Open Access Books

L’œuvre de Jean Echenoz, publiée aux Éditions de Minuit, est l’une des plus singulières de notre époque. Couronnés par de nombreux prix (dont le Goncourt qui récompense en 1999 Je m’en vais), les romans de Jean Echenoz ont conquis un large public. En utilisant certains genres aussi populaires que le roman policier, le roman d’aventures ou le roman d’espionnage, en faisant très souvent référence au cinéma, Jean Echenoz entend renouer avec le plaisir de l’intrigue. Simultanément, une écriture alerte et ironique déjoue les poncifs, revisite la tradition, multiplie les clins d’œil et fait tanguer les repères historiques, sociologiques et linguistiques. Par cette esthétique du tremblé, l’œuvre pose un regard neuf sur l’univers contemporain. Elle interroge la place de l’homme dans un territoire marqué par les figures du vide et du vertige.Il s’agit ici de cartographier ce double parcours : dessiner les contours d’une géographie littéraire en mettant en perspective le texte avec des mythes, des films, de la musique ou d’autres textes ; explorer la représentation d’une géographie « déterritorialisée » qui renvoie au vide, à la fragmentation et au passage. L’essai se propose ainsi d’entrecroiser les données pour se faire topographie critique des romans de Jean Echenoz.

The book critically addresses the role of spatial methods in a transdisciplinary research-practice agenda regarding the promotion of urban sustainability throughout the globe with the aid of eight different, transdisciplinary approaches primarily based throughout the Global South and jointly penned by academics and practitioners. While the range of methodological discussions regarding research-and-practice collaborations between scientific researchers and local practitioners (based in NGOs, private firms or local government agencies) as well as independent policy-makers or artists for the purpose of urban sustainability has been thriving vastly over the last years, little attention has been paid to spatial methods in particular. This is not to mention their transdisciplinary use in urban contexts of the Global South. Resorting on empirical settings as diverse as Pretoria (South Africa), Porto Alegre and São Paulo (Brazil), Kolkata (India), Bangkok (Thailand) and Tshwane (South Africa) during the last four (partially Covid-19 pandemic) years as well as Tangerang (Indonesia) from 2001 to 2021, and San José (Costa Rica) between 2004 and 2007, the book sheds light on the following, twofold question: Which possibilities and limitations can spatial methods respectively unravel and encounter for transdisciplinary research and practice, in view of the SDG11 targets? By pursuing very diversified research-and-practice paths with the aid of specific combinations of spatial methods, each of the eight chapters makes evident the book’s central claim: the deployment of spatial methods in transdisciplinary projects for SDG11 has a transformative role. While some chapters especially highlight the personal dimension of the changes brought about to academics by the spatial-methodological, transdisciplinary experiments, others emphasize the academic reach of the spatial-methodological experience accomplished in and through transdisciplinarity. This is an open access book.

This book provides a rich analysis of the history of Swedish victim support. With the majority of research on victim support centering on the Anglosphere, this book offers a unique case study for considering the role of the victim in the criminal justice system. While Sweden has enacted many laws to support victims, and victim assistance programs have grown rapidly, welfare policy has become more restrictive and crime policy, to some degree, more punitive. Drawing on archival material and interviews with key representatives for the Swedish Association for Victim Support (BOJ), this book examines what role the victim movement has played in a changing welfare state. It argues that BOJ filled a function in the decentralization and privatization of the Swedish welfare state and explores distinctive features of the Swedish victim movement and the form it has taken, as compared to that in other countries. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of criminology, sociology, social policy, civil society studies, and social work, and those engaged in studies of victims and victimology.

La figure de l'artiste tiraillé entre la création et les contingences d'un travail alimentaire n'épuise pas la réalité de la pluriactivité dans les mondes de l'art et de la culture. Aujourd'hui, vivre de son art implique souvent de vivre aussi grâce à l'art, en tant qu'enseignant, administrateur, technicien, animateur d'atelier, médiateur ou critique, voire comme chercheur en sciences sociales. Mais quel est le sens et la portée de cette diversification ? En quoi est-elle un régulateur des marchés du travail artistique ? Revêt-elle les mêmes formes d'une discipline artistique à l'autre ? Y a-t-il complémentarité ou concurrence entre les activités que les professionnels tentent de mener de front ? Voici quelques unes des questions auxquelles les contributions de cet ouvrage collectif, fruit d'un séminaire organisé par le Centre d'études de l'emploi entre 2003 et 2006, tentent de répondre. Que ce soit dans la musique, la danse, le théâtre ou les arts plastiques, les compétences créatrices se révèlent insuffisantes pour l'exercice d'un métier artistique. Depuis vingt ans, les artistes investissent massivement la formation, la médiation et le travail social, ces champs du « travail sur autrui » où la concurrence est rude. Désormais, l'enjeu est sans doute dans la définition des nouveaux faisceaux de tâches qui constituent les métiers d'artistes et dans leur reconnaissance par les acteurs sociaux.

