Humanities & Social Sciences

The book presents the challenges faced by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) in the first two and a half decades after Indian independence. It looks at the shifts in Government policies, how ASI found its feet in a global environment, and the new realities of economic development such as big dam constructions that invariably resulted in the submergence of archaeological sites. Based on unpublished archival data, this book highlights the contributions of the longest-serving Director-General Amalananda Ghosh and members of his staff. It thus provides a corrective to the histories of archaeology that describe the policies of the post-1947 ASI as a continuation of colonial archaeologists such as Mortimer Wheeler, who was appointed Director-General at the cusp of Indian independence in 1944 by the British. The book will be indispensable to researchers and scholars of history, heritage studies and archaeology, and South Asian studies. It will also be of appeal to those interested in the history of archaeology and the development of the discipline in India.

Built in the 1890s at the center of the nation, Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary was designed specifically to be a replica of the US Capitol Building. But why? The Prison of Democracy explains the political significance of a prison built to mimic one of America’s monuments to democracy. Locating Leavenworth in memory, history, and law, the prison geographically sits at the borders of Indian Territory (1825–1854) and Bleeding Kansas (1854–1864), both sites of contestation over slavery and freedom. Author Sara M. Benson argues that Leavenworth reshaped the design of punishment in America by gradually normalizing state-inflicted violence against citizens. Leavenworth’s peculiar architecture illustrates the real roots of mass incarceration—as an explicitly race- and nation-building system that has been ingrained in the very fabric of US history rather than as part of a recent post-war racial history. The book sheds light on the truth of the painful relationship between the carceral state and democracy in the United States—a relationship that thrives to this day. “The imaginative rereading, through primary sources, of Fort Leavenworth and a host of other subjects including abolitionism, border prisons, North-South relations, and the campaign against Native Americans adds up to an original and exceptionally significant piece of research and scholarship.” DESMOND KING, author of Separate and Unequal “A significant contribution to the literature regarding race, crime, and punishment. The analytical insight that the author provides through a rereading and recentering of Leavenworth is both a contribution to and an immanent critique of racialized notions of mass incarceration.” DANIEL KATO, author of Liberalizing Lynching SARA M. BENSON is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at San Jose State University and teaches at Oakes College at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

This book originated from the need to review the results and methods of empirical research on reading aloud, and it proposes the translation into Italian of five studies conducted in different parts of the world. The studies were chosen to be representative of different orientations and survey methods, as well as prestigious international peer-reviewed journals with open access. The aim, well-illustrated in the introductory essay by Federico Batini, is to encourage teachers, scholars and decision-makers in our country to attribute a fundamental role to the teaching of reading aloud throughout the entire education path. This should apply not only to children, on whom educational actions and research activities have already tried to focus for several decades. The future of reading aloud, if observed from the particular point of view of international research, seems to promise an intensification of surveys and a broadening of the field of educational application to school age in response to a greater awareness of the effects of reading exposure.

The present volume offers a detailed analysis of a fifteenth-century court debate on God’s unicity (tawḥīd), involving the Ottoman scholars Mollā Zeyrek (d. 903/1497-98 [?]) and Ḫocazāde Muṣliḥuddīn Muṣṭafā (d. 893/1488), as a chance to highlight the dynamics of knowledge production at the time: in post-classical Islamic scholarship, an essential element of the process was scholars’ adroitness in synthesizing arguments from differing schools of philosophy and theology – via close readings of past masters. This dialectic unfolded during a period of imperial restructuring, at a time when Sultan Meḥmed II (d. 886/1481) realized his cosmopolitan and universalistic ambitions through his persistent patronage of philosophy and science, a case that is illustrated by his glorious palatine library. The setting, audience, and format of the debate, along with the analyses reveal that the production of knowledge in the early modern Islamic world was intricate, vibrant, and dynamic – not stale or derivative as previously thought. This book attempts at reconstructing the debate through the information found in bio-bibliographical sources, and comments on certain social and cultural aspects of the fifteenth-century Ottoman scholarship. Analyses of lemmata in the plethora of commentaries and glosses reveal that Ottoman scholars could posit numerous and disparate doctrinal positions, each referencing specific texts, through which the scholars gave their own syntheses based on their unique perspectives. This method of scholarly arbitration is called ‘verification’ (taḥqīq) and is exemplified here in Ḫocazāde’s defense and recontextualization of Avicennan philosophy in early Ottoman philosophical theology. The court debate at hand concerns Avicenna’s often-contested ontological formulation, which equaled God’s quiddity/essence to His existence and necessity, a view that went against the theological principle of God’s singularity according to a tradition of Muslim theologians. Ḫocazāde’s defense of the philosophers’ proof demonstrated that one of the senses of the ontological term ‘necessity’ that Avicenna put forth was identical to God’s quiddity/essence, as well as His ‘pure existence’. Having gained the upper hand in the debate by verifying Avicenna’s thesis, Ḫocazāde’s argumentative efforts proved that not only could the philosophers’ claim be reconciled with post-classical Islamic theology, but this proof also held true on their own terms despite Zeyrek’s (and the theologians’) objections.

