Open Access Books

This chapter provides an overview of the latest empirical evidence on the extent to which specific school policies and interventions can affect social mobility. It covers the new literature showing positive effects of school spending on pupil outcomes, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. It also covers evidence on the specific ways in which extra resources can be used, such as reduced class sizes, one-to-one tutoring and extending school time. The latter margins are of particular interest in light of the evidence on lost learning and widening inequalities during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also review the wide body of evidence showing the importance of teacher quality in the education production function, and how the uneven distribution of teacher quality across schools can contribute to educational inequalities. Finally, we review the literatures on the sorting of pupils across schools and the role of more autonomous schools in shaping educational inequality.

Slavery and the Shaping of the Muslim Family delves into the wide-ranging and complex subject of slavery within the familial sphere of Islamic societies. For too long, secondary literature has treated the family and slavery as separate domains, overlooking the ways in which enslaved individuals were deeply embedded in domestic life. Contemporary research increasingly recognises that the presence and participation of slaves within households were crucial to the formation of both family structures and broader social frameworks in the Islamic world. Bringing together the work of distinguished historian-philologists specialising in diverse regions of the Islamic world, the book examines this theme through a variety of genres – including Islamic jurisprudence, literature, and mysticism. What unites these contributions is a shared commitment to primary sources and a rigorous approach to historical inquiry. While the majority of the chapters address the premodern era, the volume also includes work that extends into the eighteenth century, enriching the discussion with a wider chronological perspective. This volume underscores the value of approaching social history from an intersectional perspective – one that resists viewing the individual as a monolithic whole, and instead attends to the multiple dimensions of identity that inform and mediate social relations across varied contexts, both spatial and temporal.

The 43rd UID conference, held in Genova, takes up the theme of ‘Dialogues’ as practice and debate on many fundamental topics in our social life, especially in these complex and not yet resolved times. The city of Genova offers the opportunity to ponder on the value of comparison and on the possibilities for the community, naturally focused on the aspects that concern us, as professors, researchers, disseminators of knowledge, or on all the possibile meanings of the discipline of representation and its dialogue with ‘others’, which we have broadly catalogued in three macro areas: History, Semiotics, Science / Technology. Therefore, “dialogue” as a profitable exchange based on a common language, without which it is impossible to comprehend and understand one another; and the graphic sign that connotes the conference is the precise transcription of this concept: the title ‘translated’ into signs, derived from the visual alphabet designed for the visual identity of the UID since 2017. There are many topics which refer to three macro sessions: - Witnessing (signs and history) - Communicating (signs and semiotics) - Experimenting (signs and sciences) Thanks to the different points of view, an exceptional resource of our disciplinary area, we want to try to outline the prevailing theoretical-operational synergies, the collaborative lines of an instrumental nature, the recent updates of the repertoires of images that attest and nourish the relations among representation, history, semiotics, sciences.

The long awaited conclusion to the magisterial Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice.Originally published in 1997. In 1985 Frederic C. Lane and Reinhold C. Mueller published the magisterial Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice, volume 1: Coins and Moneys of Account. Now, after ten years of further research and writing, Reinhold Mueller completes the work that he and the late Frederic Lane began. The history of money and banking in Venice is crucial to an understanding of European economic history. Because of its strategic location between East and West, Venice rapidly rose to a position of preeminence in Mediterranean trade. To keep trade moving from London to Constantinople and beyond, Venetian merchants and bankers created specialized financial institutions to serve private entrepreneurs and public administrators: deposit banks, foreign exchange banks, a grain office, and a bureau of the public debt. This new book clarifies Venice's pivotal role in Italian and international banking and finance. It also sets banking—and panics—in the context of more generalized and recurrent crises involving territorial wars, competition for markets, and debates over interest rates and the question of usury.

