Humanities & Social Sciences

Remnants challenge the institution of the museum. They are tipping figures that open up attributions and thus collaborate in transgressing the taxonomic, disciplinary, architectural and institutional boundaries of the museum. They can be found everywhere - in the exhibition space as well as in the depot, in the laboratory as well as in the administration. In each of these contexts, different forms of professional self-understanding, knowledge and practical interaction are available to determine the status of remains. The volume contributes to clarifying concepts such as rest, waste, traces, edges in the context of the museum and to re-evaluating them for debates in conservation, curation, art history and museum anthropology.

Even 30 years after the birth of the first "artificially produced baby Louise Brown in 1978, the desire for a child remains unfulfilled for many couples. Their hopes are to modern techniques of assisted reproduction. Reproductive medicine has since made enormous progress and opens up new opportunities. With these opportunities, however, are also linked new challenges, their moral and legal implications are considerable.

The notion that photographs are the products of biases and hidden agendas is nothing new. Photographs have presented Argentina’s Proceso as a source of peace and stability, Canada’s residential schools as agents of successful assimilation and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia as an unimpeachable force for justice. Photography has proven a valuable partner in these endeavours. Photographs provide evocative visual, temporal and material links to the past that allow them to be used as evidence, affirmations of different types of truth, political critique, and individual and shared historical narratives. Contemporary patterns of international photography education, exhibition, theorization and publication reaffirm the critical necessity of bringing a deterritorialized perspective to national case studies. Contemporary photographers are deterritorializing their responses to human rights abuses by forging connections between different historical events across time and space.

The uprising which shook France in May 1968 also had a revolutionary effect on the country's most prominent film journal. Under editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma embarked on a militant turn that would govern the journal's work over the next five years. Inspired by Marxist and psychoanalytic theory, the red years of Cahiers du cinéma produced a theoretical outpouring that was seminal for the formation of film studies and is still of vital relevance for the contemporary audiovisual landscape. The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973) gives an overview of this period in the journal's history and its aftermath, combining biographical accounts of the critics who wrote for Cahiers in the post 1968 period with theoretical explorations of their key texts..

This book deals with memories of Atlantic slavery in museums, in the public space, and at historic sites in France and Spain, the early colonial powers, as well as in the overseas department of Martinique and independent Cuba. The author investigates the topography of memory and the social context of sites of memory by applying oral history methods.

Currently, there are two prominent schools in linguistics: Minimalism (Chomsky) and Construction Grammar (Goldberg, Tomasello). Minimalism comes with the claim that our linguistic capabilities consist of an abstract, binary combinatorial operation (Merge) and a lexicon. Most versions of Construction Grammar assume that language consists of flat phrasal schemata that contribute their own meaning and may license additional arguments. This book examines a variant of Lexical Functional Grammar, which is lexical in principle but was augmented by tools that allow for the description of phrasal constructions in the Construction Grammar sense. These new tools include templates that can be used to model inheritance hierarchies and a resource driven semantics. The resource driven semantics makes it possible to reach the effects that lexical rules had, for example remapping of arguments, by semantic means. The semantic constraints can be evaluated in the syntactic component, which is basically similar to the delayed execution of lexical rules. So this is a new formalization that might be suitable to provide solutions to longstanding problems that are not available for other formalizations.

In a dialogue with Prof. Del Punta’s essays on the topic, the paper analyses the peculiarities of the relationship between labour, labour law and nonprofit organizations. To this aim, the A. explores the latest reform concerning such organizations, focusing on the distinction between volunteer and paid work — neat on a theoretical level but very promiscuous on an empirical one. Finally, the article highlights the impact of the reform on the guarantees entitled to workers and volunteers and on the role in society of nonprofit organisations, which is rooted (and limited by) the fundamental principles established by the Italian Constitution.

This open access book offers a critical analysis of the history of the International Bureau of Education (IBE) from its founding in 1925 to its integration into UNESCO in January 1969. Based on the conceptual and methodological tools of the transnational turn and on archives, fully exploited for the first time by the research team, this book enriches knowledge of the phenomena of globalization. It does so in a field, education, which is currently one of those most invested in globalization, but whose sociogenesis in the era of its first period of institutionalization remains to be explored more profoundly. The authors do this by analyzing how the actors of the IBE tried to realize their aspiration towards universal aims in education, the contradictions they were confronted with, the causes they invested in, their operating mode and the governments and international organizations with which they cooperated.

