Humanities & Social Sciences

This open access volume provides an overview of the latest methods used to study neuronal function with all-optical experimental approaches, where light is used for both stimulation and monitoring of neuronal activity. The chapters in this book cover topics over a broad range, from fundamental background information in both physiology and optics in the context of all-optical neurophysiology experiments, to the design principles and hardware implementation of optical methods used for photoactivation and imaging. In the Neuromethods series style, chapters include the kind of detail and key advice from the specialists needed to get successful results in your laboratory. Comprehensive and cutting-edge, All-Optical Methods to Study Neuronal Function is a valuable resource for researchers in various disciplines such as physics, engineering, and neuroscience. This book will serve as a guide to establish useful references for groups starting out in this field, and provide insight on the optical systems, actuators, and sensors. This is an open access book.

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The Politics and Poetics of Indian Digital Diasporas explores the emancipatory potential and pitfalls of digital platforms and how well or how poorly they reflect intra-communal diversities within South Asian diasporic communities. This book brings together an international network of scholars, both established and emerging, to explore South Asian diasporic communities in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the U.K. It is a comparative cross-national analysis of the intersection of digital technologies and South Asian diasporas. The book centres on three key themes: the ever-presence of digital spaces and the importance of exploring them as focal points for defining and contesting identities; an exploration of how ‘home’ is represented in and across South Asian diasporic communities; and intra-communal diversity in South Asian diasporic communities. The chapters show how digital spaces sometimes create unprecedented opportunities for diasporic communities to mobilise (multi)cultures, sexuality, race, and queerness within South Asian diasporic communities and to move beyond ‘Desi’ and ‘Brown’ as homogenising identifiers. The contributors also demonstrate that digital spaces can be and have been used to reassert internal hegemonies far from homelands. Examining the discursive meanings of South Asian-ness – ‘Desi’, ‘Brown’, ‘South Asians’– the book foregrounds how it is defined, performed, and contested through digital platforms, in ways that redefine the concept of diaspora in innovative, non-territorialized, polyphonic, variegated, and dialogic ways. A novel contribution to the intersection of global digital inequalities, digital cultures and the South Asian diaspora, this book will be of interest to a wide scholarly audience of digital media, South Asian diaspora, culture and ethnicity, race, and the politics of resistance and counter-hegemonic mobilisations.

This book analyses how war and bordering impact daily life and mobility and immobility tactics. It brings to light the memories of people who were displaced from Ukraine’s eastern regions because of Russian aggression against Ukraine started in 2014. Based on extensive in-depth research including interviews with individuals who were direct witnesses, participants, and victims of the events in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the study presents a novel perspective. It explores everyday experiences of war, bordering, and (im)mobilities through the lens of ‘inconvenient people’ including their hard journeys and resistance in occupied territories, the loss of home and struggles to find housing, volunteering, and the traumatic responses. The book amplifies the voices and agency of civilians who experienced the war and displacement, including older adults and people with disabilities, and provides theoretical and practical implications beyond Ukraine in a context of global uncertainties and growing mass population displacement. The book urges politicians and experts to look at the experiences of both displaced and immobile people who lived through the war in Ukraine before the full invasion. It will be of great interest to scholars of Race and Ethnic Studies, Asian Studies, European Politics, Security Studies, Migration Studies, Human Geography, and War and Conflict Studies.

This book deals with the challenges for history education arising from the centrality of colonialism in shaping the modern world. It breaks new ground by bringing together an international range of national studies on the legacies of colonialism that permeate the way how colonial history is thought and taught at schools. The case studies examine the representation, understanding and use of colonial heritage from different angles: They focus on European and non-European states as well as on states with and without colonial past as colonizers or colonized. Thus, and with its wide range of approaches – postcolonial theory, memory studies, educational media studies, teaching practice – this volume makes an essential research contribution to the ongoing international debate on the position of colonial history in present and future history education.

This paper provides an introduction to financial technology and blockchain, while exploring: the impact of FinTechs and TechFins on the financial sector, a description of blockchain technology and its applications, with a focus on cryptocurrencies, the impact on financial inclusion, risks and challenges, applications for international financial institutions and their clients.

This paper presents an overview of Robert Castel’s discussion on labour, by focusing on his analysis of the social supports of individuality and social property. In exploring these notions and the history of the wage-earning society, the French sociologist sheds light on the genealogy of the social and political link between wage labour, social (dis)affiliation and individual identity. Far from adopting a workist approach, he argues in favor of the reshaping of social welfare and labour law in contemporary, neoliberal, societies.

Are all the barbarians slaves by nature according to Aristotle? This contribution intends to answer this question, in the awareness that the theme of natural slavery is one of the most complex and tormented in Aristotelian philosophy. Through the analysis of some significant passages of the Politics, the article aims to show that for Aristotle natural slavery is not linked to ethnic categories, but to ethics one, therefore it does not necessarily and exclusively concern the barbarians. For this reason, the paper argues that Aristotelian thought seems to deviate, in a critical key, from the dominant ideology in the Greece of its time.

