Humanities & Social Sciences

Over the last 25 years, South Korea has witnessed growing inequality due to the proliferation of non-standard employment, ballooning household debt, deepening export-dependency, and the growth of super-conglomerates such as Samsung and Hyundai. Combined with declining rates of economic growth and turbulent political events, these processes mark a departure from Korea’s past recognition as a high growth “developmental state.” The Postdevelopmental State radically reframes research into the South Korean economy by foregrounding the efforts of pro-democratic reformers and social movements in South Korea to create an alternative economic model—one that can address Korea’s legacy of authoritarian economic development during the Cold War and neoliberal restructuring since the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s. Understanding these attempts offers insight into the types of economic reforms that have been enacted since the late 1990s as well as the continued legacy of dictatorship-era politics within the Korean political and legal system. By examining the dilemmas economic democracy has encountered over the past 25 years, from the IMF Crisis to the aftermath of the Candlelight Revolution, the book reveals the enormous and comprehensive challenges involved in addressing the legacy of authoritarian economic models and their neoliberal transformations.

During the long years of civil strife in China the Nationalist authorities amassed extensive materials on their Communist adversaries. Now stored in government institutions on Taiwan, these materials are an excellent source for the study of the Chinese Communist movement. Among them is the Bureau of Investigation Collection (BIC), which holds over 300,000 volumes of primary documents on the Chinese Communist movement. The purpose of Chinese Communist Materials is, without any attempt at comprehensive listing of the Bureau’s holdings, to give scholars a representative description of the collection, to point out its implications for research, and suggest new areas for research at the Bureau in the fields of political science and history [1, 4].

The essay critically analyses the legal concept of freedom as it is expressed in the Labour Law scholarship. The essay starts from the original conception of freedom ‘of’ work, meaning ‘freedom to work’, that is the original expression of liberal labour law, and how it is limited and not absolute freedom. The author then engages with the other conceptions of freedom (‘in’ work and ‘from’ work) that are expressed in practice as a limitation of the first freedom.

This chapter introduces Niklas Luhmann’s theory of organizations, which he conceived as communicatively constituted social systems that are created through decision-making. Decisions are thereby also understood as communicative events, ones that are inherently paradoxical as they attempt to select a certain option while simultaneously communicating discarded alternatives. Decisions are, hence, fragile events provoking opposition and rejection. Organizations can be understood as social phenomena that are capable of de-paradoxifying decisions by featuring these very decisions as their main mode of operation. However, Luhmann asserts that not only organizations, but our entire social world is constituted through communication. Against this backdrop, this chapter also highlights the role of macro-societal domains such as politics, science, economics, and love. Like organizations, these macro-societal domains can be understood as communicatively constituted systems that have certain characteristics and effects. In this respect, the Luhmannian framework offers a communication-based counterprogram to the mainstream debates of institutionalism.

Although Franz Brentano was one of the most influential turn-of-the-century philosophers, he, like Ludwig Wittgenstein, published little but left a large philosophical legacy. This study examines the biographical and theoretical reasons for Brentano’s reluctance to publish and offers an overview of the checkered history of his philosophical legacy.

A pioneering book on prisons in West Africa, Colonial Systems of Control: Criminal Justice in Nigeria is the first comprehensive presentation of life inside a West African prison. Chapters by prisoners inside Kirikiri maximum security prison in Lagos, Nigeria are published alongside chapters by scholars and activists. While prisoners document the daily realities and struggles of life inside a Nigerian prison, scholar and human rights activist Viviane Saleh-Hanna provides historical, political, and academic contexts and analyses of the penal system in Nigeria. The European penal models and institutions imported to Nigeria during colonialism are exposed as intrinsically incoherent with the community-based conflict-resolution principles of most African social structures and justice models. This book presents the realities of imprisonment in Nigeria while contextualizing the colonial legacies that have resulted in the inhumane brutalities that are endured on a daily basis.

Nowadays, scientific literacy is a key aspect for active citizenship and for making informed decisions regarding scientific issues of everyday life. However, the PISA 2018 data highlight the low scientific competence of the upper secondary school students, underlining the need to foster STEM teaching. In particular, the use of the so-called X-Reality for acquiring scientific skills and to increase interest in the discipline seem promising. During the first year of my PhD, I carried out a scoping review on STEM teaching with X-Reality in the context of secondary school. The main purpose was to draw a state-of-the-art regarding X-Reality use, focusing on potential, critical aspects and challenges. After the search and selection process, 10 articles were included in the analysis. The results showed the effectiveness of X-Reality in promoting the achievement of learning objectives, the interest in the discipline and the long-term retention of knowledge. These results will be the starting point for setting up the empirical part of the PhD project.

