Humanities & Social Sciences

Religious sometimes broke their vows and returned illegally to the society of the late Middle Ages. The study deals with the most radical violation of the monastic way of life, the escape from the monastery and the apostasy of the religious community. The focus is almost a thousand petitions from the Roman-German Empire. The study of apostasy provides insights into motives, dissemination, prevention and sanctions and explains divergences between norms and practice.

‘More cosmopolitan, more lively, more global’ is how the China Daily summed up the year 2016 in China. It was also a year of more control. The Chinese Communist Party laid down strict new rules of conduct for its members, continued to assert its dominance over everything from the Internet to the South China Sea and announced a new Five-Year Plan that Greenpeace called ‘quite possibly the most important document in the world in setting the pace of acting on climate change’. The China Story Yearbook 2016: Control surveys the year in China’s economy, population planning, law enforcement and reform, environment, Internet, medicine, religion, education, historiography, foreign affairs, and culture, as well as developments in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

This book comprises the final excavation report of the western part of the late Middle Kingdom settlement in Area A (ca 1830 to 1700 BC) excavated from 1966 to 1969. Included are a comprehensive description of the archaeology, the architecture and all relevant finds. Book: http://e-book.fwf.ac.at/o:1453 Map: http://e-book.fwf.ac.at/o:1454

Democratic Situations challenges researchers and students in Science & Technology Studies and related fields to treat democracy as an empirical phenomenon. This means leaving behind off-the-shelf theoretical notions of democracy that may have travelled into STS unexamined. The alternative strategy pursued in this volume is to pay as much analytical attention to the study of democratic politics as STS has previously offered to familiar topics of science and technology. This timely collection of empirical stories and conceptual inventions leads the way by showing how the making and doing of democracy can be placed at the centre of relational research. The book turns the well-known sites of contemporary Euro-American participatory democracy, such as elections, bureaucracies, public debate and citizen participation, into fluctuating democratic situations where supposedly untouchable democratic ideals are shaped, contested and warped in practice. The fact that Euro-American participatory democracy is often upheld as an ideal for the rest of the world makes it all the more important to study how it is a situated, distributed, material, emergent, heterogenous, fragile and at times faltering figure and project. Through situated analyses, the authors demonstrate that democracy cannot be reduced to theoretical ideals and schemes of conflict, institutions, or deliberation. Instead, the volume offers an urgently needed empirically driven renewal of our understanding of democratic politics in a time when conventional ideas increasingly fail to capture current events such as Brexit, Trump and Covid19. The twelve chapters are organised into three sections. The first part, entitled Interfaces of technodemocracy, focuses on how democratic politics is co-shaped by its interfaces with more or less rigid institutions and bureaucracies. The second section, Technosciences, democracy and situated enactments of participation, emphasises the relationships between science and public participation. The third part called Reconfigurations of democratic politics with new nonhuman actors focuses on the role of material objects, especially new digital technologies, in democratic politics.

In 1847, Russian military engineer and diplomat Egor Petrovich Kovalevsky embarked on a journey through what is today Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, recording his impressions of a region in flux. Invited by Egyptian ruler Mohammed Ali to look for gold and construct mines in the area between the Blue and White Nile, Kovalevsky captured the social milieu of both elites and ordinary people as well as compiled a rich record of the Upper Nile’s climate and natural resources. A Journey to Inner Africa, masterfully translated into English for the first time by Anna Aslanyan, is both a tale of encounter between Russia and northern Africa and an important document in the history and development of the Russian imperial project.

This is the first book to focus on participatory research in the context of sport and physical activity. It explores the transformative potential of participatory research methods and provides an introduction to the practicalities of doing participatory research in sport and physical activity. The book is structured around phases of the research process, covering research design, data collection, data analysis, and knowledge mobilization and translation. Chapters cover research design topics such as building research partnerships, reflexivity and ethical issues; methods such as social photo-elicitation, go-along interviews, and biographical mapping; analytical approaches such as collective memory work and collaborative analysis; and knowledge mobilization and translation topics such as podcasting, digital tools, and peer review. Every chapter includes a review of key developments, a guide to how that approach can be employed, an example from the author’s own work, and critical reflections on how that approach can shape future research and have an impact on public discourse. This book is an invaluable resource for students and researchers working in sport studies, the sociology of sport, sport and exercise psychology, sport management and policy, and human movement and health studies more broadly. It will be particularly useful for those interested in diverse and inclusive approaches to qualitative research methodologies.

This special volume collects contributions from leading scholars who scrutinize the challenges digital finance presents for the EU internal market and financial market regulation from multiple public policy perspectives. Author contributions aim to provide policy-relevant research and ideas shedding light on the complexities of the digital finance promise. They also offer solid proposals for reform of EU financial services law.

Bandits in Print examines the world of print in early modern China, focusing on the classic novel The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan). Depending on which edition a reader happened upon, The Water Margin could offer vastly different experiences, a characteristic of the early modern Chinese novel genre and the shifting print culture of the era. Scott W. Gregory argues that the traditional novel is best understood as a phenomenon of print. He traces the ways in which this particularly influential novel was adapted and altered in the early modern era as it crossed the boundaries of elite and popular, private and commercial, and civil and martial. Moving away from ultimately unanswerable questions about authorship and urtext, Gregory turns instead to the editor-publishers who shaped the novel by crafting their own print editions. By examining the novel in its various incarnations, Bandits in Print shows that print is not only a stabilizing force on literary texts; in particular circumstances and with particular genres, the print medium can be an agent of textual change.