Landscape/Regional and Urban Planning; Water Quality/Water Pollution; Hydrology/Water Resources; Urban Ecology

Unlike in the past, the phenomenon of luxury in the modern era marks a paradigm shift that has an immediate impact on the development of work in the capitalist sense. The wealth produced by the arts, commerce and work raises questions, even disturbing ones, in relation to customs, morality, justice, and the stability of the state. Among the detractors and apologists of luxury, a median position is taken by economists. While recognizing the ambivalence of luxury, the latter support the possibility of regulating it, if not morally, at least economically, for the benefit of work and civil well-being.

Why do we wonder “what if?” about the past? In his pathbreaking, two-volume study, Gavriel Rosenfeld provides the first comprehensive examination of counterfactual history from its inception to the present day. Surveying more than three millennia of western history, Rosenfeld challenges the longstanding claim that historical speculation is contrary to legitimate historical inquiry. He documents the astounding ubiquity of counterfactual thought in the western tradition, showing how historians, theologians, politicians, philosophers, journalists, and novelists wondered “what if?” about the events of their day. In Volume I, Rosenfeld surveys the period between antiquity and the late 18th century, examining hundreds of classic texts – from Herodotus’s Histories to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France – to shed light on the missed opportunities and close calls of western history. By showing how counterfactual history first developed and then gradually spread throughout western culture, Rosenfeld demonstrates that imagining what might have happened is essential for understanding what did. This is the first out of two volumes. The second volume (978-3-11-914351-6) can be accessed here: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/isbn/9783112219720/html. Also available as a two-volume set (978-3-11-224603-0): https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/isbn/9783112246030/html

Audio drama is overlooked by philosophy even though it raises many philosophical questions. It seems to be a contradiction: drama is a form of showing yet the exemplary form of showing a world—visual representation—is absent from it. What kinds of world do we find if we concentrate on what is revealed through sound and the voice? According to fans of the medium, ‘the best pictures are in the head’ but might its potency be more fully realized if we consider that the best pictures are in the body? This book shows how phenomenology addresses these questions and provides new ways of theorizing audio drama. It transpires that the phenomenologist and the audio dramatist share the same predicament: how is a world going to make itself apparent to us or to our audience when our materials—sound and the voice—are only available when we are active and noisy in our environment? The book gives a clear account of phenomenology’s rethinking of embodiment, technology and causality, and how it enables the drawing of relations between audio drama, sound art and audio fiction. Instead of contradiction, sound and the voice emerge as principal expressions of dramatic structure and human being-in-the-world, and audio drama is shown to be an art form that manifests the power of causality to enrich aesthetic sensibility. The Phenomenology of Audio Drama will appeal to philosophers working in aesthetics and modern European philosophy, and to theorists and practitioners within the fields of audio drama, sound art and performance.

The thoroughly contemporary question of the relationship between emotion and reason was debated with such complexity by the philosophers of the 17th century that their concepts remain a source of inspiration for today`s research about the emotionality of the mind. The analyses of the works of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and many other thinkers collected in this volume offer new insights into the diversity and significance of philosophical reflections about emotions during the early modern era. A focus is placed on affective components in learning processes and the boundaries between emotions and reason.

The present work "Lernwerkstatt als Prinzip - Möglichkeiten für Lehre und Forschung" (Learning Workshop as Principle - Possibilities for Teaching and Research), as the third volume of the series "Lernen und Studieren in Lernwerkstätten" (Learning and Studying in Learning Workshops), takes up the question of the possibilities of the principle of learning workshop work as a productive moment of developments in higher education didactics. Currently, there are controversial efforts to place the education of future pedagogues and educational scientists in a closer practical and research context. In this context, learning workshops as higher education institutions play a central role. Despite diverse forms and foundations, university learning workshops are united by a fundamental understanding: learning workshop work as a principle. In the contributions to this volume, the authors explore the potential of learning workshops for teaching and research in the context of science.

In the recent years, a number of recognition and authentication systems based on biometric measurements have been proposed. Algorithms and sensors have been developed to acquire and process many different biometric traits. Moreover, the biometric technology is being used in novel ways, with potential commercial and practical implications to our daily activities. The key objective of the book is to provide a collection of comprehensive references on some recent theoretical development as well as novel applications in biometrics. The topics covered in this book reflect well both aspects of development. They include biometric sample quality, privacy preserving and cancellable biometrics, contactless biometrics, novel and unconventional biometrics, and the technical challenges in implementing the technology in portable devices. The book consists of 15 chapters. It is divided into four sections, namely, biometric applications on mobile platforms, cancelable biometrics, biometric encryption, and other applications. The book was reviewed by editors Dr. Jucheng Yang and Dr. Norman Poh. We deeply appreciate the efforts of our guest editors: Dr. Girija Chetty, Dr. Loris Nanni, Dr. Jianjiang Feng, Dr. Dongsun Park and Dr. Sook Yoon, as well as a number of anonymous reviewers.