Open Access Books

Ce volume portant sur les identités provinciales, culturelles et sociales plus que politiques, s’inscrit dans le cadre d’une réflexion menée depuis plusieurs années sur la notion d’identité, vécue ou perçue. Dans un cadre géographique circonscrit, celui de l’empire romain en tant qu’espace et sur une longue durée, de la fin de la République à l’Antiquité tardive, les présentations envisagent des cas précis permettant de comprendre si le niveau administratif qu’est la province a pu contribuer à nourrir une identité spécifique, qui n’était ni la citoyenneté romaine, ni la citoyenne civique locale. En effet, si aucun élément juridique ne définit l’appartenance à une communauté provinciale, d’autres éléments, sociaux, culturels… peuvent permettre, dans certains cas et à certains moments, de mettre en évidence le sentiment d’appartenance à une communauté supra-civique, à une communauté provinciale. Sources littéraires (Pline l’Ancien), épigraphiques et juridiques ont été convoquées, et permettent de parcourir l’empire, de l’Afrique à la Dacie, en passant par la Narbonnaise, l’Achaïe ou l’Égypte… Se déterminer comme prouincialis, reconnaître qu’une communauté tout au moins culturelle était comprise dans le cadre administratif de la province, c’est ce que les travaux rassemblés ici ont mis en évidence.

This work brings together summaries of final papers from the International Relations and Integration course at UNILA, selected in Joint Call 13/2023 in celebration of the university's tenth anniversary. Produced between 2014 and 2024, the texts reflect the diversity of nationalities, trajectories, and perspectives of young internationalists, valuing critical approaches to gender, race, Latin Americanisms, and the Global South. The chapters address topics such as the Marxist Theory of Dependency, the role of non-state actors in the rise of China, feminist critiques of Human Rights, hierarchies in the UN trusteeship system, the impacts of the post-peace agreement in Colombia, the construction of Haitian-phobia in Dominican foreign policy, and non-tariff barriers in Mercosur. The collection highlights the transformative power of new readings of International Relations, strengthening perspectives committed to justice, diversity, and regional integration.

Dans la vallée du Saint-Laurent (Québec), les seigneurs résidants constituaient une minorité parmi les propriétaires de fiefs. De l’implantation du système seigneurial, au xviie siècle, jusqu’à son abolition, en 1854, les seigneurs se distinguaient davantage par leur absence que par leur présence auprès des censitaires. Or, la décision de prendre résidence et de rester sur ses terres, surtout si elle se maintient de génération en génération, représente une implication concrète et entraîne une sociabilité spécifique dans ces communautés rurales. Pour les habitants des lieux, la présence de la famille seigneuriale, dotée d’un statut distinctif, entraînait un rapport d’altérité intrinsèque aux fondements du système seigneurial, marqué par l’inégalité sociale. Toutefois, selon leur statut noble ou roturier, le moment de leur installation, mais aussi la localisation du fief, ces familles seigneuriales résidantes n’entretiennent pas toutes le même type de rapport à la communauté, allant d’une quasi-intégration (voire une assimilation) à la population locale à une complète différenciation sociale se manifestant par de nombreux conflits portés devant les instances judiciaires. Cette étude des seigneurs résidants dans le monde rural laurentien plaide en faveur de la diversité seigneuriale et de son caractère évolutif, entre le xviieet le xixe siècle.

From the traditional stereotyped viewpoint, femininity and technology clash. This negative association between women and technology is one of the features of the sex-typing of jobs. Men are seen as technically competent and creative; women are seen as incompetent, suited only to work with machines that have been made and maintained by men. Men identify themselves with technology, and technology is identified with masculinity. The relationship between technology, technological change and women's work is, however, very complex.; Through studies examining technological change and the sexual division of labour, this book traces the origins of the segregation between women's work and men's work and sheds light on the complicated relationship between work and technology. Drawing on research from a number of European countries England, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, international contributors present detailed studies on women's work spanning two centuries. The chapters deal with a variety of work environments - office work, textiles and pottery, food production, civil service and cotton and wool industries.; This work rejects the idea that women were mainly employed as unskilled labour in the industrial revolutions, asserting that skill was required from the women, but that both the historical record about women's work and the social construction of the concept of "skill" have denied this.

