Humanities & Social Sciences

Approaching subalternity from a broad Gramscian angle, this edited collection contributes to the understanding of popular politics in parliamentary, autocratic, and colonial contexts. The book explores individual stories and micro-histories of complaints, requests, rumors, and other mediated and unmediated interactions between political institutions and the subjects they claimed to govern or represent. It challenges the approaches of institutionally oriented political historiography and its attention to the top-down construction of political representation, citizenship, and power and powerlessness. The book discusses more subtle forms of agency and the spaces these pertained to, which could indicate contestation or resistance taking place within a framework of loyalty towards the existing political institutions. This research does not only bridge the divide between political and apolitical frames of reference, but it also provides a new perspective on the dichotomy between loyalty and resistance by acknowledging the nuances of these seemingly opposing stances. With case studies from Europe, North Africa, South America, and India, the chapters cover political communication in proto-democratic, democratic, imperial, and authoritarian contexts. This volume is crucial reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars in history and social sciences who are interested in political culture and the mechanisms of negotiating local, national, or imperial identities.

This article examines a range of objects described in Roman antiquarian sources that functioned as carriers of memory and guarantors of identity. Some, like the pignora imperii, were regarded as divine pledges securing Rome’s imperium; others, such as Romulus’ lituus or the sow of Lavinium, served as material witnesses to foundational events. Although materially lost today, these objects acted as signs of continuity, shaping Roman collective memory and political power. Embedded in the urban fabric, they contributed to a sacred topography that anchored political authority in a mythical past.

In an age of smartphones, Facebook and YouTube, privacy may seem to be a norm of the past. This book addresses ethical and legal questions that arise when media technologies are used to give individuals unwanted attention. Drawing from a broad range of cases within the US, UK, Australia, Europe, and elsewhere, Mark Tunick asks whether privacy interests can ever be weightier than society’s interest in free speech and access to information. Taking a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, and drawing on the work of political theorist Jeremy Waldron concerning toleration, the book argues that we can still have a legitimate interest in controlling the extent to which information about us is disseminated. The book begins by exploring why privacy and free speech are valuable, before developing a framework for weighing these conflicting values. By taking up key cases in the US and Europe, and the debate about a ‘right to be forgotten’, Tunick discusses the potential costs of limiting free speech, and points to legal remedies and other ways to develop new social attitudes to privacy in an age of instant information sharing. This book will be of great interest to students of privacy law, legal ethics, internet governance and media law in general.

This book provides an overview of the next generation Internet of Things (IoT), ranging from research, innovation, development priorities, to enabling technologies in a global context. It is intended as a standalone in a series covering the activities of the Internet of Things European Research Cluster (IERC), including research, technological innovation, validation, and deployment.The following chapters build on the ideas put forward by the European Research Cluster, the IoT European Platform Initiative (IoT–EPI), the IoT European Large-Scale Pilots Programme and the IoT European Security and Privacy Projects, presenting global views and state-of-the-art results regarding the next generation of IoT research, innovation, development, and deployment.The IoT and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) are evolving towards the next generation of Tactile IoT/IIoT, bringing together hyperconnectivity (5G and beyond), edge computing, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), virtual/ andaugmented reality (VR/AR), and artificial intelligence (AI) transformation.Following the wider adoption of consumer IoT, the next generation of IoT/IIoT innovation for business is driven by industries, addressing interoperability issues and providing new end-to-end security solutions to face continuous treats.The advances of AI technology in vision, speech recognition, natural language processing and dialog are enabling the development of end-to-end intelligent systems encapsulating multiple technologies, delivering services in real-time using limited resources. These developments are focusing on designing and delivering embedded and hierarchical AI solutions in IoT/IIoT, edge computing, using distributed architectures, DLTs platforms and distributed end-to-end security, which provide real-time decisions using less data and computational resources, while accessing each type of resource in a way that enhances the accuracy and performance of models in the various IoT/IIoT applications.The convergence and combination of IoT, AI and other related technologies to derive insights, decisions and revenue from sensor data provide new business models and sources of monetization. Meanwhile, scalable, IoT-enabled applications have become part of larger business objectives, enabling digital transformation with a focus on new services and applications.Serving the next generation of Tactile IoT/IIoT real-time use cases over 5G and Network Slicing technology is essential for consumer and industrial applications and support reducing operational costs, increasing efficiency and leveraging additional capabilities for real-time autonomous systems.New IoT distributed architectures, combined with system-level architectures for edge/fog computing, are evolving IoT platforms, including AI and DLTs, with embedded intelligence into the hyperconnectivity infrastructure.The next generation of IoT/IIoT technologies are highly transformational, enabling innovation at scale, and autonomous decision-making in various application domains such as healthcare, smart homes, smart buildings, smart cities, energy, agriculture, transportation and autonomous vehicles, the military, logistics and supply chain, retail and wholesale, manufacturing, mining and oil and gas.

