Humanities & Social Sciences

This volume brings together seminal papers and contributions from Diane Elson’s extensive back catalogue, including key contributions from the pre-digital era that are now difficult to find. The collection reflects the author’s enduring fascination with the interaction of gender, development and economics and the relevance of her thinking for tackling inequality and economic problems today.

Using interviews with and academic studies of the careers of internationally-famous music producers and music industry professionals from Småland, Sweden, this open access book studies the history and present state of pop music production and entrepreneurship. An exceptionally high number of established and emerging pop artists and producers from this region of Sweden have had significant success on the international stage. This book describes how the situation for music producers and artists from Småland has changed during the past 50 years or so, starting in the 1970s with the so-called ‘Swedish music wonder’ and ending with the situation contemporary artists and entrepreneurs are facing. The field has changed massively both in terms of technology (from analogue to digital), social production (from individual productions to collective projects), distribution and marketing (from selling concert tickets and LPs to creating “prosuming” fanbases and multipronged careers considering genres, venues and activities). This book will be of interest to students of and professionals in music production; music, economy and media scholars; readers active in creative industries; and fans of (Swedish) pop music.

Written by two leading international experts, Early Childhood in the Anglosphere offers a unique comparison of early childhood education and care services, and parenting leave, across seven high-income Anglophone countries. Peter Moss and Linda Mitchell explore what these systems have in common, including the dominance of 'childcare’ services, widespread privatisation and marketisation, and weak parenting leave. They highlight the substantial failings of these systems, and the causes and consequences of these failings. But this book is ultimately about hope, about how these failings might be made good through major changes. In other words, it is about transformation: why transformation is both necessary and possible at this particular time, what transformation might look like, and how it might happen. Part of that transformation concerns the need for new policies and structures, but even more it is about how the Anglosphere thinks about early childhood. The authors call for turning away from conceptualising early childhood services as `childcare' and marketised businesses selling commodities to parent-consumers; and for reconceptualising them as education imbued with an ethics of care, a public good available as a right to all children and families, and complemented by well-paid, individual entitlements to parenting leave. Using examples from the Anglosphere and beyond, and in a context of converging crises, the book argues that transformation of thinking, policies and structures is desirable and doable.

Medieval authorship is a fragile concept, yet digital approaches offer a path towards clarity. This book examines the work of Jehan de Saint-Quentin, an under-studied author from fourteenth-century France who has been credited with twenty-four poems, but whose name only appears in one of them. This volume expands Jehan’s œuvre through the addition of two new poems, namely Le dit de Guillaume d’Engleterre and Le dit de Robert le Deable . It also identifies echoes of two lost works by the same author in La vie saint Jehan Paulus and Richard sans Peur . Through this case study, the book offers a new model for the field, demonstrating how humanistic approaches and reproducible data can combine in bespoke ways to unlock new insights about medieval literature.

Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series Beyond the Nation charts an expansive history of Filipino literature in the U.S., forged within the dual contexts of imperialism and migration, from the early twentieth century into the twenty-first. Martin Joseph Ponce theorizes and enacts a queer diasporic reading practice that attends to the complex crossings of race and nation with gender and sexuality. Tracing the conditions of possibility of Anglophone Filipino literature to U.S. colonialism in the Philippines in the early twentieth century, the book examines how a host of writers from across the century both imagine and address the Philippines and the United States, inventing a variety of artistic lineages and social formations in the process. Beyond the Nation considers a broad array of issues, from early Philippine nationalism, queer modernism, and transnational radicalism, to music-influenced and cross-cultural poetics, gay male engagements with martial law and popular culture, second-generational dynamics, and the relation between reading and revolution. Ponce elucidates not only the internal differences that mark this literary tradition but also the wealth of expressive practices that exceed the terms of colonial complicity, defiant nationalism, or conciliatory assimilation. Moving beyond the nation as both the primary analytical framework and locus of belonging, Ponce proposes that diasporic Filipino literature has much to teach us about alternative ways of imagining erotic relationships and political communities.

The German Linguistic Studies Series is a comprehensive and outstanding forum in its field. It has borne the name of its subject in its title since the foundation of the series in the eighth decade of the last century. The series is comprehensive in the broad spectrum of topics covered (language levels, varieties, communication forms, epochs) in the range of research perspectives (theoretical and empirical studies, fundamental research and applications, interdisciplinarity with psychology, the social sciences etc.) and methodologies (the sole criterion is quality), in the rhythm of research (trends are perceived and also set, achievements are secured) and in the forms of presentation (monographs, textbooks, collected volumes, dictionaries). Professorial theses, outstanding doctoral theses, pioneering research findings from wider contexts, but also the surprising ‛stroke of genius’ set the standards for inclusion in the series. Call for Book Proposals: https://blog.degruyter.com/call-for-book-proposals-reihe-germanistische-linguistik/

The Viennese Jesuit astronomer Maximilian Hell was a nodal figure in the eighteenth-century circulation of knowledge. This study of his career sheds light on the Enlightenment, Catholicism, reform in the Habsburg monarchy, and the cultivation of science in the Republic of Letters. Readership: Anyone interested in eighteenth-century Central Europe and Scandinavia, in the production and circulation of knowledge in the Enlightenment, in enlightened absolutism, in Catholicism and the Society of Jesus in the eighteenth century, in the history of astronomy and related subjects, and the history of comparative linguistics and its ideological implications.