Dieser Open-Access-Band präsentiert einen Digitalbaukasten für kompetenzorientiertes Lehren und Lernen, der sowohl Studierenden als auch Lehrenden Angebote zur Steigerung ihrer digitalen Kompetenzen bietet und Studierende beim Ausbau ihrer Selbstlernkompetenz und Studierfähigkeit unterstützt. Für Studierende gibt es digitale Selbstreflexionsinstrumente, für Lehrende gibt es eine Toolbox mit digitalen Lehrmethoden. Darüber hinaus stehen Ausbildungsmaterialien zur Ausbildung zum „Digital Learning Scout“ zur Verfügung. Die Praxis- und Forschungsergebnisse des gleichnamigen Projekts DigikoS "Digitalbaukasten für kompetenzorientiertes Selbststudium" sollen einer breiten Fach- und Hochschulöffentlichkeit verfügbar gemacht werden.

Nowadays poverty can be defined as a construct that can no longer be ascribed to the material scarcity of resources but to the lack of all available relational, social and cultural resources, that are an expression of a “suffering” territory. This fragility testifies to a problem of educational sustainability that requires an exit from the emergency logic of “buffer interventions” by activating social, training and professional networks, capable of responding to the educational needs expressed by the territory. For this reason, in the epistemic framework of Civil and Digital-Civil Pedagogy, the need emerges for new professional profiles capable of being “managers” of integrated territorial development, educators-planners of territorial educational services with a view to social sustainability and the educational human transition.

Matthew Omelsky theorizes the embodied experience of time in twentieth- and twenty-first-century black art to outline the distinct utopian desire directed at the moment when pain vanishes from the body and mind, bringing with it a form of being that is free of the violence that has consumed blackness.

The ERC-funded research project BuddhistRoad aims to create a new framework to enable understanding of the complexities in the dynamics of cultural encounter and religious transfer in pre-modern Eastern Central Asia. Buddhism was one major factor in this exchange: for the first time the multi-layered relationships between the trans-regional Buddhist traditions (Chinese, Indian, Tibetan) and those based on local Buddhist cultures (Khotanese, Uyghur, Tangut) will be explored in a systematic way. The second volume Buddhism in Central Asia II—Practice and Rituals, Visual and Materials Transfer based on the mid-project conference held on September 16th–18th, 2019, at CERES, Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany) focuses on two of the six thematic topics addressed by the project, namely on "practices and rituals", exploring material culture in religious context such as mandalas and talismans, as well as “visual and material transfer”, including shared iconographies and the spread of ‘Khotanese’ themes.

This Security Sector Reform (SSR) Paper offers a universal and analytical perspective on the linkages between Security Sector Governance (SSG)/SSR (SSG/R) and Sustainable Development Goal-16 (SDG-16), focusing on conflict and post-conflict settings as well as transitional and consolidated democracies. Against the background of development and security literatures traditionally maintaining separate and compartmentalized presence in both academic and policymaking circles, it maintains that the contemporary security- and development-related challenges are inextricably linked, requiring effective measures with an accurate understanding of the nature of these challenges. In that sense, SDG-16 is surely a good step in the right direction. After comparing and contrasting SSG/R and SDG-16, this SSR Paper argues that human security lies at the heart of the nexus between the 2030 Agenda of the United Nations (UN) and SSG/R. To do so, it first provides a brief overview of the scholarly and policymaking literature on the development-security nexus to set the background for the adoption of The Agenda 2030. Next, it reviews the literature on SSG/R and SDGs, and how each concept evolved over time. It then identifies the puzzle this study seeks to address by comparing and contrasting SSG/R with SDG-16. After making a case that human security lies at the heart of the nexus between the UN’s 2030 Agenda and SSG/R, this book analyses the strengths and weaknesses of human security as a bridge between SSG/R and SDG-16 and makes policy recommendations on how SSG/R, bolstered by human security, may help achieve better results on the SDG-16 targets. It specifically emphasizes the importance of transparency, oversight, and accountability on the one hand, and participative approach and local ownership on the other. It concludes by arguing that a simultaneous emphasis on security and development is sorely needed for addressing the issues under the purview of SDG-16.

