Humanities & Social Sciences

"This volume presents the collective adventure of Dingdingdong, the Institute for the Co-production of Knowledge about Huntington’s Disease, founded in 2012 between Paris and Brussels. Katrin Solhdju’s Testing Knowledge: Toward an Ecology of Diagnosis pursues the question of taming the violence of the new species of medical foreknowledge represented by genetic testing. Adopting historical and epistemological perspectives on diagnostic situations, including observations from anthropological field research, speculative storytelling, and ancient oracles, Testing Knowledge proposes a new ecology of predictive diagnostic gestures, which potentially concern us all. Testing Knowledge is preceded by the Dingdingdong collective’s Manifesto (2013), which tells the story of the young Alice Rivières, who in 2006 took the presymptomatic, genetic test, foretelling her that she will eventually develop Huntington’s. Her first-person account of the revelation of her test results, which she experienced as an act of poisoning or cursing, pulls the reader into the manifold ethical, psychological, and existential issues inherent to medical predictions. Testing Knowledge is also preceded by a foreword from Alice Wexler, author of Mapping Fate: A Memoir of Family, Risk, and Genetic Research, and is followed by an afterword by philosopher Isabelle Stengers."

Winner, 2012 Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award. Women of the Washington Press argues that for nearly two centuries women journalists have persisted in their efforts to cover politics in the nation’s capital in spite of blatant prejudice and restrictive societal attitudes. They have been held back by the difficulties of combining two competing roles – those of women and journalists. As a group they have not agreed among themselves on feminist goals, while declaring that they aspire to be seen as professional journalists, not as advocates of a particular ideology. Still, they have brought a different perspective to the news, as they have fought hard to prove that they are capable of covering political issues just like male journalists. Over the years women have networked with each other and carved out areas of expertise – such as reporting of politically-oriented social events and coverage of first ladies – that men disdained, while they pressed to gain entrance to sex-segregated institutions like the National Press Club. Attempting to merge the personal and the political, they have raised issues like sexual harassment that men journalists left untouched. At a point today where they represent about half of accredited correspondents, women still face shifting barriers that make it difficult to combine the roles of both women and journalists in Washington, but they are continuing to broaden the definition of political journalism.

Those convicted of homicide were hanged on the public gallows before being dissected under the Murder Act in Georgian England. Yet, from 1752, whether criminals actually died on the hanging tree or in the dissection room remained a medical mystery in early modern society. Dissecting the Criminal Corpse takes issue with the historical cliché of corpses dangling from the hangman’s rope in crime studies. Some convicted murderers did survive execution in early modern England. Establishing medical death in the heart-lungs-brain was a physical enigma. Criminals had large bull-necks, strong willpowers, and hearty survival instincts. Extreme hypothermia often disguised coma in a prisoner hanged in the winter cold. The youngest and fittest were capable of reviving on the dissection table. Many died under the lancet. Capital legislation disguised a complex medical choreography that surgeons staged. They broke the Hippocratic Oath by executing the Dangerous Dead across England from 1752 until 1832.

Every representation of the world, every drawing, every critical reflection ultimately describes ourselves; it defines us as people and as researchers. The text Cities suspended between capes and rivers collects the results of a research carried out for over a decade, from 2011 to 2023, which involved six small towns on the Sicilian Ionian coast: Forza d’Agrò, Casalvecchio, Mandanici, Fiumedinisi, Alì and Itala. The synthetic restitution of tangible and intangible data is graphically described in six reports dedicated to each city. The intent is to build an “identity map” characterized by the overlapping of numerous levels of interpretation: some analytical and structured, others abstract and synthetic, still others nuanced and playful.

Practices of comparing shape how we perceive, organize, and change the world. Supposedly innocent, practices of comparing play a decisive role in forming categories, boundaries, and hierarchies; but they can also give an impetus to question and change such structures. Like almost no other human practice, comparing pervades all social, political, economic, and cultural spheres. This volume outlines the program of a new research agenda that places comparative practices at the center of an interdisciplinary exploration. Its contributions combine case studies with overarching systematic considerations. They show what insights can be gained and which further questions arise when one makes a seemingly trivial practice - comparing - the subject of in-depth research.

