Humanities & Social Sciences

The Qur'an Seminar Commentary is an unprecedented work of collaboration in the field of Qur'anic Studies, involving the insights of 25 scholars on 50 Qur'anic passages. These scholars represent a diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds and provide readers with unique insights into the latest trends of research in the Qur'an. This Commentary is a useful and illuminating reference work for students and scholars in the field of Qur'anic Studies.

Plasmonic nanomaterials have emerged in the last years as a very interesting option for many photocatalytic processes. Their localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) brings in some unique properties that overcome some of the drawbacks associated with traditional photocatalysis based on semiconductors. Even when in its infancy, many advances have been made in the field, mainly related to the synthesis of new structures with the capabilities of light absorption in the whole solar spectrum. A great number of reactions have been attempted using nanoplasmonic materials. In this chapter, we present the most recent advances made in the field of plasmonic photocatalysis comprising an introductory section to define the main types of plasmonic nanomaterials available, including the most recently labeled alternatives. Following with the major areas of catalytic application, a second section of the chapter has been devoted to liquid-phase reactions for the treatment of pollutants and a selection of organic reactions to render added-value to chemicals under mild conditions. The third part of the chapter addresses two specific applications of nanoplasmonic photocatalysts in gas-phase reactions involving the remediation of volatile organic compounds and the transformation of carbon dioxide into valuable energy-related chemicals. Finally, a fourth section of the chapter introduces the most recent applications of plasmonics in biochemical processes involving the regulation of cofactor molecules and their mimetic behavior as potential enzyme-like surrogates.

Peacebuilding; EULEX; Kosovo; European Union; Conflict prevention; Normative power; Post-conflict; IECEU

Critical Making in the Age of AI invites students, teachers, learners, and digital humanists to explore making as scholarship. Inspired by the craft traditions of textile arts, this book combines a survey of forms of alternative scholarly communication—such as comics, GIFs, maps, games, and generative AI—and a pattern book, where patterns serve as starting points that makers can reimagine and remix. Firmly grounded in the humanities and utilizing free tools and platforms (including Twine, Voyant, and Tracery) wherever possible, this engaging and accessible guide to digital methods introduces and puts into practice concepts that are essential to preparing students to navigate a changing landscape of media and information without investing in proprietary software, dedicated lab space, or expensive creative tools. The book’s eight patterns are especially appropriate for those just beginning to explore digital scholarly methods, and one goal of Critical Making in the Age of AI is to provide structure for work that is both meaningful and achievable with limited resources and time. By centering critical making through a design-justice and feminist lens, the coauthors model how inclusive and expansive approaches to making in research and teaching are vital to shaping the humanities of the future.

This open access volume critically reviews a diverse body of scholarship and practice that informs the conceptualization, curriculum, teaching and measurement of life skills in education settings around the world. It discusses life skills as they are implemented in schools and non-formal education, providing both qualitative and quantitative evidence of when, with whom, and how life skills do or do not impact young women’s and men’s lives in various contexts. Specifically, it examines the nature and importance of life skills, and how they are taught. It looks at the synergies and differences between life skills educational programmes and the way in which they promote social and emotional learning, vocational/employment education, and health and sexuality education. Finally, it explores how life skills may be better incorporated into education and how such education can address structures and relations of power to help youth achieve desired future outcomes, and goals set out in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Life skills education has gained considerable attention by education policymakers, researchers and educators as being the sine qua non for later achievements in life. It is nearly ubiquitous in global and national education policies, including the SDGs, because life skills are regarded as essential for a diverse set of purposes: reducing poverty, achieving gender equality, promoting economic growth, addressing climate change, fostering peace and global citizenship, and creating sustainable and healthy communities. Yet, to achieve these broad goals, questions persist as to which life skills are important, who needs to learn them, how they can be taught, and how they are best measured. This book addresses these questions.

