Humanities & Social Sciences

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands maps the relationship between gender and borderlands at a global scale and sets the agenda for developing a global composite field of gender and borderlands studies. This interdisciplinary collection seeks to understand the complex nexus at which gender and the borderlands intersect, modelling radical relationality at epistemological, ontological, and activist levels. Going beyond border studies’ frequent site at the U.S.–Mexico Border, this book examines the power relations of borderlands as they play out in, influence, and reflect gender dynamics. Contributors draw on case studies from around the world, and their chapters span diverse fields from anthropology, literature, and history, to political science, religious studies, sociology, and the arts. The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands is an indispensable resource for scholars and students engaged in border studies, gender studies, and the wide range of interlocking disciplines that inform and enrich these fields.

The fifth volume of “bricolage. Innsbrucker Zeitschrift für Europäische Ethnologie“ analyzes health and disease-related concepts and practices of different social groups from a socio-historical and cultural-scientific point of view. Instead of the terminology of the older “folk medicine research”, the authors orientate themselves on the concept of “medical culture(s)” as is the case in the identical research area “Cultural Encounters - Cultural Conflicts” of the University of Innsbruck. This association of humanities and social science subjects deals with different forms of cultural contact, whereby culture is understood as a dynamic system for the creation of meaning. So far, there is no anthology that does this with regard to specifically Austrian conditions and developments. The fifth volume of “bricolage” tries to fill this gap and would like to stimulate further discussion in this field of research in Austria.

This chapter explores the relations between women, land, property and the law. The first part of the chapter outlines single, widowed and married women’s legal position as property owners, paying particular attention to the doctrines of primogeniture and coverture and their impact on women’s property rights. It explores the circumstances by which women most commonly became landowners, outlining the four main routes to landownership for women, as well as the practices by which married women were sometimes able to circumvent the restrictions of coverture. As a corollary to this, it also explores the impact of various changes to the early modern legal system – including the shift from dower to jointure arrangements, the emergence of strict settlement and the declining power of the ecclesiastical courts – on women’s property rights. The second half of the chapter sets out to assess the significance of women as a class of landowners in Georgian England, quantifying the scale of women’s landholding in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries using a large sample of data drawn from the parliamentary enclosure awards. In doing so, it responds to considerable uncertainty about the scale of women’s property ownership. Little quantitative information is available on the proportion of land owned by women, although a handful of studies have used rentals and leases to examine female landholding – as opposed to landownership – within small groups of manors. The results of the sampled enclosure awards are presented below, comparisons between this data and the earlier, smaller studies explored, and the new data used to throw light on four key issues: the legal and marital status of female landowners, the scale of individual female landowners’ holdings, the geography of female landownership and the thorny issue of change over time.

»The Church of Jesus Christ« is regarded as the most widely received doctrinal text of the Communion of Protestant Churches in Europe (CPCE). It was adopted by the General Assembly in 1994. It was the first time that the churches of the Reformation developed the basic insights into the church and its mission contained in the Leuenberg Agreement and fundamentally defined their understanding of »unity in reconciled diversity«. On the basis of God’s action in Christ as the foundation of the church and its mission as witness to salvation, it reflects on the concrete shape of the church and its mission in the world. The text has given important stimuli for the realisation and deepening of church communion in the CPCE and for ecumenical dialogue. It has found a kind of continuation in the outcome of the 2018 doctrinal dialogue »Church Communion«.

La collana «Diaspore. Quaderni di ricerca» nasce dal desiderio di indagare la dimensione diasporica dell’essere umano, nelle sue molteplici declinazioni. Nei meccanismi messi in atto dai processi di globalizzazione, tendenti ad assimilare le diversità e a confondere gli inevitabili conflitti derivanti dalla differenza, il fenomeno diasporico e migratorio può paradossalmente costituire l’elemento di originale salvaguardia di un modo di essere e di una cultura in un territorio nuovo. I dieci testi che compongono il volume costituiscono un variegato contributo al dibattito sul tema della violenza e del suo racconto, tanto dal punto di vista teorico, quanto da quello storico, sociale e letterario, ripercorrendo le sue molteplici manifestazioni da nord a sud del continente latinoamericano.

Through the paths of three resorts, this book examines how the areas af-fected by tourism and mobility change, and questions the notion of territorial value. The development of territories is understood through their mobility: the mobility not only of people but also of knowledge and information, as well as markets. Today, in a "hypermobile" world, places must be connect-ed. These networks lead to a standardization of territories. However, to at-tract tourists, media attention, and investors, territories must stand out! It is this process of staging and construction of value that this book presents.

This third and final part of the INFINITECH book series begins by providing a definition for Fintech, namely: the use of technology to underpin the delivery of financial services. The book further discusses why Fintech is the focus of industry nowadays as the waves of digitization and the way financial technology (FinTech) and insurance technology (InsuranceTech) are rapidly transforming the financial and insurance services industry. The book also introduces technology assets that follow the Reference Architecture (RA) for BigData, IoT and AI applications. Moreover, the series of assets includes the domain area where applications from the INFINITECH innovation project and the concept of innovation for the financial sector are described. Further described is the INFINITECH Marketplace and its components including details of available assets, as well as a description of solutions developed in INFINITECH.

