Humanities & Social Sciences

Healthcare ethics cannot be limited in scope to apply only to the patient but needs to apply to the healthcare practitioner as well. The relationship between the patient and the healthcare practitioner has shifted from a power relationship to a complementary relationship. Leadership, mentorship and coaching play important roles in facilitating this shift. Several themes informed this book on healthcare ethics: Vulnerability in healthcare ethics, Decisions between right and wrong, Quality of healthcare, Life-ending decisions, Community-based research, Ethical decision-making, Spritiuality in healthcare.

Though Graeco-Roman antiquity (‘classics’) has often been considered the handmaid of colonialism, its various forms have nonetheless endured through many of the continent’s decolonising transitions. Southern Africa is no exception. This book canvasses the variety of forms classics has taken in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and especially South Africa, and even the dynamics of transformation itself. How does (u)Mzantsi classics (of southern Africa) look in an era of profound change, whether violent or otherwise? What are its future prospects? Contributors focus on pedagogies, historical consciousness, the creative arts and popular culture. The volume, in its overall shape, responds to the idea of dialogue – in both the Greek form associated with Plato’s rendition of Socrates’ wisdom and in the African concept of ubuntu. Here are dialogues between scholars, both emerging and established, as well as students – some of whom were directly impacted by the Fallist protests of the late 20-teens. Rather than offering an apologia for classics, these dialogues engage with pressing questions of relevance, identity, change, the canon, and the dynamics of decolonisation and potential recolonisation. The goal is to interrogate classics – the ways it has been taught, studied, perceived, transformed and even lived – from many points of view.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. President Clinton's time in office coincided with historic global events following the end of the Cold War. The collapse of Communism called for a new US Grand Strategy to address the emerging geopolitical era that brought upheavals in Somalia and the Balkans, economic challenges in Mexico and Europe and the emergence of new entities such as the EU, NAFTA and the WTO. Clinton's handling of these events was crucial to the development of world politics at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Only by understanding Clinton's efforts to address the challenges of the post-Cold War era can we understand the strategies of his immediate successors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, both of whom inherited and continued Clinton-era policies and practices. James D. Boys sheds new light on the evolution and execution of US Grand Strategy from 1993 to 2001. He explores the manner in which policy was devised and examines the actors responsible for its development, including Bill Clinton, Anthony Lake, Samuel Berger, Warren Christopher, Madeline Albright and Richard Holbrook. He examines the core components of the strategy (National Security, Prosperity Promotion and Democracy Promotion) and how they were implemented, revealing a hitherto unexplored continuity from campaign trail to the White House. Covering the entire duration of Clinton’s presidential odyssey, from his 1991 Announcement Speech to his final day in office, the book draws extensively on newly declassified primary materials and interviews by the author with key members of the Clinton administration to reveal for the first time the development and implementation of US Grand Strategy from deep within the West Wing of the Clinton White House.

The volume presents a critical reading of the Moscow notebooks by Osip Mandel'štam. The poems are analysed one by one in chronological order, verse by verse, and are accompanied by an interlinear translation. Special attention is paid to their arrangement in poryvy, “impulses” embracing and connecting several compositions, and to their connection with the Mandel'štamian contemporary prose. The aim is to offer on the one hand a support for the reading of the verses, on the other an interpretative glimpse of the work of the late Mandel'štam as a whole.

Der vorliegende Band enthält Vorträge, die auf einem Kolloquium zum Thema "Rußland aus der Feder seiner Frauen. Zum femininen Diskurs in der russischen Literatur" am 21./22 Mai 1992 an der Universität Potsdam gehalten wurden. Slavistinnen und Slavisten aus Finnland, Italien, Polen, Rußland, den USA und aus verschiedenen deutschen Universitäten, ergänzt durch Beiträge aus germanistischer und anglistischer Sicht, legten ihre Gedanken in Vorträgen und einer angeregten Diskussion dar.

This book contributes to the understanding of gender and regional inequalities in developing countries. First, it deals with social institutions related to gender inequality and proposes new composite indices to measure them. Using these indices, some interesting empirical connections between social institutions related to gender inequality and several relevant development outcomes are examined at the cross-country level. The second part of the book is concerned with the historical development of another type of inequality which is relevant for developing countries: inequality between regions. The topic of regional convergence in Colombia during the last quarter of the 20th century is analyzed using different approaches and focusing on both income and social indicators.