This is the first book to develop a postmigrant analytical perspective for the study of art, concentrating on how postmigration reopens the study of contemporary art and migration. The book introduces art historians and other scholars with a methodological interest in cultural analysis to the innovative concept of postmigration, offering a comprehensive introduction to the various meanings and uses of the term as well as translating it methodologically to an art historical context. The book analyses art projects from Denmark, Germany and Great Britain, which address some of the current challenges to European societies of immigration, and by drawing on theory from fields such as migration studies, transcultural studies and feminist, postcolonial and political theory, as well as re-engaging established concepts such as imagination, commemoration, belonging, identity, racialization, community, public space and participation. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, art and politics, migration studies, and transcultural studies.

This book examines how emerging digital technologies are reshaping industrial production and national energy infrastructures. Drawing on interdisciplinary research and real-world case studies, the author illuminates the organizational, economic, and policy transformations driven by the accelerating shift toward digital and agentic systems. Key features include an in-depth assessment of how digital tools can enhance productivity, resilience, and sustainability across manufacturing, energy, and organizational systems. The book explains the principles of Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0, the evolution of knowledge-management practices, and the growing role of agentic AI in shaping decision-making and energy security. Through analytical frameworks and a detailed case study of Électricité de France, the book demonstrates how digital transformation can be implemented in practice. Its multidisciplinary approach, drawing from management science, engineering, economics, and sustainability, equips readers with both theoretical insight and actionable guidance. This monograph offers a concise yet comprehensive guide to navigating the complexities of the digital era. It is intended for researchers and postgraduate students seeking to understand or implement effective digital strategies in industry and the energy sector. By combining conceptual clarity with applied analysis, the book highlights the opportunities and challenges of digital transformation and provides readers with the tools to respond effectively to technological, organizational, and societal change. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Cosmopolitical Ecologies Across Asia offers a unique insight into the non-human and spiritual dimensions of environmental management in a changing world. This volume presents a comparative, place-based exploration of landscapes across Asia and the entities, practices and knowledges that inhabit them. Rather than treating sacred mountains, terrains and water sources as self-contained, esoteric religious phenomena, the authors consider them within critical 'cosmopolitical ecologies' framings in which non-human entities are engaged as actors in the socio-political arena. The chapters include case studies of healing springs recognized by governments, and sacred mountains that are addressed by heads of states and Communist Party cadres, or that speak to the faithful through spirit mediums in a politics of re-enchantment. Contributors explore the diverse ways in which non-human entities such as forest spirits, reindeer, mountains and Buddhist Masters of the Land are engaged by humans to navigate environmental change and address a range of ecological threats from large-scale mining to climate change. Cosmopolitical ecologies approaches encompass the healing power of topography as well as transformative intimacies with other-than-human beings such as sparrows within an Islamic eco-theological poetic setting. In this light the book observes dynamic and creative processes of cosmological innovation including the repurposing of ritual to address challenges such as the Covid-19 epidemic. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environment and society across disciplinary perspectives in general, and to anthropologists, human geographers, political ecologists, indigenous studies, area studies, environmental sciences and environmental humanities scholars in particular.

This volume presents the Proceedings of the International Conference of the MEDCORE project held in Florence, Italy, in November 2005. The MEDCORE project "From river catchment areas to the sea: a comparative and integrated approach to the ecology of Mediterranean coastal zones for sustainable management", funded by the European Commission, was carried out from 2002 to 2005 by a consortium of researchers from European and Mediterranean partner countries. It focused on coastal areas, with particular attention to the interactions and links between the elements. The approach was characterised by multidisciplinary research and integration of expertise. This book contributes to the information flow originated by the project and the conference. Despite the variety of the contributions, they have been gathered into this single volume to construct a baseline for an innovative interdisciplinary perspective.

