Humanities & Social Sciences

The essay aims to verify the enduring relevance of the method developed by Riccardo Del Punta when, in 2012, he supported the legislator in the writing of a crucial text for the evolution of Italian labour law. On the basis of RDP's teaching in the process of building the discipline on the minimum wage, the labour law discourse should follow a communicative procedure open to dialectical confrontation between different points of view and leave room for interdisciplinarity, taking into account, above all, the economy. It is precisely the encounter between law and economics, and therefore the evaluation of the efficiency of the new rules, that can offer a valuable epistemological opportunity and contribute to giving more solid foundations to our subject.

This monograph examines the relationship between government and religion in the United States from historical, intellectual-historical, and constitutional perspectives, with particular emphasis on the concept of American civil religion. The study outlines the historical development of American religiosity from the colonial period to the present and discusses debates surrounding the interpretation of the First Amendment as well as major Supreme Court precedents concerning religious freedom and church-state relations. Special attention is given to the theoretical interpretations of civil religion and its manifestations in political rhetoric, including presidential discourse and controversies surrounding the Pledge of Allegiance. The final chapter analyzes the future prospects of American civil religion in the context of growing political polarization and the first presidency of Donald Trump. The book aims to interpret this distinctive feature of American political culture and its role in shaping national identity.

This book introduces readers to the age of intra-African migration, a period from the mid-19th century onward in which the center of gravity of African migration moved decisively inward. Most books tend to zoom in on Africa’s external migration during the earlier intercontinental slave trades and the more recent outmigration to the Global North, but this book argues that migration within the continent has been far more central to the lives of Africans over the course of the last two centuries. The book demonstrates that only by taking a broad historical and continent-wide perspective can we understand the distinctions between the more immediate drivers of migration and deeper patterns of change over time. During the 19th century Africa’s external slave trades gradually declined, whilst Africa’s expanding commodity export sectors drew in domestic labor. This led to an era of heightened mobility within the region, marked by rapidly rising and vanishing migratory flows, increasingly diversified landscapes of migration systems, and profound long-term shifts in the wider patterns of migration. This era of inward-focused mobility reduced with a resurgence of outmigration after 1960, when Africans became more deliberate in search of extra-continental destinations, with new diaspora communities emerging specifically in the Global North. Broad ranging in its temporal, spatial, and thematic coverage, this book provides students and researchers with the perfect introduction to age of intra-African migration.

Syntax of Hungarian aims to present a synthesis of the currently available syntactic knowledge of the Hungarian language, rooted in theory but providing highly detailed descriptions, and intended to be of use to researchers, as well as advanced students of language and linguistics. As research in language leads to extensive changes in our understanding and representations of grammar, the Comprehensive Grammar Resources series intends to present the most current understanding of grammar and syntax as completely as possible in a way that will both speak to modern linguists and serve as a resource for the non-specialist. This volume provides a comprehensive overview and description of coordinate structures, the syntactic and semantic types of conjunctions, as well as the types of ellipses in sentences and short dialogues. It discusses multiple conjunctions, coordinated wh-constructions, sluicing, and sentence fragments.

"We use evaluative terms and concepts every day. We call actions right and wrong, teachers wise and ignorant, and pictures elegant and grotesque. Philosophers place evaluative concepts into two camps. Thin concepts, such as goodness and badness, and rightness and wrongness have evaluative content, but they supposedly have no or hardly any nonevaluative, descriptive content: they supposedly give little or no specific idea about the character of the person or thing described. In contrast, thick concepts such as kindness, elegance and wisdom supposedly give a more specific idea of people or things. Yet, given typical linguistic conventions, thick concepts also convey evaluation. Kind people are often viewed positively whilst ignorance has negative connotations. The distinction between thin and thick concepts is frequently drawn in philosophy and is central to everyday life. However, very few articles or books discuss the distinction. In this full-length study, Simon Kirchin discusses thin and thick concepts, highlighting key assumptions, questions and arguments, many of which have gone unnoticed. Kirchin focuses in on the debate between 'separationists' (those who think that thick concepts can be separated into component parts of evaluative, often very 'thin', content and nonevaluative content) and 'nonseparationists' (who deny this). Thick Evaluation argues for a version of nonseparationism, and in doing so argues both that many concepts are evaluative and also that evaluation is not exhausted by thin positive and negative stances."

