Humanities & Social Sciences

The kings of the III. Dynasty of Ur (2112-2004 BC) were always married with several women at a time, of which only one woman took the position of a queen. Among the large number of economic documents of that period, which give a detailed insight into the state economy and administration, more than 1,000 articles relating to transactions of the royal consorts can be assigned. All women of the rulers of Ur were active in business and administration, they were involved in the cult on several occasions and involved in the complex structures of court life. This work investigates in the sources in which functions and activities the royal women were involved and by which degree the posts of a Queen of Ur were different from that of a concubine. In four discurses the situation of the royal women of the Ur III period is compared with the women of the ruling houses in Ebla and the Early Dynastic Akkade (Akkadezeit).

In diesem Open-Access-Buch untersucht Stefanie Lütters, inwieweit Sozialkapital die verzerrte Inanspruchnahme politischer Teilhaberechte erklärt. Denn entgegen der demokratischen Idealvorstellung von politischer Gleichheit ist die politische Beteiligung durch eine Selektivität gekennzeichnet, die sich systematisch entlang sozialer Statusvariablen ausformt. Unter Bezugnahme auf die strukturelle Komponente sozialen Kapitals stehen formelle und informelle Netzwerkkonstellationen im Fokus der Untersuchung, die im Rahmen kontrastierender Sozialräume analysiert werden. Dabei verbindet die Autorin sozialstrukturelle und rationale Handlungstheorien mit netzwerkorientierten und kontextuellen Erklärungsansätzen. Die empirischen Ergebnisse bestätigen den Wert sozialer Netzwerkelemente für die politische Partizipation und stützen eine Rückführung der politischen Passivität prekärer Wohnviertel auf ihr limitiertes Sozialkapitalvermögen. Damit erweist sich nicht die statusbedingte Ressourcenausstattung als partizipationsrelevant, sondern erst deren Überführung in Sozialkapital. Die Datengrundlage bildet eine quantitative Befragung in zwei Kölner Stadtteilen.

This open access book examines the rising challenges of managing diversity in European and Asian cities. It spotlights the roles of varied city makers - from urban leaders to migrant communities and civil society activists - in negotiating and transforming their city’s diversity governance. The book brings together the contributions of urban studies and migration studies scholars, which offer rich empirical analyses on various European and Asian cities, such as Paris, Singapore, Barcelona, and Guangzhou. Adopting a comparative lens, the book presents a decentered understanding of 'super-diverse' cities, examining shifts in urban policy-making within different geographical contexts, with distinct patterns of migration and diversification. By advancing urban comparison as a research tool, it contributes to the contemporary discussions on the local turn of migration and diversity policies.

This open access edited volume is based on the premise that entanglements between current societal, political, technological, ecological, and cultural transformations cannot be sufficiently understood without transforming the modes, forms, and notions of understanding. Conceptually, “uncertain curiosity” is inspired by Helga Nowotny’s Insatiable Curiosity, as it maps trends in the history of knowledge on creative curiosity and its shifting relation to innovation-promoting institutions and societal notions of un/certain and un/predictable futures. This volume explores epistemic, infrastructural, and cosmological conditions under which the curiosity drive can flourish. Adopting an encyclopedic structure, the contributions engage with terminologies that echo transformation processes and conditions of change by foregrounding the ephemeral, the processual, and the desynchronous and address issues of insurability, vagueness, and ambiguity. This is achieved through a blend of case study research, critical terminological work, poetic engagement with language, and visual culture and discourse analysis through the lenses of artistic research, philosophy, media and cultural studies.

The twentieth century has spawned a great interest in Indonesian music, and now books, articles, and manuscripts can be found that expound exclusively about karawitan (the combined vocal and instrumental music of the gamelan). Scholar Judith Becker has culled several key sources on karawitan into three volumes and has translated them for the benefit of the Western student of the gamelan tradition. The texts in her collection were written over a forty-five-year time period (ca 1930–1975) and include articles by Martopangrawit, Sumarsam, Sastrapustaka, Gitosaprodjo, Sindoesawarno, Poerbapangrawit, Probohardjono, Warsadiningrat, Purbodiningrat, Poerbatjaraka, and Paku Buwana X. The final volume also contains a glossary of technical terms, an appendix of the Javanese cipher notations (titilaras kepatihan), a biographical listing, and an index to the musical pieces (Gendhing).

The dynastic centre and the provinces were linked by agents and ritual occasions. This book includes contributions by specialists examining these connections in late imperial China, early modern Europe, and the Ottoman empire, suggesting important revisions and an agenda for comparison. This title is available online in its entirety in Open Access

This book explores how actors practise sovereignty as a force in a multiscalar context. Among the various power structures that perform sovereignty, such as the head of state, a legislative body, or the military, one aspect is clear: the practice of sovereignty relies upon people at multiple levels - better portrayed as scales - of authority. This book focuses on actors – the people who bring sovereignty to life, who imbue it with meaning, and who are ultimately responsible for its practice. With that perspective, the volume interprets various case studies, such as Russian approaches to sovereignty in its leadership and Central Bank, Scottish parties' discourses, and NATO command structures. Beyond those contexts, the work also examines Chinese digital platforms, criminal gangs in Latin America, Polish and Czech nationalist movements, want-to-be states in Kurdistan-Iraq and Abkhazia, and Polish video games – together, these examples demonstrate how actors practise sovereignty in unity with, but also in place of, the state. As proof of concept, the authors further examine how they, as researchers, also qualify as practitioners of sovereignty. In a concluding three-chapter section, they reflexively explore how research methods and disciplines of study actively shape sovereignty and how the latter defines the outer limits of scholarly research. This book will be of interest to students of statehood, sovereignty, discourse analysis, history, political science, sociology, and international relations.

