Open Access Books

After a nation has transitioned from authoritarianism to democracy, how are democratic norms most effectively fostered and maintained? This book uses as its case study Indonesia after the fall of the dictator Suharto to reveal that a contentious, even scandal-obsessed press can actually prove extremely useful for an emergent democracy. A society that can tolerate and protect journalists willing to expose corruption and scandal among elites is one, the author finds, in which ordinary citizens are willing to believe in and support other democratic institutions. Based on extensive interviews and research in Indonesia, this book offers a new and surprising perspective on the role of the press and the nature of scandal-driven journalism in fledgling democracies.

This book examines both the obvious and less obvious ways in which Germans struggle with their Nazi past. It embraces only a small part of a complex problem, which is impossible for an individual author to grasp in its entirety and character. The main intention, which leads through a thick of actors, issues, institutions, events and phenomena, is a reflection upon the reasons for which German reckoning with the past turned out to be a process full of contradictions; a bumpy road rippled with political, intellectual and moral mines. This intention is accompanied by the question about the specific character of German collective memory in relation to the helplessness and moral condition of a person defending himself/herself and his/her nation in the face of unimaginable evil.

This study proposes that Afropolitanism may be best approached as a distinct cultural moment or historical constellation that allows us to glimpse the shifting and multiple silhouettes which Africa – as signifier, as real and imagined locus – embodies in the globalized cultural landscape of the 21st century. As such, Making Black History looks at contemporary diasporic fictions that have been written and received in the moment of Afropolitanism.

Artistic media seem to be in a permanent condition of mutation and transformation. Contemporary artists often investigate the limits and possibilities of the media they use and experiment with the crossing, upgrading and mutilation of media. Others explicitly explore the unknown intermedial space between existing media, searching for the hybrid beings that occupy these in-betweens. This issue of Theater Topics explores the theme of mutating and adapting media in its relation with theatre and performance.Bringing together international scholars and artists, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the subject. Throughout, Bastard or Playmate? is responsive to the cross-disciplinary use of key concepts such as remediation, digitization, interactivity, corporeality, liveness, surveillance, spectacle, performativity and theatricality. The book guides readers new to the area of intermediality, as well as experienced researchers into one of the most dynamic fields of scholarship.Bastard or Playmate? Adapting Theatre, Mutating Media and the Contemporary Performing Arts is the fifth issue of the series Theater Topics. This series contains publications about research in and about theatre, each issue giving a comprehensive overview of research concerning a specific topic.,This issue contains contributions by Katia Arfara, Edwin Carels, Jeroen Coppens, Nancy Delhalle, Tom Engels, Christophe Van Gerrewey, Eva Heisler, Evelien Jonckheere, Sarah Kenderdine and Jeffrey Shaw, Elise Morrison, Marco Pustianaz, Frederik Le Roy, Anna Teresa Scheer, Klaas Tindemans, and Nele Wynants.

"In this ingenious study, Kathryn Rudy takes the reader on a journey to trace the birth, life and afterlife of a Netherlandish book of hours made in 1500. Image, Knife, and Gluepot painstakingly reconstructs the process by which this manuscript was created and discusses its significance as a text at the forefront of fifteenth-century book production, when the invention of mechanically-produced images led to the creation of new multimedia objects. Rudy then travels to the nineteenth century to examine the phenomenon of manuscript books being pillaged for their prints and drawings: she has diligently tracked down the dismembered parts of this book of hours for the first time. Image, Knife, and Gluepot also documents Rudy’s twenty-first-century research process, as she hunts through archives while grappling with the logistics and occasionally the limits of academic research. This is a timely volume, focusing on questions of materiality at the forefront of medieval and literary studies. Beautifully illustrated throughout, its use of original material and its striking interdisciplinary approach, combining book and art history, make it a significant academic achievement. Image, Knife, and Gluepot is a valuable text for any scholar in the fields of medieval studies, the history of early books and publishing, cultural history or material culture. Written in Rudy’s inimitable style, it will also be rewarding for any student enrolled in a course on manuscript production, as well as non-specialists interested in the afterlives of manuscripts and prints. The Royal Society of Edinburgh has generously contributed to this Open Access publication. Due to the number and quality of the images in this book, we have provided the option of a more expensive hardback edition, printed on the best quality paper available, in order to present the images as clearly and beautifully as possible. We hope this range of options — the freely available PDF, HTML and XML editions; the economically priced EPUB, MOBI and paperback editions; and the more expensively printed hardback — will satisfy everyone. Furthermore the HTML edition allows readers to magnify the images of the manuscripts displayed in the book. "

