Humanities & Social Sciences

In the canton of Bern, the Child and Adult Protection Court performs the tasks of the judicial complaints authority in child and adult protection matters. It forms part of the civil department of the higher court and is made up of senior judges as well as specialist judges. The proceedings before this specialized court are characterized by a pluralism of legal sources: a federal rump order in the Swiss Civil Code is given concrete form by a cantonal special procedural code, which in turn refers to the general administrative process of the canton of Bern. The present work systematically presents the proceedings before the child and adult protection court and is intended to serve as an orientation for those seeking justice, lawyers and members of the court on procedural issues.

This open access book seeks to explain how the literary commentary of the Lives of the Poets speaks to us today because of its ethical goals. Edward Tomarken elucidates this element of Johnson’s literary criticism by using Ralph Cohen’s genre method, the topic of Chapter One, “Why Genre”. Chapters two to five address the most prevalent genres of the Lives: tragedy, metaphysical poetry, the epic, the pastoral elegy, and the mock epic. Chapter six considers the rise of literary criticism as a genre. Chapter Seven demonstrates how ethical genre criticism relates literature to life. And the final chapter explains why, although Johnson considers ‘moral’ and ‘ethical’ as nearly interchangeable terms, Tomarken prefers ‘ethical’ because it relates genre criticism to present problems in literary and non-literary worlds.

Mosquitoes are vectors of many disease-causing pathogens, including malaria, dengue, chikungunya, and yellow fever. According to the World Health Organization, these vector-borne diseases account for several hundred thousand deaths annually. They also cause zoonoses, such as Rift Valley fever and West Nile fever. In this context, the development of operational tools to support surveillance and control strategies is essential—not only in countries of the Global South, where mosquito-borne diseases are most prevalent in tropical and subtropical regions, but also in the countries of the North, where the establishment of invasive species such as the tiger mosquito is increasing the risk of disease emergence. To address these challenges, Earth observation imagery offers valuable potential: the spatial distribution and seasonal dynamics of mosquito populations are closely linked to climatic factors (such as temperatures, rainfall, and humidity) and environmental variables (such as the presence of water bodies and vegetation), many of which can be monitored through satellite data. Numerous recent studies have led to the development of innovative methods that combine remote sensing with spatial modelling to predict the spatial and temporal dynamics of vector mosquitoes and associated diseases. Moving beyond proof-of-concept, some of these approaches have given rise to operational tools and processing chains that are now actively used by public health authorities and vector control agencies. This book, intended for students, researchers, and public health professionals, offers a synthesis of current research and operational tools in the field.

Cultivating Racial and Linguistic Diversity in Literacy Teacher Education examines how English and literacy teacher education—a space dominated by White, English-monolingual, middle class perspectives—shapes the experiences of preservice teachers of color and their construction of a teacher identity. Significant and timely, this book focuses attention on the unique needs and perspectives of racially and linguistically diverse preservice teachers in the field of literacy and English education and offers ways to improve teacher training to better meet the needs of preservice teachers from all racial, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds. These changes have the potential to diversify the teacher force and cultivate teachers who bring rich racial, cultural, and linguistic histories to the field of teaching.

This updated and expanded second edition brings together cutting-edge research across six continents to provide a comprehensive, global, up-to-date review of political uses of social media. In its 32 chapters, this second edition of The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics covers the good, the bad, and the as yet uncertain of current developments in the uses of social media in political contexts, ten years on from the first book. It is organised into six sections: Concepts, Challenges, Policies, Problems, Platforms, and Possibilities, each featuring chapters by leading researchers in the field that address these themes from a wide variety of viewpoints. This edition arrives at a new critical point: generative AI and other emerging technologies may either accelerate the crises of disinformation, polarisation, and democratic decline, or open new spaces for civic innovation, regulation, and accountability. The politics of digital platforms remain unsettled, and this Companion provides a critical map of the present while pointing to the possibilities and futures that will define the next decade of social media and politics. At a time when the politics of social media use remain unsettled, this comprehensive collection is an essential reference for academic communities in areas ranging from media and communication studies through internet studies and journalism studies to political science, and may be used by researchers as well as teachers and students in these respective fields. Chapters 3, 5, 15 and 26 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 International license.

