Humanities & Social Sciences

Education for sustainable development (ESD) is an important cross-sectional task in schools. However, even 30 years after Agenda 21 and numerous programs to implement ESD in schools and classrooms, there is still a great need for action on the part of teachers, who are considered central to the implementation of ESD. The book examines the professional demands on teachers with regard to the implementation of ESD. The analysis shows that especially the moment of dedication proves to be central in order to cope with ESD as a task under precarious conditions.

Foreword. Dostoevsky: Paradox, Humor, Deconstruction. A foreword to the present book and to each of the 15 articles that are part of it. While the analysis of humor, paradox, and deliberate deconstruction has generally occupied a marginal position in the study of Dostoevsky’s universe, it seems impossible to understand his poetics without pointed attention to these categories. The present book aims to fill the existing gap by focusing on the nature of ambivalent humor, paradoxicality, and methods of “de-automatizing” consciousness through deconstruction. It is precisely the dialogical and paradoxical nature of Dostoevsky’s artistic method that enables such different and sometimes contradictory readings.

This book investigates the social, political, and cultural dimensions of Indigenous sport and nation-building. Focusing on the Indigenous Sámi of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, it addresses how colonization variously impacts organizational arrangements and everyday sporting life in a modern world. Through detailed case data from the Norwegian side of Sápmi (the land of the Sámi), this book provides a critical and contemporary perspective of post-colonial influences and their impacts on sport. The study uses concepts of conventions, citizenship and communities, to examine the tenuous roles of Indigenous-based sport organizations and clubs towards the building of an Indigenous nation. The book further draws together international, national, and local Sámi experiences to address the communal and assimilative influences that sport brings for people in the North Calotte. Taken together, the book signals the importance of sport in future community development and the (re)emergence of Indigenous culture. Appealing to policy makers and scholars alike, the book will be of particular interest to researchers in sport sociology, Indigenous studies and post colonialism. It also provides essential insight for public officials and administrators of sport and/or Indigenous issues at various levels of public office.

Since the broad diffusion of Computer-Assisted survey tools (i.e. web surveys), a lively debate about innovative scales of measure arose among social scientists and practitioners. Implications are relevant for applied Statistics and evaluation research since while traditional scales collect ordinal observations, data from sliders can be interpreted as continuous. Literature, however, report excessive times of completion of the task from sliders in web surveys. This experimental protocol is aimed at testing hypotheses on the accuracy in prediction and dispersion of estimates from anonymous participants who are recruited online and randomly assigned into tasks in recognition of shades of colour. The treatment variable is two scales: a traditional multipoint 0-10 multipoint vs a slider 0-100. Shades have a unique parametrisation (true value) and participants have to guess the true value through the scale. These tasks are designed to recreate situations of uncertainty among participants while minimizing the subjective component of a perceptual assessment and maximizing information about scale-driven differences and biases. We propose to test statistical differences in the treatment variable: (i) mean absolute error from the true value (ii), time of completion of the task. To correct biases due to the variance in the number of completed tasks among participants, data about participants can be collected through both pre-tasks acceptance of web cookies and post-tasks explicit questions.

The Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design (FMCAD) is an annual conference on the theory and applications of formal methods in hardware and system verification. FMCAD provides a leading forum to researchers in academia and industry for presenting and discussing groundbreaking methods, technologies, theoretical results, and tools for reasoning formally about computing systems. FMCAD covers formal aspects of computer-aided system design including verification, specification, synthesis, and testing.

