Humanities & Social Sciences

Why do governments still negotiate with trade unions and employers in the design of labour market and welfare reforms despite the steady decline of trade union membership almost everywhere in Europe? Social Concertation in Times of Austerity investigates the political underpinnings of social concertation in this new context with a focus on the regulation of labour mobility and unemployment protection in Austria and Switzerland. It shows that the involvement of organised interests in policymaking is a strategy of compromise-building used by governments when they are faced with party-political divisions, or when unpopular reforms are likely to have risky electoral consequences.

This book gives an analysis of the role of the bioactive sphingolipids sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P) and ceramide 1-phosphate (C1P) in the skeletal muscle. The enzyme that produces S1P, sphingosine kinase 1 (SK1) has proved crucial in the biological action of growth factors and cytokines involved in the inflammatory process that follows muscular damage. Indeed, in myoblasts the cytokine TGFβ exercises its fibrotic action through induction of the SK1/S1P axis. Furthermore, the PDGF growth factor, positive regulator of proliferation and motility, activates the enzyme SK1 and the transactivation of S1P1 inhibits the proliferation and induces the migration induced by the growth factor. Finally, the mitogenic role of C1P in myoblasts has been identified, characterizing the signalling pathways involved.

Small cities face intricate challenges. No Straight Lines provides the basis for a refined model of community-engaged leadership and research designed to realize equality of quality of life. With particular attention to the small city of Kamloops, BC, this book explores the impact of extended, short-term, and unique leadership collaborations and local responses to homelessness, sustainability and food security, aging populations, and the recovery of local history. It offers exciting insights into the role of the university in the small city, from generating local learning opportunities to the integration of undergraduates and faculty in achieving positive change. Based on active engagement, No Straight Lines reveals the obstacles present in addressing local needs, and the transformations that can be achieved through effective collaboration. It offers rich accounts and valuable insights into flexible practices that respond to the needs of community organizations while recognizing the challenges associated with resource constraints and limitations in capacity. This unique collection provides new insights into the barriers and benefits of leadership and learning in the small city. With Contributions By: Ginny Rastoy, Lisa Cooke, Robin Reid, Kendra Besanger, Dawn Farough, Tina Block, and Terry Kading

Das Projekt „Fair Debattieren und Erörtern" (FDE) untersucht, wie mündliches Argumentieren die Fähigkeit zum schriftlichen Erörtern im Deutschunterricht fördert. Dafür wurde eine kontrollierte Interventionsstudie mit 355 Schüler:innen der 9. Jahrgangsstufe an Gymnasien und Nicht-Gymnasien durchgeführt. Die Studie testet die wechselseitige Beeinflussung von Debattier- und Erörterungskompetenz. Die Ergebnisse zeigen unterschiedliche Anwendungen beim Einsatz der Reihenfolgen Debattieren-Erörtern (DE) und Erörtern-Debattieren (ED).

One of the most beautiful island groups of the Pacific, Bougainville has a remarkable history. Tragically, it is as the site of devastating civil conflict that Bougainville is perhaps best known. In exploring the rich environmental, cultural and social heritage of Bougainville before the conflict, this collection provides an insight into the long-term causes of the crisis. In doing so, it surveys such topics as Bougainville’s prehistory and traditional cultures, the impact of German and Australian colonialism, the attempts by disparate local cultures to find a common identity, the assertion of political autonomy in the face of coercion to integrate with Papua New Guinea, and contemporary efforts to resolve conflict and plan a viable future. A landmark collaboration between expert commentators on Bougainville and Bougainvilleans themselves, this volume provides a comprehensive picture for those seeking to understand Bougainville’s history and future directions. Bougainville before the conflict was published in association with the State, Society and Governance in Melanesia Project, which is supported by The Australian National University and the Commonwealth of Australia.

The study of early modern cancer is significant for our understanding of the period’s medical theory and practice. In many respects, cancer exemplifies the flexibility of early modern medical thought, which managed to accommodate, seemingly without friction, the notion that cancer was a disease with humoral origins alongside the conviction that the malady was in some sense ontologically independent. Discussions of why cancer spread rapidly through the body, and was difficult, if not impossible, to cure, prompted various medical explanations at the same time that physicians and surgeons joined with non-medical authors in describing the disease as acting in a way that was ‘malignant’ in the fullest sense, purposely ‘fierce’, ‘rebellious’ and intractable.3 Theories seeking to explain why cancer appeared most often in the female breast similarly joined culturally mediated anatomical and humoral theory with recognition of the peculiarities of women’s social, domestic and emotional life-cycles. Moreover, as a morbid disease, cancer generated eclectic and sometimes extreme medical responses, the mixed results of which would prompt many questions over the proper extent of pharmaceutical or surgical intervention.