In der öffentlichen Diskussion erlebt derzeit ein Begriff eine Renaissance, der in Deutschland bisher gemieden wurde: "Rassismus?. Daher müssen sich Rechtswissenschaft und Gesellschaft dringend der Frage stellen, welche verschiedenen Erscheinungsformen des Rassismus es gibt und inwiefern diese von den juristischen Diskriminierungsverboten im deutschen, europäischen und internationalen Recht erfasst werden. Der Band versammelt führende Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler, um einer doppelten Leitfrage auf den Grund zu gehen: Umfassen die Diskriminierungsverbote neben vermeintlich angeborenen Unterschieden auch kulturalisierte Formen des Rassismus? Wie erhält sich das Verbot einer offenen, versteckten oder mittelbaren Diskriminierung zu den Erscheinungsformen eines strukturellen bzw. institutionellen Rassismus, der nicht auf intentionalen Handlungen beruht?

The term mobility has different meanings in the following science disciplines. In economics, mobility is the ability of an individual or a group to improve their economic status in relation to income and wealth within their lifetime or between generations. In information systems and computer science, mobility is used for the concept of mobile computing, in which a computer is transported by a person during normal use. Logistics creates by the design of logistics networks the infrastructure for the mobility of people and goods. Electric mobility is one of today’s solutions from an engineering perspective to reduce the need of energy resources and environmental impact. Moreover, for urban planning, mobility is the crunch question about how to optimize the different needs for mobility and how to link different transportation systems. In this publication we collected the ideas of practitioners, researchers, and government officials regarding the different modes of mobility in a globalised world, focusing on both domestic and international issues.

The Western, with its stoic cowboys and quickhanded gunslingers, is an instantly recognizable American genre that has achieved worldwide success. Cultures around the world have embraced but also adapted and critiqued the Western as part of their own national literatures, reinterpreting and expanding the genre in curious ways. Canadian Westerns are almost always in conversation with their American cousins, influenced by their tropes and traditions, responding to their politics, and repurposing their structures to create a national literary phenomenon. The American Western in Canadian Literature examines over a century of the development of the Canadian Western as it responds to the American Western, to evolving literary trends, and to regional, national, and international change. Beginning with Indigenous perspectives on the genre, it moves from early manifestations of the Western in Christian narratives of personal and national growth, and its controversial pulp-fictional popularity in the 1940s, to its postmodern and contemporary critiques, pushing the boundary of the Western to include Northerns, Northwesterns, and post-Westerns in literature, film, and wider cultural imagery. The American Western in Canadian Literature is more than a simple history. It uses genre theory to comment on historical perspectives on nation and region. It includes overviews of Indigenous and settler-colonial critiques of the Western, challenging persistent attitudes to Indigenous people and their traditional territories that are endemic to the genre. It illuminates the way that the Canadian Western enshrines, hagiographies, and ultimately desacralizes aspects of Canadian life, from car culture to extractive industries to assumptions about a Canadian moral high ground. This is a comprehensive, highly readable, and fascinating study of an underexamined genre.

Tax compliance; Reciprocity; Ethnography; Economic anthropology; Welfare; Exchanges; Taxpayer; Marcel Mauss; Swedish Tax Agency; quid-pro-quo exchange; Fiscal anthropology; Swedish tax; Behavioural economics; Economic exchanges and reciprocity; Tax as a gift; Public economics; Progressive marginal tax; Contributive and distributive balancing

This book provides international perspectives on corrections, correctional treatment, and penitentiary laws. Although its focus is on African and South American countries, the information provided can be easily expanded to North America and Europe. The chapters present legal frameworks and applied research on prisons and their potential to deter crime and reduce recidivism rates. The book puts the human rights agenda at the forefront and is a useful resource for those who work in corrections, including prison, education, and probation officers.

The first volume of a series connected with the Florence University PhD course in Landscape Design – a disciplinary sector that is innovative in terms of its political and social engagement – it illustrates the potential of this field of study through the results of a wide-ranging educational and creative workshop. The various design experiences are grouped into six thematic sections: Parks and landscape; City parks; Urban spaces; Fortified systems; Art sites; Historic landscapes; Concepts and projects (the latter addressing issues that are central to Italian research, such as agricultural and river landscapes).