« Le fait que personne ne me parle jamais a été plus dur à supporter que toutes les raclées que j’ai prises. » En 2004, Arthur Honneger résumait ainsi pour Swissinfo la détresse des enfants placés : au-delà des négligences et des violences, le pire était encore le sentiment de n’exister pour personne. Au début des années 2000, les voix des anciens enfants placés ont commencé à émerger d’une chape de silence longtemps entretenue. Grâce à la mobilisation tenace de certain·e·s, soutenus par quelques historien·ne·s et journalistes, la thématique de l’enfance placée s’est imposée comme un problème public au niveau national, suscitant de nouvelles recherches historiques ainsi qu’un processus politique de reconnaissance et de réparation. En proposant une synthèse des travaux récents, cet ouvrage explique comment ces dispositifs de placement ont vu le jour au nom de la protection de l’enfant, tout en conduisant aux dérives dénoncées par les témoins. Il entend contribuer à intégrer cette thématique dans l’histoire nationale et agir en faveur d’une reconnaissance de la mémoire des victimes. C’est aussi l’occasion d’alimenter un regard critique et réflexif sur le risque coercitif propre aux mécanismes d’assistance, hier comme aujourd’hui.

Patient quality of life (QoL) is a pivotal parameter, which is often used by clinicians to evaluate how treatments and therapies influence patients’ functionality and emotional state, aiming to ameliorate interventions and their outcomes. Currently, the majority of questionnaires assessing the QoL are designed with the main contribution of clinicians and, therefore, include items that are cantered on the disease rather than on its multifaceted impact on people’s life. The failure to truly grasp the patients’ perspective, their needs, aspirations, perceptions and emotional state, is a major drawback that sets medical care on clinical parameters alone. We aimed to bridge this gap by establishing an innovative patient-designed QoL index to provide a new, unbiased tool considering the patients’ perception of their own well-being. Based predominantly on patients’ contribution, we defined specific areas (physical, emotional, social, functional, economical) and the respective characterizing features, and applied a pseudo-Delphi methodology combined with customer-satisfaction techniques. For each feature, the degree of agreement and the importance were assessed on a Likert scale. A synthetic QoL index was created by weighting the importance of each item. The methodology tested led to the development of a valid patient-designed QoL index, providing a way forward that could potentially be applied to many different conditions. The areas and the features included are indeed common to all patients, irrespective of their disease. We found that the process of methodology development enhanced the patients’ awareness of their subjective experience with the disease, and enabled them to better present their situation to the clinicians. The patient-designed QoL index provides a descriptive model that can be helpful to patients, clinicians and third parties and that can be further integrated with clinical details to obtain an overall view of the course of treatment for each patient.

Germany’s acceptance of its direct responsibility for the Holocaust has strengthened its relationship with Israel and has led to a deep commitment to combat antisemitism and rebuild Jewish life in Germany. As we draw close to a time when there will be no more firsthand experience of the horrors of the Holocaust, there is great concern about what will happen when German responsibility turns into history. Will the present taboo against open antisemitism be lifted as collective memory fades? There are alarming signs of the rise of the far right, which includes blatantly antisemitic elements, already visible in public discourse. But it is mainly the radicalization of the otherwise moderate Muslim population of Germany and the entry of almost a million refugees since 2015 from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan that appears to make German society less tolerant and somewhat less inhibited about articulating xenophobic attitudes. The evidence is unmistakable—overt antisemitism is dramatically increasing once more. The Future of the German-Jewish Past deals with the formidable challenges created by these developments. It is conceptualized to offer a variety of perspectives and views on the question of the future of the German-Jewish past. The volume addresses topics such as antisemitism, Holocaust memory, historiography, and political issues relating to the future relationship between Jews, Israel, and Germany. While the central focus of this volume is Germany, the implications go beyond the German-Jewish experience and relate to some of the broader challenges facing modern societies today.

