first part of The Post Card, “Envois.” The result is a prismatic array of commentaries, excursions, and interpretations that take Derrida “to the letter.” The different glosses on lemmas such as genre, erasure, telepathy, philately, and sperm transport The Post Card into the twenty-first century and offer a “correspondence,” if fragmentary, with Derrida’s work and the work to come.

Urbanization is a global phenomenon and the book emphasizes that this is not just a social-technological process. It is also a social-ecological process where cities are places for nature, and where cities also are dependent on, and have impacts on, the biosphere at different scales from local to global. The book is a global assessment and delivers four main conclusions: Urban areas are expanding faster than urban populations. Half the increase in urban land across the world over the next 20 years will occur in Asia, with the most extensive change expected to take place in India and China Urban areas modify their local and regional climate through the urban heat island effect and by altering precipitation patterns, which together will have significant impacts on net primary production, ecosystem health, and biodiversity Urban expansion will heavily draw on natural resources, including water, on a global scale, and will often consume prime agricultural land, with knock-on effects on biodiversity and ecosystem services elsewhere Future urban expansion will often occur in areas where the capacity for formal governance is restricted, which will constrain the protection of biodiversity and management of ecosystem services

This open access book presents selected contributions on a wide range of scientific and technological areas originating from the BUiD Doctoral Research Conference (BDRC 2022). It discusses the following topics: project management, macroeconomic factors, Fourth Industrial Revolution, agility, multiculturalism, diversity, inclusion, leadership, language, discourse analysis, curriculum, critical thinking, programming, online learning, and natural ventilation. The contributions reflect the multifaceted nature of the research in three academic disciplines, i.e., humanities, formal science, and applied science. This publication shares with its readers genuine research studies and reflections from practitioners on the current practice and understanding in the three academic disciplines. The significant findings of these studies have considerable educational, industrial, and economic implications.

This book comprehensively scrutinizes the key issue of the accountability of policy-makers in democratic governance. The electoral punishment of the incumbents, parliamentary control of government, and sanctions in case of administrative misconduct or negligence are the most visible manifestations of accountability in politics. However, the phenomenon is much more complex, and fully understanding such a multifaceted object requires bridging bodies of work that usually remain disjointed. The Element assesses the effectiveness of vertical accountability through elections and how interinstitutional accountability operates in checks-and-balances systems, including with the growing role of courts. It evaluates how the accountability of the bureaucracy has been affected by managerial reforms and different governance transformations. The book also scrutinizes to what extent mediatization and policy failure boost accountability, before zooming into the feelings and reactions of those who are held to account. It concludes by exploring new research areas.

This open access book presents a thorough look at tortuosity and microstructure effects in porous materials. The book delivers a comprehensive review of the subject, summarizing all key results in the field with respect to the underlying theories, empirical data available in the literature, modern methodologies and calculation approaches, and quantitative relationships between microscopic and macroscopic properties. It thoroughly discusses up to 20 different types of tortuosity and introduces a new classification scheme and nomenclature based on direct geometric tortuosities, indirect physics-based tortuosities, and mixed tortuosities (geometric and physics-based). The book also covers recent progress in 3D imaging and image modeling for studying novel aspects of tortuosity and associated transport properties in materials, while providing a comprehensive list of available software packages for practitioners in the community. This book is a must-read for researchers and students in materials science and engineering interested in a deeper understanding of microstructure–property relationships in porous materials. For energy materials in particular, such as lithium-ion batteries, tortuosity is a key microstructural parameter that can greatly impact long-term material performance. Thus, the information laid out in this book will also greatly benefit researchers interested in computational modeling and design of next-generation materials, especially those for sustainability and energy applications.

When the war was over in 1945, Germany was a country with no government, little functioning infrastructure, millions of refugees and homeless people, and huge foreign armies living largely off the land. Large parts of the country were covered in rubble, with no clean drinking water, electricity, or gas. Hospitals overflowed with patients, but were short of beds, medicines, and medical personnel. In these conditions, the potential for epidemics and public health disasters was severe. This is a study of how the four occupiers—Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States—attempted to keep their own troops and the ex-enemy population alive. While the war was still being fought, German public health was a secondary consideration for them, an unaffordable and undeserved luxury. But once fighting ceased and the occupation began, it rapidly turned into a urgent priority. Public health was now recognized as an indispensable component of creating order, keeping the population governable, and facilitating the reconstruction of German society. But they faced a number of insoluble problems in the process: Which Germans could be trusted to work with the occupiers, and how were they to be identified? Who could be tolerated because of a lack of alternatives? How, if at all, could former Nazis be reformed and reintegrated into German society? What was the purpose of the occupation anyway? This is the first carefully researched comparison of the four occupation zones which looks at the occupation through the prism of public health, an essential service fundamentally shaped by political and economic criteria, and which in turn was to determine the success or failure of the occupation.

Castles usually appear in the Kingdom of León’s written sources during the medieval period. The 10th and 11th centuries show an increase in those mentions, including some that helped scribes describe the landscape and territory. This study analyses the different terminology that represented fortifications, and their use as spatial markers to situate other settlements, lands, or relevant sites. Further, it considers some fortifications that appear to have been abandoned when the documents were written as a useful tool to enhance the relationship between local territories and memory.