The evolution of activism against the expansion of copyright in the digital domain, with case studies of resistance including eBook and iTunes hacks.The movement against restrictive digital copyright protection arose largely in response to the excesses of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998. In The Digital Rights Movement, Hector Postigo shows that what began as an assertion of consumer rights to digital content has become something broader: a movement concerned not just with consumers and gadgets but with cultural ownership. Increasingly stringent laws and technological measures are more than incoveniences; they lock up access to our “cultural commons.”Postigo describes the legislative history of the DMCA and how policy “blind spots” produced a law at odds with existing and emerging consumer practices. Yet the DMCA established a political and legal rationale brought to bear on digital media, the Internet, and other new technologies. Drawing on social movement theory and science and technology studies, Postigo presents case studies of resistance to increased control over digital media, describing a host of tactics that range from hacking to lobbying.Postigo discusses the movement's new, user-centered conception of “fair use” that seeks to legitimize noncommercial personal and creative uses such as copying legitimately purchased content and remixing music and video tracks. He introduces the concept of technological resistance—when hackers and users design and deploy technologies that allows access to digital content despite technological protection mechanisms—as the flip side to the technological enforcement represented by digital copy protection and a crucial tactic for the movement.

In this comprehensive study of Belgian settlement in western Canada, Cornelius Jaenen shows that Belgian immigration was unique in its character and brought with it significant benefits out of proportion to its comparatively small numbers. Canadas first Immigration Act (1869) included Belgium among the "preferred countries" from which immigrants should be sought, but unlike many other European countries, Belgium did not encourage its nationals to emigrate to relieve economic, demographic, and social crises, and Belgian officials took a strong interest in their emigrants, monitoring the conditions of settlement and, where fraud was discovered, intervening diplomatically and paying for repatriation. The result was a resourceful body of settlers adaptable to both anglophone and francophone communities and adept at promotion and raising of capital. The first wave of immigration, beginning in the 1880s, consisted mainly of farmers to southern Manitoba and miners to Vancouver Island. A second wave after 1896, facilitated by a direct steamship link to Antwerp, brought more miners, as well as orchard planters to the Okanagan, sugar beet farmers to Alberta, and dairymen to Manitoba. World War I was followed by a further wave of agriculturally oriented settlement, and World War II by a mainly urban and skill-oriented cohort. In all cases, Belgians differed from the larger immigrant groups in that they were not recruited by important immigration societies and did not settle in ethnic blocs. There is probably no one better equipped than Cornelius Jaenen to write the history of the Belgians in western Canada. An eminent historian and the son of Flemish and Walloon Belgian immigrants himself, Professor Jaenen has gleaned, from Belgian and Canadian archival sources and from local, community, and family histories, a story rich in detail and context that will be invaluable to Canadians of Belgian origin as well as scholars and students of western Canadian ethnic and immigration studies.

Drawing upon meticulous ethnographic analysis and unique data sources, this book dissects the multifaceted challenges and occasional victories encountered by both educators and detained youth in Sweden. Originally published in Swedish, this book provides fresh insights into a crucial aspect of youth care and education. Theoretical underpinnings draw from ethnomethodology’s focus on members’ accounts, complemented by C. Wright Mills’ framework of motives and Erving Goffman’s seminal studies on total institutions. The book also includes seven practical suggestions directed to teachers, but also to pupils, treatment staff, and institutional managers, that aim for translating analytical insights into everyday practice. Education in Youth Detention Homes will be of interest to researchers and students in criminology, sociology, social anthropology, and social work, as well as to professionals in the field of education for young people at risk of crime, psychosocial problems, and social exclusion.

Since 1960, two-thirds of very large governmental projects in Nigeria have not only failed, but been abandoned mid-course. This presents a bigger failure rate than mega projects elsewhere, and yet there is no available data or analysis to help us understand the reasons behind such failures. This book provides an authoritative examination into why very large projects in Nigeria have failed so badly, and provides practical recommendations on how the Nigerian government can improve its project performance. Drawing on data from 38 very large projects (19 completed and 19 abandoned) with a total budget of over $25B, this book presents detailed analysis of these projects and in-depth case studies 11 of the projects, and presents lessons for improvement. Through this, the authors have identified a small number of key success drivers, and argue that making moderate improvements on any of them would, on average, save hundreds of millions of dollars on one large project alone. This book is a game-changer in the management of government mega projects in Nigeria. With clear implications for other developing economies, this is a vital resource for project management practitioners, executives and civil servants. This is an open access book.