This book addresses historical perspectives and contemporary challenges of the politics of forestland governance and the related sustainability crisis in Africa. It focusses on the power dynamics between key actors involved in the governance of forest-related resources either for their exploitation or with regards to biodiversity conservation policies promoted at international arenas. The book provides conceptual and empirical contributions on what happens when global sustainability agendas and the related policy instruments meet the realities of domestic politics in Africa. It reveals that several actors in forest-rich countries, especially those with limited sovereignty, have often employed complex informal strategies as the ‘weapon of the weak’ to resist the domination of the most powerful actors of global environmental politics.

The proceedings of the 12th World Congress on Genetics Applied to Livestock Production provide you with 816 papers representing the leading research in livestock genetics around the globe. This book covers all aspects of genetics applied to livestock production in 44 sections. Next to the exciting plenary speakers, and the recurrent technical and species orientated sections, there are sections focusing on specific challenges for animal breeding. For instance, large-scale phenotyping of individual animals, use of whole genome sequence data and improving genomic prediction, and sessions on the contribution that genetics can make to societal challenges, like animal welfare, climate change, biodiversity, or control of infectious diseases.

Drawing on a rich corpus of contemporary and post-war sources – including personal letters and legal documentation – this open access book illuminates the roles of eleven female doctors and nurses at a camp for female prisoners in Nazi Germany. While it may seem unthinkable that medical staff worked in a place of death and suffering, Kate Docking looks at how female medical personnel were hired to work at Ravensbrück concentration camp from September 1939 until its liberation by the Allies in April 1945, highlighting why many women sought jobs there. Examining the experiences of these women from a gendered perspective, Gender and Power in a Nazi Concentration Camp sheds new light on the role of female medical personnel during the Nazi era. Though the Ravensbrück female medical personnel committed atrocities, the majority were not brought to justice. Docking underscores how stereotypes of femininity as ‘naturally innocent’ helped to allow women involved in Nazi crimes to continue their lives peacefully after the war. This ground-breaking book demonstrates the need for gender to be considered in explanations of how Nazi persecution was able to happen. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Centre for the Study of Health, Ethics, and Society, University of Hamburg, Germany.

Victims' State is the first integrated account of how Imperial Austria and the successor Austrian Republic responded to the needs of citizen-soldiers and their families in the age of mass politics and the First World War. It shows that compulsory military service and war mobilization changed the mission of the Austrian state and citizens' understanding of what they were entitled to, thus showing how war victim welfare was central to shaping modern European welfare state.

The purpose of this book is to showcase a diverse set of directions in empirical research on mediated discourse, reflecting on the state-of-the-art and the increasing intersection between Corpus-based Interpreting Studies (CBIS) and Corpus-based Translation Studies (CBTS). Undeniably, data from the European Parliament (EP) offer a great opportunity for such research. Not only does the institution provide a sizeable sample of oral debates held at the EP together with their simultaneous interpretations into all languages of the European Union. It also makes available written verbatim reports of the original speeches, which used to be translated. From a methodological perspective, EP materials thus guarantee a great degree of homogeneity, which is particularly valuable in corpus studies, where data comparability is frequently a challenge. In this volume, progress is visible in both CBIS and CBTS. In interpreting, it manifests itself notably in the availability of comprehensive transcription, annotation and alignment systems. In translation, datasets are becoming substantially richer in metadata, which allow for increasingly refined multi-factorial analysis. At the crossroads between the two fields, intermodal investigations bring to the fore what these mediation modes have in common and how they differ. The volume is thus aimed in particular at Interpreting and Translation scholars looking for new descriptive insights and methodological approaches in the investigation of mediated discourse, but it may be also of interest for (corpus) linguists analysing parliamentary discourse in general.

Saint Birgitta of Sweden (d. 1373), one of the most famous visionary women of the late Middle Ages, lived in Rome for the last 23 years of her life. Much of her extensive literary work was penned there. Her Celestial Revelations circulated widely from the late 14th century to the 17th century, copied in Italian scriptoria, translated into vernacular, and printed in several Latin and Italian editions. In the same centuries, an extraordinary number of women writers across the peninsula were publishing their work. What echoes might we find of the foreign widow’s prophetic voice in their texts? This volume offers innovative investigations, written by an interdisciplinary group of experts, of the profound impact of Birgitta of Sweden in Renaissance Italy. Contributors include: Brian Richardson, Jane Tylus, Isabella Gagliardi, Clara Stella, Marco Faini, Jessica Goethals, Anna Wainwright, Eleonora Cappuccilli, Eleonora Carinci, Virginia Cox, Unn Falkeid, and Silvia Nocentini.

