Humanities & Social Sciences

Dopo aver percorso sinteticamente le tappe fondamentali dello sviluppo storico delle biblioteche, l'autore si sofferma sul ruolo che deve rivestire la biblioteca pubblica come strumento di sviluppo individuale e sociale, evidenziando la mancanza di una visione strategica della politica nei confronti delle biblioteche e, di conseguenza, ponendo in primo piano la necessità di un impegno a partire dal basso, dalle singole realtà locali, supportate dall'azione delle Soprintendenze Bibliografiche.

This is the first long-form descriptive grammar of the Pahari Indo-Aryan language, Gaddi (also called Bharmauri), spoken by the Gaddi people, a traditionally pastoral community now undergoing rapid occupational and lifestyle change. In 2010, the language was considered ‘definitely endangered’ by the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. A Grammar of Gaddi begins with an account of the historical and sociolinguistic profile of the community, including a discussion on the vitality of the language. Following this is a detailed documentation of the linguistic properties of the language, with chapters dedicated to the language’s phonetics and phonology, its word classes, its morphosyntax and its syntax. The appendices in the book contain the phonemic inventory of the language, a basic word list, and the cardinal, ordinal, fractional and distributive numerals of Gaddi. The careful linguistic analysis in the book allows for Gaddi language data to be presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet, with minute morphological glosses for maximum transparency. The book thus serves as a vital resource for public and private bodies, and will be of use to the language community as a basis for primers, textbooks and learning tools.

Digital spaces are saturated with metaphor: we have pages, sites, mice, and windows. Yet, in the world of digital textuality, these metaphors no longer function as we might expect. Martin Paul Eve calls attention to the digital-textual metaphors that condition our experience of digital space, and traces their history as they interact with physical cultures. Eve posits that digital-textual metaphors move through three life phases. Initially they are descriptive. Then they encounter a moment of fracture or rupture. Finally, they go on to have a prescriptive life of their own that conditions future possibilities for our text environments—even when the metaphors have become untethered from their original intent. Why is ""whitespace"" white? Was the digital page always a foregone conclusion? Over a series of theses, Eve addresses these and other questions in order to understand the moments when digital-textual metaphors break and to show us how it is that our textual softwares become locked into paradigms that no longer make sense. Contributing to book history, literary studies, new media studies, and material textual studies, Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History provides generative insights into the metaphors that define our digital worlds.

This two-volume set LNCS 12962 and 12963 constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 7th International MICCAI Brainlesion Workshop, BrainLes 2021, as well as the RSNA-ASNR-MICCAI Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) Challenge, the Federated Tumor Segmentation (FeTS) Challenge, the Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation (CrossMoDA) Challenge, and the challenge on Quantification of Uncertainties in Biomedical Image Quantification (QUBIQ). These were held jointly at the 23rd Medical Image Computing for Computer Assisted Intervention Conference, MICCAI 2020, in September 2021. The 91 revised papers presented in these volumes were selected form 151 submissions. Due to COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held virtually. This is an open access book.

Warum buchstabieren Rapper so gern ihren eigenen Namen? Warum nennen sie so oft die aktuelle Jahreszahl? Und warum benutzen sie lieber Vergleiche als Metaphern? Auf der Grundlage eines breiten Korpus deutschsprachiger Musik der letzten drei Jahrzehnte und im kritischen Dialog mit der Rap-Forschung präsentiert Martin Wagner eine prägnante Theorie eines prägenden popkulturellen Genres unserer Zeit. Als Leitmotiv erweist sich dabei die Idee der minimalen Moral. Minimal ist diese den Rap definierende Moral deswegen, weil ihr einziges konstantes positives Moment in der Affirmation des (sprechenden) Subjekts besteht.

Emphasising the alien qualities of anthropomorphic technologies, Machine Sensation makes a conscious effort to increase rather than decrease the tension between nonhuman and human experience. In a series of rigorously executed cases studies, including natural user interfaces, artificial intelligence as well as sex robots, Leach shows how object-oriented ontology enables one to insist upon the unhuman nature of technology while acknowledging its immense power and significance in human life. Machine Sensation meticulously engages OOO, Actor Network Theory, the philosophy of technology, cybernetics and posthumanism in innovative and gripping ways.

"On this subject, I only knew the excellent little book by the late Schurtz”— Marcel Mauss, 1914, “Les origines de la notion de monnaie”.Heinrich Schurtz’s 1898 book has been a touchstone for economic historians, anthropologists, and philosophers interested in the nature and origins of money in various societies, including Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Marcel Mauss, and Karl Polanyi. Schurtz experimented with concepts about money, going beyond traditional economic paradigms. Drawing on an extensive range of archaeological and ethnographic sources, he reframed a theory of money to include its materiality, symbolic nature, relationship to forms of property, and its dual origin in “outside-” and “inside-money.” While not well known today, it was important to the theorization of money in the first half of the 20th century and its innovative synthesis offers galvanizing questions and insights into how value relations are formed and how currency systems are interrelated."