This book examines the adaptive reuse of Roman Catholic churches through twenty-five case studies from Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium. It addresses the complex intersection of theology, heritage conservation, and contemporary social needs and explores how sacred spaces can serve new secular purposes while preserving their spiritual, historical, and cultural significance. Integrating historical, theological, architectural, and policy perspectives, this book traces the historical evolution of church reuse, the impact of secularization, and the ethical responsibilities of architects, alongside the conservation principles that shape sacred heritage management. Theological reflections address ecclesiastical spatial symbolism, canon law, profanation, and episcopal guidelines in the selected countries. Comparative national profiles analyze religious demographics, church infrastructure, and property stewardship. Case studies illustrate diverse reuse models – from liturgical continuity to radical transformation – across cultural, social, commercial, residential, and interfaith contexts. The conclusions synthesize the findings, offering strategies that balance heritage preservation with contemporary functional needs. This publication is aimed at architects, historians, art theorists, architecture researchers, conservators, priests, and the managers of these buildings, as well as enthusiasts of sacred architecture who care deeply about its future, as this book is intentionally multi-layered and multi-dimensional.

Fillers are non-silent linguistic devices used in disfluencies to gain time while searching for words. In addition, they are frequently used intentionally to avoid words for reasons of politeness, ‘conspirational’ motivations, or rhetorical purposes. Two syntactically distinct types of conventionalized fillers can be distinguished: placeholders and hesitatives (also called hesitators). Placeholders are referential and morphosyntactically integrated, while hesitatives are neither. Strikingly, even though fillers are cross-linguistically widespread, dedicated studies of such items in particular languages are still largely lacking._x000D_ This collective volume comprises in-depth descriptions of conventionalized fillers in a substantial variety of languages from Eurasia, Papunesia, Australia, and the Americas, hoping to stimulate typological research on fillers, both hesitatives and placeholders. The book aims to contribute to a better visibility of the topic among general linguists, to make data and analyses accessible that will be useful for further typological studies on the topic, and to provide models for descriptive linguists._x000D_ The introductory chapter discusses issues emerging from the previous literature and offers a new typology of fillers. It also highlights the major findings of the eleven remaining chapters. Each of these contains a detailed and typologically informed analysis of fillers in one or several underdescribed languages, based on corpora of natural speech and focusing on lexical fillers rather than on phenomena below the word-level (phonetic lengthening, truncation) or above the word-level (such as idioms and discourse markers like ‘you know’, or rhetorical questions like ‘what’s the word for that?’). The chapters cover a large amount of diversity, both in terms of languages and with respect to the type of filler. They focus on (i) the criteria for identification of the various types of fillers and the terminology used, keeping in mind that the domain is still largely under construction, (ii) a detailed analysis in terms of morphosyntactic distribution and, if possible, (iii) frequency in speech, and (iv) some reflection on the diachronic development of these disfluency markers.

The paper is in English because it is dedicated to Philip Stadter. It offers a brief but philologically conducted demonstration that the dialogue between Odysseus and the sorceress Circe – as well as the heated discussion between Odysseus and the “pig-man” Gryllus – (A) takes place on the beach of Circe’s island, Aeaea, not in her dwelling; (B) happens during the last night on the island, just before Odysseus’ departure – on his ship, with his companions; (C) refers therefore to the timing of the 12th book of the Odyssey, not of the 10th. Clearly, Odysseus is leaving Circe after a year’s love with her.

This book provides an overview of a diverse array of preventive strategies relating to mental illness, and identifies their achievements and shortcomings. The chapters in this collection illustrate how researchers, clinicians and policy makers drew inspiration from divergent fields of knowledge and practice: from eugenics, genetics and medication to mental hygiene, child guidance, social welfare, public health and education; from risk management to radical and social psychiatry, architectural design and environmental psychology. It highlights the shifting patterns of biological, social and psychodynamic models, while adopting a gender perspective and considering professional developments as well as changing social and legal contexts, including deinstitutionalisation and social movements. Through vigorous research, the contributors demonstrate that preventive approaches to mental health have a long history, and point to the conclusion that it might well be possible to learn from such historical attempts. The book also explores which of these approaches are worth considering in future and which are best confined to the past. Within this context, the book aims at stoking and informing debate and conversation about how to prevent mental illness and improve mental health in the years to come.