This volume explores the roles and uses of abstraction in scientific and artistic practice. Conceived as an interdisciplinary dialogue between experts across histories and philosophies of art and science, this collection of essays draws on the shared premise that abstraction is a rich and generative process, not reducible to the mere omission of details in a representation. When scientists attempt to make sense of complex natural phenomena, they often produce highly abstract models of them. In the history and philosophy of art, there is a long tradition of debate on the function of abstraction, and – more recently – its relation with theories of depiction. Adopting a process-oriented perspective, the chapters in this volume explore the epistemic potential of a diversity of practices of abstracting. The systematic analysis of a wide range of historical cases, from early twentieth-century abstractionist painting to contemporary abstract photography, and from nineteenth-century physics to recent research in biology and neurosciences, invites the reader to reflect on the material lives of abstraction through concrete artefacts, experimental practices, and theoretical and aesthetic achievements. Abstraction in Science and Art: Philosophical Perspectives will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of science, and epistemology, as well as to historians of science and art, and to practicing artists and scientists interested in exploring foundational questions at the heart of the creative practice of abstracting. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. Open access for this book was funded by University College London.

This open access Regional Reader provides a contemporary look at the emerging challenges and issues facing South Asian migration amidst covid-19 and discusses a framework for a sustainable and cooperative migration from and within the region, which will impact both the economic and regional development of South Asia. The book draws a focus on this area through an interdisciplinary and holistic lens and follows the three broad areas of migration studies in South Asia: Governance and mobility, Family, health and demography, and Forced migration. It thereby covers a number of issues from South Asian countries such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan and the Maldives. This book is a valuable resource for those who want to understand the dynamics of migration from the largest migrant-sending region in the world and one which will determine the shape of global migration patterns in the future.

‘Mind the Gap!’ is an almost iconic exhortation, originating in the London Underground, warning travellers to be careful when navigating the ‘gap’ between the platform and train. In this volume, Peter Carroll, Rex Deighton-Smith, Helen Silver and Chris Walker retrospectively assess the ‘gap’ — no less dynamic and perilous in a public policy context — between the promise and performance of successive waves of regulation in Australia since the 1980s. Regulatory bodies exist to exercise what might be broadly termed ‘control functions’ and, by nature, tend to be conservative both in their culture and operations. Institutional conservatism does not, of necessity, preclude the exercise of creativity and foresight, both of which are sorely required if government is to successfully meet the challenge of delivering more effective and less costly regulation. The business and policy environment is complex, the risks are great and the rewards of success and the costs of failure will be enormous. The true measure of success will be how effectively we are able to close the gap between promise and performance.

Humanitarian NGOs often disagree on the boundaries of their role and take vastly different views about what constitutes an ethical response to distant suffering. This book shows that, in the 1980s, decisions about when to adopt elements of human rights advocacy were fundamentally contested according to Cold War positionalities. Moreover, different underlying conceptions of rights were evident when humanitarians clashed over how to narrate suffering for Western audiences, when to speak out about atrocities witnessed by staff, and the material entitlements of aid recipients. Informed by the conviction that humanitarian NGOs must be examined as products of their national political cultures, this book compares the opposing decision-making patterns of two globally influential European NGOs – the French Médecins Sans Frontières and the British Oxfam – across three Cold War crises, namely the Cambodian refugee settlements and situation within post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, the Ethiopian famine, and displacement from the Salvadoran civil war. While MSF’s work in this decade was animated by anti-communism and a commitment to advocating for the rights of individuals against state oppression, Oxfam’s was fuelled by a moral opposition to the excesses of Western foreign policy and a developmentalist orientation that emphasised the rights of people to have their basic needs met, leading the NGO to partner with states in pursuit of poverty reduction in the Global South. By excavating the social structures within which the NGOs’ identities were formed, this book shows that humanitarian actions (and silences) were political acts that influenced post-Cold War rights discourses in distinct ways.