In this paper, we estimate agricultural productivity change at country level based on the same data employed by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the current reference data source, using a stochastic frontier model instead of the growth accounting method. The use of a stochastic frontier model is motivated by the opportunity to overcome the limitation of USDA estimates which rely on approximated and imputed input cost shares, and of the growth accounting method in general, which ignores technical inefficiency. We found that, in general, USDA estimates are higher in absolute value than ours but in substantial agreement, confirming the different theoretical foundations of the two methods and suggesting the empirical validity of both of them. Furthermore, our results show that the assumption of constant returns to scale made by many authors appears just a simplification and not a real property of the production processes of the various countries. This work has the value to provide, for the first time in the literature, a comparison between agricultural productivity changes estimated with different methodologies, and an additional data source that can be employed in a large variety of longitudinal economic analyses at country level.

During the last 30 years, the governments of many Western countries have repeatedly called for an end to welfare. While the virtue of this goal and the means of achieving it continue to be debated in politics, much of contemporary social science research assumes that, in fact, the end of the welfare state has already occurred. The authors of this volume hope to contribute to a clearer understanding of how, where and to what extent welfare state settings really have changed since the 1980s. Their work examines questions of change and continuity while exploring various welfare practices in the Western world.

In this chapter, we bring queer theory into dialogue with critical race studies. We ask “How does the literature in queer kinship engage with the issues of race and intersecting inequalities?’’ This chapter builds upon the foundational literature in queer family studies. It departs from the foundational literature in the anthropology of reproduction by placing the role that racial hierarchies and racial logics play at the center of analysis. We refer to family forms that do not conform to heteronormative, monoracial models. This chapter also advances debates in anthropology that illuminate the social, cultural, and political imperatives that confer respectability and legitimacy to transgressive family forms. Given the changing legal and global landscape, we offer a nuanced analysis of the ways that queer families employ racial and cultural logics as they engage with technologies in their pathways to parenthood. Finally, our analysis innovates and renovates queer family studies by proving an analysis of the ways that heteronormativity and Whiteness mark all logics of reproduction in the early twenty-first century.

Die gesellschaftliche Brisanz des virtuellen Hasses hat zugenommen. Shitstorms, Empörungswellen oder Online-Eskalationen können als eine Phase in der Literatur- und Mediengeschichte des Tribunals gelesen werden. Die Beiträger*innen analysieren im Kontext der Geschichte und Theorie des Tribunals eskalierende Konflikte in sozialen Medien. Dabei setzen sie den Schwerpunkt auf mediale Gesten, rhetorische Darstellungstechniken, autofiktive Strategien und Interaktionsformen. Ein weiterer Aspekt sind Prozesse des Umstülpens, bei denen originär digitale Phänomene in analoge Kontexte übertragen werden. Der Fokus des Bandes wird somit um künstlerische und literarische Praktiken, die auf den virtuellen Hass reagieren, erweitert.

