Humanities & Social Sciences

This book provides new and stimulating perspectives on how Kosovo has shaped the new Europe. It breaks down traditional assumptions in the field of security studies by sidelining the theoretical worldview that underlies mainstream strategic thinking on recent events in Kosovo. The contributors challenge the epistemological definition of the Kosovo conflict, arguing that we should not only be concerned with the 'Kosovo out there', but also with the debate about what counts as security and how our definition of security is shaped by various power and knowledge interests in Kosovo. They have adopted an innovative critical approach, both re-essentialising and deconstructing orthodox assumptions about the nature of European and global security. This book is perfect for final year undergraduates, postgraduates and academics in the field of security studies and international politics.

The “Ambras Book of Heroes,” commissioned by Maximilian I, is one of the most important sources of medieval German literature. In this eleven-volume complete edition, all 25 texts from the codex appear in print for the first time in their original Early New High German wording – for 15 of which there is only a singular transmission. Alongside a precise, diplomatic transcription, this edition also provides additional manuscript scans.

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 open access book provides worldwide examples demonstrating the importance of the interplay between demography and disasters in regions and spatially. It marks an advance in practical and theoretical insights for understanding the role of demography in planning for and mitigating impacts from disasters in developed nations. Both slow onset (like the of loss polar ice from climate change) and sudden disasters (such as cyclones and man-made disasters) have the capacity to fundamentally change the profiles of populations at local and regional levels. Impacts vary according to the type, rapidity and magnitude of the disaster, but also according to the pre-existing population profile and its relationships to the economy and society. In all cases, the key to understanding impacts and avoiding them in the future is to understand the relationships between disasters and population change. In most chapters in this book we compare and contrast studies from at least two cases and summarize their practical and theoretical lessons.

Behind the Story: Ethical Readings of Qurʾānic Narratives is a pivotal work that presents groundbreaking research on the Qurʾānic narrative as a literary genre with profound moral significance. It underscores the genre's integral role in shaping Islamic moral thought, as manifested in areas like Islamic law, theology, Sufism, politics, and art. The book offers insightful interpretations of various Qurʾānic narratives, delving into their ethical dimensions and challenges. It also examines their historical reception and influence across both Muslim and non-Muslim scholarship, covering diverse disciplines such as mysticism, art, and applied ethics. This volume stands as an invaluable resource for scholars and students seeking a deeper understanding of the Qurʾānic narrative and its multifarious interpretations in the context of Islamic Studies and beyond. Contributors Taira Amin, Halla Attallah, Bilal Badat, Fatih Ermiş, Mohammad Fadel, Hannelies Koloska, Samer Rashwani, Emmanuelle Stefanidis, and Devin Stewart. ما وراء الحكاية: دراسات أخلاقية في القصة القرآنية، يعالج هذا الكتاب القَصص القرآني من حيث هو نوعٌ أدبي ذو مضمون أخلاقي في المقام الأول، الأمر الذي لم يَحظَ بالنظر العلمي والمنهجي من قبل؛ على الرغم من تأثيره العميق في حقول الفقه والكلام والتصوف والسياسة والأخلاق والفن، وغيرها. يقدم القسم الأول قراءات تأويلية تسعى للكشف عن المفاهيم والمبادئ والأسئلة الأخلاقية التي يثيرها القصص القرآني، بينما يكشف القسم الثاني عن تاريخ تلقيها وتأثيرها في فنون عديدة تشمل التصوف والأدب والعمارة والأخلاق التطبيقية. هذا الكتاب لبنة جديدة في منهج دراسة القصص القرآني، ويطمح إلى أن يكون مرجعاً لا غنى عنه للباحثين والطلاب المشتغلين في حقول الدراسات القرآنية، والأخلاق النظرية والتطبيقية، والتصوف، والفنون، والدراسات الإسلامية عمومًا. المساهمون فاتح إرمش، وطاهرة أمين، وبلال بادات، وسامر رشواني، وإيمانويلا ستيفانيديس، وديفين ستيوارت، وهالة عطاء الله، ومحمد فاضل، وهانيليس كولوسكا.

The evangelisation of the peoples of western Europe to Christianity was arguably the single most important historical development of the early Middle Ages, shaping not only the beliefs and religious practices but also the social, political, cultural and intellectual landscape of the last 1,500 years. Although much has been written on the conversion period, little has been done to understand the development of the Christian impulse to spread the Gospel ‘to the ends of the earth’. When and why did Christians develop the idea of the evangelisation of all peoples? When and why did they begin to express this idea by deliberately setting out to evangelise pagan peoples? How did the conception or expression of the idea of evangelisation change over time? How did authors interpret key scriptural texts to justify or explain their views on evangelisation? This book offers the first book-length, diachronic study of these questions. Through contextualised close readings of authors writing mostly in Latin between the fourth and the eighth centuries (including Augustine, Patrick, Gregory and Bede), it argues for a gradual but fundamental transformation in Christian thinking about evangelisation. This in turn provides new insights into the origins of Christian mission.