This chapter explores the daily deviations and elusive practices implemented by communities to circumvent the new administrative organization. From irregular practices to the persistence of ancient customs, a landscape of tacit dissent and creative adaptation emerges. The interventions of the central Government, often delayed, confirm a conduct aimed at compromise rather than frontal confrontation, following a strategy of soft and gradual imposition.

The research is aimed at investigating the changes in the methods of "construction" of representations of the territory due to the communicative evolution of disciplinary statutes and to the increasingly stringent and widespread use of new information and communication technologies. It focuses its reflection on the field of representations intended to substantiate the local and territorial project dimension. The focus of the work is on the methodological value and possible process innovation, rather than on the simple description of an expert technical product. The emphasis is on the possible value of building knowledge of territorial representations (heritage elaborations or project scenarios) drawn up through collective action.

Four operational factors, together with high development cost, currently limit the use of ocean observatories in ecological and fisheries applications: 1) limited spatial coverage; 2) limited integration of multiple types of technologies; 3) limitations in the experimental design for in situ studies; and 4) potential unpredicted bias in monitoring outcomes due to the infrastructure’s presence and functioning footprint. To address these limitations, we propose a novel concept of a standardized “ecosystem observatory module” structure composed of a central node and three tethered satellite pods together with permanent mobile platforms. The module would be designed with a rigid spatial configuration to optimize overlap among multiple observation technologies each providing 360° coverage of a cylindrical or hemi-spherical volume around the module, including permanent stereo-video cameras, acoustic imaging sonar cameras, horizontal multi-beam echosounders and a passive acoustic array. The incorporation of multiple integrated observation technologies would enable unprecedented quantification of macrofaunal composition, abundance and density surrounding the module, as well as the ability to track the movements of individual fishes and macroinvertebrates. Such a standardized modular design would allow for the hierarchical spatial connection of observatory modules into local module clusters and larger geographic module networks, providing synoptic data within and across linked ecosystems suitable for fisheries and ecosystem level monitoring on multiple scales.

Biofouling of Spiral Wound Membrane Systems gives a complete and comprehensive overview of all aspects of biofouling, bridging the gap between microbiology, hydraulics and membrane technology. High quality drinking water can be produced with membrane filtration processes like reverse osmosis (RO) and nanofiltration (NF). As the global demand for fresh clean water is increasing, these membrane technologies are increasingly important. Most past and present methods to control biofouling have not been very successful. An overview of several potential complementary approaches to solve biofouling is given and an integrated approach for biofouling control is proposed.

This Open Access book presents practical approaches to managing patients affected by various rheumatological diseases, allowing readers to gain a better understanding of the various clinical expressions and problems experienced by these patients. Discussing rheumatology from an organ systems perspective, it highlights the importance ofdetailed musculoskeletal examinations when treating patients affected by rheumatological diseases. The book first explores the latest diagnostic approaches and offers key tips for accurate musculoskeletal examinations before addressing the various treatment modalities, with a particular focus on the most common joints involved in rheumatoid arthritis: the wrists and the metacarpophalangeal joints (2nd and 3rd). Featuring easy-to-understand flow diagrams and explaining the common medical problems associated with rheumatic disease, such as shortness of breath and anemia, it is not only a valuable resource to rheumatologists, but will also appeal to medical students, junior residents, and primary healthcare physicians.

This book presents the transcriptions and annotated translations of fifteen key historical documents concerning the Tapuia indigenous people written just before and during the Dutch occupation of northeastern Brazil. The selected documents vary widely in type, including letters, descriptions, reports, first-person declarations, diaries, and transcripts of interrogations, thereby showcasing different perspectives and audiences. Some of the documents were authored by European writers, while others register indigenous voices somewhat more directly in the form of interviews or declarations. These texts provide important first-hand information about the Tapuia and other indigenous peoples during the Dutch conquest, revealing their cultural practices and knowledge while also detailing their strategic engagements with each other and with different European colonizers.