Humanities & Social Sciences

This book explores the international ordering visions of key global and regional powers in the international system from 2014 onwards. Using a fourfold analytical framework based on the distributional, normative, institutional, and temporal dimensions of the visions propagated by the relevant political elites in the states/actors in question, the book addresses the ultimate question in international relations for the coming decades: To what extent can the visions pushed forward by the leading powers of the world be reconciled to arrive at a shared direction for international order writ large? The book’s analysis also offers normative prescriptions on how to avoid a tragic race to the bottom – a fragmented world of competing orders where states are unable to address shared global crises and challenges such as pandemics, cross-border crime, climate tragedies, and armed conflict. With this, it concludes by recognising the importance of agency as well as political imagination in navigating the crisis-ridden ordering moment of the international system. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students in global order studies and governance, geopolitics, regional studies, foreign policy analysis as well as more broadly to international relations and security, political history, human geography, and policymakers. Chapter 3 and Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 International license.

With the rise of humanitarianism and the international refugee regime in the twentieth century, visual representations of refugees and their forced displacement permeated the cultural sphere. Understanding displacement aesthetics offers a groundbreaking analysis of the role of visual culture, art, and art museums in shaping ideas about people forced to flee. The book identifies the refugee as a cultural figure, analysing the history of visual tropes across multiple visual arenas and their endurance in the present day. Addressing contemporary contexts, the book investigates how displaced artists face distinct barriers that manifest aesthetic outcomes. Language, identity, and labour also appear as critical factors informing how art is made, curated, collected, and publicly understood. Advancing the new concept of ‘displacement aesthetics’ – a negotiation between representation, lived experience, and institutions – this book offers a major interdisciplinary analysis that intervenes in cultural history, art history, and museum studies. Combining archival research, analysis of art, and collaborative co-curation with artists and museums, the book presents new insights into the role of art and culture in mediating this pressing social and political issue in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This is the first complete English translation of Journey into Northern Pennsylvania and the State of New York by Michel-Guillaume St. Jean de Crèvecoeur. It presents the rich reflections and tales of an 18th-century Frenchman who lived and traveled in America for 27 years. Soldier-of-fortune, gentleman farmer, friend of Washington and Franklin, Crèvecoeur describes his natural surroundings with a charm and delight unrivaled by any writer but Thoreau. In this book we follow two men, a narrator and his friend, as they witness unfamiliar Native American rituals and visit frontier settlements along the Hudson River. Interwoven are fanciful impressions of the Indigenous communities of the region and sagas of adventure that stretch credibility. More than a straightforward narrative of travel, the book has the ideological goal of attacking the corruption of Old World civilization and contrasting it with a vision of harmony, abdundance, and democracy resulting from the American revolution. The work has not previously been translated into English.

Polystyrene (PS) is a petroleum‐based plastic made from styrene (vinyl benzene) monomer. Since it was first commercially produced in 1930, it has been used for a wide range of commercial, packaging and building purposes. In 2012, approximately 32.7 million tonnes of styrene were produced globally, and polystyrene is now a ubiquitous household item worldwide. In 1986, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that the polystyrene manufacturing process was the fifth largest source of hazardous waste. Styrene has been linked to adverse health effects in humans, and in 2014, it was listed as a possible carcinogen. Yet, despite mounting evidence and public concern regarding the toxicity of styrene, the product of the polymerisation of styrene, PS, is not considered hazardous. This chapter draws on a series of movements called the ‘new materialisms’ to attend to the relational, unstable and contingent nature of PS, monomers and other additives in diverse environments, and thus, we highlight the complexities involved in the categorisation of PS as ‘hazardous’ and the futility of demarcating PS as ‘household waste'. While local examples are drawn from the New Zealand context, the key messages are transferrable to most policy contexts and diverse geographical locations.