On account of its focus on unique 16th- and 17th-century Safavid (Persia, Iran) and Mamluk (Egypt, Kairo) carpets and their specific provenances, the collection of Oriental carpets of the MAK—Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art in Vienna—is one of the most famous of its kind. However, the museum never appointed a specialized curator for its Orient Collection; this is perhaps one of the reasons why an inventory catalog did not appear until 2001. Most of the world-famous pieces originally belonged to the Imperial House of Habsburg and ultimately found their way into the museum after the end of the monarchy. In 1868, the museum itself began collecting in this sector. The carpets from a third source, the “Kaiserliches Königliches Handels Museum” [Imperial Royal Austrian Trade Museum], were purchased in 1907. This diverse background has had a formative influence on the specific structure of the Vienna collection. Mamluk Carpets are among the highlights of the Viennese collection, especially celebrated for the sole silk Mamluk Carpet existing in the world today. Equally famous and precious are the 16th-century silk Hunting Carpet, a Herat Scrolling Vine and Animal Carpet, a so-called Portuguese Carpet, several Isfahan carpets, carpets from the Ottoman court workshop, among them the Vienna niche rug and an Indian landscape carpet, also the renowned Indian Millefleur carpet. The catalogue contains the one hundred-and-fifty pieces from the Vienna collection starting with five Mamluk Carpets, followed by five Ottoman pieces (Turkey, Istanbul), one small so-called chessboard carpet, nineteen Anatolian carpets and fifteen Iranian carpets from different regions. There are four Indian rugs and rug fragments and seventeen rugs from Central Asia, also one Moroccan piece. The catalogue meticulously characterizes every carpet and locates and dates every piece. It states the provenance and measurements, also important technical details such as the thread material of warp, weft and knots, the knot count, and the condition of sides and ends of each rug. Every carpet is shown in full length. The most important ones are pictured with several details. The introduction describes the history of the Vienna Carpet Collection, followed by extensive captions to every carpet in the collection. The catalogue continues with a list of lost pieces, a glossary, an extensive bibliography, and finishes with the concordance of the catalogue entries with the acquisition numbers.

This open access book explores the histories and geographies of fishing in North Korea and the surrounding nations. With the ideological and environmental history of North Korea in mind, the book examines the complex interactions between local communities, fish themselves, wider ecosystems and the politics of Pyongyang through the lens of critical geography, fisheries statistics and management science as well as North Korean and more generally Korean and East Asian studies. There is increasing global interest in North Korea, its politics, people and landscapes, and as such, this book describes encounters with North Korean fishing communities, as well as unusual moments in the field in the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation and the Republic of Korea (South Korea). It addresses fish, fishing infrastructure, fishing science and fishing statistics and other non-human elements of North Korean and other nations’ developmental regimes as actors and participants within them as much as humans and their technologies. The book enables readers to gain extensive insights into the aspirations and practices of fishing in North Korea and its neighbours, the navigation of difficult political and developmental situations and changing ecological realities in a time of environmental and climate crisis familiar to many across the globe.

De wetenschappelijke beoefening van de neerlandistiek heeft ook buiten het Nederlandse taalgebied een lange geschiedenis. In sommige landen waren er al in de eerste helft van de negentiende eeuw taal- en letterkundigen die zich met de Nederlandse taal en de Nederlandstalige literatuur bezighielden. De geschiedenis van de internationale neerlandistiek moet tot op heden nog geschreven worden. Deze bundel met artikelen, die teruggaat op een congres dat in 2008 aan de Freie Universität Berlin gehouden werd, wil daartoe een eerste aanzet geven. De artikelen, die in het Nederlands geschreven zijn en van een Duitse en een Engelse samenvatting vergezeld gaan, geven een goede indruk van een vakgebied dat in een groot aantal Europese landen niet alleen op een lange traditie kan bogen, maar vandaag de dag bovendien ook rijkgeschakeerd en springlevend is. Die Niederlandistik hat als wissenschaftliche Disziplin auch außerhalb des niederländischen Sprachraums eine lange Geschichte. In einigen Ländern haben sich schon in der ersten Hälfte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaftler mit der niederländischen Sprache und der niederländischsprachigen Literatur beschäftigt. Die Geschichte der internationalen Niederlandistik ist bislang weitgehend unerforscht, sie bedarf noch einer gründlichen Aufarbeitung. Dieser Band, der auf eine Tagung zurückgeht, die 2008 an der Freien Universität Berlin stattfand, will dazu einen ersten Anstoß geben. Die Artikel, die auf Niederländisch verfasst sind und denen eine deutsche und englische Zusammenfassung hinzugefügt wurde, bieten einen guten Überblick über ein Fachgebiet, das in einer großen Zahl europäischer Länder nicht nur eine lange Tradition hat, sondern gegenwärtig auch breit aufgestellt und quicklebendig ist.