Redefining how we understand diplomacy, Figures of Buddhist Diplomacy in Modern Asia reveals Buddhism as a dynamic force in shaping international relations . This groundbreaking open access book highlights individuals—including monastics, laity, political leaders, and royalty—who have strategically employed Buddhist objects, teachings, and networks to forge transregional ties and influence global politics. Introducing the concept of Buddhist diplomacy, the book traces how Buddhism has been mobilized for soft power, cultural exchange, peacebuilding, and even geopolitical manoeuvring. From spiritual ambassadors like Taixu, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Hsing Yun to world leaders such as the Dalai Lama, Narendra Modi, and Xi Jinping, the twenty-two essays illuminate the surprising ways Buddhism has intersected with modern statecraft. Blending historical depth with contemporary insight, this volume invites readers to rethink diplomacy not only as negotiation and policy but also as a terrain where religion, culture, and global power converge. 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 Social Science and Humanities Research Fellowship, Social Science Research Council (Singapore).

Homicides are among the most serious offenses with serious consequences both for the relatives of victims and perpetrators and for the sense of security of the general population. This book is based on the Swiss Homicide Monitor, a database that includes all intentional homicides in Switzerland since 1990. The book provides clear information on the perpetrators, victims, circumstances of the crime, the motives behind the killing, the course of the procedure and the legal qualifications. Furthermore, individual specific types of homicides (homicide-suicides, mass and serial murders, etc.) are analyzed in depth.

The volume, dedicated to the 44th International Conference of the Italian Union for Drawing, investigates the theme of ‘Transitions’, which particularly effectively represents our time and the current condition of the discipline of Drawing. The term, beyond its generic meaning of an intermediate stage in a process in which a condition changes from one state to another, has always been used in various fields, from music to geophysics. In fact, the disciplines of drawing have always been confronted with themes and issues relating to transitions from one condition to another. The history of representation tells us of transformations, even epochal ones, relating to ‘drawing’, with all that such transitions entail: suffice it to think of the evolution of forms of representation, of instrumental apparatuses, of the mutability of supports, of the analogical-digital transition underway, of the new modes of communication on platforms, of the hypertrophic offer of images also on the net that confirms Guy Debord’s intuitions relating to the new spectacularisation of society. Similarly, representation triggers transitions in the prefiguration and communication of design, the anticipation and foreshadowing of future events.The challenges posed by the digital pose open questions whose scope can only be glimpsed, such as the relationship between drawing and the act of modelling, and the construction of new paradigms of visual language and communication. ‘Transitions’, almost implicitly, points to possible futures, the evolution of technique and the search for new modes of expression; at the same time, however, it can suggest silences and reflections in a process of connection between history, theory, criticism and construction.

Der demografische Wandel stellt eine massive Herausforderung für die Finanzierung der gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung dar. Die Politik hat daher eine Neuordnung innerhalb des Drei-Säulen-Systems der Alterssicherung angestoßen. Künftige Alterseinkommen werden zu einem deutlich geringeren Teil aus der umlagefinanzierten Rentenversicherung kommen und dafür in stärkerem Ausmaß aus kapitalgedeckter betrieblicher und privater Vorsorge stammen müssen. Der Weg dazu ist durch weitreichende Fördermöglichkeiten (z.B. Entgeltumwandlung und Riesterrente) geschaffen worden. Der Autor untersucht, ob das so reformierte deutsche Alterssicherungssystem angesichts der demografischen Entwicklung zukunfts- und leistungsfähig genug ist, um die Absicherung künftiger Rentnergenerationen zu gewährleisten.

Diamela Eltit’s literary work emerged on the Chilean cultural scene in the 1980s when the Pinochet regime (1973-1990) had consolidated its project of extermination, censorship, and neoliberal shock therapy. Forced to write in a suffocating atmosphere of restriction and violence, Eltit boldly cultivated a radical, insurrectional poetics aimed at questioning the very underpinnings of authoritarian power and discourse. While Eltit’s novels, published between 1983 and the present, provide a remarkable vision of Chile that has evolved over the past decades, she offers a different vantage point through her prolific and rigorous cultivation of literary essays. Translated for the first time into English, this collection of Eltit’s essays allows readers to delve into her key concerns as a writer and intellectual: the neoliberal marketplace; the marginalization of bodies in society; questions of gender and power; struggles for memory, truth, and justice after dictatorship; and the ever-complex relationships among politics, ethics, and aesthetics.

