Humanities & Social Sciences

The author examines the practice of video interrogation for children witnesses. Starting point for their empirical investigation is the question of whether the law reform is not only meant well, but can be implemented practically. Here the author builds on the regulations of the 1998 established law for witness protection, to its feasibility in terms of the intended effective protection of victims, particularly the avoidance of so-called secondary victimization (trauma), experts from the federal state of Lower Saxony - prosecutors, police and courts - report by their own experiencees. In five selected district courts of Lower Saxony, the author has also conducted an extensive document analysis on the use of video testimony, and concluded that the video technology in criminal proceedings is used rarely. In specific reform proposals „de lege ferenda“ also the recent regulations of the Law Reform Act of 2003 victims are included in the evaluative study.

De ontwikkeling van de sociale zekerheid in de afgelopen eeuw vertoont het beeld van een grote golf: een snelle opgaande beweging na de Tweede Wereldoorlog, gevolgd door een halvering van de uitgaven sinds 1984. De neergaande beweging in de afgelopen dertig jaar was het gevolg van de financiële onhoudbaarheid van het stelsel, de verstorende werking op de arbeidsmarkt, de ongewenste morele gevolgen van te genereuze sociale zekerheid en veranderingen in preferenties van de burgers. Als gevolg van de ingrijpende hervormingen die zijn doorgevoerd, hebben deze argumenten voor de toekomst aanzienlijk aan kracht ingeboet. Toch is het aannemelijk dat het sociale stelsel nog verder zal worden geprivatiseerd, doordat de burgers hun vertrouwen in de overheid als verzekeraar hebben verloren en liever hun eigen buffers opbouwen. Er is echter ook een alternatief toekomstscenario denkbaar waarin de overheid weer een grotere rol bij de inkomensbescherming van burgers gaat spelen.

The here collected contributions relating to the 46th International Conference of the Representation Disciplines Teachers, organized jointly by Sapienza University of Rome, Roma Tre University, and San Raffaele Roma University, aim to offer the scientific community a reflection on the theoretical and methodological aspects related to the concept of èkphrasis, a term that, in the field of representation, concerns descriptive, analogical, and digital activities that generate new knowledge in several areas of application. The Conference aims to place at the center of the discussion an interpretation of the concept of research that, without neglecting an idea of study, protection, and enhancement of environmental and cultural heritage, focuses on the needs of contemporary society and its possible developments, making use of innovative theoretical, methodological, and operational activities, including those characterized by an interdisciplinary approach. According to this interpretation, research can also be seen as a foreshadowing of the definition and testing of experimental proposals aimed at exploring new areas of investigation: this opens up imaginative and utopian perspectives in the relationship between the sciences, the arts, and the disciplines that contribute to common goals, through the experimentation of methods, techniques, and languages for conceiving, prefiguring, designing, and representing.

The volume aims to present and evaluate some intervention programmes in which the visuo-gestural modality has been used as a communication and a reading support, in different educational and developmental contexts. Sign language appears to be a valid instrument of inclusion not only for deaf people but also for hearing children, with communication disorders. This is the case of the study we conducted in a primary school class, in which we used sign language as an inclusive means of communication for a non-verbal autistic child. Furthermore, we discuss Sillabiamo, a reading method based on fingerspelling, the manual alphabet used in sign languages. We conducted five case studies in order to verify the effectiveness of this method and to improve its features. In three of them, Sillabiamo is used as a first approach to reading; we used it with two groups of pre-school children (3;4-6;2) and a case of Down’s Syndrome associated with verbal dyspraxia (10;2). In the other two case studies, Sillabiamo is used as a support to specific reading difficulties in a case of Cornelia de Lange’s Syndrome (7;9) and a case of suspected SLD. These studies reveal promising results of the use of Sillabiamo in the contexts we analyse. Sillabiamo gives participants useful information and tools towards the objective of decoding a written text or overcoming difficulties in fluency and accuracy in reading.

