Humanities & Social Sciences

Media depictions of Arabs and Muslims continue to be framed by images of camels, belly dancers, and dagger-wearing terrorists. But do only Hollywood movies and TV news have the power to frame public discourse? This interdisciplinary study transfers media framing theory to literary studies to show how life writing (re-)frames Orientalist stereotypes. The innovative analysis of the post-9/11 autobiographies 'West of Kabul, East of New York', 'Letters from Cairo', and 'Howling in Mesopotamia' makes a powerful claim to approach literature based on a theory of production and reception, thus enhancing the multi-disciplinary potential of framing theory.

This book is a first exploratory inquiry into possible educational selectivity effects of the European Social Fund (ESF). It assesses the extent of the gap between the social policy objectives set through regulatory competences in multi-level governance and the structure of incentives it breeds in practice, with a broad range of implications for the capacity of the government to control for an equitable distribution of services at the community level. The chapters emphasize the educational selectivity involved in national policy decisions concerning ESF implementation in the five countries, the role of informal mechanisms in fine-tuning implementation, the negative effects of formalization and failures in accommodating the complexity of goals which characterizes the ESF, as well as the overall fairness of ESF implementation towards the most disadvantaged groups in society. The empirical analysis suggests that social-service delivery contracting as an instrument of governance is no longer regulating against risks for beneficiaries, but fuels increased social division in access to public services.

This publication examines how digitalisation supports firms in developing effective climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies. Drawing on extensive survey data, it highlights that digitally advanced firms are more likely to pursue integrated, high-impact climate actions across sectors and regions. The findings underscore the importance of fostering digital transformation to accelerate sustainable business practices and enhance climate resilience.

Luxembourg – international financial center, European administrative center, destination country for immigration? This empirical study provides insights about a society that has hitherto largely eluded scientific investigation and observes the processes of identity construction in globalised conditions. The interdisciplinary team of authors exposes the processes of subjective appropriations and institutional attributions at work in the fields of languages, spaces, perceptions of self and others as well as everyday cultures, and identifies for the first time socio-cultural milieus in the Grand Duchy. The findings of the three-year research project uncover the ambivalences and dynamics of a multicultural and multilingual society.

In Gender and Genre in the Folklore of Middle India, Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger analyzes six representative Indian folklore genres from a single regional repertoire to show the influence of their intertextual relations on the composition and interpretation of artistic performance. Placing special emphasis on women’s rituals, she looks at the relationship between the framework and organization of indigenous genres and the reception of folklore performance. The regional repertoire under examination presents a strikingly female-centered world. Female performers and characters are active, articulate, and frequently challenge or defy expectations of gender. Men also confound traditional gender roles. Flueckiger includes the translations of two full performance texts of narratives sung by female and male storytellers respectively.

urban communities; urban and manicipal planning and policy

Police in Paris arrested thousands of men for sodomy or similar acts in the eighteenth century. In the mid-1780s, they recorded depositions in which prisoners recounted their own sexual histories. These remarkable documents, curated and translated into English by Jeffrey Merrick, allow us to hear the voices of men who desired men and to explore complex questions about sources, patterns, and meanings in the history of sexuality. This volume centers on two cartons of paperwork from commissaire Charles Convers Desormeaux. Dated from 1785, the cartons contain 221 dossiers of men arrested for sodomy or similar acts in Paris. Merrick translates and annotates the police interviews from these dossiers, revealing how the police and those they arrested understood sex between men at the time. Merrick discusses the implications of what the men said (and what they did not say), how they said it, and in what contexts it was said. The best-known works of clergy and jurists, of enemies and advocates of Enlightenment, and of novelists and satirists from the eighteenth century tell us nothing at all about the lived experience of men who desired men. In these police dossiers, Merrick allows them to speak in their own words. This primary text brings together a wealth of important information that will appeal to scholars, students, and general readers interested in the history of sexuality, sodomy, and sexual policing.