Peasant revolts were widespread in late medieval Europe. Based on the extensive investigation of the project La signoria rurale nell’Italia del tardo medioevo, this essay examines the numerous cases of peasant rebellion in the Italian peninsula, scarcely known to historians – who have mostly focused on urban uprisings – and never assessed on a large scale. The comparative perspective allows to analyse the causes, contexts, relevance, and results of such revolts, as well as to understand not only the features of lordships in late medieval Italy, but also the nature of the relationship between lords and subjects.

Das Jahrbuch für Pädagogik widmet sich in der Ausgabe 2025 den kontroversen Bezugnahmen auf Sexualität und Bildung in pädagogischen und öffentlichen Diskursen. Der Band rückt dabei die Frage nach gesellschaftskritischen Einsätzen – etwa im Hinblick auf Ansätze und Konzepte sexueller Bildung – in den Vordergrund. Zur Diskussion steht damit, welche Vorstellungen und Erwartungen von Emanzipation sich mit Sexualität und Bildung verbinden (lassen): Wie wurden und werden Macht- bzw. Gewaltverhältnisse mit Beanspruchungen von Befreiung legitimiert oder reproduziert, aber auch kritisiert und verändert?

International communication as a field of inquiry is, in fact, not very “internationalized.” Rather, it has been taken as a conceptual extension or empirical application of U.S. communication, and much of the world outside the West has been socialized to adopt truncated versions of Pax Americana’s notion of international communication. At stake is the “subject position” of academic and cultural inquirers: Who gets to ask what kind of questions? It is important to note that the quest to establish universally valid “laws” of human society with little regard for cultural values and variations seems to be running out of steam. Many lines of intellectual development are reckoning with the important dimensions of empathetic understanding and subjective consciousness. In Internationalizing "International Communication," Lee and others argue that we must reject both America-writ-large views of the world and self-defeating mirror images that reject anything American or Western on the grounds of cultural incompatibility or even cultural superiority. The point of departure for internationalizing “international communication” must be precisely the opposite of parochialism – namely, a spirit of cosmopolitanism. Scholars worldwide have a moral responsibility to foster global visions and mutual understanding, which forms, metaphorically, symphonic harmony made of cacophonic sounds.

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This open access book is the first compilation that reviews a wide range of social determinants of health (SDHs) for non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and healthy ageing in Japan. With the highest life expectancy and the largest elderly population in the world, Japan has witnessed health inequality by region and social class becoming more prevalent since the 2000s. The first half of this volume describes in detail major NCDs, such as cancers, heart and kidney diseases, diabetes, stroke, and metabolic syndrome. The second half, on the other hand, explores various SDHs relating to healthy ageing. All chapters review and focus on SDHs, particularly health inequality associated with socio-economic status and social capital, which are widely addressed in the field of social epidemiology. The book makes the argument that “Health for All” advocated by the WHO should be implemented based on social justice and benefits for the greater society. Public health researchers and policymakers, both in Japan and other nations, will gain scientific evidence from this book to prepare for the coming era as ageing becomes a global issue.

This book provides a novel, cultural-historical perspective on travel in the ancient world by exploring a wide range of women’s (in)voluntary journeys and relocations, such as can be derived from passing references, short sections, and extended narratives found in the early Jewish corpora that remain to us. The book delivers a more nuanced notion of the past by challenging and demonstrating the need to move beyond the binary idea of “female stayers” and “male movers.” In doing so, it foregrounds a previously overlooked aspect of travel history: female mobility, its many facets and inherent complexity as a sociocultural phenomenon, and its multiple transformational effects. The selected sources include a large body of literary texts from the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, Pseudepigrapha, Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo of Alexandria, Flavius Josephus, and the New Testament, together with some documentary sources indicating the existence of certain types of travel up until the early second century ce. They reveal a variety of mobile girls and women, such as brides, businesswomen, captives, diplomats, diviners, economic and forced migrants, knowledge-seekers, midwives, musicians, nurses, pilgrims, refugees, sages, (semi)nomads, slaves, tourists, and war leaders. Women, Travel and Transformation from the Bible to Bar-Kokhba is of interest to students and scholars working on travel history, early Jewish literature, and women in antiquity, as well as those in biblical studies, religious studies, ancient history, and classics.

