Humanities & Social Sciences

"Middlebrow Cinema challenges an often uninterrogated hostility to middlebrow culture that frequently dismisses it as conservative, which it often is not, and feminized or middle-class, which it often is. The volume defines the term relationally against shifting concepts of ‘high’ and ‘low’, and considers its deployment in connection with text, audience and institution. In exploring the concept of the middlebrow, this book recovers films that were widely meaningful to contemporary audiences, yet sometimes overlooked by critics interested in popular and arthouse extremes. It also addresses the question of socially-mobile audiences, who might express their aspirations through film-watching; and traces the cultural consequences of the movement of films across borders and between institutions. The first study of its kind, the volume comprises 11 original essays that test the purchase of the term ‘middlebrow’ across cultures, including those of Europe, Asia and the Americas, from the 1930s to the present day. Middlebrow Cinema brings into view a popular and aspirational - and thus especially relevant and dynamic - area of film and film culture. Ideal for students and researchers in this area, this book: Remaps ‘Popular’ and ‘arthouse’ approaches Explores British, Chinese, French, Indian, Mexican, Spanish ‘national’ cinemas alongside Continental, Hollywood, Queer, Transnational cinemas Analyses Biopic, Heritage, Historical Film, Melodrama, Musical, Sex Comedy genres."

Der interdisziplinäre Band postuliert eine Macht des Kontextes und erklärt, was darunter verstanden wird. Die Beiträge beleuchten und hinterfragen die Macht des Kontextes in dessen Relationen zu Sprache(n), Gesellschaft(en) und Medien. Dies geschieht teils aus philologischem, teils aus sozialwissenschaftlich-kommunikationswissenschaftlichem Blickwinkel und schließt jeweils mit Thesen zur Macht des Kontextes. Der Fokus in den Beiträgen lässt sich entlang der sozialwissenschaftlichen Ebenen (Mikroebene, Mesoebene, Makroebene) differenzieren. Mit Blick auf die gewonnenen Erkenntnisse eröffnet sich die Perspektive einer breit verstandenen Kontextlinguistik, und es werden Impulse und Anknüpfungspunkte für weitere Forschung in den Einzeldisziplinen sowie für disziplinenverbindende Forschung geboten.

This book examines various policies, including the legal and commercial aspects of the Open Source phenomenon. Here, ‘Open Source’ is adopted as convenient shorthand for a collection of diverse users and communities, whose differences can be as great as their similarities. The common thread is their reliance on, and use of, law and legal mechanisms to govern the source code they write, use, and distribute. The central fact of open source is that maintaining control over source code relies on the existence and efficacy of intellectual property (‘IP’) laws, particularly copyright law. Copyright law is the primary statutory tool that achieves the end of openness, although implemented through private law arrangements at varying points within the software supply chain. This dependent relationship is itself a cause of concern for some philosophically in favour of ‘open’, with some predicting (or hoping) that the free software movement will bring about the end of copyright as a means for protecting software.

The struggle for independence in Indonesia between 1945 and 1949 has literally and figuratively left its mark. Through images and text the authors take the reader along on their quest through people, objects and places in Indonesia and the Netherlands. This bilingual Indonesian/Dutch book focuses on the personal experiences of civilians and soldiers who experienced the conflict at close quarters. It reflects on how people from both countries look back on that time and how memories of it are kept alive or not. By doing so, the authors restore the human dimension to an intriguing history. What choices did witnesses and contemporaries make at the time, to whom did they remain loyal, and why? How do their experiences live on in the present and what meaning does this period have now, for themselves but also for others for whom this history is important

From 1950, increasing numbers of Aboriginal and Māori women became nationally or internationally renowned. Few reached the heights of international fame accorded Evonne Goolagong or Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, and few remained household names for any length of time. But their growing numbers and visibility reflected the dramatic social, cultural and political changes taking place in Australia and New Zealand in the second half of the twentieth century. This book is the first in-depth study of media portrayals of well-known Indigenous women in Australia and New Zealand, including Goolagong, Te Kanawa, Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Dame Whina Cooper. The power of the media in shaping the lives of individuals and communities, for good or ill, is widely acknowledged. In these pages, Karen Fox examines an especially fascinating and revealing aspect of the media and its history — how prominent Māori and Aboriginal women were depicted for the readers of popular media in the past.

The study of war in all periods of prehistory and recorded history has always commanded the attention of historians, dramatists, poets and artists. The study of peace has, however, not yet gained a comparable readership, and the subject is attracting an increasing amount of scholarly research. This volume presents the first work of academic research to tackle this imbalance head on. It looks at war and peace through the ages, from the Classical world through to the 18th century. It considers the nature and advocacy of war and peace both from an historical perspective but also a philosophical one, particularly looking at how universal peace, which began as a personal philosophy, became over the centuries a political philosophy that underpins much of modern society’s attitudes towards warfare and militarism.