Sometimes, the maelstrom of a crisis can be captured in a single image. The image of the mundane, barely noticeable movement of an urban dweller as they go about their everyday life. Athens and the War on Public Space commences from images just like this one, collected over a two-year period of research (2012–2014) in Athens during a time of severe financial and political crisis. For the author-curators of this volume, public space became a light-sensitive surface upon which they could begin to map the material imprints of the most structural and violent characteristics of the crisis, and their research spread in different directions, tracking the role of infrastructure and the shifts the financial crisis brought about upon built environments, the violent manifestations of the official anti-migrant policy, the rise of racism, the imposition of the emergency upon public space, and the phenomenology of mass transit.

Chi-rho ⳩ is universally known as the Christian monogram, consisting of the first two letters of the name Χριϲτόϲ. In ancient times, it coexisted with other common signs, the staurogram ⳨ and stauros ϯ, both connected to the Holy Cross of Jesus. An analysis of the development of these signs in papyrological evidence from Hellenistic, Roman, and Late-Antique Egypt allows us to track the everyday use of these writing strategies from their pre-Christian origins onward. While the staurogram and stauros are extensively employed in late documents to place texts under God’s protection, the chi-rho developed in a distinctive way. It originated in Ptolemaic cursive handwritings as a simple monogram, inconsistently abbreviating words beginning with χρ-, and survived with a similar function in Roman and Byzantine documents, though mostly in other χρ-words and terms characteristically containing those letters (e.g. χειρόγραφον, χαίρειν). A specific field examined is that of medicine, where it indicated the imperative χρῷ “use” in prescriptive texts, and eventually became a graphic symbol in medical recipes and lost its linguistic role. In only one document is the monogram employed to indicate Christ’s name. Possibly, the extensive use of ⳩ in documentary writings prevented the Christian meaning of the monogram from being employed in non-literary papyri. This chapter discusses these complex interactions, attempting to outline the interplay between writing strategies, symbolic thought, and the materiality of written texts from a semiographic point of view.

Few concepts have captured the imagination of the conflict and development communities in recent years as powerfully as the idea of a ‘political settlement’. At its most ambitious, ‘political settlements analysis’ (PSA) promises to explain why conflicts occur and states collapse, the conditions for their successful rehabilitation, different developmental pathways from peace, and how to better fit development policy to country context. Yet despite the meteoric rise of the term and its tremendous promise, not all is well in the world of PSA. Rival definitions of the concept abound; there are disagreements about its scope and the way it should be used; a growing schism between conflict specialists and economists; basic concepts are ambiguous; and little progress has been made on measurement. This book consequently has three main aims. The first is to argue for a revised definition of a political settlement, capable of unifying its diverse strands. The second is to put the concept on a more solid theoretical and scientific footing, providing a method for measuring and categorizing political settlements, using both qualitative case studies and a large-n statistical analysis to illustrate its potential. And the third is to examine the implications of the findings for mainstream social science analysis and for policymakers.

Beschränkte sich die Kritik der Kulturindustrie, die Adorno und Horkheimer in ihrer Gemeinschaftsarbeit »Dialektik der Aufklärung« entwickelt haben, darauf, dass sie bloß den Kommerz und Ausverkauf der Kultur monierten? Und erklärten sie die Massen für zu dumm, das Unterhaltungsangebot als stumpfsinnigen Betrug zu durchschauen? Entgegen dieser gängigen Lesart der Kulturindustriethese interpretiert Roger Behrens den Begriff als zentrale Kategorie einer kritischen Theorie der Gesellschaft. Die Kritik der Kulturindustrie bewahrt ihre Aktualität angesichts der neueren Entwicklung - Stichwort »Popkultur« - als radikale Diagnose einer von der ökonomischen Verwertungslogik bestimmten Gesellschaft. Die kritische Theorie der Kulturindustrie konstatiert, dass von der Kulturindustrie durchaus mehr Befriedigung und Glück erwartet werden darf, als heute dem Publikum vermittelt wird. Das Publikum ist keineswegs zu dumm, um sich mit den angebotenen Kulturwaren zu bescheiden, sondern verfügt über genügend Phantasie, sich eine bessere Welt vorzustellen, die freilich mehr menschliches Glück garantiert als die durch das abstrakte Profitmotiv vermittelte Ideologie der Kulturindustrie. - Nicht die Kultur gilt es abzuschaffen, sondern die Gesellschaft selbst muss verändert werden, um das Recht der Menschen auf gute Unterhaltung zu gewährleisten.