The German-born, Chilean author Norbert Lechner remains one of Latin America’s most prominent and creative social scientists. His work is indebted to the intense debates regarding theories of modernization, developmentalism, and dependence that took place in Latin American intellectual and political circles. These theoretical sources were present as a cognitive horizon in his essential writings, and many of the central concerns that enlivened his oeuvre arose from his intellectual immersion in these deliberations. If the confrontations with the revolutionary discourses of the 1960s informed his vision of the Latin American state, his experience with authoritarianism led him to pose a question that would become central to all his career: What does it mean to do politics, and what does it mean to do democratic politics? This anthology, which includes the first translations into English of three of his most outstanding works can guide our readers, like Ariadne’s thread, through the intellectual output of this great thinker. It should also be said that these writings contain some of the most intellectually stimulating approaches to political sociology written in Latin America. Published between the 1980s and the first decade of the 2000s, the texts cover a span of more than thirty years during which the author developed a very personal vision as he sought to understand politics in a different way.

Listeners with hearing impairments have difficulties understanding speech in the presence of background noise. Although prosthetic devices such as hearing aids and cochlear implants may improve the hearing capability, listeners with hearing impairments still complain about their speech perception in the presence of noise. The basic tonal audiometry only gives a cursory idea of the degree of difficulty in spoken communication caused by hearing loss because it does not assess the ability to understand speech. Therefore, the use of speech-in-noise tests to measure hearing loss in complex scenes is an integral part of a patient's audiological study. Most research has concentrated on studying only stationary sound sources, but in natural acoustic scenes, conversations may become very difficult to understand in the presence of moving sound sources such as a moving talker or a passing vehicle. Therefore, this thesis deals with quantifying speech perception in the presence of moving maskers through virtual sound sources presented binaurally via headphones. Significant differences in several conditions were found, revealing that the auditory system assesses differently the moving maskers than the stationary maskers. Therefore, the inclusion of moving conditions in clinical listening tests is recommended, in order to assess speech-in-noise perception in a more realistic environment.

This book offers the first panoramic study on the development and characteristics of the literary-journalistic genre of spectator periodicals in Hispanic America and Brazil. After contextualizing these publications within the emancipation processes of 19th-century American Enlightenment, it explores the new coexistence modes and esthetics they disseminated.

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Coronavirus, known officially as SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), is an evolving threat. Threat entities have explored and exploited the pandemic to advance their agenda. Although lockdowns inhibited virus attacks in government-controlled areas, terrorist attacks continued unabated in the conflict areas. While government entities and military forces abided by lockdown measures, postponing training and scaling down operations, insurgent and terrorist groups operated relatively freely and mounted attacks. Both on the battlefields and off the battlefields, threat groups have invested in digital acceleration, maintaining strength and ideological influence during COVID-19.

The responsibility of transnational corporations for human rights violations in global supply chains continue to be of public interest: Fires in textile factories in Pakistan, environmental destructions due to oil production or worst forms of child labour in mines which produce minerals for electronic goods are just a few examples. Even if companies are not formally bound to internationally binding human rights according to current legal doctrine, a number of legal and political instruments emerged recently through which companies can be held accountable. The contributions to this volume analyse recent developments in public international law and domestic torts law and provide fresh insights into the fundamental questions of corporate responsibility for human rights violations in global supply chains.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. Gambling is both a multi-billion-dollar international industry and a ubiquitous social and cultural phenomenon. It is also undergoing significant change, with new products and technologies, regulatory models, changing public attitudes and the sheer scale of the gambling enterprise necessitating innovative and mixed methodologies that are flexible, responsive and ‘agile’. This book seeks to demonstrate that researchers should look beyond the existing disciplinary territory and the dominant paradigm of ‘problem gambling’ in order to follow those changes across territorial, political, technical, regulatory and conceptual boundaries. The book draws on cutting-edge qualitative work in disciplines including geography, organisational studies, sociology, East Asian studies and anthropology to explore the production and consumption of risk, risky places, risk technologies, the gambling industry and connections between gambling and other kinds of speculation such as financial derivatives. In doing so it addresses some of the most important issues in contemporary social science, including: the challenges of studying deterritorialised social phenomena; globalising technologies and local markets; regulation as it operates across local, regional and international scales; and the rise of games, virtual worlds and social media.