In der zweiten Hälfte des 4. Jahrhunderts erfand ein unbekannter Autor einen Briefwechsel zwischen Seneca und Paulus. Die vierzehn kurzen Briefe, acht vom Philosophen, sechs vom Apostel, sind in sehr schlechtem spätantikem Latein geschrieben und weitgehend inhaltslos. Ihr Ziel ist es, mittels eines Austauschs von freundschaftlichen Billetts, wie er unter den Intellektuellen der Spätantike üblich war, Seneca zum Freund des Paulus zu machen und so das hohe Ansehen Senecas in der spätantiken lateinischen Theologie apostolisch zu sanktionieren. Diese Fiktion war sehr erfolgreich und regte im Laufe der Geschichte immer wieder zu Spekulationen über das Verhältnis zwischen Stoa und Christentum an. Dieser Band bietet eine neue Übersetzung des Briefwechsels auf der Basis der neuesten kritischen Edition, versehen mit einer Einleitung, Erläuterungen und Testimonien. Ferner werden zwei wenig bekannte Texte aus dem Umfeld des Briefwechsels abgedruckt, erstmals übersetzt und erläutert: ein angeblicher Brief des Mordechai an Alexander den Großen aus einer Fassung des Alexanderromans und ein Brief Senecas über Hochmut und Götterbilder, eine christliche Apologie aus dem 5. Jahrhundert. Die Essays behandeln zentrale Probleme des Verhältnisses zwischen Stoa und Christentum (Gottesbild und Ethik) sowie die Seneca-Rezeption vom Mittelalter bis in die frühe Neuzeit.

Across the humanities and the social sciences, “cultural analysis” is a vibrant research practice. Since its introduction in the 1990s, its main principles have remained largely the same: interdisciplinarity, political urgency, a heuristic use of concepts, the detailed analysis of objects of culture, and an awareness of the scholar’s situatedness in the present. But is the practice still suited to the spiraling of social, political, and environmental crises that mark our time? Drawing on experiences in research, teaching, activism, and the creative arts, contributors explore what cultural analysis was back then, what it is now, and what it may be by 2034. In a shifting conjuncture, contributors strike notes of discomfort, defiance, and irony—as well as a renewed sense of urgency and care.

By the later middle ages wax had become an indispensable element in Christian religious observance, used throughout churches, liturgical services and lifecycle events. Wax was therefore both essential and ubiquitous. It was also valuable and easily re-cycled. This paper analyses the use, reuse and barter of wax in circular economies within cathedrals, monasteries and professional guilds in England and Italy. It further considers how the circulation of wax within and outside these institutions could act as a mechanism to cut expenses and potentially increase profits or provide opportunities for religious participation among even the very poor.

The number of attended MINT training courses is of central importance for the development of professional competence in early MINT education. This is the conclusion reached in the thirteenth volume of the publication series of the “Haus der kleinen Forscher” (Little Scientists’ House). It presents the results of two studies on the professional development of educational specialists and teachers in early MINT education.

This volume proposes the viral as a means of understanding socially engaged and transmedial performance practices since the mid-20th century. It rethinks the Living Theatre’s Artaudian revolution via the lens of affect theory, brings attention to General Idea’s media-savvy performances of the 70s, explores Franco and Eva Mattes and Critical Art Ensemble, and surveys the dramaturgies and political stakes of global theatrical networks. Viral performance practices testify that when people gather, something spreads. Performance renders spreading visible, raises its stakes, and encodes it in theatrical form. The artists explored here rarely disseminate their ideas as directly as a marketer or movement would; rather, they undermine simplified forms of contagion while holding dialogue with the discourses that have surrounded viral culture. This work argues that the concept of the viral is historically deeper than the digital landscape suggests, and intimately linked to performance.

Asian American Religions brings together some of the most current research on Asian American religions from a social science perspective. The volume focuses on religion in Asian American communities in New York, Houston, Los Angeles, and the Silicon Valley/Bay Area, and it includes a current demographic overview of the various Asian populations across the United States. It also provides information on current trends, such as that Filipino and Korean Americans are the most religiously observant people in America, that over 60 percent of Asian Americans who have a religious identification are Christian, and that one-third of Muslims in the United States are Asian Americans. Rather than organizing the book around particular ethnic groups or religions, Asian American Religions centers on thematic issues, like symbols and rituals, political boundaries, and generation gaps, in order to highlight the role of Asian American religions in negotiating, accepting, redefining, changing, and creating boundaries in the communities' social life.

This book examines the evolution of contemporary Spanish literature in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, proposing the concept of the postcrisis novel. The term does not suggest the end of the crisis but rather refers to a shift in narrative focus towards the ongoing consequences and social transformations triggered by this pivotal moment. The postcrisis novel is not merely a record of the repercussions but a deeper exploration of how these events challenge and reshape cultural, political, and social landscapes. The book highlights the diverse forms of crises – economic, political, social, ecological – across different regions of Spain and explores how they have influenced the literatures of each community. These events catalyzed a repoliticization of literature, where narratives no longer align with dominant ideologies but instead highlight the fractures and inconsistencies within them. The book brings a comparative perspective to the four main literatures of the Spanish state – Catalan, Basque, Galician, and Spanish – analyzing how they reflect their respective communities’ issues not just thematically but also discursively. By studying novels published after these events, this book argues that contemporary political novels in Spain are varied, context-specific, and contingent. The comparative approach breaks away from traditional separations based on linguistic, institutional, and ideological barriers, emphasizing instead the interconnectedness of these literatures. While acknowledging each literary field’s unique characteristics, it posits that all are influenced by the political dynamics of the Spanish state. Thus, the book respects these specificities while also exploring how the repoliticization of literature in each region can be understood in relation to the others, offering a nuanced understanding of the political novel in contemporary Spain.

Political Science; European Union