Book abstract Becoming Organic traces the social and bureaucratic life of organic quality, yielding fresh understandings of the meaning and practice of organic and sustainable agriculture. Decentering perspectives on organic farming that rely on the specific historical experiences of Europe and North America, the book examines how certified organic farming is introduced in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in northern India. Organic quality, the book argues, is best understood less as a material property of land or its produce than as something that is diffusely produced; it takes shape across discursive, regulatory, and affective registers, through practices that encompass producing compost as well as certification records; inspecting fields, grains, and documents; and reimagining relationships between the state, market, and agricultural producers on a rural frontier. This conceptually innovative and methodologically original ethnographic study shows how the development of organic agriculture in Uttarakhand is historically and regionally situated in broader and enduring relations between nature and agriculture that have been shaped by layered histories of colonialism, postcolonial development, and neoliberal reform. It reveals how, during a time of great political change and economic liberalization, development practice unfolds in rural India through complex relations forged among state authorities, private corporations, and new agrarian intermediaries. Introduction: Remaking the Agrarian on a Himalayan Frontier The introduction examines how organic agriculture became a crucible for reimagining and remaking the agrarian in the state of Uttarakhand, a region where, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, agriculture was deemed backward and undeveloped. Organic, it argues, should be understood and studied as a quality that must be assembled, rather than as a distinctive physical, sensory, or material property of land and its produce. It proceeds to set out a framework to provincialize organic, proposing to study organic quality as emergent in historically situated social, cultural, economic, and political practices and relations. In Uttarakhand this entails, first, paying attention to the intersection of organic agriculture with political and economic reforms in India after liberalization; second, it necessitates inquiry into how rural cultivators exercise agency and experience subjectivity through organic farming; finally, it probes how organic agriculture reworks notions of modernity and tradition, nature and agriculture, that powerfully inform understandings of human-environment relations in the Indian Himalaya and beyond. As it relates the making of organic quality to processes of state-making and post-reform development, the introduction affords new insights into the production of agricultural commodities and agrarian relations. Fertile Ground Soil has long been at the center of debates about environmental degradation in the Himalaya. This chapter shows how concern about the care of soil entwines understandings of human and nonhuman agency with practices of state-making in the region. Moving between colonial efforts to assess the fertility of land, and contemporary interventions that encourage farmers to construct compost pits, this chapter demonstrates that the ways in which agrarian practices of working with soil, manure, and compost are recognized by state institutions powerfully inform development interventions. Introducing the concept of agrarian agency, the chapter parses this notion, dwelling on distinctions drawn by state officials between being “organic by default” and becoming “organic by design.” It argues that in the twenty-first century, the particular ways in which agrarian agency gets parsed prove to be consequential both for who can become organic, and for what organic itself comes to mean. Ultimately, this chapter shows that what comes to count as human agency, and what does not, is itself a mode through which state power works. The Limits of Transparency and the Farming of Trust Focusing on the farming of certified organic basmati rice in Uttarakhand’s Doon Valley, this chapter examines the relationship between transparency and trust in certification processes. Certification, it is often claimed, affords transparent knowledge about its objects. Because of this, it is thought to be necessary for generating and maintaining widespread public trust. This chapter explores the limits of transparent knowledge, arguing that as organic agriculture becomes established under state government auspices in the Doon Valley, trust is neither solely emergent in personalized relations nor simply an outcome of certification processes. Instead, this chapter shows how practices of organic certification, under conditions of limited transparency, shape and fundamentally reconfigure trust. Through fine ethnography that focuses on sentiments of trust, belief, or faith, expressed by certification inspectors during the course of their work, the chapter traces how such sentiments become integral to the making—and the meaning—of certified organic farming. Becoming Basmati Under contract farming arrangements for organic agriculture introduced in the early 2000s in Uttarakhand’s Doon Valley, the production of organic basmati rice must adhere not only to standards for organic production and certification but, simultaneously, to standards for export-quality basmati rice that pertain to the physical and material features of the grain itself. This chapter shows how the coming into being of organic basmati rice has been shaped not only by the standards and practices of organic agriculture and certification, but also by the conditions of contract farming established in the Doon Valley in the early 2000s by means of the longer histories of commoditization through which basmati has become a globally traded grain. The chapter examines the convergence of sociotechnical and socionatural practices that have made basmati a distinct category of rice—a category brought into being through government notifications, geographic indications, processes of standardization and commodification that, while established far from the Doon Valley where basmati is cultivated, are enacted and realized every day in its fields. Market Imaginaries and the Horizons of Aspiration This chapter turns from the basmati fields of the Doon Valley to Uttarakhand’s mountainous regions, in order to explore how organic quality catalyzes imaginations of new agricultural markets for little-known hill crops. Imagination and aspiration are here taken to be forms of affect and elements of human agency that are central to forging new market connections. The analysis departs from understandings of economic agency as primarily calculative, an approach characteristic of both recent behavioral and actor-network approaches. The chapter considers the ways in which different kinds of aspiration and imagination encounter each other, and are negotiated, in the context of buyer-seller meets that bring hill cultivators together with potential commercial buyers. It then examines the forms of bureaucratic imagination through which organic agricultural production in the mountains is made amenable to the supply-chain logistics of metropolitan and international buyers. Finally, it turns to the village of Nagthari in western Uttarakhand and examines how its residents aspire and act to cultivate new forms of market participation. Exhibiting Organic Uttarakhand This chapter explores how brand-building and state-making intertwine in neoliberal development practice. It examines how the brand “Organic Uttarakhand” established by the Uttarakhand Organic Commodity Board attached itself not just to pulses, grains, and spices produced by organic farmers, but how it became a signifier for the region itself. To make this argument, the chapter considers three distinct trade fairs and exhibition spaces in which the Board participated in 2007 and 2008. These exhibitions proved to be crucial sites in which the promotion of organic agriculture was linked with efforts to build the state’s brand equity as “Organic Uttarakhand.” The circulation of discursive and material artifacts—signs, posters, and brochures as well as agricultural products from the mountains—constituted organic quality through an exhibitionary complex, and helped produce Uttarakhand as an organic state. At the same time, abiding social imaginaries of Uttarakhand as a place of nature and an abode of the gods were also conjured in these domains in order to endow organic products with a singular authenticity as they circulated through new market channels. Epilogue: Promises of Transformation The epilogue offers an account of the ways in which organic agriculture has unfolded in Uttarakhand in the years since ethnographic fieldwork was undertaken in 2007 and 2008. It reflects on what organic means, and to whom its greatest promise extends, considering the ways in which social and caste position, education, and economic status shape the extent to which different cultivators have engaged with the work of becoming organic. The epilogue places the study of organic agriculture in Uttarakhand in conversation with the rapidly rising interest in sustainable agriculture, the “green economy,” and debates about contemporary agrarian transitions. By showing how organic should be understood as a diffusely produced quality, rather than a material property or essence, it charts a course for expanded understandings of how agricultural commodities come into being.

