Humanities & Social Sciences

This book is about possibilities for, challenges for and knowledge about local cultural work among young people. It describes cultural work at a municipal level but shows also how this work is aiming to reach goals that it has in common with national cultural policy: quality, participation, inclusion, diversity and democracy. Using the municipality and town of Drammen as a vantage point, the book investigates how different parameters effect local cultural work, and how cultural policy at a municipal level is, by necessity, pragmatic, practical and sometimes prosaic. This topic is dealt with through a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis. The empirical data presented and discussed in the book is a combination of qualitative case studies and quantitative survey data. The survey data shows variations and patterns in the cultural consumption of an age cohort in the municipality, and the case studies show different ways of effectuating and organizing cultural work at this level. Finally, the book discusses the complex interplay between means and ends when a municipality is working to make culture matter for young people.

In 1931 Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote his famous Remarks on Frazer’s “Golden Bough,” published posthumously in 1967. At that time, anthropology and philosophy were in close contact—continental thinkers drew heavily on anthropology’s theoretical terms, like mana, taboo, and potlatch, in order to help them explore the limits of human belief and imagination. Wittgenstein’s remarks on ritual, magic, religion, belief, ceremony, and Frazer’s own logical presuppositions are as lucid and thought-provoking now as they were in Wittgenstein’s day. Anthropologists find themselves asking many of the same questions as Wittgenstein—and in a reflection of that, this volume is fleshed out with a series of engagements with Wittgenstein’s ideas by some of the world’s leading anthropologists, including Veena Das, David Graeber, Wendy James, Heonik Kwon, Michael Lambek, Michael Puett, and Carlo Severi.

Der Sammelband stellt den aktuellen Stand der Forschung zur Web 2.0-Lehre in der beruflichen Bildung und im Hochschulbereich vor. Zum einen werden Ansätze präsentiert, die wissenschaftliche und praktische Erfahrungen miteinander verknüpfen und die Bedürfnisse der jeweiligen Zielgruppen im Lernkontext berücksichtigen. Projekte aus dem Förderprogramm des BMBF zur Weiterentwicklung und zum Einsatz von Web 2.0-Technologien in der beruflichen Qualifizierung sind mit eigenen Kapiteln vertreten. Außerdem werden Ergebnisse aus der Forschung präsentiert, aus denen sich in der Praxis anwendbare didaktische Kriterien ableiten lassen. Weiterhin werden für den Hochschulbereich als auch für den Bereich der beruflichen Aus- und Weiterbildung zielgruppen- und situationsspezifische Aspekte diskutiert, die für die Etablierung von Web 2.0-Lehre relevant sind.

The volumes 7 contains supplementary information to the 1066 dialect maps of the volumes 1-5.

global health collaboration; global health education; urban health; multiple morbidities; global health research; international university partnerships; sustainability; public health; multi-morbidity; transcultural; interdisciplinary and multi-institutional model; capacity building in global health; urbanization and health; intersection of infectious diseases and NCDs; non-communicable diseases (NCDs); health equity; health policy; health administration; healthcare disparities

The 5th European-African Conference of Wind Engineering is hosted in Florence, Tuscany, the city and the region where, in the early 15th century, pioneers moved the first steps, laying down the foundation stones of Mechanics and Applied Sciences (including fluid mechanics). These origins are well reflected by the astonishing visionary and revolutionary studies of Leonardo Da Vinci, whose kaleidoscopic genius intended the human being to become able to fly even 500 years ago… This is why the Organising Committee has decided to pay tribute to such a Genius by choosing Leonardo's "flying sphere" as the brand of 5th EACWE.

At first glance, medicine and poison might seem to be opposites. But in China’s formative era of pharmacy (200–800 CE), poisons were strategically deployed as healing agents to cure everything from chills to pains to epidemics. Healing with Poisons explores the ways physicians, religious devotees, court officials, and laypeople used powerful substances to both treat intractable illnesses and enhance life. It illustrates how the Chinese concept of du—a word carrying a core meaning of “potency”—led practitioners to devise a variety of techniques to transform dangerous poisons into efficacious medicines. Recounting scandals and controversies involving poisons from the Era of Division to the early Tang period, Yan Liu considers how the concept of du was central to the ways people of medieval China perceived both their bodies and the body politic. Liu also examines a wide range of du-possessing minerals, plants, and animal products in classical Chinese pharmacy, including the highly poisonous herb aconite and the popular arsenic drug Five-Stone Powder. By recovering alternative modes of understanding wellness and the body’s interaction with potent medicines, this study cautions against arbitrary classifications and exemplifies the importance of paying attention to the technical, political, and cultural conditions in which substances become truly meaningful. Healing with Poisons is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) and the generous support of the University at Buffalo Libraries. DOI 10.6069/9780295749013

This open access book richly illustrates the first, and comprehensive, account of the country’s biomes and ecoregions, the driving forces that account for their diversity and vulnerability, and the ecological principles that provide an understanding of the patterns and processes that have shaped landscapes, ecoregions, and ecosystems. Angola encompasses the greatest diversity of terrestrial biomes and is the second richest in terms of ecoregions, of any African country. Yet its biodiversity and the structure and functioning of its ecosystems are largely undocumented. The author draws on personal field observations from over 50 years of involvement in ecological and conservation studies in Angola and across Southern Africa. The vast recent literature published by researchers in neighboring, better resourced countries provides depth to the accounts of ecological principles and processes relevant to Angola and thus contributing to the understanding and sustainable management of its natural resources.