In recent years, Chinese students have enjoyed a prominent presence in the Italian higher education system. A recent survey conducted by Uni-Italia shows that Chinese students account for 24% of non-EU students in Italian universities. When the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) erupted in Italy at the beginning of 2020, panic spread quickly through social media; numerous fears, generated by the tide of information available online, permeated the Chinese university student community in Italy. This chapter first analyses the problems encountered by Chinese university students in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic, and then introduces the artistic and cultural response from within that same community. Such forms of creative response also shine light, more generally, on a growing Anti-Asian sentiment in Italy. Despite the enormous challenges posed by COVID-19, Chinese university students in Italy have developed a mode of communication that builds bridges between different cultures— quite different from “mass media” or “major news outlets”—because it is personal, honest, and intimate.

The book addresses the issue of the good performance of public administration using an interdisciplinary approach (legal, political, corporate, and economic). The concepts of efficiency and effectiveness have been defined in the field of business sciences, but have had a much wider impact. An efficient and effective administrative system, in fact, affects the system of values that are the basis of our society, since it makes it possible for citizens to concretely enjoy the services that are recognized by the regulatory system. This requirement appears even more meaningful in Italy, where the principle of so-called "substantial" equality is recognized by the Constitution.; Il libro affronta la questione del buon andamento della pubblica amministrazione usando un approccio interdisciplinare (giuridico, politologico, aziendalistico, ed economico). I concetti di efficienza ed efficacia sono stati definiti nell’ambito delle scienze aziendalistiche, ma hanno avuto un impatto ben più ampio. Un sistema amministrativo efficiente ed efficace, infatti, incide sul sistema di valori che sono a base della nostra società, poiché rende possibile ai cittadini fruire concretamente dei servizi che sono loro riconosciuti dall’ordinamento normativo. Tale esigenza appare ancora più pregnante in Italia, ove il principio di eguaglianza “sostanziale” è riconosciuto dalla Costituzione.

Industrial / commercial art & design

Innovative textile-based artwork exploded across the Canadian Prairies in the second half of the twentieth century. Melding craft traditions with modern and modernist movements in art and theory, a diverse body of creators opened a beautiful new chapter in textile art. Prairie Interlace brings together some of the most important scholars of art and craft in Canada to examine the work of forty-eight artists working with textiles from the 1960s to 2000. Recapturing and recording lost histories, this book explores both artists working with textiles and centres of textile study and production, paying special attention to the contexts in which artworks were produced. Indigenous scholars, experts in textile techniques, and experts in Prairie textile history provide fascinating insight into an artistic movement which, until now, has been largely overlooked. Featuring over one hundred and fifty beautiful full-colour images of textile works, many of which have never before been photographed for print, Prairie Interlace provides an opportunity to discover a fascinating movement which has not received the attention it deserves and invites further investigation of this rich period in Canadian art history. Developed from the travelling exhibition of the same name, Prairie Interlace is a collaboration between Nickle Galleries, University of Calgary in Calgary, AB and the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, SK.

Characters who are impostors fascinate us as masters of disguise. Whether in literature, film or real life, they present themselves with consummate skill and expose the superficiality of a society that allows itself to be dazzled by appearances. They challenge social boundaries and embody a subversive spirit that reflects a desire to break free. Yet what is admired poetically is often a criminal offence in reality and has destructive consequences for those who have been deceived. This volume examines imposture as a contemporary cultural practice. What social, cultural and media conditions foster imposture? And what does it mean for the construction of identity in the modern age when the boundaries between reality and appearance become blurred? Building on previous research discussions, the contributions from the fields of literary studies and literary pedagogy bring together answers to these questions. Furthermore, they shed light on the close connection between fiction, deception and self-presentation.

This publication provides a comprehensive compendium of the current state of Germany’s research infrastructure in the social, economic, and behavioural sciences. In addition, the book presents detailed discussions of the current needs of empirical researchers in these fields as well as of opportunities for future development.