Open Access Books

«We are being stunted by a form of critical illiteracy», state Tierney, Smith and Kan, and «our global scholarship is facing a crisis of similar proportion to that of climate change […] because we are insufficiently ‘reading the world’, in the Freirean sense — acting as if we can and should be monolingual in a world that is multilingual» (Tierney et al. 2021, 305). This chapter will briefly chart the history of formal literacy education and describe the scope of the field of research and practice today that encompasses both standardised models of reading and writing text as well as more expansive models of meaning making across many sign systems. We relate the current standardised and universal model of functional literacy to a colonial past whereby systems designed for the benefit of the urban global north were imposed upon other contexts to ensure their expansion of power and economic advantage. Pluriversality is a concept that emerges from a decolonial movement of thought that provides a counternarrative to contemporary Northern assumptions of the universal and, in Escobar’s words, to «the hegemony of modernity’s one-world ontology» (2018, 4). This chapter provides a conceptual framework of pluriversal literacies in education inclusive of, but exceeding, the literacy of print. To illustrate the opportunities of a pluriversal literacies model in education, we provide a case study of land literacy practices in agricultural education in Patía, Colombia.

In this work, the solidification process of the high-temperature materials NiAl-34Cr und Nb-Si is investigated with the phase-field method. This work includes an entire investigation chain from the modeling of the material systems to the conduction of representative phase-field simulations, and finally to the analyzation of the resulting microstructures.

Before the multibillion computer game industry, there was Dungeons & Dragons, a tabletop game created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974. D&D captured the attention of a small but influential group of players, many of whom also gravitated to the computer networks that were then appearing on college campuses around the globe.With the subsequent emergence of the personal computer, a generation of geeky storytellers arose that translated communal D&D playing experiences into the virtual world of computer games. The result of that 40-year journey is today’s massive global community of players who, through games, have forged very real friendships and built thriving lives in virtual worlds. Dungeons & Dreamers follows the designers, developers, and players who built the virtual games and communities that define today’s digital entertainment landscape and explores the nature of what it means to live and thrive in virtual communities.

In February 1972, the world’s first group of and for queer Jews convened in London for their first public symposium. Their aim was to tackle the exlusion of non-heteronormative Jews in Jewish and queer communities. A few years later, two similar groups were founded in Paris and Amsterdam for socializing and political activism among queer Jews there. This study comprises the groups’ early histories and their networking in Europe.

In Morbid Undercurrents, Sean M. Quinlan follows how medical ideas, stemming from the so-called birth of the clinic, zigzagged across the intellectual landscape of the French Revolution and its aftermath. It was a remarkable "hotspot" in the historical timeline, when doctors and scientists pioneered a staggering number of fields—from forensic investigation to evolutionary biology—and their innovations captivated the public imagination. During the 1790s and beyond, medicine left the somber halls of universities, hospitals, and learned societies and became profoundly politicized, inspiring a whole panoply of different—often bizarre and shocking—subcultures. Quinlan reconstructs the ethos of the time and its labyrinthine underworld, traversing the intersection between medicine and pornography in the works of the Marquis de Sade, efforts to create a "natural history of women," the proliferation of sex manuals and books on family hygiene, anatomical projects to sculpt antique bodies, the rage for physiognomic self-help books that taught readers to identify social and political "types" in post-revolutionary Paris, the use of physiological medicine as a literary genre, and the "mesmerist renaissance" with its charged debates over animal magnetism and somnambulism. In creating this reconstruction, Quinlan argues that the place and authority of medicine evolved, at least in part, out of an attempt to redress the acute sense of dislocation produced by the Revolution. Morbid Undercurrents exposes how medicine then became a subversive, radical, and ideologically charged force in French society.