The digitization of the analog radio frequency (RF) domain, carried out to realize flexible, low-cost software-defined radio transmitters, has reached the power amplifier (PA). Switched mode operation is used to implement a digital input interface and optimize the efficiency of RF amplifiers by minimizing the current-voltage overlap at the transistor. Differential (push-pull) operation is used to enhance the bandwidth of an amplifier by taking advantage of the symmetry to match even harmonics. This work discusses differential switched mode operation to design simultaneously efficient and wideband PAs. Using the example of the current mode class-D (CMCD) amplifier, the required harmonic output impedances in differential and common mode are derived from the ideal waveforms. In order to implement the output impedances with a large bandwidth, this thesis presents optimized designs of wideband output filters and planar baluns. The book concludes with several examples of differential switched mode RF PAs. Furthermore, the integration of antennas as differential loads for differential PAs is examined and an implementation of a so-called "amplitenna" is presented.

Africa’s recovery from the COVID-19 crisis will depend on private firms sustaining and creating jobs. But even previously thriving enterprises have been badly hit by the crisis. This report outlines the consequences of the health crisis in Africa, the potential cost of the recovery and the willingness of banks to support green investments as they look to the future.

This work deals with questions about the tasks and goals of art education. In the first part of the text, a fundamental ethical perspective on the teaching of art is developed. Art is negotiated as a specific form of knowledge, as 'worlding', which makes the human-made boundaries between human beings, nature and the planet world questionable and recognisable, and leads us to care for one another. The second part of the text is dedicated to concrete suggestions for care-bearing art lessons in the ethical context of care that has already been developed. The starting points for this are the so-called world days, which remind us of international themes and current world problems.

Political Science; Economics

Vorliegende Arbeit, die 1959 der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität München als Dissertation eingereicht wurde, versucht erstmals in deutscher Sprache einen umfassenden Überblick über das Schaffen des weißruthenischen Nationaldichters Janka Kupała zu geben. Um den Nachweis zu führen, wie tief Kupałas dichterisches Werk in seinem Volkstum verwurzelt ist, wurde auf die Darstellung der volkskundlichen und volkstümlichen Elemente in seinem Werk besonderer Nachdruck gelegt.

Dieses Open-Access-Buch klärt die Frage, ob Marketing einen essenziellen Beitrag leisten kann, um die Herausforderungen der gegenwärtigen Klima- und Vielfachkrise zu bewältigen. Louise I. H. Rieck untersucht das Transformationspotenzial von Marketing mithilfe des innovativen Forschungsinstrumentes der Erkundungsaufstellung. Die Untersuchung identifiziert eine Reihe an irreführenden Annahmen im klassischen Mindset, z. B. bezüglich der Axiome „Konsumentensouveränität“ und „Verbrauchermacht“. Auch der Topos vom „grünen Wachstum“ erweist sich als Sackgasse. In der repräsentierenden Wahrnehmung zeigt sich ein neues, weitsichtiges Marketingdenken, das Erwerbsorientierung und Ressourcenorientierung als Antagonisten begreift, die zueinander in einem kreativ-fruchtbaren Spannungsverhältnis stehen. Als Ergebnis der Untersuchung steht die Idee eines anderen, zukunftsorientierten Marketing, das als Katalysator für transformative Bewegungen und ressourcengerechte Konsuminnovationen wirken kann. Das Merkmal, welches das besondere Potenzial von Marketing für eine ressourcenorientierte Transformation des Konsumsystems – seine USP gegenüber anderen verbraucherpolitischen Akteuren – begründet, überrascht: Es liegt im besonderen Verhältnis von Marketing zur Wahrheit.

Politics and Community-Based Research: Perspectives from Yeoville Studio, Johannesburg offers a substantive and compelling analysis for a diverse readership interested in urban politics, community mapping and the built environment. The book draws on a critical reflection of Yeoville Studio, a research project conducted by Wits University academics from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds, together with community partners and postgraduate students. A collection of vignettes portraying people and places in Yeoville interwoven with theoretically analytical chapters, it explores the politics of community research at a neighbourhood scale in its multiple facets, and will resonate with similar contested and complex neighbourhoods across the world. The mix of analysis, vignettes, photographs, architectural design and graphics builds the discussion in engaging, rich and integrated ways, to capture the many participatory approaches taken to this city-community studio.

Information and communication technology (ICT) makes it possible to bring information to everyone who wants to learn. Rapid advances in technology offer strong support for using ICT in teaching. Online education can intensify and improve students' learning process, and enables us to reach more students than by traditional means. The number of courses and modules being offered online is increasing rapidly worldwide. Although online education can reach more people nowadays and new and challenging learning experiences can be created with it, in the average university course the digital dimension too often remains limited to simply publishing the existing face-to-face course content online. It is crucial that lecturers have and can obtain knowledge about how to design technology-enhanced teaching. Technical advances can be expected to continue in the future, and those who wish to implement educational technology in their own teaching practice must reckon on becoming lifelong learners. This fits the culture of academic teachers perfectly: they are already lifelong learners and creators of new knowledge within their discipline. This book is based on the notion that a lecturer who uses ICT in teaching must learn how to apply his or her knowledge about content, pedagogy and technology in an integrated manner. The idea of integrating these three types of knowledge is based on the TPACK model, which stands for Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge model. The material for this book was developed in a Dutch higher education innovation project known as MARCHET (Make Relevant Choices in Educational Technology, MARCHET, 2009-2011).