Inklusion ist ein mehrdeutiger sozialer, politischer und pädagogischer Begriff, der von einer Vielzahl an Disziplinen zunehmend auch als analytische Kategorie gefasst wird. Die Beiträger*innen erweitern diesen theoretisierenden Zugang und setzen dabei den Fokus auf das Verhältnis von Inklusion und Grenzen. Aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive zeigen sie, dass Grenzen und Grenzziehungen nicht nur dem Gegenstand Inklusion immanent sind, sondern Inklusion selbst die Logiken und Grenzen disziplinärer Diskurse verschiebt - was einen neuen Blick auf politische Partizipationsfragen, wechselseitige Zu- und Anerkennungsverhältnisse und pädagogische Imperative zulässt.

Mit der Geschlechtszugehörigkeit ist eine spezifische Vorstellung von körperlicher Leistungsfähigkeit verbunden. Im Sport zeigt sich diese darin, dass eine Trennung in Männer und Frauen als grundlegende Voraussetzung erachtet wird, um fairen Wettbewerb zu ermöglichen. Doch was bedeutet eine solche Trennung für intersexuelle Sportler*innen, die sich schon körperlich der Zweigeschlechterordnung entziehen? Dennis Krämer arbeitet aus soziologischer, medizinischer und sexualwissenschaftlicher Perspektive die existierenden Vorstellungen über Intersexualität als zeitgenössische Körperpolitiken heraus und reflektiert ihre Entstehung unter Berücksichtigung der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse.

The volume is a tribute to Aza Alibekovna Takho-Godi by the former students, colleagues, and friends to commemorate her 100th birthday. It contains biographical essays on Aza Alibekovna; essays on ancient Greek literature; ancient Greek philosophy; ancient Greek history; Byzantium; the reception of ancient philosophy in the medieval West; ancient motifs in German Romanticism and Russian philosophy and theology; the reception of Classical literature in Russia; postmodern approaches to Classical themes. There are also essays on Alexei Losev; his epistolary exchanges with Western scholars; Neoplatonism in his history of philosophy; the concepts of time and symbol; studies of the Renaissance; and the challenge of translating Losev’s early philosophical works into English.

This conference proceedings volume contains the contributions from the 34th ""Computational Intelligence"" workshop, held in Berlin from November 21 to November 22, 2024. The main focus areas are methods, applications, and tools for: Fuzzy Systems, Artificial Neural Networks, Evolutionary Algorithms, and Data Mining Techniques, as well as comparative studies of methods based on industrial and benchmark problems.

Recognising the urgent need for further progress in teacher education and preparation for the success of early language learning, this volume presents research on the education and professional development of teachers, exploring how they can foster multilingual spaces in the early years of formal education. Investigating a range of European contexts, the book examines the effectiveness of teacher education for early language learning, covering contexts of multilingualism and English as a foreign language (EFL) with children under the age of 12. Split into three parts examining research into teacher practices, education, and curricula, chapters cover emerging topics such as teacher education and local linguistic encounters; global citizenship and transcultural education; linguistic landscapes and visual narratives; mixed-age classrooms and literacy skills; pre-service and in-service teacher education; and teacher and teacher educator competencies and beliefs. Offering a unique combination of foci on teachers, teacher education and classroom practice, this book will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of early language education, multilingualism, EFL and teacher education more broadly. Student teachers and teachers working in early language learning contexts may also find the volume of interest.

