Humanities & Social Sciences

Through a rigorous analysis of original scriptures and later commentaries, this open access book unearths a cornucopia of idiosyncratic motifs pervading the famous Tibetan sky-gazing meditation known as “Skullward Leap” (thod rgal). Flavio Geisshuesler argues that these motifs suggest that the practice did not originate in the context of Buddhism, but rather within indigenous Tibetan culture and in close contact with the early Bön tradition. The book argues that Dzogchen once belonged to a cult centered on the quest for vitality, which involved the worship of the sky as primordial source of life and endorsed the hunting of animals, as they were believed to be endowed with the ability to move in between the divine realm of the heavens and the world of humans. The book also traces the historical development of the Great Perfection, delineating a complex process of buddhicization that started with the introduction of Buddhism in the 7th century, intensified with the rise of new schools in the 11th century, and reached its climax in the systematization of the teachings by the great scholar-yogi Longchenpa in the 14th century. The study advances an innovative model of meditation as an open-ended practice that animates practitioners to face the most challenging moments of their lives with courage and curiosity, imagination and creativity, and playfulness and excitement; qualities that are oftentimes overlooked in contemporary descriptions of contemplation. 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 Swiss National Science Foundation.

La gran extensión geográfica del español ha producido numerosas obras lexicográficas que se enfrentan al reto de dar respuesta a problemas derivados de la internacionalización lograda por esta lengua. Por una parte, los diccionarios bilingües aportan una perspectiva diferente para reflexionar sobre nuestro léxico y sobre cómo representarlo de forma eficaz en los diccionarios; por otra parte, dentro de los países hispanohablantes, el colorido mosaico de variedades regionales, nacionales y supranacionales suscita debates sobre la manera de abordar el panhispanismo y conseguir una representación ecuánime para todos. En este volumen, especialistas de diferentes orígenes contrastan problemas, métodos y soluciones lexicográficas para tratar esta dimensión internacional.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) gehört zu den großen Gegenwarts- und Zukunftsthemen des Aktien-, Bilanz- und Kapitalmarktrechts. Der vorliegende Band erschließt den aktuellen Forschungsstand in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz. Er sichtet und systematisiert die verstreuten Einzeldiskurse rund um die gesellschaftliche Verantwortung von Unternehmen und schlägt Brücken zur CSR-Diskussion in benachbarten Disziplinen. Behandelt werden aktienrechtliche Grundfragen der CSR, die internationale Regel- und Standardsetzung in diesem Bereich und die CSR-Berichterstattung im Bilanzrecht. Außerdem finden sich Beiträge zur Haftung inländischer Unternehmen für Menschenrechtsverletzungen im Ausland, zu CSR und Arbeitnehmerbeteiligung sowie zur nachhaltigen Managervergütung und zum politischen Engagement im Spiegel von CSR.

Following economists and scientists, politicians of various European countries have realized that a modern society with a declining birthrate is in need of immigrants. What can journalists contribute, in order to enable migrants to feel at home in their receiving country? What can be missed and ruined by journalists and media with regard to the integration of ethnic minorities? Scholars from Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Russia, Switzerland, The Netherlands, and the U.S. present their findings on the matter of media integration of migrants. Can European media learn from experiences in the classic countries of immigration in North America?

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Shortlisted for the 2021 BSLS Book Prize Genomic technologies have had a profound impact on understandings of what it means to be human and our links to the world we inhabit, and on practices of inhabiting the world. This open access book considers this impact across a range of literary forms, cultural practices, and political imaginaries, and argues that new descriptions of biological value introduced through practices of genomic sequencing from the late 1970s registered a broader crisis of narrative form. Examining a wide range of texts by Doris Lessing, Samuel Delany, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Kir Bulychev, Kazuo Ishiguro, Saidiya Hartman, Yaa Gyasi, Svetlana Alexievich, and Jeff VanderMeer, Narrative in the Age of the Genome casts new light on the intersections of genomics with politics of racism, sexuality, labour and gender, neoliberal economics and environmental crisis. 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 Wellcome Trust

In den zentralen Modellen der Neuen Wachstumstheorie (NWT) wird durch die Einführung von Externalitäten bei der Akkumulation von Sach- und Humankapital endogenes Wachstum des Pro-Kopf-Einkommens möglich. Diese Vorgehensweise basiert auf Kenneth Arrows Konzept des learning by doing. Während dabei nachfrageseitige Aspekte des Wachstumsprozesses ausgeblendet werden, finden sich diese in den wachstumstheoretischen Arbeiten von Nicholas Kaldor. Die von ihm betonte Rolle steigender Skalenerträge und des damit verbundenen Verdoorn-Zusammenhangs bilden eine wichtige Parallele zur NWT. Anhand einer kritischen Darstellung und Gegenüberstellung beider Sichtweisen verdeutlicht der Autor die Relevanz der Beiträge Kaldors für die NWT und die Notwendigkeit einer integrierten Erklärung von Wachstumsprozessen.

This essay examines illness as an anthropological and educational experience, exploring its philosophical, historical, literary, and pedagogical dimensions. From biblical texts to Hippocratic writings, from Aquinas to Cartesian modernity, and from Canguilhem and Sontag to the medical humanities, illness is portrayed as an event linking body, language, and freedom. It disrupts life’s continuity, urging new norms of meaning and acting as a call to personal awareness. Pedagogy does not tame the enigma of suffering but guides individuals in transforming vulnerability into narrative and ethical resources, fostering an education to care that preserves the uniqueness and symbolic depth of illness.