Sensing the Everyday is a multi-sited ethnographic inquiry based on fieldwork experiences and sharp everyday observations in the era of crisis. Blending sophisticated theoretical analyses with original ethnographic data, C. Nadia Seremetakis journeys from Greece to Vienna, Edinburgh, Albania, Ireland, and beyond. Social crisis is seen through its transnational multiplication of borders, thresholds and margins, divisions, and localities as linguistic, bodily, sensory, and performative sites of the quotidian in process. The book proposes everyday life not as a sanctuary or as a recessed zone distanced from the structural violence of the state and the market, but as a condition of im/possibility, unable to be lived as such, yet still an encapsulating habitus. There the impossibility of the quotidian is concretized as fragmentary and fragmenting material forces. Seremetakis weaves together topics as diverse as borders and bodies, history and death, the earth and the senses, language and affect, violence and public culture, the sociality of dreaming, and the spatialization of the traumatic, in a journey through antiphonic witnessing and memory. Her montage explores various ways of juxtaposing reality with the irreal and the imaginal to expose the fictioning of social reality. The book locates her approach to ethnography and the ‘native ethnographer’ in wider anthropological and philosophical debates, and proposes a dialogical interfacing of theory and practice, the translation of academic knowledge to public knowledge

Pollution & threats to the environment

In this research work, an archaeometric study was carried out on 374 pottery samples (prehistoric, indigenous, black-painted, kitchenware, amphorae, Terra Sigillata, and Tegole) from two archaeological areas in Sicily: The Sicani Mountains and the chora of Camarina. For this purpose, The ceramic fractions were analyzed by particle-induced X-ray emission (PIXE). This form of analysis proved to be crucial, as it permitted the comparison of the find materials studied in this thesis and the data obtained from the scientific literature through multivariate statistical analysis. This made it possible to identify the place of production of the finds, distin-guish local materials from imported ones, and reflect on their circulation in Sicily, in a regional and interregional framework. Data processing also highlighted the evolution of regional economic exchanges in Sicily, allowing a reconstruction of some trade circuits.

Die Forschung zum kindlichen Wortlernen hat in den letzten Jahren aufgezeigt, dass der Erwerb eines neuen Wortes durch Prozessualität gekennzeichnet ist. Ein aktuelles Forschungsinteresse richtet sich in diesem Zusammenhang auf die Frage, inwieweit die längerfristigen kontextuellen Gegebenheiten diesen Lernprozess beeinflussen und ob der Erwerbsprozess durch stabile kontextuelle Bedingungen oder durch kontextuelle Variabilität begünstigt wird. Während sich bisherige Arbeiten in dieser Hinsicht vornehmlich auf isolierte Kontextfaktoren konzentrierten, rückt dieser Band die rahmende soziale Handlung und die beteiligten interaktiven Prozesse in den Mittelpunkt. Er zielt darauf ab, die Auswirkungen langfristiger Kontextbedingungen auf das Wortlernen von Vorschulkindern mit sozialen Robotern und menschlichen Interaktionspartnern systematisch zu untersuchen.

This article engages with trans artistic practices: both trans in art as well as trans as art. It takes as its point of departure the artistic work of Ro Robertson, Tama Sharman, and Erica Rutherford, each of whom works with trans in different ways. In our analysis, we take a cue from Rosemarie Buikema’s attunement to the materiality and medium specificity of artworks, and we discuss how these elements offer new entry points into a consideration of transness.

N. Katherine Hayles here investigates parallels between contemporary literature and critical theory and the science of chaos. She finds in both scientific and literary discourse new interpretations of chaos, which is seen no longer as disorder but as a locus of maximum information and complexity. She examines structures and themes of disorder in The Education of Henry Adams, Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook, and works by Stanislaw Lem. Hayles shows how the writings of poststructuralist theorists including Barthes, Lyotard, Derrida, Serres, and de Man incorporate central features of chaos theory.