Diaspora Reads explores the role of literature and reading practices in the community life of Russian-speaking migrants in Britain. Russophone culture abounds with myths about the special mission of literature and the writer in society. The broader cultural myth of Russian literaturocentrism encompasses the sanctification of highbrow literature, the idolisation of authors as heroes and martyrs, and the idealisation of avid readership. In the diaspora, literaturocentrism takes on a new form, retaining elements of the Russian and Soviet tradition while primarily responding to the needs of migrant readers. Following the discussions, games, and celebrations of a community book club in London, Diaspora Reads demonstrates how collective reading enables migrants to shape shared cultural identities, forge communities, build a long-distance relationship with their homelands, and become members of a global network of readers. Angelos Theocharis is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Media, Culture, Heritage at Newcastle University.

Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan focuses on women’s activities in the new public spaces of Meiji Japan. With chapters on public, private, and missionary schools for girls, their students, and teachers, on social and political groups women created, on female employment, and on women’s participation in print media, this book offers a new perspective on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese history. Women’s founding of and participation in conflicting discourses over the value of women in Meiji public life demonstrate that during this period active and vocal women were everywhere, that they did not meekly submit to the dictates of the government and intellectuals over what women could or should do, and that they were fully integrated in the production of Meiji culture. Mara Patessio shows that the study of women is fundamental not only in order to understand fully the transformations of the Meiji period, but also to understand how later generations of women could successfully move the battle forward. Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan is essential reading for all students and teachers of 19th- and early 20th-century Japanese history and is of interest to scholars of women’s history more generally.

The research examines the building materials of the ancient fortress known as Rocca Vecchia, in the Gorgona Island, built by the Republic of Pisa and commonly dated to the 13th century. Particular attention is paid to the composition of the artificial stone materials (bricks, bedding mortars, plasters and renders) in order to better understand and define the different construction phases. The results will be useful from the historical point of view and for the future conservation intervention which will have to involve a group of prisoners who will also have the task of the subsequent maintenance.

This open access book explores the political utility and consequences of memory laws with a focus on how militant memory laws frame, underpin and generate international conflicts. Proceeding from Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine, this examination plots how memory laws have preceded, partially led to, and encouraged the outbreak of the war itself via Russian propaganda. It also offers a broader perspective looking at developments in the Baltic States, Belarus, Finland, Germany, Hungary, and Poland, as well as in European (Council of Europe and European Union) law. Bringing together scholars with diverse perspectives, this book provides both analysis and conceptual reflection for scholars assessing the politics of memory laws. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open Access was funded by the University of Copenhagen.

Seit 40 Jahren herrscht in Afghanistan Krieg. Bisher war die Frage der Machtverteilung, also die Definition der Hoheitsgebiete der einzelnen Elitefraktionen, nicht klar zu erkennen. Frangis Dadfar Spanta untersucht die unterschiedlichen Konfliktdynamiken, um dann Lösungsschritte für einen Friedenbildungsprozess vorzuschlagen. Anhand der unterschiedlichen Eliten aus Politik, Kultur, Wirtschaft, Medien, Bildung und Religion zeichnet sie die Patronage-Klientel-Netzwerke nach. Eine Besonderheit der Studie bilden Interviews mit Ashraf Ghani, Hamid Karzai, Abdullah Abdullah, Atta Noor sowie mit zwei Taliban-Repräsentanten. Die Untersuchung ist aufgrund ihrer theoretischen und methodischen Herangehensweise sowohl für Politik- und Sozialwissenschaftler_innen als auch für Anthropolog_innen lesenswert.

For most of its history, decision theory has investigated the rational choices of humans under the assumption of static preferences. Human preferences, however, change. In recent years, decision theory has increasingly acknowledged the reality of preference change throughout life. This Element provides an accessible introduction and new contributions to the debates on preference change. It is divided into three chapters. In the first chapter, the authors discuss what preference change is and whether we can integrate it into decision theory. In the second chapter, they present models of preference change, including a novel proposal of their own. In the third and final chapter, they discuss how we can rationally choose a course of action when our preferences might change. Both the transformative experience literature and recent work on choosing for changing selves are discussed.