The thirteenth volume of Comunicazioni dell’Istituto Papirologico «G. Vitelli» is divided, as was the previous one, into three sections: 1. Editions and rieditions of texts; 2. Critical notes; 3. Chronique de lexicographie papyrologique de la vie matérielle. In the first section there are texts which are being published for the first time or which are subject to a revision and a new edition, both belonging to various collections. This section also includes the exhibition of an exceptional artefact from the Arab period, belonging to the Papyrological Institute «G. Vitelli»’s collection. The second section includes three contributions with careful palaeographic and linguistic observations on literary and documentary texts, and a fourth contribution offering an exhaustive summary of the publication state of an archive from the Institute's collection. Lastly, the third section, as consolidated by the previous volume of the Comunicazioni, collects several findings of the international research project on the lexicography of material culture (Lex.Pap.Mat.), documented in the language of papyri.

In Peki, an Ewe town in the Ghanaian Volta Region, death is a matter of public concern. By means of funeral banners printed with synthetic ink on PVC, public lyings in state, cemented graves and wreaths made from plastic, death occupies a prominent place in the world of the living. Rest in Plastic gives an insight into local entanglements of death, synthetic materials and power in Ewe community. It shows how different materials and things that come to shape power relations, exist in a delicate balance between state and local governance, kin and outsiders, death and life, the invisible and the visible, movement and containment.

Most of us think of punishment as an ugly display of power. But punishment also tells us something about the ideals and aspirations of a people and their government. How a state punishes reveals whether or not it is confident in its own legitimacy and sovereignty. Punishment and Political Order examines the questions raised by the state’s exercise of punitive power—from what it is about human psychology that desires sanction and order to how the state can administer pain while calling for justice. Keally McBride's book demonstrates punishment's place at the core of political administration and the stated ideals of the polity.

Während das deutsche Recht eine Beachtlichkeit des Motivirrtums nur für letztwillige Verfügungen kennt, ist im französischen und österreichischen Recht der Motivirrtum auch bei Schenkungen beachtlich. Dieser Unterschied bei der Lösung einer zeitlosen Problemstellung ist angesichts des gemeinsamen Ursprungs der kontinentaleuropäischen Rechtsordnungen im römischen Recht bemerkenswert. Wie haben sich diese gesetzlichen Regelungen in Deutschland, Frankreich und Österreich entwickelt? Wie werden sie heute in Wissenschaft und Praxis gehandhabt? Und haben Rechtsprechung und Lehre in Deutschland funktionale Ersatztatbestände für eine Motivirrtumsanfechtung von Schenkungen geschaffen? Diese Fragen beantwortet Luca Wimmer aus rechtshistorischer und -vergleichender Perspektive und unterzieht die Lösung des deutschen Rechts einer kritischen Würdigung.

"Cicero composed his incendiary Philippics only a few months after Rome was rocked by the brutal assassination of Julius Caesar. In the tumultuous aftermath of Caesar’s death, Cicero and Mark Antony found themselves on opposing sides of an increasingly bitter and dangerous battle for control. Philippic 2 was a weapon in that war. Conceived as Cicero’s response to a verbal attack from Antony in the Senate, Philippic 2 is a rhetorical firework that ranges from abusive references to Antony’s supposedly sordid sex life to a sustained critique of what Cicero saw as Antony’s tyrannical ambitions. Vituperatively brilliant and politically committed, it is both a carefully crafted literary artefact and an explosive example of crisis rhetoric. It ultimately led to Cicero’s own gruesome death. This course book offers a portion of the original Latin text, vocabulary aids, study questions, and an extensive commentary. Designed to stretch and stimulate readers, Ingo Gildenhard’s volume will be of particular interest to students of Latin studying for A-Level or on undergraduate courses. It extends beyond detailed linguistic analysis to encourage critical engagement with Cicero, his oratory, the politics of late-republican Rome, and the transhistorical import of Cicero’s politics of verbal (and physical) violence."