This richly-illustrated work offers a representative panorama of parasitic agents encountered in fish. Based on the new phylogenetic classification concepts, it emphasises the biological properties, epidemiology and clinical effects of groups of organisms in question, in the light of cognitive advances made possible by the new biology tools. It is intended for a wide audience, from the world of aquaculture to animal health and teaching as well as to researchers.

Afghanistan has been in the headlines for many years – but tragically for all the wrong reasons. First invaded by the Soviets in 1979, the country then experienced the trauma of civil war followed by yet another intervention, this time by the United States and allies, which ended with the West’s ignominious withdrawal in August 2021. Afghanistan: Long War, Forgotten Peace examines multiple dimensions of what happened and why, and what the future holds for the country now the Taliban are back in power. Multidisciplinary in approach, this book features analysts from a variety of academic disciplines, including policy-makers and public intellectuals – many with direct experience of having lived and worked in Afghanistan. It explains why the Taliban finally triumphed, what this means for Afghan society, and how competing actors in the international system have reacted to the Taliban takeover. Questions include whether the West’s withdrawal represented a major or only a temporary setback for NATO and the United States, and whether and how there can be any amelioration of the situation in Afghanistan itself. The country and its people face multiple interrelated challenges, including those of women’s rights, the drugs economies and human trafficking and exploitation. This volume is essential reading for all those concerned with what happens in Afghanistan over the coming months and years, the consequences for the Afghan people – and for the rest of the world.

Tally sticks worked as ubiquitous stores of numerical knowledge and tools of accounting and administration in medieval Europe. Previous research emphasized both the potential and value of the wooden notched sticks not only for the social and economic history of the Middle Ages, but also for the history of writing, intellectual history. This article combines the analysis of archival objects and written sources from England and Germany analysing their various contexts of use. These involve the centralised, highly professional and ritualised tax accounting at the English Exchequer, husbandry and agriculture, consumer taxation as well as public credit and circulating money-substitutes. Furthermore tallies were often used as evidence in court and functioned alongside written administration.

The odd and brilliant works of Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedenskii were lost to both Russia and the West for some thirty years. It was the misfortune of these writers to be nurtured in a period of literary experiment that was cut off suddenly just as they were starting out. Their first steps, taken under the aegis of an antic literary group called Oberiu, turned out to be the only public testament of their career, and to this day Oberiu remains the touchstone of their notoriety in the West. The connection is unfortunate, because the silence that was forced on the group became paradoxically the silence under which Kharms and Vvedenskii matured as writers. Their later works, masterpieces of black humor with an infusion of the sacred, are firmly rooted in the Russian tradition, and bear comparison with the finest works of the European theater of the absurd.

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computational Structures, FOSSACS 2019, which took place in Prague, Czech Republic, in April 2019, held as part of the European Joint Conference on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2019. The 29 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 85 submissions. They deal with foundational research with a clear significance for software science.

This book examines the history and influence of Magna Carta in British and American history. In a series of essays written by notable British specialists, it considers the origins of the document in the political and religious contexts of the thirteenth century, the relevance of its principles to the seventeenth century disputes that led to the Civil War, the uses made of Magna Carta to justify the American Revolution, and its inspiration of the radical-democratic movement in Britain in the early nineteenth century. The introductory essay considers the celebration of Magna Carta's 800th anniversary in 2015 in relation to ceremonials and remembrance in Britain in general. Given as papers to a joint conference of British and Chinese historians in Beijing in 2015, these essays provide a clear and insightful overview of the origins and impact of a medieval document that has shaped the history of the world.

Dieses Open-Access-Buch beschäftigt sich mit dem Einfluss des meritokratischen Prinzips auf die Wertschätzung beruflicher Bildung gegenüber allgemeiner bzw. akademischer Bildung. Diesen Einfluss untersucht die Autorin sowohl allgemein, das heißt auf idealtypischer Ebene, als auch in Bezug auf die Ukraine. Als Ergebnis zeigt die Studie, dass das meritokratische Leistungsprinzip idealtypisch und auch im Falle der Ukraine als Katalysator für nachteilige Entwicklungen wirkt, was die Wertschätzung beruflicher Bildung und die Erfüllung ihrer gesellschaftlichen Funktion anbelangt.