Humanities & Social Sciences

This open access book explores the socio-economic challenges and recovery efforts in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Myanmar during the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses on the pandemic’s wide-ranging impacts, particularly on individuals, households, and small and medium-sized enterprises across key sectors such as agriculture, garment manufacturing, and tourism. The analysis incorporates cross-cutting themes, including gender disparities and social protection, highlighting the uneven effects on different demographics. The book also discusses the policy responses adopted by these countries to mitigate socio-economic challenges. It examines the mechanisms employed during policy implementation, identifying key lessons for managing crises in the region. The book aims for a diverse audience, including students, researchers, policymakers, and development practitioners. Offering evidence-based insights, this volume is an important resource for understanding crisis management and policy development in the context of developing countries.

In January 1995, four Latin American countries, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay joined their destinies within a common and ambitious enterprise called MERCOSUR. MERCOSUR, the Common Market of the South, represents an important economic integration area that generates a GDP of $US 600 billion, providing a market of 200 million people spread over an area of 12 million square km. Initially, MERCOSUR performance has been more than successful, as intra-MERCOSUR trade has increased significantly. However, the elimination of intra-MERCOSUR tariffs will not be efficient if at the same time the sharp variability of nominal exchange rates artificially affects the relative prices of different products. The question as to the choice of the optimal exchange rate system to be adopted among MERCOSUR countries becomes critical if MERCOSUR states attempt to go further along the path of increasing their trade flows of goods and services. The study contributes to filling this gap by providing some alternative answers to this issue. The analysis has been based on three pillars: a theoretical review of exchange rate systems; a review of the European experience; and an analysis of the Latin American experience.

This book has been prepared to embody the major and efficient applications of the different duties and the role of sustainability in urban planning and design, by a new reading of the city structure and composition, as well as offering a solid and clear concept for this kind of science. The book aims to illustrate various theories and methods of the treatment of the modern ideas of metropolitan life. The book is divided into two parts and contains 23 chapters.

Heated debates about Muslim women's veiling practices have regularly attracted the attention of European policymakers over the last decade. The headscarf has been both vehemently contested by national and/or regional governments, political parties and public intellectuals and passionately defended by veil wearing women and their supporters. Systematically applying a comparative perspective, this book addresses the question of why the headscarf tantalises and causes such controversy over issues about religious pluralism, secularism, neutrality of the state, gender oppression, citizenship, migration, and multiculturalism. Seeking also to establish why the issue has become part of the disciplinary practices of some European countries but not of others, this work brings together an important collection of interpretative research regarding the current debates on the veil in Europe, offering an interdisciplinary scope and European-wide setting. Brought together through a common research methodology, the contributors focus on the different religious, political and cultural meanings of the veiling issue across eight countries and develop a comparative explanation of veiling regimes. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of religion & politics, gender studies and multiculturalism.

To several governments, modern international terrorism cannot be handled adequately within the ordinary criminal justice system. To fight terrorism (including the criminalization of certain “abstract danger”, preparatory activities such as terrorist training, membership in a terrorist organization) more effectively, criminal law had to be adapted.

In this landmark Companion, expert contributors from around the world map out the field of the critical medical humanities. This is the first volume to introduce comprehensively the ways in which interdisciplinary thinking across the humanities and social sciences might contribute to, critique and develop medical understanding of the human individually and collectively. The thirty-six newly commissioned chapters range widely within and across disciplinary fields, always alert to the intersections between medicine, as broadly defined, and critical thinking. Each chapter offers suggestions for further reading on the issues raised, and each section concludes with an Afterword, written by a leading critic, outlining future possibilities for cutting-edge work in this area. Topics covered in this volume include: the affective body, biomedicine, blindness, breath, disability, early modern medical practice, fatness, the genome, language, madness, narrative, race, systems biology, performance, the postcolonial, public health, touch, twins, voice and wonder. Together the chapters generate a body of new knowledge and make a decisive intervention into how health, medicine and clinical care might address questions of individual, subjective and embodied experience.

Building on concepts from Science & Technology Studies, Simon David Hirsbrunner investigates practices and infrastructures of computer modeling and science communication in climate impact research. The book characterizes how scientists calculate future climate risks in computer models and scenarios, but also how they circulate their insights and make them accessible and comprehensible to others. By discussing elements such as infrastructures, visualizations, models, software and data, the chapters show how computational modeling practices are currently changing in light of digital transformations and expectations for an open science. A number of inventive research devices are proposed to capture both the fluidity and viscosity of contemporary digital technology.

The 43rd UID conference, held in Genova, takes up the theme of ‘Dialogues’ as practice and debate on many fundamental topics in our social life, especially in these complex and not yet resolved times. The city of Genova offers the opportunity to ponder on the value of comparison and on the possibilities for the community, naturally focused on the aspects that concern us, as professors, researchers, disseminators of knowledge, or on all the possibile meanings of the discipline of representation and its dialogue with ‘others’, which we have broadly catalogued in three macro areas: History, Semiotics, Science / Technology. Therefore, “dialogue” as a profitable exchange based on a common language, without which it is impossible to comprehend and understand one another; and the graphic sign that connotes the conference is the precise transcription of this concept: the title ‘translated’ into signs, derived from the visual alphabet designed for the visual identity of the UID since 2017. There are many topics which refer to three macro sessions: - Witnessing (signs and history) - Communicating (signs and semiotics) - Experimenting (signs and sciences) Thanks to the different points of view, an exceptional resource of our disciplinary area, we want to try to outline the prevailing theoretical-operational synergies, the collaborative lines of an instrumental nature, the recent updates of the repertoires of images that attest and nourish the relations among representation, history, semiotics, sciences.