Conchita Wursts Sieg beim Eurovision Song Contest 2014 war ein zentrales diskursives Moment, welches das derzeitige Spannungsfeld zwischen Postgenderismus und Traditionalismus in Russland offenlegte und aufzeigte, wie sehr Geschlecht und Sexualität, nicht zuletzt für das russische Selbstbild und die Konstruktion einer russischen nationalen Identität, instrumentalisiert und politisiert werden und wie sehr Identitätskonzepte den russischen Alltag mitbestimmen. Die Monografie widmet sich der Diskussion um Geschlecht und Sexualität in Russland nach dem Sieg von Conchita Wurst und untersucht das Verhältnis von Diskurs und Identität. Im Vordergrund steht die Funktion von Sprache sowohl für die Identitätskonstruktion als auch für die Schaffung und Abgrenzung von Räumen. Dabei lassen sich nicht nur lexikologische und wortbildnerische Besonderheiten beobachten, sondern es liegt insgesamt ein auffälliger Sprachgebrauch mit interessanten Argumentationsstrategien vor. Ausführungen zu Identität und kritische Anmerkungen zur russischen Gender- und Queer-Linguistik komplettieren diesen Band. Conchita Wurst’s 2014 victory in the Eurovision Song Contest was a significant discursive moment which revealed the current tensions between postgenderism and traditionalism in contemporary Russia. This case also made clear just how far gender and sexuality are instrumentalised and politicised – not least in creating Russians’ self-perception and constructing a Russian national identity – and how massively notions of identity impact on Russian everyday life. The monograph focuses on the discussion of gender and sexuality in Russia following the 2014 event and investigates the relation between discourse and identity. Above all, it is concerned with the function of language in identity construction, and in the creation and demarcation of spaces. In this context, Dr. Scheller-Boltz’s study not only analyses lexicological and word-formation peculiarities, but also provides some revealing research findings about specific language use, including certain argumentation strategies. The monograph begins with a detailed introduction to notions of identity and concludes with some critical remarks on Russian gender and queer linguistics.

The topic of embedded literacy, closely connected to embedded learning on one hand, and training in the workplace on the other, is a central theme for reflection on adult education in Europe and around the world. The Council of Europe indicates knowledge as a pivotal element for the economic and social development of the EU countries and the workplace is an important place for the learning and production of know-how and knowledge. The problem of achieving the competences needed for entering the current labour market concerns a large part of the adult population. And this is where embedded literacy comes in, a topic which the volume tries to deal with from a twofold viewpoint: through theoretical reflection outlining the theme against the development of the European labour market, and reflection on hands-on experiences resulting from a project financed by the European Community called CELiNE, Content Embedded Literacy Education for the New Economy, carried out between 2007-2009.

Why are Khanty shamans still active? What are the folklore collectives of Komi? Why are the rituals of Udmurts performed at cultural festivals? In their insightful ethnographic study Anna-Leena Siikala and Oleg Ulyashev attempt to answer such questions by analysing the recreation of religious traditions, myths, and songs in public and private performances. Their work is based on long term fieldwork undertaken during the 1990s and 2000s in three different places, the Northern Ob region in North West Siberia and in the Komi and Udmurt Republics. It sheds light on how different traditions are favoured and transformed in multicultural Russia today. Siikala and Ulyashev examine rituals, songs, and festivals that emphasize specificity and create feelings of belonging between members of families, kin groups, villages, ethnic groups, and nations, and interpret them from a perspective of area, state, and cultural policies. A closer look at post-Soviet Khanty, Komi and Udmurts shows that opportunities to perform ethnic culture vary significantly among Russian minorities with different histories and administrative organisation. Within this variation the dialogue between local and administrative needs is decisive.

This open access book directs its attention to a desire for inter- and transdisciplinary, reciprocal collaborations in studies concerning young children. It focuses on the possibilities and obstacles in collaborative forms of inquiry involving those stakeholders and actors whom the research concerns, specifically the participating children. The backdrop of the discussions and theoretical investigations is the inter- and transdisciplinary project Enhancing Children’s Attention. Within the framework of an evidence-based intervention, this project performed multiple qualitative forms of inquiry, including emergent forms of collaborations with children. The book provides a discussion on how young children’s development, learning, and lives are understood in the developmental sciences, and in the humanities and social sciences. It specifically addresses scholars interested in postdevelopmental, posthumanist, new materialist, and postqualitative approaches. The book proposes a displaced form of postdevelompentalism for future collaborative forms of inquiry with a focus on multiple forms of knowledge and knowing.