Stories That Speak to Us—a digital collection of scholarly, curated exhibits—is designed to investigate literacy narratives from a number of perspectives: to explore why they are important, what information they carry about reading and composing, why they might be valuable, not only for scholars and teachers, but also for librarians, community literacy workers, individual citizens and groups of people. As the editors and authors collectively suggest, literacy narratives are powerfully rhetorical linguistic accounts through which people fashion their lives; make sense of their world, indeed construct the realities in which they live. Literacy narratives are sometimes laden so richly with information that conventional academic tools and ways of discussing their power to shape identities; to persuade, and reveal, and discover, to create meaning and affiliations at home, in schools, communities, and workplaces, are inadequate to the task. For this reason, the collection focuses on the work of both narrative theorists and literacy educators. The curated exhibits in Stories That Speak to Us provide analyses of narratives selected by the author/scholars from among the more than 3,500 narratives preserved in the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN), a publicly available online archive of personal literacy narratives in a variety of formats (text, video, audio) that recount contributors’ literacy practices and values in their own words. The motif of exhibits and curators is employed in part to suggest the relationship between the narratives “on display” in this particular project and the much larger collection of narratives in the DALN as a whole—the narratives “on display” here constitute less than two percent of the entire archive. The Stories That Speak to Us collection allows visitors to study the literacy narratives in the exhibits directly via links to the DALN, while the essays in this collection constitute something analogous to exhibit catalogs. The individual exhibits examine themes such as “betweenity,” scaffolding, digital divides, ethnolinguistic vitality, ludic literacies, black women’s literacy narratives, the convergence of local and global discourses about literacy, feminism and digital literacy, and transnational “thirdspaces” of literacy. At the end of the collection, we suggest some ways to explore, and provide some tools for exploring, these and other topics in the entire archive.

Począwszy od roku 1952, marketing polityczny nieustająco rozwijał się w USA, które ostatecznie stały się światowym liderem w skutecznej aplikacji marketingu na rynku politycznym. Po upadku komunizmu w Polsce w roku 1989 pojawiły się nowe uwarunkowania rynkowe, gdzie wzorem wielu innych państw kampania wyborcza prowadzona w amerykańskim stylu stała się możliwa do przeprowadzenia. Artykuł zawiera marketingową ocenę kluczowych kampanii prezydencko-parlamentarnych w Polsce, które toczyły się w pierwszej dekadzie po transformacji ustrojowej. Tekst weryfikuje charakter zaangażowania marketingowego lokalnych organizacji partyjnych, poddając ocenie kwestię potencjalnej amerykanizacji kampanii wyborczych w Polsce w latach dziewięćdziesiątych XX w. Podjęty problem weryfikowano, wykorzystując metodę obserwacji oraz krytyki dostępnych źródeł literaturowych.

Volume 5 contains the biographies of Franz Joseph Ritter von Buß (1803-1878), Karolina Gerhardinger (1797-1879), Peter Reichensperger (1810-1892), Franz Xaver Kraus (1840-1901), Theodor Hürth (1877-1944), Eugen Bolz (1881-1945), Joannes Baptista Sproll (1870-1949), Benedict Kreutz (1879-1949), Ludwig Wolker (1887-1955), Laurentius Siemer (1888-1956), Josef Gockeln (1900-1958), Heinrich Wienken (1883-1961), Friedrich Dessauer (1881-1963), Johannes Albers (1890-1963), Ernst Michel (1889-1964), Wilhelm Elfes (1884-1969), Alois Hundhammer (1900-1974), Hans Ehard (1887-1980).

The chapter analyses the current legal situation of whistleblowers in work-related context in Poland. Protection of whistleblowers is not regulated by a single comprehensive legal act but may be granted on the basis of different pieces of legislation as well as according to the case law of the Supreme Court, which established the concept of ‘permissible criticism’ expressed by a worker. The level of whistleblower protection is by no means satisfactory, especially as regards atypical workers. The author assesses the shortcomings of the current legal situation and presents proposals for improvement in the light of the EU Whistleblower Protection Directive and international conventions ratified by Poland.