Latin America underwent two major transformations during the 2000s: the widespread election of left-leaning presidents (the so-called left turn) and the diffusion of conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs)—innovative social programs that award regular stipends to poor families on the condition that their children attend school. Combining cross-national quantitative research covering the entire region and in-depth case studies based on field research, Human Capital versus Basic Income: Ideology and Models for Anti-Poverty Programs in Latin America challenges the conventional wisdom that these two transformations were unrelated. In this book, author Fabián A. Borges demonstrates that this ideology greatly influenced both the adoption and design of CCTs. There were two distinct models of CCTs: a “human capital” model based on means-tested targeting and strict enforcement of program conditions, exemplified by the program launched by Mexico’s right, and a more universalistic “basic income” model with more permissive enforcement of conditionality, exemplified by Brazil’s program under Lula. These two models then spread across the region. Whereas right and center governments, with assistance from international financial institutions, enacted CCTs based on the human capital model, the left, with assistance from Brazil, enacted CCTs based on the basic income model. The existence of two distinct types of CCTs and their relation to ideology is supported by quantitative analyses covering the entire region and in-depth case studies based on field research in three countries. Left-wing governments operate CCTs that cover more people and spend more on those programs than their center or right-wing counterparts. Beyond coverage, a subsequent analysis of the 10 national programs adopted after Lula’s embrace of CCTs confirms that program design—evaluated in terms of scope of the target population, strictness of conditionality enforcement, and stipend structure—is shaped by government ideology. This finding is then fleshed out through case studies of the political processes that culminated in the adoption of basic income CCTs by left-wing governments in Argentina and Bolivia and a human capital CCT by a centrist president in Costa Rica.

Christoph Hennings materialreiche Studie unterzieht hundert Jahre theoretischer Marxrezeption über die Disziplingrenzen hinweg einer kritischen Analyse. Vor diesem Hintergrund versucht der Autor eine Rekonstruktion des Marx'schen Werkes gegen seine bisherigen Auslegungen. Der erste Teil des Bandes behandelt systematisch die Marxrezeptionen in Sozialdemokratie und Kommunismus, in Ökonomie, Soziologie, Philosophie, Kritischer Theorie und Theologie. Als Haupttendenz erweist sich hier die Verlagerung ökonomischer Argumente in immer spekulativere Gefilde. Der zweite Teil kritisiert heutige Sozialphilosophien und zeigt, dass ihr dezidiert normativer Ansatz aus diesen verfehlten Marxrezeptionen resultiert. Der Band fordert damit zu einer neuen Auseinandersetzung mit Marx jenseits politischer Grabenkämpfe heraus.

entrepreneurship; innovation; Horizon 2020; capital gains; taxation; income; rights; R&D policy; technology; commercialization; financing; investment

Studies of rock art normally depart from a classification of type, style and what the motifs represents or depicts. South Scandinavian rock art, however, is often vague, incomplete and fragmentary. In this chapter, it is argued that certain rock art motifs, mainly boats and anthropomorphs, were deliberately made incomplete as a part of a vitalist technology with the aim of affecting the world. An important aspect of such visual vagueness, intentional or not, is that it can function as a punctum in Roland Barthes’s terminology and evoke affect among beholders. The incomplete motifs also stress the making of rock art as a continuous process in which details can be added over time to enhance certain aspects or radically alter the motif. The chapter is illustrated with examples of Bronze Age rock art of the Mälaren district in central-eastern Sweden.

The article deals with three case studies on the appropriation of Spanish comedy in the so-called “Spanish-style comedy” from the second half of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth century. The textual samples relating to the figures of the donaire in De Leonardis (Il finto incanto), Carlo Celano (Proteggere l’inimico), Andrea Belvedere (Difendere l’inimico) and in the play attributed to Domenico Antonio Parrino, Amare e fingere, show variations in the configuration of the character and in the way of domesticating verbal humour with respect to their Spanish sources, namely El hechizo imaginado by Juan de Zabaleta, Amparar al enemigo by Antonio de Solís and Fingir y amar by Agustín Moreto. These partial data are added to others in the attempt to define the evolution of the spagnoleggiante genre, such as the gradual autonomy of the figure of the Neapolitan servant. They also corroborate the interest in this type of high comedy and in the genre even when a new taste was emerging and theatrical reform was being considered.

Humans in the Cyber Loop: Perspectives on Social Cybersecurity addresses the evolving role of humans in cyberspace through an analysis of how digital interactions and advancements both shape and are shaped by societal, economic, and political factors. The book systematically explores social cybersecurity, the impact of disinformation on democratic processes, the influence of social media on public opinion, and the implications of algorithmic decision-making to demonstrate the importance of building societal resilience to cyber attacks and to better understand specific needs and challenges in this domain.