Humanities & Social Sciences

"This book studies the ”grey area” of the success story of rural lending libraries in the Nordic countries through the activities of people’s libraries in one area of Central Finland. The study explores the influence of social, cultural, geographical and economic phenomena, such as the spread of revivalist movements, on the reading habits of the local population and reveals interesting reasons why the establishment of elementary schools and popular libraries and the growth of functional literacy did not automaticallyincrease the informational capital of the common people of remote regions or lead to their social advancement. This study represents a methodological experiment in describing the life history of a people’s library. The combination of collective biographical and transnational comparative methods with rarely utilized original sources in this study is innovative and has not been used before in Finnish historical research on functional literacy and popular libraries. The advantage of the comparison is that it reveals the attitudes to libraries that were characteristic of each of the cultures involved. For the people of the Finnish countryside in the late nineteenth century, libraries represented a way of acquiring new information that was still strange and unwelcome. The distribution of immaterial capital was extremely unevenwith regard to age, gender and social rank. In the earlier Finnish research has not very often been analysed, how the communal status of the peasant reader and his or her personal networks in the local community affected the quality of his or her reading habits. This book shows, that the location of the library in its local community and on the other hand the status and position of its customers in their networks, had a great significance on the use of the library and thus to the improvement of reading skills."

Sweden is seen as a forerunner in environmental and ecological policy. Sweden and ecological governance is about policies and strategies for ecologically rational governance, and uses the Swedish case study to ask whether or not it is possible to move from a traditional environmental policy to a broad, integrated pursuit of sustainable development, as illustrated through the 'Sustainable Sweden' programme. The study begins by looking at the spatial dimensions of ecological governance, and goes on to consider the integration and effectiveness of sustainable development policies. It analyses the tension between democracy and sustainable development, which has a broader relevance beyond the Swedish model, to other nation states as well as the European Union as a whole. In this book the author offers the latest word in advanced implementation of sustainable development by a front-runner in environmental and ecological policy. It will be useful for students of environmental politics and sustainable development researchers.

With their rich traditions of conflict resolution and peacemaking, the Pacific Islands provide a fertile environment for developing new approaches to crime and conflict. Interactions between formal justice systems and informal methods of dispute resolution contain useful insights for policy makers and others interested in socially attuned resolutions to the problems of order that are found increasingly in the Pacific Islands as elsewhere. Contributors to this volume include Pacific Islanders from Vanuatu, Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea including Bougainville, as well as outsiders with a longstanding interest in the region. They come from a variety of backgrounds and include criminal justice practitioners, scholars, traditional leaders and community activists. The chapters deal with conflict in a variety of contexts, from interpersonal disputes within communities to large-scale conflicts between communities. This is a book not only of stories but also of practical models that combine different traditions in creative ways and that offer the prospect of building more sustainable resolutions to crime and conflict.

The importance of plant-based food fermentation and the need for analytical methods. Food fermentation is a complex yet highly relevant topic in food science today and is very likely to remain so for years to come. It is a technology that can enhance the sensory attributes, health-related properties, and shelf life of a wide variety of foods. Typical of food fermentation processes is that they induce numerous changes in the raw material or food matrix, including various (bio)chemical conversions of food constituents. To fully unlock the potential of grain-based food fermentation processes, a robust analytical toolbox, specifically developed for fermented raw materials and foods, is essential. This edited volume, written by leading experts in the field of food science and fermentation technology and one of the outcomes of the Horizon Europe project HealthFerm, offers a comprehensive collection of chemical analytical methods, each in its distinct way suited for the characterisation of fermented grain-based raw materials and food products.

Anthropology

"In this chapter, I argue that Aristotle's doctrine of hylomorphism, which con- ceived the natural world as consisting of substances which are metaphysically composed of matter and form, is ripe for rehabilitation in the light of quantum physics. I begin by discussing Aristotle's conception of matter and form, as it was understood by Aquinas, and how Aristotle's doctrine of hylomorphism was `physicalised' and eventually abandoned with the rise of microphysicalism. I argue that the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, and the emergence of irreducibly macroscopic phenomena in nite temperature quantum systems, have given us good reasons to doubt the truth of microphysicalism. In support of my argument, I show how to construct a hylomorphic interpretation of the de Broglie-Bohm theory that posits a single Cosmic Substance. I then show how to construct a hylomorphic interpretation of an alternative `contextual' wave function collapse theory (recently proposed by the physicists Barbara Drossel and George Ellis) which posits a plurality of Thermal Substances. Both of these neo-Aristotelian ontologies reject the microphysicalist dogma that nature consists fundamentally of some set of microscopic constituents."

Présent dans toute politique environnementale et pourtant s'en distinguant précisément parce qu’il n’est pas ce qui nous entoure mais ce qui existe pour et par lui-même, le vivant ne se laisse pas enfermer par les humains – pas si facilement, dirait-on avec nuance – et c’est cet acte de résistance qui le rend politique.