It is easy to find books and libraries within fiction from the earliest times onwards in works for all age groups, in canonical literature and in books that form part of popular culture. From Don Quixote to Louisa M. Alcott’s March girls and Terry Pratchett’s Unseen University wizards, the reading material of fictional personae is part of their characterisation; we are often reading readers. This volume breaks new ground in offering a chronological range of essays exploring the depiction of books, libraries and reading specifically in fiction from the medieval period to the present. Through detailed case studies from primarily British fiction that address common themes such as gender, genre and the relation between reading and writing itself, the collection examines the ways in which authors of fiction mediate and interpret books, libraries, and the act of reading to their own readers. Fiction enables writers to teach readers how to read, but it can also portray subversive acts of reading that engage with contemporary cultural anxieties or moral debates. The volume draws on approaches from literary studies, book history, library history, and theories and histories of reading, to examine what fictional representations of reading tell us about changing cultural attitudes to different reading practices, and the use (and abuse) of books beyond actual reading, both in the context of specific works and about the reception of books more widely.

The book aims to help the Teachers of Early Childhood Education (EI) to plan functional mathematical learning activities, showing how to create in the classroom the need to know, seek, look and work, in this case, from the stories. And it is done from the scope of the theory of didactic situations, formulated by Guy Brousseau (1998), which provides a framework for teaching staff and allows planning an adequate and coherent evolution of the designed learning activities. With this intention of use for teachers, there are examples of analysis of the mathematical content of the stories, as well as activities that have been implemented in EI classrooms and that have been used in the mathematical-didactic training of the EI teachers in the EI in theUniversity of Murcia.Annexes that collect poems and images (drawings, scenarios, vignettes) that can be used for activities related to stories, poems and songs have also been included.

Analysis of Genetic Variation in Animals includes chapters revealing the magnitude of genetic variation existing in animal populations. The genetic diversity between and within populations displayed by molecular markers receive extensive interest due to the usefulness of this information in breeding and conservation programs. In this concept molecular markers give valuable information. The increasing availability of PCR-based molecular markers allows the detailed analyses and evaluation of genetic diversity in animals and also, the detection of genes influencing economically important traits. The purpose of the book is to provide a glimpse into the dynamic process of genetic variation in animals by presenting the thoughts of scientists who are engaged in the generation of new idea and techniques employed for the assessment of genetic diversity, often from very different perspectives. The book should prove useful to students, researchers, and experts in the area of conservation biology, genetic diversity, and molecular biology.

For a long time, the tight junction (TJ) was known to form and regulate the paracellular barrier between epithelia and endothelial cell sheets. Starting shortly after the discovery of the proteins forming the TJ—mainly the two families of claudins and TAMPs—several other functions have been discovered, a striking one being the surprising finding that some claudins form paracellular channels for small ions and/or water. This Special Issue includes 43 articles covering numerous dedicated topics including pathogens affecting the TJ barrier, TJ regulation via immune cells, the TJ as a therapeutic target, TJ and cell polarity, function and regulation by proteins of the tricellular TJ, TJ as a regulator of cellular processes, organ- and tissue-specific functions, TJ as sensors and reacting to environmental conditions, and last but not least, TJ proteins and cancer.

In arid and semiarid landscapes, water is the primary limiting resource for human activity and ecosystem functioning. More than 40% of the world’s population lives in dryland environments (White and Nackoney, 2003). In these landscapes annual rainfall can vary greatly and be highly unpredictable both in space and time. Longer intervals between precipitation events are also highly erratic and global atmosphere-ocean teleconnections—such as unusually cool Pacific Sea surface temperatures during the La Niña phase of the El Niño -Southern Oscillation can trigger multi-decadal “megadroughts” (McCabe et al., 2004; Cook et al., 2016; Routson et al., 2016; Steiger et al., 2019). Soil moisture and local ecohydrology constrain the extent and intensity of food production possible through agriculture. Complex combinations of social and physical infrastructure have sustained population growth and managed hydroclimate risks in the past. Indigenous soil and water conservation has been tested over millennia to support agriculture (Johnson et al. 2021).