Liberty-restricting measures are basic measures in combatting any pandemic. But whose liberty should be restricted? One standard response in public health ethics is to appeal to the “least restrictive alternative” necessary to achieve a public health goal. The problem is that in practice, greater restriction of liberty can lead to greater control of the pandemic and save more lives, though with increasing burdens to others. Liberty restriction is thus a question of the distribution of benefitsbenefits benefits and burdens in a population, a question of distributive justice. In this chapter, I argue that in some pandemics, such as COVID-19, it may be a more proportionate restriction of liberty to restrict the liberty of certain groups, rather than the population as a whole. Two arguments were given in the COVID-19 pandemic for liberty restriction: (1) protection of the vulnerable; (2) protection of the health service. These These are, however, more fundamentally issues about distributive justice. I explore how several approaches to distributive justice can support the differential differential differentialdifferentialdifferential restriction of liberty. In addition, I argue that the commonly accepted justificationjustificationjustificationjustificationjustification justification justification justification for liberty restrictions (that liberty restrictions may be justifiedjustifiedjustifiedjustifiedjustified justified to prevent direct harm to others) - can be overly simplistic, as illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that where risk groups (such as the elderly in the COVID-19 pandemic) are more likely to utilise limited health resources, they pose an indirect threat to others during the pandemic that warrants coercion. I argue there should be a side-constraint on justice of non-maleficence.non-maleficence.non-maleficence. non-maleficence. non-maleficence. non-maleficence. This This requires that there is a limit to harm which can be imposed on individuals for others, best captured by a collective duty of easy rescue. For groups such as the young, vaccination or lockdown may not constitute an “easy rescue” of those at greatest risk. I address the issue of whether selective restriction of liberty constitutes unjust discrimination and I propose an algorithm for making decisions about selective restriction of liberty.

This book is based around two key premises: all software is an artefact of human construct and all software shapes the behaviours of those who use it directly or experience its influence indirectly. With the rise of popular consumer-facing generative AI tools, never has understanding these two premises been more important or more obscured. This book explores the relationship between people and software as a relationship between a tool and its users. Through a series of exemplar cases, it presents an examination of the historical development of software from a critical perspective, with special attention given to the consequences of using this software and assumptions made around its neutrality. The author explores the development of the World Wide Web, Word and Excel, and social media, concluding with an investigation of how the principles identified in these earlier examples are now being found within public interface generative AI tools. The book looks beyond the functionality and user interface of the software to look at it as a complex artefact of human manufacture by exploring the wider cultural and technical environment in which the software is created and considering the political, economic and social forces that come to bear on the software and become embodied within. This narrative approach provides readers with valuable insights into the influences of specific software on contemporary society and business, encouraging them to apply a critical lens to their own and their organisation’s software use. This book is a novel read for academics and students within software development, information systems, AI and critical management studies.

Political Science

This open access book presents a rich set of innovative solutions for artificial intelligence (AI) in manufacturing. The various chapters of the book provide a broad coverage of AI systems for state of the art flexible production lines including both cyber-physical production systems (Industry 4.0) and emerging trustworthy and human-centered manufacturing systems (Industry 5.0). From a technology perspective, the book addresses a wide range of AI paradigms such as deep learning, reinforcement learning, active learning, agent-based systems, explainable AI, industrial robots, and AI-based digital twins. Emphasis is put on system architectures and technologies that foster human-AI collaboration based on trusted interactions between workers and AI systems. From a manufacturing applications perspective, the book illustrates the deployment of these AI paradigms in a variety of use cases spanning production planning, quality control, anomaly detection, metrology, workers’ training, supply chain management, as well as various production optimization scenarios. This is an open access book.

This collection of essays, by well known writers on the subject of writing for television, is divided into three sections, with the first one devoted to the debates on quality television. The second one focuses on literature and television. The final section examines 'Science on television', with series editors from Britain and Germany giving first-hand accounts of the scope for serious science reporting on television.

The study examines the fiction of Black Women’s Renaissance. It focuses on the novels of the 1980s, which appreciated “culture-bearing” mothers as reproducers of the nation, to analyze the vexed relationship between cultural nationalism and feminism. It argues that the BWR created “matrifocal” nationalism that made black women principal agents of national identity, but also promoted gender essentialism at the expense of social and economic issues.

Prisons are an invisible, but dominant, part of American society: the United States incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world. In Michigan, the number of prisoners rose from 3,000 in 1970 to more than 50,000 by 2008, a shift that Buzz Alexander witnessed firsthand when he came to teach at the University of Michigan. Is William Martinez Not Our Brother? describes the University of Michigan's Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), a pioneering program founded in 1990 that provides university courses, a nonprofit organization, and a national network for incarcerated youth and adults in Michigan juvenile facilities and prisons. By giving incarcerated individuals an opportunity to participate in the arts, PCAP enables them to withstand and often overcome the conditions and culture of prison, the policies of an incarcerating state, and the consequences of mass incarceration.

Terror ist mittlerweile zu einem Weltproblem geworden. Dabei liefern die Massenmedien typisch die Bildvorlagen - die verstümmelten Menschen, die zerbombten Gebäude, die herumirrenden Verletzten - und damit die Resultate des Terrors ins Haus. In den Beiträgen des Bandes wird der Versuch unternommen, von dieser Resultatsicht loszukommen und eine Analyse zu starten, die ausprobiert, ob sich Terror als System der modernen Gesellschaft begreifen lässt. Dabei soll auch die furchtbare Frage zumindest präzisiert werden, ob das, was so sinn- und funktionslos erscheint, nicht als eine Funktion ebendieser Gesellschaft zu thematisieren ist.

Development Economics; Economic Growth; Social Structure, Social Inequality; Political Economy; Latin American Culture