Humanities & Social Sciences

This article reconsiders the impact of the Spanish comedia on early-seventeenth-century French theatre, arguing that its influence extends well beyond direct translations to a deep reshaping of dramaturgical practice. It traces the diffusion of the so called « pentagonal schema » from Lope de Vega into French comedy and tragedy, especially in Corneille, where it powers action despite classicist demands for unity. By subordinating multiple love plots to a primary through-line, Corneille reframes Aristotelian theory into a two-thread model that heightens uncertainty and spectacle. The study situates these mechanisms within wider European narrative habits yet underscores the comedia’s distinctive role in formal consolidation and stage efficacy.

How and under what conditions does the European Union (EU) shape processes of institution building in other regional organizations? This book develops and tests a theory of interorganizational diffusion in international relations that explains how successful pioneer organizations shape institutional choices in other organizations by affecting the institutional preferences and bargaining strategies of national governments. The author argues that Europe’s foremost regional organization systematically affects institution building abroad, but that such influence varies across different types of organization. Mixing quantitative and qualitative methods, it shows how the EU institutionally strengthens regional organizations through active engagement and by building its own institutions at home. Yet the contractual nature of other regional organizations bounds this causal influence: EU influence makes an identifiable difference primarily in those organizations that, like the EU itself, rest on an open-ended contract. Evidence for these claims is drawn from the statistical analysis of a dataset on the institutionalization of 35 regional organizations in the period from 1950 to 2017, as well as from detailed single and comparative case studies on institutional creation and (non-)change in the Southern African Development Community, Mercosur, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

This open-access textbook provides a comprehensive, up-to-date guide for students and practitioners wishing to access in a single volume the key disciplines and principles of wheat breeding. Wheat is a cornerstone of food security: it is the most widely grown of any crop and provides 20% of all human calories and protein. The authorship of this book includes world class researchers and breeders whose expertise spans cutting-edge academic science all the way to impacts in farmers’ fields. The book’s themes and authors were selected to provide a didactic work that considers the background to wheat improvement, current mainstream breeding approaches, and translational research and avant garde technologies that enable new breakthroughs in science to impact productivity. While the volume provides an overview for professionals interested in wheat, many of the ideas and methods presented are equally relevant to small grain cereals and crop improvement in general. The book is affordable, and because it is open access, can be readily shared and translated -- in whole or in part -- to university classes, members of breeding teams (from directors to technicians), conference participants, extension agents and farmers. Given the challenges currently faced by academia, industry and national wheat programs to produce higher crop yields --- often with less inputs and under increasingly harsher climates -- this volume is a timely addition to their toolkit.

The Syntax of Dutch will be published in at least seven volumes in the period 2012-2016 and aims at presenting a synthesis of the currently available syntactic knowledge of Dutch. It is primarily concerned with language description and not with linguistic theory, and provides support to all researchers interested in matters relating to the syntax of Dutch, including advanced students of language and linguistics. The volume Adjectives and Adjective Phrases discusses the internal make-up as well as the distribution of adjective phrases. Topics that will be covered include: complementation and modification of adjective phrases; comparative and superlative formation; the attributive, predicative and adverbial uses of adjective phrases. Special attention is paid to the so-called partitive genitive construction and the adverbial use of past/passive participles and infinitives.

Through his way of historical representation, Orosius wants to proof that Christianity is not responsible for the catastrophe of his own time: the sack of Rome in 410 AD. In her study, the author examines Orosius’ numerous descriptions of war in a systematic way. In doing so, she demonstrates how through his compilations Orosius is able to present pre-Christian history as a succession of cruelty, death and bloodshed and at the same time separates wars and disasters in Christian times clearly from this previous picture. In the end, the Christian Goths invading Rome transform the plundering into a holy procession. According to Orosius, war success and better conditions thus stand for the superiority of the Christian faith.

In 1982, the Italian television network RAI produced a TV series by Giuliano Montaldo on the travels of the Venetian merchant Marco Polo. Broadcast in forty-six countries, the Emmy Award-winning cinematic project, which involved partners from the United States, Japan, Germany, and France, stood as the first film co-production between Italy and China and represented a relevant step in the consolidation of the Sino-Italian friendship after the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1970. This paper aims to research the transnational dynamics enacted by Marco Polo during the Sino-Italian co-production and presents the making of the TV series in China from ideation to distribution. The study includes an original interview with the director Montaldo (2022).