This book surveys the music of seventy years of Hindi films and provides a long-term investigation of film songs and their musical and cinematic conventions. Focusing on the music of Hindi language films (i.e. Bollywood) in their historical, social, and commercial contexts, the author pays special attention to the meanings that songs generate inside and outside film narratives and within Indian society at large. Songs are a vital component of film promotion on broadcast media, are distributed via soundtracks by music companies, and have long been the hegemonic popular music genre in India (even for people who rarely watch the films for which the songs were written). The book illustrates how film songs are produced through the collaboration of film directors, music directors (composers), lyricists, musicians, and singers in order to enhance the film narrative, but also to have commercial success outside of the film. Through close musical and multimedia analysis of more than twenty landmark songs, along with biographical and musical descriptions of the people who have crafted and performed these songs, this book illustrates how the creators of Hindi film songs have always mediated a variety of musical styles, instruments, and performance practices from Indian and international sources in order to produce a distinctive Indian music genre. This genre has always had cosmopolitan orientations, yet has consistently retained discrete sound and production practices over its long history.

The trust of patients and test subjects is an indispensable prerequisite for the success of medical research projects that cannot be carried out without the collection, long-term storage and analysis of clinical data and samples. Medical research today mainly works in networks in increasingly larger research networks. Accordingly, the importance of data protection and data security continues to increase. The TMF published generic data protection concepts for medical research associations in 2003 for the first time. On this basis, numerous research projects were able to develop and coordinate their data protection concepts more quickly. The experience gained has been incorporated into the fundamental revision of the generic concepts. The new concept of the complexity of medical research processes takes account of this with a modular structure and was also embedded in a comprehensive guideline.

Capitalizing a Cure takes readers into the struggle over a medical breakthrough to investigate the power of finance over business, biomedicine, and public health. When curative treatments for hepatitis C launched in 2013, sticker shock over their prices intensified the global debate over access to new medicines. Weaving historical research with insights from political economy and science and technology studies, Victor Roy demystifies an oft-missed dynamic in this debate: the reach of financialized capitalism into how medicines are made, priced, and valued. Roy’s account moves between public and private labs, Wall Street and corporate board rooms, and public health meetings and health centers to trace the ways in which curative medicines became financial assets dominated by strategies of speculation and extraction at the expense of access and care. Provocative and sobering, this book illuminates the harmful impact of allowing financial markets to determine who heals and who suffers and points to the necessary work of building more equitable futures. “An important voice on the links between finance and health ecosystems, Victor Roy makes a valuable contribution to building an economy that is based on providing health for all.” — Mariana Mazzucato, author of The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy and Chair of the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All “This book is a riveting read that will strike fear in the heart of anybody who cares about the right to health or thinks that the drive for profits should not supersede democracy or human need.” — Salmaan Keshavjee, author of Blind Spot: How Neoliberalism Infiltrated Global Health “The best piece of nonfiction I have read in a long time. This book offers a fantastic, relevant, and necessary case study to understand how the financialization of the economy has affected the organization of industrial sectors.” — Marc-André Gagnon, Professor of Public Policy and Political Economy, Carleton University

The Liber at honorem Augusti has traditionally been interpreted as a work of court historiography that was supposed to legitimize the still hardly consolidated Hohenstaufen rule in the Kingdom of Sicily. In contrast to this approach, the present article focuses on a completely different background against which the book was probably drawn up: local political conditions on the Southern Italian mainland. An in-depth analysis of hitherto largely neglected focal points of the narrative suggests that the polemical rhetoric was aimed at Archbishop Nicholas of Salerno, who had been led away in captivity at the time the Liber was created. A number of families from Salerno, who had lost in power in the course of Nicholas’ ascent, benefitted from his decline. Following Henry VI’s victory over Tancred of Lecce, these families had been able to elevate their candidate to the position of electee. With their ambitious, richly decorated manuscript, this group of families intended to oblige the imperial donee to make a counter-gift and act according to the role model as the new Solomon that was drafted on him in the Liber: Showing clemency to the givers, but strict justice towards the exiled, whose imminent return would jeopardize everything they had achieved.