"Why do we think differently from one another? Why do religious people adhere to their faith even against reason, whilst atheist thinkers label it “nonsense”? Why do some judges turn more to moral values and others less? Why do we attach different meanings to the same words? These questions can be tackled on psychological or sociological levels, but we can also analyze the subjects on the epistemological level. That is the purpose of this book. Thoughts and Ways of Thinking offers Source Theory as a single explanation for epistemic processes and their religious, legal and linguistic derivatives. The idea is simple: our senses, our understanding, our memory, the testimonies that we trust, and many other objects transmit data to us and so shape our beliefs. In this function they serve as our truth sources. Different beliefs stem from different sources or different hierarchies between same sources. This notion is formalized here through the new tool of Source Calculus, and, after balancing its relativistic consequences by adding pragmatic constraints, it is applied to the philosophies of religion, law and language. With this unified theory, old doubts are framed in new perspectives, and some of them even find their solution."

Employing methodological perspectives from the fields of political geography, environmental studies, anthropology, and their cognate disciplines, this volume explores alternative logics of sentient landscapes as racist, xenophobic, and right-wing. While the field of sentient landscapes has gained critical attention, the literature rarely seems to question the intentionality of sentient landscapes, which are often romanticized as pure, good, and just, and perceived as protectors of those who are powerless, indigenous, and colonized. The book takes a new stance on sentient landscapes with the intention of dispelling the denial of “coevalness” represented by their scholarly romanticization.

Knowledge transmission and generation belong to the core mission of the public university. In democratic South Africa, the transformation of these processes and practices in higher education has become an urgent and contested task. The Faculty of Theology at the University of the Free State has already done some original work on the implications of these for theology. One area of investigation that has not yet received due attention concerns the role of theological disciplines, and especially the relation between academic disciplines and societal dynamics. This research project addresses the challenge and this volume reflects the intellectual endeavour of lectures, research fellows and a post-graduate student associated with the faculty. Each theological discipline has its own history and has already experienced reconstruction, both globally and in South Africa. Some of these genealogical developments and re-envisioning are mapped by the contributions in this volume. The critical questions addressed are: what are the contours of the (post)apartheid condition and what are the implications for responsible disciplinary practices in theology? The chapters convey an impression of the vitality of theology at the University of the Free State and in South Africa and give expression to fundamental shifts that have taken place in theological disciplines, and also of future tasks. This research project aims to stimulate reflection on responsible and innovative disciplinary practices of theology in South Africa, which, we envisage, will contribute to social justice and human flourishing. -Rian Venter, University of the Free State.

From pre-Columbian times till today, human interventions in aquatic environments have been shaping the geopolitics of Latin America. The contributors to this volume examine the relationship between water and politics in Latin America via readings of fiction and poetry by both renowned and upcoming writers. Through close literary analysis, they demonstrate how water functions as a medium for narrating submerged histories and for unsettling (post)colonial assumptions. The volume reveals literary strategies that make it possible to share knowledge about other ways of organizing life in aquatic environments.

Developing terminology products as tools for organizing and transferring specialized knowledge requires careful considerations already during the planning stage. The main content of this paper is a checklist, which is the result of reflections gathered during the reprogramming and restyling of the Information System for Legal Terminology bistro (http://bistro.eurac.edu). bistro is an application used to publish the data contained in a multilingual terminological data base. The checklist is designed as a starting point and reference for the conception and structuring of terminology tools, e. g. online terminology reference tools. Its aim is to help identify needs and, at the same time, to guide developers in the basic choices to be made already in the planning stage.

This open access book builds bridges between the science of coaching and coaching practice by analyzing the effects of coaching in detail and improving its practical effectiveness. Written by a proven expert in the field, it scrutinizes old and new methods of coaching and substantiates what still works and what does not. It provides guidance to silt the science from pseudoscience and charlatanism. Some of the topics it covers are: Simple and complex questioning methods, vision development, values analysis, strengths maps, narrative coaching, changing habits, executive communication, conflicts, stress management, burnout, health behavior, team coaching and coaching for organizational change (including e-coaching tools and artificial intelligence). The book collates the findings in an integrative, systemic theory of "result-oriented coaching" that is open to change, and addresses future developments in the coaching market, digitalization and artificial intelligent systems in coaching, with a plea for humanistic, science-driven and practice-based coaching.

This open access edited volume brings together a multidisciplinary team of social scientists and cultural experts to investigate the concept of transformative development. Contributors discuss the transformative development vision with a focus on the social sciences and cultural studies. In doing so, they explore new development paradigms for Africa in the context of Covid-19, the role of myths in the psychological transformation of Africa, the correlation between discourses on cultures in Africa and the development of the continent, interactions between Indigenous knowledge and Western innovations, and new movements in the arts, handicrafts, and even postmodern Afropop. Going beyond traditional emphases on economic and industrial progress, the authors gathered here ultimately develop new analytical frameworks that align with African realities and priorities in order to promote the decolonisation of the African minds, which remains a work in progress. 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 Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.