The here collected contributions relating to the 46th International Conference of the Representation Disciplines Teachers, organized jointly by Sapienza University of Rome, Roma Tre University, and San Raffaele Roma University, aim to offer the scientific community a reflection on the theoretical and methodological aspects related to the concept of èkphrasis, a term that, in the field of representation, concerns descriptive, analogical, and digital activities that generate new knowledge in several areas of application. The Conference aims to place at the center of the discussion an interpretation of the concept of research that, without neglecting an idea of study, protection, and enhancement of environmental and cultural heritage, focuses on the needs of contemporary society and its possible developments, making use of innovative theoretical, methodological, and operational activities, including those characterized by an interdisciplinary approach. According to this interpretation, research can also be seen as a foreshadowing of the definition and testing of experimental proposals aimed at exploring new areas of investigation: this opens up imaginative and utopian perspectives in the relationship between the sciences, the arts, and the disciplines that contribute to common goals, through the experimentation of methods, techniques, and languages for conceiving, prefiguring, designing, and representing.

This chapter aims to interpret the political role and moral values that characterised the action of the first two generations of the Supponids (and in particular that of the count Adalgisus) in order to study how the emperors structured their relationship with some of the main families of the kingdom. As “resources” of the publicum, the members of this kin group were protagonists of political developments and social paths which gradually developed into a complex relationship that combined loyalty to the king with a strong aristocratic consciousness.

This book is a rich text for introducing diverse aspects of real-time systems including architecture, specification and verification, scheduling and real world applications. It is useful for advanced graduate students and researchers in a wide range of disciplines impacted by embedded computing and software. Since the book covers the most recent advances in real-time systems and communications networks, it serves as a vehicle for technology transition within the real-time systems community of systems architects, designers, technologists, and system analysts. Real-time applications are used in daily operations, such as engine and break mechanisms in cars, traffic light and air-traffic control and heart beat and blood pressure monitoring. This book includes 15 chapters arranged in 4 sections, Architecture (chapters 1-4), Specification and Verification (chapters 5-6), Scheduling (chapters 7-9) and Real word applications (chapters 10-15).

Over recent years, there has been rising interest in the societal and political roles of multinational corporations (MNCs), increasingly engaging in issues previously reserved for govern-mental actors. Scholars have started analyzing the various interactions between corporations, foreign governments, and communities, referring to corporate diplomacy as the societal engagement of MNCs in the host country environment. The core goal of corporate diplomacy is to gain organizational legitimacy in the host country society and, in this regard, be perceived as acting appropriately and being socially acceptable. By applying a neo-institutional public relations perspective on corporate diplomacy, I explore the legitimation process of European MNCs in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on three levels. The three views applied in this thesis include the company aiming at communicating its corporate diplomacy efforts, the mass media covering news about corporate diplomacy and the corporation, and the general audience that receives and interprets the information about corporate diplomacy, ascribing legitimacy. Building on that, the purpose of my thesis is to (1) examine the extent to which and how corporate diplomacy is practiced and communicated to be perceived as legitimate, (2) investigate how the media coverage in the host country covers and frames the MNC and its corporate diplomacy efforts, and (3) analyze how corporate diplomacy news affects the organizational legitimacy perceptions of the host country community toward the foreign corporation. In this thesis, I applied a multi-method research design, including in-depth interviews with public relations executives in Abu Dhabi and Dubai (N = 25), a content analysis of the media coverage of corporate diplomacy in Emirati news outlets (N = 385), and an experimental design study surveying residents in the UAE (N = 199) to explore the legitimation process of MNCs through corporate diplomacy. The findings indicate that MNCs strategically use public relations and communication to identify and respond to the societal expectations of the most relevant groups in their host country environment, which can contribute to the MNCs’ legitimacy. Simultaneously, MNCs seek to address demands arising from the corporations’ head-quarters and home countries, leading to different corporate diplomacy modes that affect organizational legitimacy differently. The analysis of the local media coverage revealed two media frames that contribute to organizational legitimacy on both a moral level and a pragmatic level. The findings suggest that legitimacy judgments in the local media mainly depend on the demonstrated linkages between corporate diplomacy and the key actors in the host country and the outlined beneficiaries of corporate diplomacy. The findings of the experimental survey revealed that favorable assessments of organizational legitimacy most probably occur in the UAE when the MNCs engage with the local government, which is, in most cases, inevitable due to the particularities in the given country context. In this way, my results pointed particularly to the role of a country’s culture and its political system regarding corporate diplomacy, public relations, and the legitimation process. Analyzing corporate diplomacy from a communicative and relationship-oriented perspective on the corporations, the media, and the general audience, this thesis provides substantial insights into how MNCs can take an active role in gaining legitimacy while shedding light on how legitimacy is co-constructed by the media and its audiences. This central research gap has not been analyzed before, thus this study contributes significantly to international public relations research and practice.