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.

This paper reflects on the experience of the 1999–2002 minority pipeline program (MPP) at the University of California, Riverside. With support from the American Economic Association, the MPP identifi ed students of color interested in economics, let them explore economic issues aff ecting minority communities, and encouraged them to consider postgraduate work in economics. The MPP’s successes and failures can be traced to the shifting balance in California’s racialized political economy, especially a state ballot initiative forbidding the use of applicant race or ethnicity in University of California admission decisions, and to the transformation of economics itself, especially at the level of doctoral training. The MPP experience may be of relevance for other eff orts to increase racial/ethnic diversity in social science disciplines.

Education; Teaching; Learning

Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits is a spatial and historical critique of the capitalist State that examines how Black Rage—conceived as a constructive and logical response to the conquest of resources, land, and human beings racialized as Black—is cleaned for the unyielding means of White capital. Interlacing political theory with international histories of Black rebellion, it presents a thoughtful challenge to the counterinsurgent tactics of the State that consistently convert Black Rage into a commodity to be bought, sold, and repressed. Laundering Black Rage investigates how the Rage directed at the police murder of George Floyd could be marshalled to funnel the Black Lives Matter movement into corporate advertising and questionable leadership, while increasing the police budgets inside the laundry cities of capital - largely with our consent. Essayist/Performer Too Black and Geographer Rasul A. Mowatt assert Black Rage as a threat to the flow of capital and the established order of things, which must therefore be managed by the process of laundering. Intertwining stories of Black resistance throughout the African diaspora, State building under capitalism, cities as sites of laundering, and the world making of empire, Laundering Black Rage also lays the groundwork for upending the laundering process through an anti-colonial struggle of reverse-laundering conquest. Relevant to studies of race and culture, history, politics, and the built environment, this pathbreaking work is essential reading for scholars and organizers enraged at capitalism and White supremacy laundering their work for nefarious means.

Als organisches Baumaterial erfährt Holz in Zeiten der Klimakrise eine besondere Wertschätzung. Eingebunden in umweltschonende Ressourcenkreisläufe zeigt sich seine Innovationskraft, wenn es als Material Bestandteil neuer technologischer Entwicklungen und hybrider Verwendungen wird, die aktuellen und komplexen architektonischen Aufgaben gewachsen sind. Das neue Denken des Materials Holz als hochmodernem und veränderlichem Baustoff der Zukunft hat gerade erst begonnen. GAM. 17 nimmt Holz in seiner Vielschichtigkeit und seinem architektonischen Potenzial neu in den Blick und stellt dabei konstruktive und gestalterische Konzepte vor, die die Möglichkeiten des Materials für eine klimafreundlichere Bauwirtschaft ausloten. Ergänzt wird dies durch einen Rückblick in die Geschichte des Holzbaus und seine ideologischen Verstrickungen, die die Weiterentwicklung des Baustoffs lange erschwert haben. Mit Beiträgen von Reyner Banham, Urs Hirschberg, Anne Isopp, Jens Ludloff, Laila Seewang, Stephan Trüby, Anselm Wagner und anderen

The territory along the coast north-west of Ro me, still well preserved; in the Etruscan period was for the most under Caere control; it had the three important ports. The territory of Caere has been analyzed for a long time now, through an historical-topographic analytical study of the traces of archaeological remains. The research has been carried out by use of historical and recent aerial photographs and glass slides, last but not least the contribution of the monitoring aerial flights operated with the Carabinieri Helicopter Group of Pratica di Mare.

This book explores recent developments, constraints and opportunities relating to the advancement of sexual and reproductive health and rights in Africa. Despite many positive developments in relation to sexual and reproductive health in recent years, many Africans still encounter challenges, for instance in poor maternity services, living with HIV, and discrimination on the basis of age, gender, sexual orientation or identity. Covering topics such as abortion, gender identity, adolescent sexuality and homosexuality, the chapters in this book discuss the impact of culture, morality and social beliefs on the enjoyment of sexual and reproductive health and rights across the continent, particularly in relation to vulnerable and marginalized groups. The book also explores the role of litigation, national human rights institutions and regional human rights bodies in advancing the realization of sexual and reproductive health and rights in the region. Throughout, the contributions highlight the relevance of a rights-based framework in addressing topical and contentious issues on sexual and reproductive health and rights within Sub-Saharan Africa. This book will be of interest to researchers of sexuality, civil rights and health in Africa. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003175049, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Public support and feed-in tariff as a nonvariable compensation for the electric power production of energy have suppressed the risky investment of distributed generators (DGs) in smart distribution systems (SDSs). Although the using renewable energy technologies and the incorporation of plug-in DGs into SDS may have positive effects on congestion management, power loss reduction, and sustainability, they may create some difficulties relating to manage the system optimally by considering the intermittency of renewable resources in power production and uncertainties. Many researches have been carried out to deliver the high-quality power to the end-users with acceptable reliability. This book aims to present the recent materials related to the smart microgrids and the management of intermittent renewable energy sources that organized into seven chapters.