For the fist time, the WEFTA Annual Meeting takes place in Italy, at Firenze on September 17th to 19th, 2008. The WEFTA 2008 theme is "Seafood from Catch and Aquaculture for a Sustainable Supply". WEFTA 2008 aims the gathering of international researchers, scientists and technicians, as well as professionals from seafood Industry, particularly involved in research and development, quality control and management for a three-day conference involving scientific and technical presentations, discussion and social contacts. The book of abstracts contains the 117 full and short abstracts of the communications presented in this 38th WEFTA Annual Meeting by scientists coming from several European Countries but also from USA, Canada, Brazil and Japan, able to give up-to-date information of great interest, useful for the development of scientific knowledge in much of the seafood issues.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Drawing on a wide range of examples from literature, comics, film, television and digital media, Nerd Ecology is the first substantial ecocritical study of nerd culture’s engagement with environmental issues. Exploring such works as Star Trek, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, The Hunger Games, and superhero comics such as Green Lantern and X-Men, Anthony Lioi maps out the development of nerd culture and its intersections with the most fundamental ecocritical themes. In this way Lioi finds in the narratives of unpopular culture - narratives in which marginalised individuals and communities unite to save the planet - the building blocks of a new environmental politics in tune with the concerns of contemporary ecocritical theory and practice.

This book argues for a theory of mobile mapping, a situated and spatial approach towards researching how everyday digital mobile media practices are bound up in global systems of knowledge and power. Drawing from literature in media studies and geography -- and the work of Michel Foucault and Doreen Massey -- it examines how geographical and historical material, social, and cultural conditions are embedded in the way in which contemporary (digital) cartographies are read, deployed, and engaged. This is explored through seventeen walking interviews in Hong Kong and Sydney, as potent discourses like cartographic reason continue to transform and weave through the world in ways that haunt mobile mapping and bring old conflicts into new media. In doing so, Mobile Mapping offers an interdisciplinary rethinking about how multiple translations of spatial knowledges between rational digital epistemologies and tacit ways of understanding space and experience might be conceptualized and researched.

This book examines authoritarian practices in relation to humanitarian negotiations. Utilising a wide variety of perspectives and examining a range of contexts, the book considers how humanitarians assess and engage with authoritarian practices and negotiate access to populations in danger. Chapters provide insights at the macro, meso, and micro levels through case studies on the international and domestic legal and political framing of humanitarian contexts (Xinjiang, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Russia, and Syria), as well as the actual practice of negotiating with authoritarian regimes (Ethiopia). A theoretical grounding is provided through chapters elaborating on the ethics and trust-building dimensions of humanitarian negotiations, and an overview chapter provides a theoretical framework through which to analyse humanitarian negotiations against the backdrop of different types of authoritarian practices. This book provides a wide-ranging view which broadens the frame of reference when considering how humanitarians view and engage with authoritarian practices. The objective is to both put these contexts into conceptual order and provide a firm theoretical basis for understanding the politics of humanitarian negotiations in such difficult contexts. This book is useful for those studying international politics and humanitarian studies, as well as for practitioners seeking to better systematise their humanitarian negotiations.

Dieser Band enthält sechs einzelne Aufsätze zur Problematik der adjektivischen Attribute. Ausgangspunkt aller Arbeiten war die Frage nach der Motiviertheit der Attributssetzung, d.h. die Frage danach, warum überhaupt Adjektive verwendet werden und warum gerade die gegebenen verwendet werden. Ein solcher Ansatz impliziert, daß auch nach Restriktionen der Attributssetzung bzw. ihrer Distribution gesucht und die Abgrenzung von konkurrierenden Mitteln näher betrachtet wird. Es zeigt sich, daß adjektivische Attribute ein komplexes Phänomen darstellen, das viele interessante Fragen aufwirft. Literaturangaben.

Studies of post-war Europe have conventionally stressed the Cold War’s ideological divisions and competing economic models. This open access book brings together historians from across Europe to explore the ways in which these political differences were circumvented, subverted, or overcome, whether in the spirit of international collaboration, solidarity or for more pragmatic reasons of national interest. Rethinking Cooperation in Cold War Europe examines the systemic divide not as an Iron Curtain but – borrowing the metaphor of the Hungarian historian György Péteri, as a ‘Nylon Curtain’ – a present and yet surmountable partition that was frequently breached in a variety of ways by ordinary citizens, artists, scientists, politicians, and other historical actors. From environmental collaboration and medical ethics to academic exchanges and peace activism, this book brings to life a complex series of ambiguous allegiances and complicated collaborations. For all of the difficulties, the mistrust, the paranoia, and the ulterior motives, the contributors here demonstrate the myriad ways in which ‘Bloc thinking’ could be and often was overcome in the service of common interests and shared visions. With Europe today facing an array of military and political challenges unprecedented in the post-war era, the book offers a wide-ranging and timely overview of the ways in which channels of communication can be kept open even at times of heightened geopolitical tensions. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council.