This book compiles, discusses, and explains the key concepts in land politics in an easy-to-navigate A–Z format. This book takes a broad view on land, across the rural and urban corridor, and advocates for a holistic view of the politics of land, as an aggregation of land and global social life, that is, the politics of food, climate, labour, citizenship, and geopolitics. The authors have curated a wide-ranging list of 67 key terms most commonly used in the field, with each entry mapping out an important concept or idea and illustrating how it relates more broadly across this growing discipline. Across the entries, the book showcases that land has been and remains central to productive and social reproductive activities of humanity for the incessant renewal of life and society. A key assumption in this book is that the politics of land is made up of building blocks in the form of key concepts. These key concepts evolve, both in the sense that they are politically contested and in the changing broader context within which they are embedded. The key concepts in this book are therefore not discussed in a random way but rather framed from Critical Agrarian Studies perspectives and scholar-activist tradition, which means taking the side of the exploited and oppressed. With further reading recommendations included alongside the entries, this innovative and accessible volume will be of great interest to students, scholars, policy practitioners, and political activists.

The Aulic Council, together with the Imperial Chamber Court, exercised supreme jurisdiction in the Holy Roman Empire on behalf of the Emperor. It also acted as the supreme feudal court, as an advisory body to the head of the Empire and as the administrative organ of the exclusively imperial rights, which for example concerned matters of status and privileges. The archival heritage of the Aulic Council is kept in Vienna by the Austrian State Archives. The holdings extend over approximately 1.3 kilometres of shelving with tens of thousands of files containing first-rate sources on the history of Central Europe in the early modern period.

Migration is a highly debated issue in political but also academic terms. Research on the national and international level is more and more sophisticated and detailed in the selection of the case studies. In this scenario, the authors of this volume aim to present to the academic attention and to the community of university students a multi-disciplinary approach to the analysis of migration in Italy, whose main purpose is to go beyond the over-adopted concept of migration as social, political and cultural “challenge”

Imke Buß weist in ihrem Open-Access-Buch nach, dass Hochschulen durch die strategische Gestaltung ihrer Studienstrukturen die Vereinbarkeit von Studium, Familie und Beruf ermöglichen können. Die Autorin entwickelt ein empirisch geprüftes Modell struktureller Studierbarkeit, welches die Bedürfnisse einer diversen Studierendenschaft berücksichtigt. Die Gemeinsamkeiten, welche Studierende mit Sorgeaufgaben, Erwerbstätigkeit und Behinderung eint, sind insbesondere deren zeitliche Restriktionen. Das Modell ist als Steuerungsinstrument für ein selbstbestimmtes Qualitätsmanagement an Hochschulen geeignet. Die Arbeit bietet darüber hinaus Empfehlungen für die Gestaltung von Studienstrukturen, u.a. zu E-Learning, Veranstaltungszeiten, SWS und Teilzeitstudium.

New Thinking, New Scholarship and New Research in Catholic Education gives a forum to many established and leading scholars to review and critically appraise the research contribution of Gerald Grace to Catholic education. The book demonstrates the way in which the field of Catholic Education Studies has developed under the influence of Grace, to become internationally recognised. This book demonstrates the ways in which Gerald Grace has shaped Catholic education since 1997. This begins with the primacy of empirical study and carefully conducted fieldwork when researching Catholic education. Many contributors focus on the way Grace champions the alignment between Catholic education and what we have come to know as the option for the poor. The collection also reflects Grace's intention to ensure the voices of women are properly represented in the field of Catholic education. The book is based on an inclusive and open principle that seeks to establish dialogue with educators of different faiths and different religious backgrounds, as well as secular and humanist critics. It will be of great interest to academics, scholars and students of religious education, the history of education and all those interested in the developing field of Catholic Education Studies.

Dieses Buch ist für alle, die mutig genug sind, sich selbst und das Zeigen von Kunst zu stören. Beatrice Miersch entwirft radikal-relationale Alternativen zu zeitgenössischen Ausstellungspraktiken. Um sich der gesellschaftlichen Verantwortung im Rahmen des Ausstellens von Kunst zu stellen, erprobt sie queer-feministische, kulturwissenschaftliche und selbstreflektierende Methoden in der Praxis und Theorie des Kuratierens. Momente kuratorischer Störung werden zu produktiv-schöpferischen Momenten der Unterbrechung, mit denen sie reflektierte, offene, engagierte und vulnerable Perspektiven auf das Ausstellen eröffnet und tradierte Strukturen durchbricht.