Humanities & Social Sciences

This open access book includes original, peer-reviewed research papers from the 2023 International Conference on Wireless Communications, Networking and Applications (WCNA 2023), held in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China, from December 29 to 31, 2023. The topics covered include but are not limited to: Wireless Communications; Devices, Tools, and Techniques for WSN and Other Wireless Networks; Wireless Sensor Networks; Internet of Things (IoT); AI; Signal Processing; and Sustainable Pervasive WSN Applications. The papers showcased here share the latest findings on Wireless Communications, Networking and Applications, making the book a valuable asset for researchers, scientists, scholars, engineers and students from the universities all around the world and the industry.

This handbook engages with and broadens current debates on men and masculinities in conflict and peacebuilding. Through an expansive range of chapters across a unique array of geographical settings, the volume shatters prevailing assumptions about men’s relationship to conflict and its wake. Situated across scholarship, policy, and practice, the contributions offer new possibilities for a more complex and complete picture of the gendered tapestries of conflict, peace, and the spaces in between. The handbook combines feminist, intersectional, relational, decolonial, and queer perspectives on the conceptualisation of masculinities in conflict and peacebuilding. This approach provides us with the tools to go beyond direct, physical, conflict-related violence to examine less visible forms of violence and power as well as other ways in which masculinities interact with conflict and peace. In doing so, the book permits a multi-faceted view of men’s roles, relationships, vulnerabilities, and non-violent agencies in conflict and peacebuilding across scholarship, policy, and practice. This book will be of much interest to students of gender, masculinities, peace and conflict studies, and international relations. Chapter 1, 3, 9, 13, and 30 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. Chapter 25 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

Screen Captures: Film in the Age of Emergency offers a vibrant and accessible collection of essays that explore how films and changes in the media industries reflect and influence our political, cultural, technological, and ecological moment. Critic Stephen Lee Naish reveals what lies just out of frame: the climate crisis, the ongoing Disney-fication of franchises, the audience's active participation in the rewriting and reproduction of their attention, and the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the movie theaters. Screen Captures explores these tensions from the rebooted Star Wars franchise to the dominance of superheroes, the pop cultural memeification of Nicholas Cage to the artistic worlds of David Lynch, the failing American Dream in the American Pie franchise, and the female interpretation of toxic masculinity on screen and in public life. Naish argues that film isn’t merely escapism and entertainment—it’s a political space that bleeds into our daily lives. Appealing to pop culture fans and film critics alike, these essays challenge the reader to question, critique, and go beyond passive consumption of what we see on our screens.

"From Jonathan Swift to Washington Irving, those looking to propose and justify exceptions to social and political norms turned to Cervantes’s notoriously mad comic hero as a model. A World of Disorderly Notions examines the literary and political effects of Don Quixote, arguing that what makes this iconic character so influential across oceans and cultures is not his madness but his logic. Aaron Hanlon contends that the logic of quixotism is in fact exceptionalism—the strategy of rendering oneself an exception to everyone else’s rules. As British and American societies of the Enlightenment developed the need to question the acceptance of various forms of imperialism and social contract theory—and to explain both the virtues and limitations of revolutions past and ongoing—it was Quixote’s exceptionalism, not his madness, that captured the imaginations of so many writers and statesmen. As a consequence, the eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of imitations of Quixote in fiction and polemical writing, by writers such as Jonathan Swift, Charlotte Lennox, Henry Fielding, and Washington Irving, among others. Combining literary history and political theory, Hanlon clarifies an ongoing and immediately relevant history of exceptionalism, of how states from Golden Age Spain to imperial Britain to the formative United States rendered themselves exceptions so they could act with impunity. In so doing, he tells the story of how Quixote became exceptional."