Land is at the centre of crucial public debates ranging from climate adaptation to housing and development, to agriculture and indigenous peoples’ rights. These debates frequently become stuck, though, because the meaning of land in different contexts is poorly understood. Bringing together specialists of epistemology and land, this open access book is a landmark contribution to understanding land knowledge as a complex factor in these debates. Land has been known in astonishingly different ways throughout history, but in recent decades one particular understanding of land as commodity has become increasingly hegemonic globally. This understanding has enormously destructive effects, not only for many people and animals living on and from the land that is increasingly grabbed for extractivist purposes, but also for possible imaginations of how humans can relate to land in the future. In Epistemologies of Land , scholars reconstruct how the understanding of land has come to be reduced to “land as commodity” historically, what the consequences of this epistemological transformation have been, and what alternative ways of understanding land could help establish intellectually abundant and ecologically sustainable ways of relating to the land we live on. Particularly, the book shows how a change in perspective – thinking society through land – can lay the foundation not only for knowing more about land, but for a different kind of environmental and social knowledge that could recover forgotten wisdom of how humans and animals have historically related to land, and by that transform the ways in which land contributes to our daily life beyond its diminished meaning as an economic resource. Contributors include: Eloisa Berman Arevalo, Shailaja Fennell, Inanna Hamati-Ataya, Katarina Kusic, Maarten Meijer, David Nally, Sakshi, Leo Steeds, and Anna Wolkenhauer. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by European Research Council (ERC).

The aim of this two-volume title is to give a comprehensive review of one hundred years of development of general relativity and its scientific influences. This unique title provides a broad introduction and review to the fascinating and profound subject of general relativity, its historical development, its important theoretical consequences, gravitational wave detection and applications to astrophysics and cosmology. The series focuses on five aspects of the theory: Genesis, Solutions and Energy Empirical Foundations Gravitational Waves Cosmology Quantum Gravity The first three topics are covered in Volume 1 and the remaining two are covered in Volume 2. While this is a two-volume title, it is designed so that each volume can be a standalone reference volume for the related topic.

The properties of atmospheric particles - often also termed aerosol - have been the subject of scientific studies for several decades because of their effects on air quality, health, visibility, propagation of electromagnetic radiation in the atmosphere, and climate. However, despite intense research efforts, several knowledge gaps remain to be filled; the reason being related also to the complexity of the physical and chemical characteristics of these particles and of their dynamic interactions with the surrounding environment. One of the frontier topics in this scientific endeavor is the subject of this special issue: the morphology and mixing of atmospheric aerosol at the single particle level.

Les nouvelles technologies entrent dans les bibliothèques... Nombre de bibliothèques publiques proposent aujourd'hui à leurs utilisateurs des catalogues informatisés. La Bibliothèque publique d'information a mis en place en 1988 deux systèmes de consultation différents. Joëlle Le Marec s'intéresse ici aux modes d'usages mis en œuvre par le public. La multiplicité et la diversité des façons de faire ne rencontrent pas toujours les objectifs des concepteurs. L'auteur met en évidence deux grandes logiques d'usage : l'imaginaire du dialogue entre l'homme et le système et le modèle spatial du parcours (labyrinthique ?) de consultation. Cette recherche s'inscrit dans une réflexion plus générale sur les usages sociaux des nouvelles technologies et sur les modifications dont elles peuvent être sources dans la réception et l'appropriation des documents.

Foucaults »archäologisch« genannte Schriften sind mehr als nur historiographische Methode. Sie bilden einen Diskurs, der den historischen Prozess seiner eigenen Konstitution als Diskurs beschreibt und betreibt. Der performativen Dimension von Foucaults archäologischem Diskurs wohnt damit eine spezifische Reflexionsfigur inne, die in der vorliegenden Studie als der »archäologische Zirkel« freigelegt wird. Ferner leistet diese Freilegung eine neuartige Auslotung des Foucault'schen Diskursbegriffs und, im Ausgang von Descartes, Kant und Nietzsche, eine Neueinbettung der Philosophie in eine diskontinuierliche Diskursgeschichte.

What knowledge and skills are needed to be more inclusive and to give children with disabilities a better quality of life in Tanzania and in Norway? Professional helpers, such as teachers, social educators [vernepleiere, Norwegian], and social workers are agents of change in this interprofessional and intercultural field. Students and staff involved in international exchange projects, such as with The Norwegian Agency for Exchange Cooperation (NOREC), are also agents of change in this field. Whether academics or practitioners, they all emphasize the need for new and updated knowledge across many wellestablished research fields due to the children’s multifaceted needs. This anthology introduces this diverse field of research and contributes with knowledge of children’s needs and human rights, theoretical perspectives and research approaches as well as the implications for education and practice. The book’s target group is broad, encompassing researchers, students as well as practitioners in the global south and north. The chapters are written by international researchers and professionals working in education, health, and social work in Tanzania and Norway. Several of the chapters are the result of a collaboration between Tanzanian and Norwegian authors, and collaboration is an important subject in the book. Change Agents can be read as a whole as well as individual chapters. The book and the individual, scientific chapters have been peer-reviewed.