According to Communist Party discourse, China's 'New Era’ began when Xi Jinping was anointed Party boss in 2012. The shape of this New Era became eminently clear in 2023 when Xi commenced his third five-year term as General Secretary of the Party, a fortification of one-man authoritarian rule unprecedented in post-Mao China. Under Xi, the Party has expanded its influence over government, the economy and society. The Party-State is now more Party than State. The year 2023 saw other ‘new eras’ for China as well. Despite initial optimism sparked by the end of COVID-19 restrictions in late 2022, the Chinese economy in 2023 was buffeted by continuing property sector woes, record unemployment, and an unfolding local government debt crisis. Globally, China adopted a series of new and ambitious diplomatic initiatives to woo the Global South and amplify its voice on the world stage. The China Story Yearbook 2023: China’s New Era provides informed perspectives on these and other important stories that will resonate for years to come.

Available open access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. One of the most significant ways that social workers can engage with policy is by holding elected office. How and why do social workers transition into political roles? And what impact do they have on policy making once they get there? This book is the first systematic, comparative study of social workers in electoral politics across liberal democracies. Drawing on a common conceptual framework, leading scholars analyse the recruitment, career trajectories and advocacy roles of social workers in Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Israel, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, the UK and the US. The book highlights key similarities, differences and underlying factors that shape social workers’ political engagement. This is a valuable resource for academics, practitioners, policy makers and students in social work, social policy and political science, offering fresh insights into the intersection of professional practice and political leadership.

L’existence ne peut-elle pas être vue comme un voyage, dont le carnet se remplit peu à peu d’histoires vécues ? Les initiateurs de ce livre ont voulu, à travers des approches monographiques très variées, susciter une réflexion sur la manière dont on voyage, du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours, et dont on rend compte de cette expérience dans des écrits personnels qui ne sont pas destinés à la publication. Quels liens se tissent entre les personnes qui partent et leur pays natal ? En quoi l’âge, le genre, l’origine sociale, le métier, les conventions influent-ils sur le récit ? Quelle est la part des lacunes, des blancs et des silences dans ces correspondances et ces carnets de route ? De quelle perception de l’espace et des autres témoignent ces savants, ces artistes, ces explorateurs et ces touristes « ordinaires » ? Le journal de voyage est-il un miroir de soi autant qu’une documentation sur les contrées visitées ? Chaque voyageur, chaque voyageuse agit comme un révélateur des interrogations et des changements que vit son époque. Du tourisme d’élite au tourisme industriel, d’une mission scientifique dans l’Afrique coloniale aux pérégrinations de jeunes bourgeois en quête de plaisirs balnéaires sur la Côte d’Azur, à pied ou en voiture, en mer ou en haute montagne, de la Suisse aux confins du monde, le voyage a sa part d’aventures et de jouissances, de méditations sur la destinée parfois. Tous les témoignages étudiés ici démontrent, par le texte comme par l’image, que le voyage participe d’une expérience à la fois personnelle et collective.