International scholars and specialists in Jewish, German, British and European history offer this first comparative approach to the study of German and British Jewish history from the late 18th century to the 1930s. The volume's comparative dimension goes beyond a parallel exploration of the Jewish experience in the two societies by examining British and German Jewries in equal measure and discussing a broad spectrum of social, political, cultural and economic issues.

Biomedical engineering is currently relatively wide scientific area which has been constantly bringing innovations with an objective to support and improve all areas of medicine such as therapy, diagnostics and rehabilitation. It holds a strong position also in natural and biological sciences. In the terms of application, biomedical engineering is present at almost all technical universities where some of them are targeted for the research and development in this area. The presented book brings chosen outputs and results of research and development tasks, often supported by important world or European framework programs or grant agencies. The knowledge and findings from the area of biomaterials, bioelectronics, bioinformatics, biomedical devices and tools or computer support in the processes of diagnostics and therapy are defined in a way that they bring both basic information to a reader and also specific outputs with a possible further use in research and development.

This open access book examines timely issues of integrated, international, and harmonized longitudinal research on child development and wellbeing. It describes the unique approach of the Growing up in Digital Europe (GUIDE) study, which is rooted in robust scientific inquiry and provides a solid evidence base for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers focused on child development in a digital world. Chapters employ a parallel structure, including background on each GUIDE topic as well as a summary of the current state of, future directions in, and recommendations for additional research. The book offers several select case studies that provide synergy and coherency across the chapters. Key areas of coverage include: Holistic understanding of child wellbeing. Child development in the digital age. Child-centered research approaches. Cross-national harmonized questionnaire development. Potential for data linkage and biological data. Ethical considerations in an age of digital data. Fieldwork best practices, including translation. Sampling frames across diverse jurisdictions. Growing up in Digital Europe is a must-have resource for researchers, professors, and graduate students as well as policy makers, educators, and related professionals in developmental, clinical child, and school psychology, family studies, clinical social work, migration studies, health psychology, economics, and all related disciplines.

Lange vor dem sich immer deutlicher abzeichnenden totalen Versagen der kommunistischen Welterlösungsideologie und dem Zusammenbruch ihrer politischen Führungsmacht haben die bedeutendsten Schriftsteller des Landes den materiellen und geistigen Niedergang ihrer Gesellschaft erfaßt und zur Anschauung gebracht. Kritik am ökonomischen Versagen, Befragung der jüngeren Geschichte nach den Ursachen für den politischen Irrweg, Auseinandersetzung mit der moralischen Deformation im öffentlichen und privaten Bereich und die Suche nach einem neuen geistigen Halt sind die dominierenden Kennzeichen der russischen Dramatik der achtziger Jahre, die einen von Jahr zu Jahr schmerzlicher empfundenen Prozeß der Desillusionierung, aber auch der Selbstbefreiung von Verblendung und Lüge durchlaufen hat.

This text describes water's use in the production of raw fuels, as an energy carrier (e.g., hot water and steam), and as a reactant, reaction medium, and catalyst for the conversion of raw fuels to synthetic fuels. It explains how supercritical water is used to convert fossil- and bio-based feedstock to synthetic fuels in the presence and absence of a catalyst. It also explores water as a direct source of energy and fuel, such as hydrogen from water dissociation, methane from water-based clathrate molecules, and more.

This open access book is about understanding the processes involved in the transformation of smallholder rice farming in the Lower Mekong Basin from a low-yielding subsistence activity to one producing the surpluses needed for national self-sufficiency and a high-value export industry. For centuries, farmers in the Basin have regarded rice as “white gold”, reflecting its centrality to their food security and well-being. In the past four decades, rice has also become a commercial crop of great importance to Mekong farmers, augmenting but not replacing its role in securing their subsistence. This book is based on collaborative research to (a) compare the current situation and trajectories of rice farmers within and between different regions of the Lower Mekong, (b) explore the value chains linking rice farmers with new technologies and input and output markets within and across national borders, and (c) understand the changing role of government policies in facilitating the on-going evolution of commercial rice farming. An introductory section places the research in geographical and historical context. Four major sections deal in turn with studies of rice farming, value chains, and policies in Northeast Thailand, Central Laos, Southeastern Cambodia, and the Mekong Delta. The final section examines the implications for rice policy in the region as a whole.

In this Open Access Publication, we present four chapters that provide a holistic view of the critical steps in a family firm’s decarbonization journey. Achieving the EU's climate targets relies heavily on German family firms, given their pivotal role in the economy and substantial greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. First, we explore the measurement and accounting mechanisms of GHG emissions, leveraging data from German family firms across various industries. Second, we examine the management of goal tensions between environmental and economic objectives, focusing on how family firms can derive value from their emissions data. Third, with the upcoming Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the importance of communicating decarbonization efforts to stakeholders, we analyze the implications of this reporting mandate for family firms. Fourth, given the high investment demands of decarbonization measures, profitability remains a critical concern. Therefore, we also delve into the relationship between corporate environmental performance and corporate financial performance, highlighting the intersection of sustainability and long-term financial viability.