Sich zu beschweren gehört zu den üblichsten Formen der Alltagssprache. Zugleich ist das Vorbringen von Beschwerden ein zentrales Element der Aushandlung sozialer Systeme. In beiden Fällen changieren Beschwerden zwischen konstruktivem Engagement und destruktivem Exzess. Die Beiträger*innen aus der Literatur- und Medienwissenschaft untersuchen die Strukturlogik des Beschwerdeführens in Literatur, Film und anderen Medien und decken auf, wie dessen grundlegende Ambivalenz die Verhandlung von Sachfragen bestimmt. Dabei liegt der Fokus nicht nur darauf, über was, sondern auch darauf, wie Beschwerde geführt wird.

In view of challenges such as structural weakness, ageing and depopulation, it has become more important than ever in Japan since the 2011 triple disaster to revitalise rural regions with the help of various bottom-up and top-down initiatives. Not only are regional residents to be strengthened in their ties to their homeland, but peripheral areas themselves are to be staged as attractive working and living spaces and restructured in the long term. "Post-colonial" dependencies on economic powers in the big cities, socio-economic disparities between urban and rural areas, and failures in long-term planning and knowledge development are only a handful of the causes that shape the challenges of rural provinces today. From grassroots initiatives to save traditional matsuri to anime tourism and marriage migration, the volume reports on the background, consequences and interactions of the problems in Japan's regions. The third volume of the series "Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Japanforschung" (Cultural and Social Science Research on Japan) thus portrays a Japan of the regions whose image is always shifting between nostalgic retreat and disconnected countryside, invigorating alternative to the big city and deserted ghost village.

Exhibitions as constructed cultural dispositions, media of showing and processes of social interaction hold great interest for cultural analysis. The ability to analyze exhibitions provides us with the opportunity to critically examine their effects and uses as public places and subsequently also change them. This book offers nineteen methods of exhibition analysis that stem from cultural analysis, perception studies and practical museum work, examines the context of their respective discourses and presents them in step-by-step guidelines for hands-on application.

The subject of this book is the discourse of persecution used by Christians in Late Antiquity (c. 300–700 CE). Through a series of detailed case studies covering the full chronological and geographical span of the period, this book investigates how the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity changed the way that Christians and para- Christians perceived the hostile treatments they received, either by fellow Christians or by people of other religions. A closely related second goal of this volume is to encourage scholars to think more precisely about the terminological difficulties related to the study of persecution. Indeed, despite sustained interest in the subject, few scholars have sought to distinguish between such closely related concepts as punishment, coercion, physical violence, and persecution. Often, these terms are used interchangeably. Although there are no easy answers, an emphatic conclusion of the studies assembled in this volume is that “persecution” was a malleable rhetorical label in late antique discourse, whose meaning shifted depending on the viewpoint of the authors who used it. This leads to our third objective: to analyze the role and function played by rhetoric and polemic in late antique claims to be persecuted. Late antique Christian writers who cast their present as a repetition of past persecutions often aimed to attack the legitimacy of the dominant Christian faction through a process of othering. This discourse also expressed a polarizing worldview in order to strengthen the group identity of the writers’ community in the midst of ideological conflicts and to encourage steadfastness against the temptation to collaborate with the other side.

‘Who is in and who is out? – these are the first questions that any political community must answer about itself’ (Walzer 1993: 55). We can agree with Michael Walzer on this point, but there is one important question that precedes asking who is in and who is out and that is, why are we in this together in the first place? How did a concrete political community come into being, and why does it still exist? How does a person find himself or herself in a particular community whose members are then recognized as co-citizens? And, are we all satisfied with the existing legal, political and social arrangements within the shared polity? Maybe we want our political community to be organized differently, or we want to belong to an entirely different community, one that exists or the one that is yet to be? In short, every political community is confronted with the why of its existence, having to convince its members – or at least a good portion of them – that they do belong together. This is what I call the citizenship argument of a political community.

Automated vehicles heavily rely on accurate self-localization to operate safely and efficiently in dynamic road traffic scenarios. In this work, an iterative and robust approach to create highly accurate maps comprising any number of drives of arbitrary length with constant computation complexity is proposed. Furthermore, a high-precision self-localization method using multiple cameras covering the surrounding environment is presented.

Erhard Weigel (1625-1699) was a German mathematician, astronomer, educator, philosopher, and inventor. He was professor of mathematics at Jena University and is considered a key figure in the development of the mathematical sciences of the 17th Century. In particular, he is known to be the teacher of the young Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) and other notable students. These proceedings record papers presented at an international colloquium held at the Göttingen State and University Library in collaboration with the Erhard Weigel Society based in Jena on December 5-6, 2014. The colloquium was concerned with Erhard Weigel and some of his many students as well as discussed his contribution to the history of science as an excellent educator. Moreover, the colloquium dealt with the flow of impact of his methods and ideas into the scientific community, whose members played a significant role in the scientific revolution of the 17th Century. Finally, a list of known students who attended Weigel's lectures is given.