Today’s modern world often affords individuals to form teams to work together towards shared goals and objectives. The need for tools to digitally support collaboration distributed in time and space increased over the past decades significantly with a recent sudden increase due to the Corona pandemic crisis. The research goal in the field of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) has always been to design systems that facilitate collaboration based on the understanding of groups and social interaction – especially on how people coordinate their work. In the real-world coordination happens in a seemingly seamless and effortless way. However, the resulting mechanisms translated to digital systems often provide a clumsy and awkward experience as users lack the means for subtle and rich interaction beyond the spoken word. After numerous failures revealing system deficits and a large number of ethnographic studies, researchers identified awareness to become the support mechanism for effortless coordination in digital systems. Yet, instead of addressing the problem using appropriate methods and tools, researchers found themselves trapped in circular reformulations of concepts and evaluations of prototypes on the basis of disciplinary preferences ignoring the basic characteristics of the objects of interest. Even worse, the most basic design tensions stemming from a use-inspired perspective have not been resolved indicating a substantial problem with the evaluation of awareness and coordination support. Effortless coordination cannot be reached without being measured, thus not without an appropriate measurement approach. This thesis introduces an appropriate assessment method for the efforts related to awareness and coordination support in cooperative settings – the STANDARDIZED COORDINATION TASK ASSESSMENT (SCTA). Applying a use-inspired basic research driven approach it creates and leverages an effort-based operationalization of the two constructs derived from literature and especially from a cognitive perspective. A highly automated and scalable framework delivers quantitative results to be used for hypotheses validations that allows a benchmark-based approximation of effortless coordination. At the same time the method opens the door for a lot more use-inspired basic research to resolve many of the still open design tensions and challenges.

This volume approaches the phenomenon of slavery and other types of strong asymmetrical dependencies from two methodologically and theoretically distinct perspectives: semantics and lexical fields. Detailed analyses promise to provide new insights into the worldview of pre-modern societies. The case studies range from Ancient China and Egypt over Greek and Maya societies to Early Modern Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Islamic and Roman law

Integrated river basin management is an approach focusing on the development and management of land and water resources in a coordinated manner with the primary aim to ensure society development, which is well balanced from the environmental, economic, and social points of view. It is a complex approach, including all aspects of water resource management (water and aquatic ecosystem protection, disaster management, and water use) and covering a wide range of disciplines (e.g., hydrology, ecology, environmental management, and economy), cross-cutting issues (climate change, data sharing, and stakeholder involvement), and approaches (river basin management plans preparation, water-food-energy-ecosystems nexus assessment, science-policy integration, and transboundary cooperation). This book provides a comprehensive overview of achievements and challenges associated with the implementation of the approach throughout the world.

The Return of Malthus is the first comprehensive analysis of the post-war fear of scarcity. Linnér traces the development of an international discourse of crisis through the influence of such thinkers as William Vogt, Fairfield Osborn and Georg Börgström, labelled ‘neo-Malthusians’ for their emphasis on an impending clash between population growth and resource limits, after the manner of the nineteenth-century father of scarcity economics. The book analyses the role of science and technology in securing food supply, the transmutation of older ideas about preserving nature into a new conservation ideology based on sustainable use, and the preoccupation of the industrialised nations with forestalling communism and controlling power relations. First published by The White Horse Press in 2003. Even more relevant today, this revised edition charts perceptions of and prescriptions for crises of population growth and resource shortage, which have had profound influence on agricultural, population and security policies from the Second World War to the present.

Scarti, tracce e frammenti: controarchivio e memoria dell’umano. Literature and art, increasingly interested in the dark side of production, now appear as a reservoir of fragments and waste of all sorts. The attraction towards scraps, conceived as anti-goods, testifies the existence of a parallel world where the myths of growth and productivity show their tragic face. Through different textualities and media, waste emerges as a testimony of a subversive marginality from which unexpected perspectives, which can undermine the established order, arise. The volume, using the image of waste, offers a hidden or marginalized counter history, which however 'returns' overbearingly in order to give contemporaneity its shapeless substance.

The word media hype is often used as rhetorical argument to dismiss waves of media attention as overblown, disproportional and exaggerated. But these explosive news waves, as well as - nowadays - the twitter storms, are object of scientific research, because they are an important phenomenon in the public area. Sometimes it is indeed ‘much ado about nothing’ but in many cases these media storms have play an important role in political issues, scandals and crises. Twitter storms sometimes ruin reputations within hours. Although different concepts are used, such as media hypes, news waves, media storms, information cascades or risk amplification, all the studies in this book refer to the same process in which key events trigger a chain of reactions and interactions, building up huge news waves in the media or rapidly spreading social epidemics in the social media.