This open access book provides a unique research perspective on life course transitions. Here, transitions are understood as social processes and practices. Leveraging the recent “practice turn” in the social sciences, the contributors analyze how life course transitions are “done.” This book introduces the concept of “doing transitions” and its implications for theories and methods. It presents fresh empirical research on “doing transitions” in different life phases (e.g., childhood, young adulthood, later life) and life domains (e.g., education, work, family, health, migration). It also emphasizes themes related to institutions and organizations, time and normativity, materialities (such as bodies, spaces, and artifacts), and the reproduction of social inequalities in education and welfare. In coupling this new perspective with empirical illustrations, this book is an indispensable resource for scholars from demography, sociology, psychology, social work and other scientific fields, as well as for students, counselors and practitioners, and policymakers.

While Dickens used to be seen as a writer of shallow and sentimental children’s literature, as the prolific caterer to the new market of mass literature, this collection of essays shows that Dickens was not only a reader of high-brow literature, but also expected his readers to understand them in the context of contemporary scientific and economic debates. Covering a wide range of writers – from Sidney, Shakespeare, Cervantes to Swift, Smollett and Bulwer-Lytton – Dickens’s novels reveal a multi-layered cosmos and supply their readers with richly woven nets of intertextuality.

The Ragusan maritime network gradually developed from the ancient Venetian one, at the time of Venetian preponderance (1205-1358). But, at the end of the Venetian domination, the Ragusan network developed some characteristics of its own, presented in this contribution. The characteristics of the network are here presented through its four mains aspects: extension, ramification, temporality and dangerousness. In terms of extension, both in the East and in the West of the Mediterranean, the Ragusan maritime network had great similarities with the Venetian one. It is in terms of ramification, that the differences gradually appear.

Killer Fandom is the first long-form treatment of serial killer fandom. Fan studies have mostly ignored this most moralized form of fandom, as a stigmatized Bad Other in implicit tension with the field’s successful campaign to recuperate the broader fan category. Yet serial killer fandom, as Judith May Fathallah shows in the book, can be usefully studied with many of the field’s leading analytic frameworks. After tracing the pre-digital history of fans, mediated celebrity, and killers, Fathallah examines contemporary fandom through the lens of textual poaching, affective community, subcultural capital, and play. With close readings of fan posts, comments, and mashups on Tumblr, TikTok, and YouTube, alongside documentaries, podcasts, and a thriving “murderabilia” industry, Killer Fandom argues that this fan culture is, in many ways, hard to distinguish from more “mainstream” fandoms. Fan creations around Aileen Wuornos, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and Richard Ramirez, among others, demonstrate a complex and shifting stance toward their objects—marked by parodic humor and irony in many cases. Killer Fandom ultimately questions—given our crime-and violence-saturated media culture—whether it makes sense to set Dahmer and Wuornos “fans” apart from the rest of us.

The first collection of essays in the English language dedicated to the cultural achievements and politics of one of the most important ruling houses of late medieval Europe. The house of Luxembourg between 1308 and 1437 is best known today for its principal royal and imperial representatives, Henry VII, John the Blind, Charles IV, and Charles's two sons, Wenceslas and Sigismund - a group of rulers who, for better or worse, shaped the political destiny of much of Europe during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. While some of the Luxembourg cultural legacy can still be experienced directly today in and around Prague and southern Germany, and through the literary and musical works of Machaut, Froissart, and Wolkenstein, it reached much further across Europe: from England to present-day Romania, and from the Baltic Sea to the Italian peninsula, alongside the dynasty's homelands in what is now Luxembourg, Belgium and France. However, this culture has not always attracted the scholarly attention it deserves. This volume explores the pan-European impact and influence of the Luxembourgs in a variety of fields: art and architectural history, material culture, Czech, French, German and Latin text production, gender and intellectual history, and music. Embracing the subject matter from multi-disciplinary and transnational perspectives, the essays here offer new insights into the late medieval cultures of the Luxembourg court. Particular subjects treated include the making of the "Wenceslas Bible"; Machaut at the court of John of Luxembourg; and Charles IV's patronage of multilingual literature. On publication this book is available as an Open Access eBook under the Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC-ND.