This work aims to develop a method that can reschedule the matrix production in the case of a disruption. For this purpose, different artificial intelligence methods are combined in a novel way. The developed method is validated on a theoretical and a real scheduling case.

The Yearbook aims to promote research, studies and writings in the field of international law in Asia, as well as to provide an intellectual platform for the discussion and dissemination of Asian views and practices on contemporary international legal issues. Readership: All interested in International Law and Asian Law.

Water quality standards across the world are being re-written to promote healthier ecosystems, ensure safe potable water sources, increased biodiversity, and enhanced ecological functions. Treatment wetlands are used for treating a variety of pollutant waters, including municipal wastewater, agricultural and urban runoff, industrial effluents, and combined sewer overflows, among others. Treatment wetlands are particularly well-suited for sustainable water management because they can cope with variable influent loads, can be constructed of local materials, have low operations and maintenance requirements compared to other treatment technologies, and they can provide additional ecosystem services. The technology has been successfully implemented in both developed and developing countries. The first IWA Scientific and Technical Report (STR) on Wetland Technology was published in 2000. With the exponential development of the technology since then, the generation of a new STR was facilitated by the IWA Task Group on Mainstreaming Wetland Technology. This STR was conceptualized and written by leading experts in the field. The new report presents the latest technology applications within an innovative planning framework of multi-purpose wetland design. It also includes practical design information collected from over twenty years of experience from practitioners and academics, covering experiments at laboratory and pilot-scale up to full-scale applications. Scientific and Technical Report No.27

This book explores the local environmental impact of sports stadiums, and how that impact can disproportionately affect communities of color. Offering a series of review articles and global case studies, it illustrates what happens when sport organizations and other public and private stakeholders fail to factor environmental justice into their planning and operations processes. It opens with an historical account of environmental justice research and of research into sport and the natural environment. It then offers a series of case studies from around the world, including the United States, Canada, Kenya, South Africa, and Taiwan. These case studies are organized around key elements of environmental justice such as water and air pollution, displacement and gentrification, soil contamination, and transportation accessibility. They illustrate how major sports stadiums have contributed positively or negatively (or both) to the environmental health of the compact neighborhoods that surround them, to citizens’ quality of life, and in particular to communities that have historically been subjected to unjust and inequitable environmental policy. Placing the issue of environmental justice front and center leads to a more complete understanding of the relationship between stadiums, the natural environment, and urban communities. Presenting new research with important implications for practice, this book is vital reading for anybody working in sport management, venue management, mega-event planning, environmental studies, sociology, geography, and urban and regional planning. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

First Published in 2004. Climate Since A.D. 1500 presents a unique perspective on the 'Little Ice Age' and the climate of the twentieth century. Leading scientists explore historical documents, dendroclimatic data and ice core records from all over the world, presenting an invaluable compilation for all those concerned with past climate and the risks of man-made climatic change in the future. This revised edition includes a new chapter summarizing the wealth of literature on climatic change over the past few years and a new and expanded index. Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

New technologies are changing our reading habits. Laptops, e-readers, tablets and other handheld devices supply new platforms for reading, and we must learn to manage them by scrolling, clicking or tapping. Reading Today places reading in current literary and cultural contexts in order to analyse how these contexts challenge our conceptions of who reads, what reading is, how we read, where we read, and for what purposes – and then responds to the questions this analysis raises. Is our reading experience becoming a ‘flat’ one? And does reading in a media environment favour quick reading? Alongside these questions, the contributors unpack emerging strategies of reading.They consider, for example, how paying attention to readers’ emotional reactions as an indispensable component of reading affects our conception of the reading process. Other chapters consider how reading can be explored through such topics as experimental literature, the contemporary encyclopedic novel and the healing power of books.

Computer science

This open access book sheds light on 21st-Century multilingualism in the Far North of Europe – Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Estonia – an area with multifaceted contacts between many Uralic and Indo-European languages. These contacts are taking new forms as migration and English as the lingua franca are changing the linguistic situation remarkably. The national languages dominate the life of most inhabitants, while the use of indigenous Saami languages, old minority languages, and the languages of new immigrants is limited to certain areas or domains. This volume takes a close look at multilingual individuals and discusses how their lives are affected by different languages.

Out-of-home placement in institutionalised care and returning to the family system present young people and their families with major transformational challenges. This involves affiliations and demarcations, relative autonomy and relative dependence. Based on a qualitative research project, the author explores the question of how family members experience return processes and thereby continually create 'family/families'. She analyses the interactions between the actions, feelings and explanations of young people and parents in interaction with the activities of professional actors and the legally coded structures of child and youth welfare. The empirically and theoretically orientated work links important discussions of child and youth welfare research with current concepts of family research. In particular, a relational model of care in private responsibility and in structures of state child and youth welfare interventions is developed. In addition, suggestions for practice are provided.