The essay concerns the Commitment of the University Professors within the most important local Political Institutions: the Municipality of Florence and the Tuscany Region. The chronological period examined in the first case goes from 1944 to 2019; in the first case goes from 1944 to 2019. For each election, within a brief historical-political framework, are indicated the Faculty Members who have held the position of Council members (Municipal or Regional), of Councillor or of Mayor, and the respective party to which they belong.

A kötet az etnográfusok által a magyar falvakban a második világháború utáni évtizedekben készített interjúkból válogat. A különböző szövegek elemzésével a paraszti (vagy utóparaszti) életmód, a család és a rokonság, a munka, a termelés, a társadalmi rétegződés és a mobilitás, valamint a mindennapi élet, mint a változó értékrendszerek reprezentációi, továbbá az identifikáció egyaránt vizsgálható. A narratívák arra is utalnak, hogy ezeknek a társadalmi és kulturális jelenségeknek az egykori falusi közvélemény, illetve a kommunikáció milyen jelentéseket adott, végül a szövegek nyelvi elemzése lehetőséget kínált a mnemotechnika, valamint a tapasztalat és az emlékezet vizsgálatára.

This book contributes to the study of oceans, seas, coastal waters, and rivers within blue humanities by broadening, circulating, and interweaving knowledge about such waters, ocean epistemologies, and sea narratives from pluriversal epistemological, geographical, cultural, and disciplinary perspectives. The contributors from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, North America and the Pacific explore the interconnections between oceans, coastal areas, rivers, humans, animals, plants, organisms, and landscapes in the fields of cultural history and cultural studies, critical race and postcolonial studies, marine and environmental studies, linguistics, literature, film and media studies.

Fusako Innami offers the first comprehensive study of touch and skinship—relationality with the other through the skin—in modern Japanese writing. The concept of the unreachable—that is, the lack of characters’ complete ability to touch what they try to reach for—provides a critical intervention on the issue of intimacy. Touch has been philosophically addressed in France, but literature is an effective—or possibly the most productive—venue for exploring touch in Japan, as literary texts depict what the characters may be concerned with but may not necessarily say out loud. Such a moment of capturing the gap between the felt and the said—the interaction between the body and language—can be effectively analyzed by paying attention to layers of verbalization, or indeed translation, by characters’ utterances, authors’ depictions, and readers’ interpretations. Each of the writers discussed in this book—starting with Nobel prize winner Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, and Matsuura Rieko—presents a particular obsession with objects or relationality to the other constructed via the desire for touch. In Touching the Unreachable, phenomenological and psychoanalytical approaches are cross-culturally interrogated in engaging with literary touch to constantly challenge what may seem like the limit of transferability regarding concepts, words, and practices. The book thereby not only bridges cultural gaps beyond geographic and linguistic constraints, but also aims to decentralize a Eurocentric hegemony in its production and use of theories and brings Japanese cultural and literary analyses into further productive and stimulating intellectual dialogues. Through close readings of the authors’ treatment of touch, Innami develops a theoretical framework with which to examine intersensorial bodies interacting with objects and the environment through touch.

Der zweite Band der Kleinen Schriften des Zürcher Neutestamentlers versammelt 22 Beiträge aus fast 20 Jahren, die sich historisch und philologisch dem theologischen Anspruch der Texte des Neuen Testaments widmen. Der Bogen reicht dabei von der impliziten Christologie und der apokalyptischen Eschatologie in der Verkündigung Jesu über die Modelle der Deutung seines Todes, den religiösen Hintergrund und den geistigen Weg des Paulus und Fragen seiner Rechtfertigungs- und Kreuzestheologie bis hin zum Heilsverständnis, der Ekklesiologie und Eschatologie des Neuen Testaments und zu Fragen der Konstruktion einer Theologie des Neuen Testaments. Leitende Überzeugung ist dabei, dass das Neue Testament historisch und theologisch zu lesen ist und dass seine Interpretation auch für Fragen der gegenwärtigen Glaubenspraxis fruchtbar zu machen ist.

Elections are episodic; governance is routine. This book studies patterns in public opinion on politics and society between elections in India. By using the survey data covering 24 Indian states including the National Capital Region of Delhi (NCR), it will serve as State barometers of public opinion. The surveys seek to understand how politics and governance processes are nested in the social and political relationships between citizens inter se and with government functionaries. The book explores citizen perceptions about the social and political universes they inhabit in periods between elections. It examines social attitudes of citizens, friendship ties across social groups, gender roles and relationships; opinions on governance, ease of public service access, the citizen-state interface, and trust in political institutions; and, political attitudes and identity, nationalism, freedom of expression, and populism. This book explores public perceptions of everyday development and governance outcomes that are shaped by how the government functions between elections: how it relates to citizens on a regular basis; how it provides routine public services to them; and how public order is maintained. An incisive study on public opinion on politics, society, and governance in India, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of political science, governance, public policy, and South Asian studies. It will also be of immense interest to bureaucrats, policymakers, think tanks, and organisations working in the areas of development studies, politics, society, and governance.

This volume presents three important themes for the study of Indonesian politics, cultures, and urban space: 1) urban regeneration and collective memory, 2) marginality and the other archives, 3) mood, medium, and media. Readers will find in the collection elements of urban imaginary and practices as represented in essays on community archiving, heritage, spatial experiments, gangsters and hooligans, sex work and sexual violence, youth subcultures, marketplaces, museums, and elite subdivisions. With this, the book offers readers a way to look at how the contributors approach the ever- shifting urban space as a cultural and political arena: how space is represented, produced and contested and how they are implicated in identity formations today and in the past; how individual and collective memories are fixated, disrupted, or catapulted forward by mobility and spatial transformation; how people, landscapes, buildings, movements join forces in transforming self and space, resulting in significant reconfiguration of politics, culture, and memory. This is an open access book.