This publication is a collection of articles which summarise results of investigations into archival materials concerning wartime stories of various nations involved in the Great War. The objective of the authors was to analyse the wartime experience of individuals and local communities as well as whole nations. They further tried to present a closer, more personal overview of wartime drama. As a result the book portrays the impact of the Great War on the lives of multicultural communities, re-constructs individual war narratives and studies consequences of the conflict. The use of various types of historical materials from state archives and from other sources enabled the authors to create a multifaceted portrayal of the war seen from local and international perspectives.

Fragen nach dem Verhältnis zwischen Natur und Menschen bzw. der Gesellschaft sind in Anbetracht zunehmender globaler Krisen aktueller denn je. Die komplexen Herausforderungen des 21. Jahrhunderts erfordern einen interdisziplinären Blick, um sie in Forschung, Vermittlung und Praxis tiefgründig durchdringen und verstehen zu können. In welchem Verhältnis stehen dabei Natur, Bildung und die Perspektiven unterschiedlicher Fachrichtungen? Die Beiträger*innen widmen sich sowohl praktischen als auch theoretischen Dimensionen. Dabei loten sie verschiedene fachdidaktische und pädagogische Potenziale aus, die in einer Auseinandersetzung mit den Zusammenhängen von Bildungsprozessen sowie dem weiten Begriffsfeld »Natur« schlummern.

The literary and cultural fabric of German-German relations before and after 1989 in an international context. What role do literature and literary studies play in the social negotiation processes that precede and follow political change? The contributors examine the intermediate positions of authors critical of the system and those who fled the system, such as Jurek Becker, Volker Braun, Thomas Brussig, Brigitte Burmeister, Christoph Hein, Wolfgang Hilbig, Günter Grass, Irmtraud Morgner, Herta Müller and Helga M. Novak. What impact did the (personal) change of system have on their writing, their literary subjects and their aesthetic reference points? How did publishing practices and literary reception in East and West change in the course of political transformation? With contributions by Katrin von Boltenstern, Chieh Chien, Igor Ebanoidze, Jie Han, Asako Miyazaki, Yuji Nawata, Xiaocui Qiu, Sandra Richter, Konstantin Ulmer, Hiroshi Yamamoto, Yang Yu, Leilian Zhao and a conversation with Yoko Tawada.

Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation uses original readings of Machiavelli’s texts to develop a new theoretical model of democratic practice. Christopher Holman identifies two unique ideas in Machiavelli through his rearrangement of Machiavellian concepts. The first, drawn primarily from The Prince, is an image of the individual human being as a creative subject that seeks the exteriorization of desire via political creation. The second, drawn primarily from The Discourses on Livy, is an image of the democratic republic as a form of regime in which this desire for creative self-expression is universalized, all citizens being able to affirm their psychic orientation toward innovation through their equal access to political institutions and orders. Such institutions and orders, to the extent that they function as media for the expression of a fundamental human creativity, must be arranged so that they are capable of continual interrogation and refinement.

The avant-garde posits the possibility of total rupture with the past. This book pulls back on this futuristic impulse by showing how theater became a key site for artists on the edge of capitalism to reconfigure the role of the aesthetic between 1917 and 1934. The book argues that this “unfinished art”—because of its weakness as a representative institution in Mexico and Brazil, where the bourgeois stage had not yet coalesced—was at the forefront of struggles to redefine the relationship between art and social change. Drawing on archival research, Townsend reveals the importance of avant-garde projects that belie the rhetoric of rupture and immediacy: ethnographic operas, populist puppet plays, children’s radio programs, a philosophical drama about the birth of a new race, and an antifascist spectacle written for a theater shut down by the police. The book argues that avant-garde art is tied to the experience of dependency, delay, and the uneven development of capitalism.

Sensor-based sorting enables the separation of individual particles from a material stream. In this work, a novel sorting system using an area-scan camera is investigated. The use of high-speed cameras raises exciting research questions from a computer science perspective regarding the extraction and use of more advanced features, especially motion information about the materials to be sorted.