"Mechanisms of Neuroinflammation" book explains how the neuronal cells become swollen at the moment of the blood-brain barrier disruption and how they lose their immunological isolation. A cascade of cytokines and immune cells from the bloodstream enters the nervous system, inflaming neurons and activating the glia. This produces a neuroinflammatory process that can generate different neurodegenerative diseases. Better understanding of mechanisms that are activated at the time when the damage to the brain occurs could lead to the development of suitable therapies that revert the neuronal inflammation and thus prevent further damage to the nervous system.

Christianity has often been accused for being complicit in ecological destruction. In response, Christian ecotheology offers both a Christian critique of environmental destruction and an ecological critique of Christianity. It thus encourages an ecological reformation of the Christian tradition for the sake of the whole earth. This volume focuses such a dual critique on the content and significance of the Christian faith in order to confront those aspects that may undermine an environmental praxis, ethos and spirituality. Each of the essays explores one of the core Christian symbols, seeks to capture the current state of the debate in this regard, identifies emerging horizons for such an ecological reformation and invites conversation on the road ahead. This volume includes essays on the trinity, Christology, pneumatology, creation, anthropology, natural suffering, providence, sin and salvation, the nature, governance, ministries and missions of the church, eschatological consummation, a Christian ethos, the role of liturgy, religious plurality andunderlying methodological problems. It thus complements several other discourses in ecotheology on biblical hermeneutics, a retrieval of particular traditions, environmental ethics, animal studies, ecclesial praxis, Christian missions and religion and ecology. The volume captures insights emerging from a collaborative research project on 'Christian Faith and the Earth' in which more than one hundred leading ecotheologians from six continents participated since 2007. It builds on the culminating conference of this project held in Cape Town in August 2012.It extends the conversation on the road ahead through inputs from contributing authors and various respondents.

"The student is becoming a teacher is presenting the first Norwegian study made on the sense of belonging in higher education. Central themes are comprehension and knowledge development, and the students’ process of formation is essential, without it being explicit in all the articles. The authors are concerned with interplay between techne and fronesis related to individual growth and professional development. The informants of these studies are teacher students from year 1-4, resulting in a wide range of new knowledge and theoretical viewpoints. In this anthology, the question of the dualism between theory and practice is raised. Could it be that knowledge is a circular production from practise to theory and back? It is also evident that the sensation of social belonging is closely connected to a sense of academic belonging, and that the cohesion of teacher students and their teachers is of great impact. The target group of this peer-reviewed anthology is teacher students and teacher student educators. However, these articles will also be relevant for other educational groups and students. "

The purpose of this research is to establish, from an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspective, the direct and essential relationship between environmental protection in the context of armed conflicts, the new threats posed by illegal armed groups regarding the use of natural resources, and the challenges involved in building and consolidating environmental peace. The results obtained through a socio-legal argumentative discourse demonstrated various problems inherent to the dynamics of the conflict in the country and how they have direct and indirect effects at regional and national levels on the protection of human rights and IHL, particularly regarding environmental impacts and their implications for communities and human security. For this reason, it is imperative to acknowledge that contemporary conflicts are directly linked to criminal actors who do not share the principles, practices, and values of respect for the environment; rather, they have learned to use it as a weapon of war for their purposes. Thus, this research underscores the necessity to design policies and strategies for national defense, human security, and peacebuilding. This involves recognizing the variables that constitute the strategic context, which must be incorporated into a model that allows for setting courses of action. To this end, contemporary conflicts, in addition to the actions of military power against conventional threats, require unified and legitimate responses and interventions, as well as comprehensive actions capable of responding simultaneously and adaptively to various theaters of operations and domains where conflicts, violence, and war unfold.

Equipping robots with complex capabilities still requires a great amount of effort. In this work, a novel approach is proposed to understand, to represent and to execute object manipulation tasks learned from observation by combining methods of data analysis, graphical modeling and artificial intelligence. Employing this approach enables robots to reason about how to solve tasks in dynamic environments and to adapt to unseen situations.

The book Smart Cities and Positive Energy Districts: Urban Perspectives in 2020 is the second book published by MDPI on the topic. It highlights the most recent internationally/nationally funded projects on Smart Cities and Positive Energy Districts, providing readers with an overview of the most recent and effective solutions to support the transition of urban areas towards climate neutrality as well as inspiring solutions not only for researchers but for local governments who seek to transform urban areas into sustainable places.

The historical biography of a true Jewish heroine in her day, Gracia Mendes. Born in 1510 in Portugal, the book details this woman's extraordinary personality until her death in 1569 in Constantinople (today's Istanbul). Her life exemplified a perseverance by the Jewish culture to survive and triumph even in the worst of conditions. As a young girl, Gracia secretly married successful Jewish spice trader, Francisco Mendes. But at age 27 she became a widow, yet she went on to raise her children...