Reading Robert Walser concentrates on the letters sent by the author Robert Walser to Frieda Mermet, the laundry manager at a Swiss psychiatric hospital where his sister worked as a teacher. Their exchange continued from 1913 to 1942, covering the time when Walser’s literary fortunes declined, after which he himself was placed in an asylum for almost three decades before his death in 1956. This epistolary history provides a reflection on the question of correspondence and literature, particularly the subject of lost correspondence, gender, the question of address and the performance of identity. Simon Wortham frames the letters with an extensive critical biography about the life and writing of Robert Walser, whose work has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. As her side of the exchange no longer survives, the book concludes with a fictional reimagining of Mermet’s response to Walser’s letters. This creative part is carefully introduced by chapters on epistolary writing in a range of critical settings from modernism to literary theory and deconstruction, as well as exploring what is at stake in creative engagements with a literary legacy of this kind. Praise for Reading Robert Walser ‘The very question of a subject is at stake in this enchanting book. Intriguingly, each chapter has a different voice: from a man writing about Walser to a man writing as a woman speaking as Walser, with a chorus in between that produces an exhilarating threefold reading of strangely connected desires.’ Sharon Kivland, artist, writer, and editor of the independent press MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE 'Reading Robert Walser gifts us a psychologically flexible approach to the incomparably brilliant modernist writer. Never pathologizing, Wortham shows that Walser’s texts challenge us to think ""asexuality"" and ""queerness"" in new and dynamic ways. Rather than pathologizing Walser, Wortham productively stays under Walser’s spell.' Barbara N. Nagel, Princeton University

Security Policy and Military Strength in the Arctic presents new Norwegian research in High North defence and security policy topics. Against the backdrop of today’s security situation, the book provides a unique introduction to the role military strength plays in the region. The book will be of interest to all those concerned with defence policy issues. Through research contributions by experts in land, sea and air power conditions, Security Policy and Military Strength in the Arctic renders a comprehensive overview that will be especially relevant for students at the Norwegian military academies and others studying political science and history, as well as researchers and practitioners in the field. An additional objective of the book is to advance the debate on the role of the military in the northern regions and the Arctic, and contribute to increasing awareness of ongoing developments in defence and security policy in the North.

Although letters are probably the most intensively studied type of documents in papyrology, their material and visual aspects have received little scholarly attention. Yet, in recent years there has been a noticeably growing interest in these aspects and their relation to the content of documents. Among the many examples of preserved letters, this chapter examines the formal features of one specific communication practice, namely the penning of multiple messages on a single support (papyrus, ostracon, or wooden tablet). This practice, which allowed the letter writer to save paper and time, since letters could easily encounter delays or never make it to their final destination, usually involved one individual addressing a group of people living together or in proximity, or a group of close individuals addressing the same person. Personal and social reasons could also come into play in choosing a single writing medium. The examination of this group of texts shows that multiple letters could be arranged according to four different types of layout: (1) by placing one message on top of another; (2) side by side; (3) by using the two faces of the writing medium; or (4) by shaping them into a single letter, in what I suggest we call the “shell letter.” By discussing each of these visual arrangements, this chapter investigates the reasons that may have led the scribe to prefer one layout to another, as well as the relationship between text, layout, and correspondents.

Much of the information relevant to policy formulation for industrial development is held by the private sector, not by public officials. There is, therefore, fairly broad agreement in the development literature that some form of structured engagement—often referred to as close or strategic coordination—between the public and private sectors is needed, to assist in the design of appropriate policies and provide feedback on their implementation. There is less agreement on how that engagement should be structured, how its objectives be defined, and how success be measured. In fact, the academic literature provides little practical guidance on how governments interested in developing such a framework should go about doing it. The burden of this lack of guidance falls most heavily on Africa, where—despite twenty years of growth—lack of structural transformation has slowed job creation and the pace of poverty reduction. In 2014, the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) and United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) launched a joint research project: The Practice of Industrial Policy. The aim is to help African policy makers develop better coordination between public and private sectors in order to identify the constraints to faster structural transformation and design, implement, and monitor policies to remove them. This book, written by national researchers and international experts, presents the results of that research by combining a set of analytical ‘framing’ essays on close coordination with case studies of successful and unsuccessful efforts at close coordination in Africa and in comparator countries.