Dieses Open-Access-Buch untersucht mit Fokus auf einzelne Bürger*innen fallspezifisch und empirisch den Handlungs- und Wirkungszusammenhang von Straßenprotest und Online-Aktivismus im Bereich der Umweltschutz-Bewegung. Eine ganze Bandbreite von Online- und Offline-Protestpraktiken erlaubt es Bürger*innen heutzutage, sich in politische Prozesse einzumischen, Öffentlichkeit für bestimmte Themen zu erzeugen und Politiker*innen und Unternehmen unter Druck zu setzen. Online ist hierbei jedoch nicht zwangsläufig Ersatz für Offline. In vielen Situationen von Protestpartizipation ergänzen sich Elemente beider Sphären. Warum entschließen sich Bürger*innen, ganz spezifischen Praktiken – online wie offline – nachzugehen und anderen Praktiken nicht? Welche Vor- und Nachteile benennen sie für die einzelnen ihnen zur Verfügung stehenden Formate? Die Arbeit steht im Schnittfeld unterschiedlicher politikwissenschaftlicher Forschungsfelder wie der Protestforschung, der politischen Partizipationsforschung und der Forschung rund um das Thema Digitalisierung. Basierend auf 18 Leitfaden-Interviews und einer ausführlichen Analyse werden sechs Typen von Protest-Aktivist*innen gebildet.

Die Arbeit analysiert, wie die gegenläufigen Rechtsgüter bei der Berichterstattung über Gerichtsverfahren und Rechtsprechung sowie bei Meinungsäußerungen von Richtern in den Medien in einen Ausgleich gebracht werden können, und inwiefern ein kommunikativer Ansatz justizieller Öffentlichkeitsarbeit den im Rahmen des regulatorischen Ansatzes erzielten Ausgleich ergänzen kann. Dabei werden verfassungstheoretische und für das bessere Verständnis der potentiellen Medienwirkungen vor allem kommunikationswissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse herangezogen. Die einschlägige Rechtsprechung des Europäische Gerichtshofs für Menschenrechte wird ebenso berücksichtigt, wie die aktuelle Rechtsentwicklung in England und Frankreich.

This book focuses on the fate of Polish Jews and Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust and its aftermath, in the ill-recognized era of Eastern-European pogroms after the WW2. It is based on the author’s own ethnographic research in those areas of Poland where the Holocaust machinery operated. The results comprise the anthropological interviews with the members of the generation of Holocaust witnesses and the results of her own extensive archive research in the Polish Institute for National Remembrance (IPN). «[This book] is at times shocking; however, it grips the reader’s attention from the first to the last page. It is a remarkable work, set to become a classic among the publications in this field.» Jerzy Jedlicki, Professor Emeritus at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Rainwater tank systems have been widely adopted across the world to provide a safe local source of water in underdeveloped rural areas, and as a substitution for mains water for non potable end uses in water stressed urban areas. They also provide flood control in monsoonal climates like Korea or in combined sewer systems like in Germany. The importance of these systems in cities has grown, as water managers seek to provide a range of decentralised solutions to supply constraints of current water supply systems, whilst reducing the impact of urban development on the natural environment, and increasing resilience to climate change. Rainwater Tank Systems for Urban Water Supply is based on a comprehensive, multi-million dollar research program that was undertaken in South East Queensland (SEQ) Australia in response to the Millennium drought when the water supply level in the regions drinking water dams dropped to 17% in July 2007 and the area came close to running out of water.

This qualitative study explores the significance and interrelation among trust, solidarity and emotions in third-sector organisations in Germany. Non-profit organisations (NPOs) are identified as highly emotional. Social interactions within these organisations are shaped by the control mechanism of trust and the guiding principle of solidarity. NPOs rely on interaction among the three social phenomena of trust, solidarity and emotions, which are essential for cooperation and therefore for an organisation to function. This research addresses both the theoretical background and everyday practice of trust, solidarity and emotions and shows the conditions under which they grow and function as well as their interdependencies within NPOs.