A conqueror does not only use the power of weapons and techniques. He also imports and imposes a system of norms, beliefs and forms of artistic expression in order to establish a political project that he considers legitimate. Situated on the edge of cultural and art history, this study aims to open up new perspectives on artistic creation during the Baroque period in Latin America. Lorsqu’un conquérant conscient de sa supériorité colonise un territoire, il ne se sert pas seulement de la puissance des armes et des techniques. Il importe et impose aussi un système de normes, de croyances et des formes d’expression artistique pour asseoir un projet politique qui lui semble d’entrée de jeu légitime. Située aux confins de l’histoire culturelle et de l’histoire des arts, cette étude s’efforce d’ouvrir de nouvelles perspectives sur la création artistique à l’époque baroque dans une Amérique Latine en voie de colonisation par les Européens, en analysant plus particulièrement le contexte d’apparition du syncrétisme religieux. À partir de l’étude minutieuse d’une sélection d’œuvres produites entre le xvie et le xviiie siècle dans la région andine (Pérou, Bolivie, Colombie, Équateur) et au Mexique, dans des domaines aussi divers que la gravure, la peinture, la sculpture ou encore l’architecture, il s’agit de montrer comment l’art du colonisateur intervient comme une instance productrice de normes et de jugements de valeur dans l’espace ibéro-­américain indigène. Dans l’Amérique coloniale, le syncrétisme dont témoigne l’art des premiers « créoles », autrement dit l’assimilation de nouveaux codes et leur amalgame avec le substrat culturel existant, encourage la négation de l’ancienne culture tout en procédant au recyclage d’anciens codes pour donner naissance à des croyances et des formes artistiques nouvelles, un métissage dont les conséquences, à la fois positives et négatives, se manifestent jusque de nos jours.

Some time ago, Schiano raised the question "To B or not to B", which means "To Biopsy or not to Biopsy" the liver for the evaluation of chronic hepatopathies. For a long period, liver biopsy (LB) was considered the "gold standard" for the evaluation of liver morphology. A major disadvantage of LB is its invasiveness: the risk of post-biopsy discomfort for patients and sometimes, for serious complications; also the lack of sensitivity to detect fibrosis, due to its heterogeneity; and the inability to obtain good quality fragments, adequate for pathological examination. In these conditions, the question is whether LB can be regarded as the "gold standard" for staging and grading chronic hepatitis in daily activity. But what alternative can we propose for the evaluation of liver fibrosis at this moment? The answer is: non-invasive methods and the ultrasound elastographic ones presented in this volume. Transient Elastography (FibroScan, Echosens) is a recognized method in many countries. Published papers and meta-analyses showed the value of this method for the diagnosis of liver cirrhosis (AUROC - 94%); for staging chronic HCV hepatitis (a cut-off value of 7.5 kPa differentiates F0–1 from F2–4 with 67% sensitivity, 87% specificity, 86% positive predictive value (PPV) and 68% negative predictive value (NPV), with a diagnostic accuracy of 76%; but also in HBV chronic infection, NASH, PBC, PBS). Acoustic Radiation Force Impulse (ARFI) Elastography (Siemens S2000) is another elastographic methods with promising results (a meta-analysis showed that the mean diagnostic accuracy of ARFI expressed as AUROC was 0.88 for the diagnosis of significant fibrosis (F≥2), 0.91 for the diagnosis of severe fibrosis (F≥3), and 0.93 for the diagnosis of liver cirrhosis. In the subgroup of patients who underwent both ARFI and TE, the diagnostic accuracy of ARFI was comparable to TE for the diagnosis of significant and severe fibrosis, with a trend to be inferior for the diagnosis of cirrhosis. The future of liver fibrosis evaluation points towards non-invasive methods, decreasing dramatically the number of liver biopsies. Studies have been published regarding the value of Real Time Elastography, performed for the first time with Hitachi systems (EUB-8500 and EUB-900), which uses an extended combined autocorrelation method to produce a real-time elasticity image by using a freehand approach to compress the tissues with the ultrasound transducer. The relative tissues’ elasticity is calculated and displayed as a color overlay on the conventional B-mode image. HiRT-E could be a promising method for the evaluation of liver fibrosis in chronic hepatopathies, but new methods of color code interpretation are needed to improve the accuracy, as well as a reference acquisition methodology. ShearWave™ Elastography, the new "kid on the block", produces an image where true local tissue elasticity is displayed in a color map in "real time". Elasticity is displayed using a color coded image superimposed on a B-mode image. Stiffer tissues are coded in red and softer tissues in blue, with an image resolution of approximately 1mm. The true elasticity is assessed based on Shear wave propagation speed into the tissue. It is a very new method and only small studies were presented at international meetings. Thus, having the alternative of noninvasive elastographic methods for the evaluation of liver fibrosis (maybe together with serum tests such as FibroMax) and knowing the low real life yield of liver biopsy (and the risk of complications), we can safely conclude that, for daily medical activity, liver biopsy can be avoided in the vast majority of cases. This ebook presents an interesting set of chapters on the subject and is of good value to hepatologists interested in non invasive diagnostic methods for liver diseases.