Esta obra muestra una radiografía actual de algunos de los principales focos temáticos que dominan en el ámbito de la Didáctica de la Lengua y la Literatura. La aparición hace unos años de una nueva ley orgánica —la conocida como LOMLOE— ha llevado a que la enseñanza y aprendizaje de las lenguas reajusten algunos de sus puntos de interés. Uno de los que ha surgido con mayor fuerza es el relacionado con la competencia plurilingüe, al convertirse esta en una competencia clave que todo alumnado debe adquirir a lo largo de su formación. El modo de abordarla, así como otras cuestiones directamente relacionadas con ella, como la interculturalidad o la enseñanza de lenguas extranjeras, funcionan como hilo conductor de toda esta obra. Son aportaciones que intentan ser orientadoras para que los docentes puedan enfrentar los desafíos que en estos momentos están surgiendo dentro del aula.

This volume offers a socio-technical exploration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the way it reflects and reproduces certain normative representations of gender and sexuality, to ultimately guide more diverse and radical discussions of life with digital technologies. Moving beyond the examination of empirical examples and technical solutions, the book approaches the relationship between queerness and AI from a theoretical perspective that posits queer theory as central to understanding AI differently. The chapters pose questions about the politics and ethics of machine embodiments and data imaginaries on the one hand, and about technical possibilities for a production of social identities characterised by shifting diversity and multiplicity on the other, as they are mediated by and through digital technologies. Transgressing disciplinary boundaries to engage a diversity of conceptual tools, critical approaches, and theoretical traditions, this book will be an important resource for students and researchers of gender and sexuality, new media and digital cultures, cultural theory, art and visual culture, and AI. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

In this book, we discuss the changing medical and public profile of fungal infections in the period 1850–2000. We consider four sets of diseases: ringworm and athlete’s foot (dermatophytosis); thrush or candidiasis (infection with Candida albicans); endemic, geographically specific infections in North America (coccidioidomycosis, blastomycosis and histoplasmosis) and mycotoxins; and aspergillosis (infection with Aspergillus fumigatus). We discuss each disease in relation to developing medical knowledge and practices, and to social changes associated with ‘modernity’. Thus, mass schooling provided ideal conditions for the spread of ringworm of the scalp in children, and the rise of college sports and improvement of personal hygiene led to the spread of athlete’s foot. Antibiotics seemed to open the body to more serious Candida infections, as did new methods to treat cancers and the development of transplantation. Regional fungal infections in North America came to the fore due to the economic development of certain regions, where population movement brought in non-immune groups who were vulnerable to endemic mycoses. Fungal toxins or mycotoxins were discovered as by-products of modern food storage and distribution technologies. Lastly, the rapid development and deployment of new medical technologies, such as intensive care and immunosuppression in the last quarter of the twentieth century, increased the incidence of aspergillosis and other systemic mycoses.

For most of his adult life Severt Young Bear stood in the light—in the center ring at powwows and other gatherings of Lakota people. As founder and, for many years, lead singer of the Porcupine Singers, a traditional singing and drumming group, he also stood, figuratively, in the light of understanding the cherished Lakota heritage. Young Bear's own life in Brotherhood Community, Porcupine District of the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation, is the linchpin of this narrative, which ranges across the landscape of Dakota culture, from the significance of names to the search for modern Lakota identity, from Lakota oral traditions to powwows and giveaways, from child-rearing practices to humor and leadership. "Music is at the center of Lakota life," says Young Bear; he describes in rich detail the origins and varieties of Lakota song and dance. A descendant of chiefs and of Wounded Knee survivors, he recounts his role in Wounded Knee II 1973 and his association with the AIM Song. A highly respected musician, teacher, and elder, Severt Young Bear performed with the Porcupine Singers throughout North America, taught at Oglala Lakota College, and served on the Oglala Sioux tribal council. He was music and dance consultant for the films Dances with Wolves and Thunder Heart. This book is the fruit of his long friendship and collaboration with R. D. Theisz, a fellow Porcupine Singer and professor of communications and education at Black Hills State University. Says Theisz, "We're trying to write this book so that Lakota people and our nonIndian friends can find better understanding . . . so that those people waiting in the dark—perhaps we have a little of them in all of us—can approach the light."

In 2015, Miguel Real publishes O último europeu 2284 (The Last European 2284), where he conducts, through the tale of an ideal and utopian city, an analysis of a European Union crumbling around all sorts of conflicts. In the current context, does Europe have a future? Is the future of a community compatible with human nature? These are the questions we will be reflecting upon in this article, through the study of this work.