With a specific focus on travel narratives, this collection looks at how Islamic and eastern cultural threads were weaved, through travel and trading networks, into Western European/Christian visual culture and discourse and, ultimately, into the artistic explosion which has been labeled the “Renaissance.” Scholars from across humanities disciplines examine Islamic, Jewish, Spanish, Italian, and English works from a truly comparative and non-parochial perspective, to explore the transfer through travel of cultural and religious values and artistic and scientific practices, from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries. During this period travel, military conquest and trade through the Mediterranean placed Western European citizens and merchants in contact with Islamic and eastern technology and culture, and travel narratives illustrate the converging and pragmatic dynamics of cultural acceptance. Perhaps the spread of “Renaissance” values and beliefs might have followed a trajectory the reverse of what is generally assumed, and that salient aspects of Renaissance culture traveled from the fringes of Islamic and eastern cultures to the midst of hegemonically Christian polities.

Ideas influence people. In particular, extremely well-developed sets of ideas shape individuals, groups, and societies in far-reaching ways. This book establishes these “idea systems” as an academic concept. Through three intense episodes of manipulation and mayhem connected to idea systems—Europe’s witch hunts, the Mao Zedong-era “revolutions,” and the early campaign of the U.S. War on Terror—this book charts the cognitive and informational matrices that seize control of people’s mentalities and behaviors across societies. Through these, the author reaches two conclusions. The first, that we are all vulnerable to the dominating influence of our own matrices of ideas and to those woven by others in the social system. The second, that even the most masterful manipulators of idea programs may lose control of the outcomes of programmatic manipulation. Amongst this analysis, sixty-plus central conceptual terminologies are provided for readers to analyze multiform idea systems that exist across space, time, and cultural contexts. This is an open access book.

This volume is a further continuation of the annotated bibliographies on the writings and thought of the Jewish exegete and philosopher Philo of Alexandria prepared by Roberto Radice and David Runia for the years 1937–1986 published in 1988 and by David Runia for the years 1987–1996 published in 2000. Prepared with the collaboration of the International Philo Bibliography Project, it contains a complete listing of all scholarly writings on Philo for the period 1997 to 2006. Part One lists texts, translations, commentaries etc. (58 items). Part Two contains critical studies (1024 items). In part Three additional works for the years 1987–1996 are presented (42 items). In all cases a brief description of the contents of the contribution is given. Seven indices, including a detailed Index of subjects, complete the work.

Edited by Lionel Gossman, this volume contains three programmatic essays by Michelet. The first two are available here for the first time in English translation. The third, the Preface to the 1869 edition of the Histoire de France, originally published in its first English translation by Edward K. Kaplan in his Michelet’s Poetic Vision (1977), has been revised by the translator for this volume. Curated by leading scholars and translators this volume provides essential reading for anybody interested in modern French and European history. One of the greatest Romantic historians and immensely popular during his lifetime, Jules Michelet (1798-1874) fell into disfavour among the positivist historians who came after him and who regarded his work with disdain as "literature." In the 1920s and 30s, however, he began to be rediscovered and rehabilitated by the members of the influential Annales school. The objects of Michelet’s interest—living conditions, popular mentalities, laws and the arts, the historian’s relation to the objects of his study, no less than political history—have since come to occupy a central place in modern historical research. A free online-only supplement contains an essay on Michelet by John Stuart Mill from the Edinburgh Review (January 1844) and several studies of Michelet by Lionel Gossman. The University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences of Princeton University has generously contributed to the publication of this volume.

Kerk en orde vandag konsentreer op temas wat oor die hele spektrum van die gereformeerde kerkreg versprei lê en probeer om relevante agtergrondinligting vir al die artikels van die kerkorde van die NG Kerk te verskaf. “Die skrywer lewer bewys dat hy ervare is, en uitstekend op die hoogte van al die temas en onderwerpe is, persoonlike ervaring daarvan het, en dat hy krities en apologeties daaroor kan skryf.” – Prof. Andries le Roux du Plooy, Fakulteit Teologie, Noordwes?Universiteit