Humanities & Social Sciences

What role does religion play at the end of life in Japan? Spiritual Ends draws on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews to provide an intimate portrayal of how spiritual care is provided to the dying in Japan. Timothy O. Benedict shows how hospice caregivers in Japan are appropriating and reinterpreting global ideas about spirituality and the practice of spiritual care. Benedict relates these findings to a longer story of how Japanese religious groups have pursued vocational roles in medical institutions as a means to demonstrate a so-called “healthy” role in society. Focusing on how care for the kokoro (heart or mind) is key to the practice of spiritual care, this book enriches conventional understandings of religious identity in Japan while offering a valuable East Asian perspective to global conversations on the ways religion, spirituality, and medicine intersect at death. “Timothy Benedict has produced a work brimming with wisdom drawn from his work as a chaplain as well as a broad understanding of the place of religion in the lives of contemporary Japanese people.” — HELEN HARDACRE, Reischauer Institute Professor of Japanese Religions and Society, Harvard University “Benedict offers a highly original perspective and new insightful material, providing a critical approach to the debate about spiritual care and spirituality.” — ERICA BAFFELLI, Professor of Japanese Studies, University of Manchester “Spiritual Ends reveals an unassuming approach to spiritual care that privileges human connections at life’s end.” — JACQUELINE STONE, author of Right Thoughts at the Last Moment: Buddhism and Deathbed Practices in Early Medieval Japan “A discerning study of pain and comfort at the end of life, and a story of the invention of spirituality in Japan, which traffics between medical, psychological, and religious thought.” — AMY B. BOROVOY, Professor of East Asian Studies, Princeton University

This book investigates how mourning is transformed in the digital age, where grief is mediated by algorithms, circulated through hashtags, and shaped by the economies of social media platforms. This timely edited collection explores the rise of digital mourning practices, from TikTok memorials and grief influencers to the politicisation of loss in activist movements. Through a platform- centric lens, the book examines how contemporary grief unfolds publicly, performatively, and often unequally in online spaces. This collection brings together interdisciplinary scholarship, using methods including digital ethnography, visual analysis, and platform critique to reveal the architectures that govern digital mourning. It shows how platform logics determine whose grief is amplified and whose is erased, how moderation policies impact the persistence of loss online, and how mourning is entangled with attention economies, digital labour, and resistance. Readers will gain a deeper understanding of how digital spaces both enable and constrain emotional expression, community care, and practices of remembrance during times of grief. This book will be essential reading for scholars across media and communication studies, death studies, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. It offers conceptual and methodological tools to engage critically with grief’s digital turn, addressing questions of visibility, performance, politics, and platform governance. As mourning becomes increasingly public, networked, and algorithmically structured, this book provides a necessary account of how grief is being reshaped in a rapidly changing media landscape.

This open access textbook provides a concise introduction to economic approaches and mathematical methods for the study of water allocation and distribution problems. Written in an accessible and straightforward style, it discusses and analyzes central issues in integrated water resource management, water tariffs, water markets, and transboundary water management. By illustrating the interplay between the hydrological cycle and the rules and institutions that govern today’s water allocation policies, the authors develop a modern perspective on water management. Moreover, the book presents an in-depth assessment of the political and ethical dimensions of water management and its institutional embeddedness, by discussing distribution issues and issues of the enforceability of human rights in managing water resources. Given its scope, the book will appeal to advanced undergraduate and graduate students of economics and engineering, as well as practitioners in the water sector, seeking a deeper understanding of economic approaches to the study of water management.

In the fields of management and organization, there is an ongoing debate about different ontological assumptions about people in and around organizations, and the dangers of self-fulling prophecies, i.e., the phenomena in which unsubstantiated, unethical, or dysfunctional assumptions about people can lead to adverse practical consequences. This open access book advances this debate, but in a self-reflexive direction, asking: Who do we, as scholars in the fields of management and organization, think we are? What ontological assumptions about ourselves do we live by? Do we think we are something “special”, a 'Homo Academicus', distinctively separated from the life-world of managers and employees but linked with other academics such as, say, philosophers and sociologists? If so, what are the consequences and implications of such assumptions? Part of the popular Palgrave Debates in Business and Management series, each of the chapters disclose, problematize, and criticize different ontological assumptions about 'Homo Academicus' that underpins research in the fields of management and organization. It will be of great interest to management and organization scholars and students, as well as those with a broader interest in methodology and critical studies.

Il contributo ripercorre la lunga esperienza di Giovanni Cherubini nell’Università di Firenze, dal tempo della sua tesi di laurea in Storia medievale con Ernesto Sestan nel 1961 sino al suo collocamento a riposo nel 2009, e oltre. Un arco di quasi mezzo secolo in cui l’Università di Firenze ha dato molto a Giovanni Cherubini, ma molto di più ha ricevuto in cambio, grazie alla sua attività scientifica.

Both in his novels, such as Illazioni su una sciabola (1984), Un altro mare (1991) and Alla cieca (2005), and in his travel writing, such as Danubio (1986), Microcosmi (1997) and L’infinito viaggiare (2005), Claudio Magris outlined a poetics of space that questions about the diachronic depth and the narrative meaning of places. The essay examines the topic of travel in Magris’ work, as a means of metaliterary exploration, in order to reflect on the sense of history and on the identity of the writing subject.

This open access book provides an overview of the work developed within the SODALITE project, which aims at facilitating the deployment and operation of distributed software on top of heterogeneous infrastructures, including cloud, HPC and edge resources. The experts participating in the project describe how SODALITE works and how it can be exploited by end users. While multiple languages and tools are available in the literature to support DevOps teams in the automation of deployment and operation steps, still these activities require specific know-how and skills that cannot be found in average teams. The SODALITE framework tackles this problem by offering modelling and smart editing features to allow those we call Application Ops Experts to work without knowing low level details about the adopted, potentially heterogeneous, infrastructures. The framework offers also mechanisms to verify the quality of the defined models, generate the corresponding executable infrastructural code, automatically wrap application components within proper execution containers, orchestrate all activities concerned with deployment and operation of all system components, and support on-the-fly self-adaptation and refactoring.

environmental economics; biodiversity; sustainable development

Peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbook World History Volume 2 published by OpenStax (Rice University).

Peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbook World History Volume 1 published by OpenStax (Rice University).

Peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbook Us History published by OpenStax (Rice University).

Peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbook Psychology (2e Edition) published by OpenStax (Rice University).

Peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbook Psychology published by OpenStax (Rice University).

Peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbook Introduction Sociology (3e Edition) published by OpenStax (Rice University).

Peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbook Introduction Sociology (2e Edition) published by OpenStax (Rice University).