Open Access Books

It is increasingly difficult to use the word "victim" these days without facing either ridicule for "crying victim" or criticism for supposed harshness toward those traumatized. Some deny the possibility of "recovering" repressed memories of abuse, or consider date rape an invention of whining college students. At the opposite extreme, others contend that women who experience abuse are "survivors" likely destined to be psychically wounded for life. While the debates rage between victims' rights advocates and "backlash" authors, the contributors to New Versions of Victims collectively argue that we must move beyond these polarizations to examine the "victim" as a socially constructed term and to explore, in nuanced terms, why we see victims the way we do. Must one have been subject to extreme or prolonged suffering to merit designation as a victim? How are we to explain rape victims who seemingly "get over" their experience with no lingering emotional scars? Resisting the reductive oversimplifications of the polemicists, the contributors to New Versions of Victims critique exaggerated claims by victim advocates about the harm of victimization while simultaneously taking on the reactionary boilerplate of writers such as Katie Roiphe and Camille Paglia and offering further strategies for countering the backlash. Written in clear, accessible language, New Versions of Victims offers a critical analysis of popular debates about victimization that will be applicable to both practice and theory.

In Brave Humanism, Mollie Godfrey argues that long before the post-1960s critiques of Western humanism emerged, an earlier generation of Black women writers were committed to reclaiming and redefining the human on their own terms. For the writers under study here—Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry—narrative forms offered intellectual space to challenge the white supremacist and patriarchal logics of Western humanism that underwrote de jure segregation. Through these narratives, they worked toward their own visions of humanity and human freedom—visions that would come to inspire later generations of Black feminists. By recovering Jane Crow–era Black women writers’ undervalued intellectual work of critique and creation, Godfrey also intervenes in critical conversations about the relationships between Black creative work, Black women’s intellectual work, and our ideas about human agency and collectivity. In recovering this hidden intellectual genealogy, this book offers a more nuanced history of Black women’s engagement with the idea of the human and places a longer history of Black women’s writing at the heart of humanist and posthumanist study.

¿Dónde y cuándo nació la bioética? Tradicionalmente se ha atribuido la creación del neologismo «bioética» a Potter, en 1970, y su desarrollo a los jesuitas de la Universidad de Georgetown. Sin embargo, la cuestión es mucho más compleja y supera ampliamente el contexto norteamericano, no solo porque se descubrió que el alemán Fritz Jahr ya había acuñado el término en los años veinte, sino porque la ética clínica tiene siglos de historia, y en todas las culturas y religiones se ha reflexionado sobre los problemas referentes a la salud, la vida y su ocaso. Al factor meramente histórico hemos de añadir el ideológico. «Bioética» fue el término que emplearon algunos teólogos para adoctrinar al personal sanitario conforme al dogma católico en asuntos como la reproducción y la eutanasia. Este intento de monopolizar materias tan sensibles provocó como reacción defensiva la incorporación a la disciplina de corrientes de pensamiento feministas, laicistas y multiculturales. Por último, la aceleración de la biotecnología y el temor a las consecuencias de la manipulación del genoma de los seres vivos terminaron de consolidar la bioética como campo de conocimiento plural y multidisciplinar.

Prathama Banerjee moves beyond postcolonial and decolonial critiques of European political philosophy to rethink modern conceptions of "the political" from the perspective of Indian and Bengali practices and philosophies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Latin America in the Cold War and the role of intellectuals in the East-West conflict

This reprint comprises large-scale, long-term, interdisciplinary, and multidimensional studies focusing on recent progress in land degradation processes and control via different pathways, alongside new findings related to land restoration.

By unfurling worlds, narratives also create orders. In addition, their narration has to be structured in an orderly way, so the concept of "order" can be applied to literary texts in two ways: as the order(s) of narration and as narrated order(s).

This article seeks to articulate in one image the diverse genocides in German history, an image able to capture the piling wreckages of history in a flash. The point of departure is a multimedia installation by William Kentridge called Black Box (2005), in which he thematizes the Herero and Namaqua genocide during German colonial rule between 1904 and 1908. This research wants to respond to Kentridge’s demand for grief work, and relies on Walter Benjamin’s (1968) vision of history writing and Rosemarie Buikema’s (2020) concept of revolts to seek out theoretical and conceptual possibilities that allow it to posit simultaneously the singularity of the Holocaust, to articulate its deep connections with colonial crimes, and to demand a working through of Germany’s genocidal history.