Anatolia was an area of the clash of three cultures: Roman, Greek and Eastern. This issue is exceptionally well visible in an analysis of the Third Mithridatic War which was a resolution of a battle for domination in the region lasting over a half of century. The Romans’ general was Lucius Licinius Lucullus, educated nobilis and philhellene; he fought against Mithridates VI, a despotic ruler of Pontus, who was later aided by the king of Armenia Tigranes II. Over the course of the discussed campaigns (and the previous decades) the members of three cultures enter conflicts. At the same time, examples of these groups cooperating can be found, which herald their future reconciliation.

This open access book provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in research and applications of Foundation Models and is intended for readers familiar with basic Natural Language Processing (NLP) concepts. Over the recent years, a revolutionary new paradigm has been developed for training models for NLP. These models are first pre-trained on large collections of text documents to acquire general syntactic knowledge and semantic information. Then, they are fine-tuned for specific tasks, which they can often solve with superhuman accuracy. When the models are large enough, they can be instructed by prompts to solve new tasks without any fine-tuning. Moreover, they can be applied to a wide range of different media and problem domains, ranging from image and video processing to robot control learning. Because they provide a blueprint for solving many tasks in artificial intelligence, they have been called Foundation Models. After a brief introduction to basic NLP models the main pre-trained language models BERT, GPT and sequence-to-sequence transformer are described, as well as the concepts of self-attention and context-sensitive embedding. Then, different approaches to improving these models are discussed, such as expanding the pre-training criteria, increasing the length of input texts, or including extra knowledge. An overview of the best-performing models for about twenty application areas is then presented, e.g., question answering, translation, story generation, dialog systems, generating images from text, etc. For each application area, the strengths and weaknesses of current models are discussed, and an outlook on further developments is given. In addition, links are provided to freely available program code. A concluding chapter summarizes the economic opportunities, mitigation of risks, and potential developments of AI.

What is the relationship between Greek antiquity and today's world? What is the connection between the academic analyses of a researcher, his convictions and his life as a citizen? Between a reflection on the way in which the characters of Homer and Greek tragedy make decisions at crucial moments, and the engagement of intellectuals during the Second World War in France and Germany? Between Bruno Snell, a German Greek scholar steeped in Winckelmannian idealism and a scientific practice inherited from Wilamowitz, and Jean-Pierre Vernant, a French Marxist anthropologist and philosopher? This book shows in nuance how these seemingly distant fields meet, reflect and respond to each other.

This book explores how urban sustainability is negotiated and enacted through planning practices, narratives, and institutional change. It does so through the case of Aalborg, to illustrate transitions that are shaped by urgency, legitimation and implementation. It offers a theoretically grounded and empirically nuanced account of how urban sustainability emerges through situated, negotiated, and contested processes of transition. The book provides critical insight into the governance arrangements, planning rationalities, and institutional innovations that shape sustainability in practice, with the city of Aalborg serving as a paradigmatic case. Drawing on four intersecting theoretical traditions – Urban Political Ecology, Just Sustainability, Phronetic Planning, and Urban Sustainability Governance – the book develops the Urban Sustainability Compass , an interpretive framework organised around the logics of urgency, legitimation, and implementation. Through longitudinal analysis, engagement with planning documents, and sustained collaboration with municipal practitioners, the book delivers conceptual depth and methodological guidance for scholars, planners, and policymakers aiming to understand and co-produce context-sensitive, just, and adaptive pathways towards sustainable urban futures. This book is intended for scholars, advanced graduate students, and critically engaged practitioners in the fields of urban planning, sustainability studies, human geography, and environmental governance. It will be of particular interest to those conducting research on urban transitions, planning theory, climate adaptation, and socio-ecological transformation. The volume is especially suited for postgraduate courses and seminars on sustainable urban development, strategic spatial planning, and critical approaches to environmental policy, governance, and justice.