In diesem Open-Access-Buch wird erstmals die sozialrechtsbezogene Beratung von Verbänden als Strategie im Zugang zum Recht in die Tiefe gehend analysiert und anhand von drei exemplarisch dargestellten Beratungssituationen die Herstellung eines Zugangs zum System sozialer Sicherung rekonstruiert. Die Beratung der Sozialverbände zu sozialen Problemlagen ist ein historisch gewachsenes Gefüge im Sozialstaat. Sie tragen mit ihrer Beratung dazu bei, dass Bürger:innen im Bedarfsfall Barrieren im Zugang zum System sozialer Sicherung überwinden und auf die sozialen Sicherungssysteme zugreifen können. Die Gestaltung des Beratungssettings ist dabei von ausschlaggebender Bedeutung.

En este libro se presenta una parte de los resultados del proyecto internacional de investigación “Impacto en la equidad de acceso y la eficiencia de las redes integradas de servicios de salud en Colombia y Brasil (Equity-LA)”, financiado por la Unión Europea y en el que participaron seis instituciones de cuatro países, dos europeos (España y Bélgica) y dos latinoamericanos (Colombia y Brasil). La investigación se diseñó con el propósito de mejorar la comprensión sobre el impacto de la implementación de las redes integradas de servicios de salud en el acceso, la coordinación, la eficiencia y la equidad de acceso, en diferentes contextos de Latinoamérica. El estudio además de evidencia, generó nuevas preguntas, que dieron lugar al proyecto Equity LA II (www.equity-la.eu), actualmente en desarrollo, también financiado por la Unión Europea, que profundiza en sus resultados y amplía el análisis a cuatro países más de América Latina: Argentina, Chile, México y Uruguay.

The deaf-blind poet Irene Ransburg (1898-1944) and the blind German philology student Gisela Kaufmann (1907-1941) were two extraordinary women in Graz during the interwar period, who persevered despite immense challenges. Their life stories are connected through their passion for literature and language and by their common fate of persecution under National Socialism. Though their stories were forgotten for many years, they have recently been reclaimed as part of the public memory in Graz. In this book, the lives of the two women are explored from various perspectives, and they are commemorated together.

Modernists believed that “form follows function.” Form Follows Fuel shows that in fact energy has been the biggest influence on the world’s architecture throughout the history of our species. The availability of energy under different fuel regimes – including human labour, firewood, coal, oil, gas, and renewables – shapes architecture at all scales, from what gets built to how its doors hinge. This book is the first to quantify energy inputs for a range of buildings worldwide and across the historical record. In the process, it challenges today's architects, offers practical solutions to today's ecological crises, and highlights the aspects of today’s buildings that make architecture responsible for 37% of human climate-changing emissions. It reveals the enormously lower impacts of historical alternatives to today’s default building practices. This book shows that the shift to modern fossil fuel use, from the seventeenth century, came to be the most consequential move in the history of architecture as well as in human history in general. This brought about remarkable wealth for the built environment and at the same time unprecedented dangers for our planet, as evidenced by the exacerbating climate emergency. This book consists of 14 accessibly written case studies, illustrated with beautiful and revealing new measured drawings of each project by John Joseph Burns. Each chapter focuses on a single structure in a particular historical context, sometimes contrasted to similar buildings, from subsistence farming to advanced global capitalism. The chapters analyse the consumption of embodied and operational energy in these buildings, and also discuss questions of recycling and adaptive reuse. They complement precise descriptions with hard numbers on materials and construction, using robustly sourced approximations where exact figures are not available. The case studies rely on both published research and the authors’ own calculations and allow systematic comparison across different global regions and historical periods. Cases include architectural icons such as the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Baths of Caracalla, the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, the Seagram Building, and Terminal 1 of Kuala Lumpur International Airport, as well as common types such as a pre-modern stone house, a late-nineteenth-century tenement, and a modernist panel block. Examples are taken from different regions of the world, including ancient China, pre-Columbian Mexico, and modern Europe. This book is an important contribution to architectural historical research, written for students, academics and building professionals as well as for a general audience.