Maylei Blackwell tells the story of how Indigenous women’s activism in Mexico and California moves in and between local, national, continental, and transborder scales.

L’incendie de la cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris, le 15 avril 2019, a mis en lumière ses bâtisseurs. Ses administrateurs – les chanoines de Notre-Dame – sont restés dans l’ombre sauf exception. Le minutieux dépouillement de leurs délibérations au xviiie siècle jusqu’à leur suppression en 1790, fait pénétrer dans les détails de leur organisation et de leur quotidien : du chœur de la cathédrale où ils chantaient à heures fixes les louanges de Dieu, dans la salle du chapitre au cœur du cloître-Notre-Dame, jusqu’à leurs maisons canoniales aux caves parfois bien garnies. De l’étude des revenus des canonicats, ressortent l’étendue des domaines ruraux du chapitre de Notre-Dame et les richesses qu’il en tirait. Celles-ci n’ont pas servi seulement à entretenir grassement des ecclésiastiques oisifs, cibles de Boileau puis des philosophes, mais à rémunérer des collaborateurs de l’archevêque ou de la monarchie, ainsi qu’à assurer les réparations et l’embellissement de la cathédrale, siège des pompes religieuses officielles.Cet ouvrage démontre par l’analyse juridique des modalités d’accès aux canonicats que, loin d’avoir été confisqué entièrement par la noblesse, le chapitre de Notre-Dame est resté un espace de brassage entre hommes issus de milieux divers. Ce constat s’appuie sur une prosopographie de 279 notices de dignitaires et de chanoines.

Increasing numbers of children are participating in after-school programs, and with more federal and state funding the number of such programs is likely to grow. This growth has been occurring, however, with little guidance as to what program features or practices might be most helpful in nurturing the educational achievement, emotional development, and health of the children involved. This book helps fill that need for guidance by offering a set of 18 model practices against which after-school programs can be evaluated. The authors provide ways to score adherence to the criteria, from excellent to inadequate; survey forms for collecting the information to assign these grades; and an illustrative application of their approach to a set of real-world after-school programs.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence have the potential to further develop current big data research. The Special Issue on ‘Intelligent Computing for Big Data’ highlighted a number of recent studies related to the use of intelligent computing techniques in the processing of big data for text mining, autism diagnosis, behaviour recognition, and blockchain-based storage.

Bird song, traditionally regarded as primarily a male trait, is in fact widespread among female songbirds and was probably present in the ancestor of modern songbirds (Odom et al 2014 Nature Communications). These recent findings challenge the view that sexual dimorphism in the expression and complexity of song is largely the outcome of sexual selection on males. It is now clear that understanding the evolution of bird song requires explaining variation within and among species in the expression and complexity of female song. To do this, we need a better understanding of the nature of variation in female song in different contexts and systems, as well as the fitness costs and benefits of variation in the expression and complexity of female song. This Research Topic draws together current research on female song with the goal of understanding the fitness costs and benefits of the diversity of female singing behaviour apparent among songbirds. It includes articles ranging from single-species studies investigating how female song varies with context and contrasts with male song, to comparative analyses exploring relationships between female song and ecological, social, and other factors, as well as opinion pieces.

This report presents results from a multisite, quantitative evaluation of the international Success for Kids (SFK) after-school program. A nonreligious program, SFK seeks to build resilience in children. Interestingly, the authors found that the program positively affected not just social and internal outcomes but also school-related outcomes, even though SFK is not an academic intervention.

Rising global temperatures, changing climate conditions, and increasing expectations regarding indoor comfort have intensified the demand for more accurate tools to predict and optimise the performance of buildings. As the construction sector remains one of the largest energy consumers, understanding the complex interactions between buildings, their systems, and occupant behaviour is essential for reducing energy use and improving indoor environmental quality. Advances in information technology and simulation methods offer new possibilities for analysing building behaviour under dynamic real-world conditions. This Reprint focuses on recent developments in building performance simulation and indoor environmental quality modelling. It presents research addressing energy demand, thermal comfort, thermal sensation, airflow behaviour, and the environmental impact of buildings. The contributions demonstrate a variety of modelling approaches, including whole-building simulation, airflow modelling, and computational fluid dynamics, as well as studies on calibration, validation, and optimisation of building systems. The Reprint provides an overview of current methods and tools used to analyse and improve the energy efficiency and indoor environment of contemporary buildings.