Described by Aristotle as the most vital of senses, touch contains both the physical and the metaphysical in its ability to express the determination of being. To manifest itself, touch makes a movement outwards, beyond the body, and relies on a specific physical involvement other senses do not require: to touch is already to be active and to activate. This fundamental ontology makes touch the most essential of all senses. This volume in the Law and the Senses series attempts to illuminate and reconsider the complex and interflowing relations and contradictions between the tactful intrusion of the law and the untactful movement of touch. Compelling contributors from arts, literature and social science disciplines alongside artist presentations explore touch’s boundaries and formal and informal ‘laws’ of the senses. Each contribution unveils a multi-faceted new dimension to the force of touch, its ability to form, deform and reform what it touches. In unique ways, each of the several contributions to this volume recognises the trans-corporeality of touch to traverse the boundaries on the body and entangle other bodies and spaces, thus challenging the very notion of corporeal integrity and human being.

My goal with this chapter is to share our experience at Tall Hisban in Jordan with what I have chosen to call site custody activism or simply SCA. After introducing the notion of SCA, I briefly examine the historical role of overseas institutions with regard to the custody and care of archaeological sites. Next, I describe SCA activities initiated by Andrews University at Hisban in Jordan and offer some observations on the connection between SCA and the broader field of international community development. I also critically examining the role of narrative in SCA and conclude by offering a brief coda on what’s ahead for community archaeology and SCA in Jordan and beyond.

A poetic English rendering of Rainer Maria Rilke's "Duineser Elegien" printed together with the original German on facing pages. The translation places high value on conveying the meaning of the Elegies, although it does not attempt to retain the original meter. An additional, detailed interpretive commentary will increase the English-speaking reader's understanding of Rilke's complex poetry.

Here, for the first time in English, is Georges Cuvier’s extraordinary “History of the Natural Sciences from Its Origin to the Present Day.” Based on a series of public lectures presented by Cuvier from 1829 to 1832, this first of a five-volume series, translated from the original French and heavily annotated with commentary, is a detailed chronological survey of the natural sciences spanning more than three millennia. It is truly astonishing in its detail and scope. Cuvier was fluent in many languages, English, German, Spanish, and certainly Latin, in addition to French. He was therefore well prepared to investigate and interpret firsthand the scientific literature of Europe as a whole. The work is an affirmation of Cuvier’s vast encyclopedic knowledge, his complete command of the scientific and historical literature, and his incomparable memory. This history is remarkable also for providing in one place a large set of useful references to a vast ancient literature that is not easily found anywhere else. This huge body of information provides us furthermore with unique insight into Cuvier’s concept of the natural sciences, and to the vast breadth and progress of this human endeavor. With this work, Cuvier fills an important gap in philosophical thought between the time of Carl Linnaeus and Charles Darwin.

The theory of evolution has clearly altered our views of the biological world, but in the study of human beings, evolutionary and preevolutionary views continue to coexist in a state of perpetual tension. The Taming of Evolution addresses the questions of how and why this is so. Davydd Greenwood offers a sustained critique of the nature/nurture debate, revealing the complexity of the relationship between science and ideology. He maintains that popular contemporary theories, most notably E. O. Wilson’s human sociobiology and Marvin Harris’s cultural materialism, represent pre-Darwinian notions overlaid by elaborate evolutionary terminology. Greenwood first details the humoral-environmental and Great Chain of Being theories that dominated Western thinking before Darwin. He systematically compares these ideas with those later influenced by Darwin’s theories, illuminating the surprising continuities between them. Greenwood suggests that it would be neither difficult nor socially dangerous to develop a genuinely evolutionary understanding of human beings, so long as we realized that we could not derive political and moral standards from the study of biological processes.