Published

Through the prism of the first comprehensive account of RT, the Kremlin's primary tool of foreign propaganda, Russia, Disinformation and the Liberal Order sheds new light on the provenance and nature of disinformation's threat to democracy. Interrogating the communications strategies pursued by authoritarian states and grassroots populist movements, the book reveals the interlinked nature of today's global media-politics pathologies. Stephen Hutchings, Vera Tolz, Precious Chatterje-Doody, Rhys Crilley, and Marie Gillespie provide a systematic investigation into RT's history, institutional culture, and journalistic ethos; its activities across multiple languages and media platforms; its audience-targeting strategies and audiences' engagements with it; and its response to the war in Ukraine and associated bans on the network. The authors' analysis challenges commonplace notions of disinformation as something that Russia brings to the West, where passive publics are duped by the Kremlin's communications machine, and reveals the reciprocal processes through which Russia and disinformation infiltrate and challenge the liberal order. Russia, Disinformation and the Liberal Order provides provocative insights into the nature and extent of the challenge that Russia's propaganda operation poses to the West. The authors contend that the challenge will be met only if liberals reflect on liberalism's own internal tensions and blind spots and defend the values of open-minded impartiality.

Due to their high material value and their meaningful iconography, Aegean signet rings have already attracted considerable attention in research. The focus was often on the analysis and interpretation of images, however, an overall consideration of this extremely complex archaeological genre and its diverse functions within the Minoan-Mycenaean administration and society was lacking so far. For the first time, not only preserved rings but also imprints of signet rings on sealings are systematically investigated in this work, which allows a new understanding of the material and its transformation during the Aegean Bronze Age.

Biblisches Lernen gilt als zentraler Bestandteil des Religionsunterrichts. Allerdings zeigt sich insbesondere bei Jugendlichen immer häufiger eine deutliche Distanz zur Bibel. Marie-Theres Ultsch fokussiert Schüler*innen der Sekundarstufe I und analysiert ihre individuellen Bedeutungszuschreibungen zum wichtigsten Buch des Christentums. Auf Basis einer offenen schriftlichen Befragung entwickelt sie eine Typologie, die u.a. aufzeigt, wie sich Jugendliche zur Bibel positionieren, welche Zugangsmöglichkeiten sie sehen und welche Herausforderungen sie im Umgang mit der Bibel wahrnehmen – ein wichtiger Beitrag zur empirischen Konturierung der Leser*innen biblischer Texte im schulischen Kontext, der neue didaktische Perspektiven für die Gestaltung biblischer Lernprozesse eröffnet.

If the concept of time-space, associated to the travel, usually refers to a space-temporal changing from a subject, the aim of this work is to reflect on the possibility to use the same concept for a different process, that involves space and time in other positions regarding to the subject, or else the physical immobility and the research during the time. In the last years some famous Brazilian novels deal not only with actual themes, but they find again their present origins in places cancelled by the urban palimpsest: the senzalas and the slavery live again in the echos of very different works as Becos da memória by Conceição Evaristo (2006), Passageiro do fim do dia by Rubens Figueiredo (2010), and O amor dos homens avulsos by Victor Heringer (2016).

This book navigates the neglected territory where far-right populism intersects with climate change, presenting a nuanced examination that transcends traditional research boundaries. In recent decades, Europe has grappled with the surge of far-right and populist movements, fueling robust academic debates. Simultaneously, the global discourse on climate change has become increasingly pervasive in societal and political spheres. This book provides a comprehensive exploration of how populist far-right parties discuss climate change within their national contexts, focusing on Germany, Spain, and Austria. Using a meticulous methodology rooted in critical discourse studies, Mirjam Gruber examines the perspectives on climate change held by mainstream parties thereby defining the national policy field. Gruber then delves into the discourse about climate change of populist far-right parties, revealing a complex web of obstructionist arguments intricately tied to the national policy context. By analyzing a diverse array of documents spanning five years, including social media posts, press releases, parliamentary debates, and policy documents, Gruber uncovers a stark contrast between the willingness of mainstream parties to address climate concerns and the obstructionist rhetoric employed by their far-right counterparts. This illuminating exploration underscores the importance of context in understanding political communication and provides profound insights into how different nations frame the climate change narrative. Climate Politics in Populist Times will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, environmental politics, climate change communication and populist far-right ideologies.