The essays in this volume present art historical methods for research on the conditions in which books were produced and decorated in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. The consideration of the multiple factors impacting on the production and dissemination of illustrated books serves to improve our understanding of the works and helps to place them more accurately in the cultural discourse of their time.

Der erwerbsbezogene Übergang bildet eine zentrale Herausforderung für die Soziale Arbeit. Im Mittelpunkt der qualitativen Untersuchung von Júlia Wéber stehen Teilhabe- und Zugehörigkeitskonstruktionen junger Adressatinnen der Jugendhilfe und Arbeitsvermittlung an der Schwelle der Arbeitswelt. Vier exemplarische Übergangsverläufe zwischen Selbststeuerung und institutionellem Eingriff werden in den Kontext aktueller gesellschaftlicher Machtverhältnisse eingebettet und unter Rekurs auf ausgewählte Ansätze der subjektorientierten Übergangsforschung, der Adoleszenz- und Anerkennungsforschung diskutiert.

Under the European Union lifelong learning guidelines, in the last two decades the Portuguese adult education policy has noted the emergence of new offers that have enabled the establishment of new occupations, tasks and activities for adult educators, such as those referring to guidance and validation within recognition of prior learning. Guidance and validation are developed on the basis of a wide range of tools (recommendations, guidelines, qualification frameworks, standards of competencies). This circumstance has allowed adult educators to become lifelong learning technicians as shown by the research conducted for the writing of this essay.

This handbook is written for patients and members of the public who want to understand more about the approaches, methods and language used by health-services researchers. Patient and public involvement (PPI) in research is now a requirement of most major health-research programmes, and this book is designed to equip these individuals with the knowledge and skills necessary for meaningful participation. Edited by award-winning mental-health researchers, the book has been produced in partnership with mental-health-service users and carers with experience of research involvement. It includes personal reflections from these individuals alongside detailed information on quantitative, qualitative and health-economics research methods, and comprehensively covers all the basics needed for large-scale health research projects: systematic reviews; research design and analysis using both qualitative and quantitative approaches; health economics; research ethics; impact and dissemination. This book was developed during a five-year research programme funded by the UK’s National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) called Enhancing the Quality of User Involved Care Planning in Mental Health Services (EQUIP). The handbook clearly outlines research practices, and gives an insight into how public and patient representatives can be involved in them and shape decisions. Each chapter ends with a reflective exercise, and there are also some suggested sources of additional reading. People who get involved in health research as experts from experience now have a textbook to support their research involvement journey.

"For many of us, our earliest and most meaningful experiences with literature occur through the medium of a translated children’s book. This volume focuses on the complex interplay that happens between text and context when works of children’s literature are translated. What contexts of production and reception account for how translated children’s books come to be made and read as they are? How are translated children’s books adapted to suit the context of a new culture? Spanning the disciplines of Children’s Literature Studies and Translation Studies, this book brings together established and emerging voices to provide an overview of the analytical, empirical and geographic richness of current research in this field and to identify and reflect on common insights, analytical perspectives and trajectories for future interdisciplinary research. This volume will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience of scholars and students in Translation Studies and Children’s Literature Studies and related disciplines. It has a broad geographic and cultural scope, with contributions dealing with translated children’s literature in the United Kingdom, the United States, Israel, Ireland, Spain, France, Brazil, Poland, Slovenia, Hungary, China, the former Yugoslavia, Sweden, Germany, and Belgium."

Atmosphären gehören zu den grundlegenden Eindrücken eines Konzerterlebnisses, insbesondere bei neuen Konzertformaten mit ihren multidimensionalen, multimedialen und partizipatorischen Ansätzen. Wie aber entstehen Atmosphären, wie können sie bewusst erzeugt werden? Auf Grundlage einer theoretisch-empirischen Analyse veranschaulicht Cornelia Wild die Konzertatmosphäre als Modell, mit dem sich die komplexen ästhetischen Zusammenhänge eines Konzertes erfassen lassen. Mit der atmosphärischen Musikvermittlung stellt sie zudem ein Gestaltungskonzept für die ästhetische Arbeit bereit, in dem das individuelle Erleben der Wahrnehmenden einen besonderen Stellenwert erhält.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This book takes an expansive view of vocational education and training. Drawing on case studies across rural and urban settings in Uganda and South Africa, the book offers a new way of seeing this through an exploration of the multiple ways in which people learn to have better livelihoods. Crucially, it explores learning that takes place informally online, within farmers’ groups and in public and private education institutions.

This book faces two issues: the assessment of movement-derived structures in children with cochlear implants, and the linguistic training based on the explicit teaching of syntactic rules. Participants were tested on the production, comprehension, and repetition of sentences derived by A’ movement. The performance of the children with cochlear implants was compared with the performance of a group of children with normal hearing. Results showed a better performance of hearing children than deaf children, and the typical subject-object asymmetry common to both groups. As for the training part, three case studies are presented on the adaptation into Italian of the linguistic training of relative clauses. The linguistic training follows the protocols developed for adults with aphasia and children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Results showed an improvement in both trained and untrained structures, and in the participants’ narrative skills.