Open Access Books

Artists always react to the times in which they live. They may celebrate them or criticize them, often trying to change them. But this is the first time in history that technology controlled by private companies is offering to replace the work of writers, musicians, illustrators and visual artists. What impact will generative AI have on how we create art and how we understand what art is for? How will it affect the role of the artist in the future and the conditions under which artists will work? Jan Svenungsson tackles these questions, investigating what AI might do for art, and what it might change, circling the core issue of what it is in human art-making that cannot be replaced.

This edited volume delves into the intricate landscape of educational internationalism during the Cold War, providing an in-depth examination of its diverse forms, impulses, and global impacts. Through multilingual archival research, the chapters uncover a variety of experiences that have fostered cross-border exchanges and cooperation within, between, and beyond the Western and Eastern blocs. Promoted by a wide range of individual and collective actors, internationalism in education has extended across a broad spectrum of fields, including academic mobility schemes, cultural interchanges, youth science competitions, development programs, and training courses. This collection offers, for the first time, a comprehensive analysis of these initiatives, revealing their intersections with national educational policies and processes of decolonization, development, and Europeanization. It also challenges conventional historical narratives by both uncovering forms of collaboration and solidarity that transcended the Iron Curtain and emphasizing the pivotal role of the Global South as a central arena of encounters. Educational Internationalism in the Cold War presents a rich understanding of the Cold War as a laboratory of contemporary globalization and is a valuable addition to the scholarship on one of the most critical moments of the twentieth century.

Over the last thirty years, more than four hundred million hectares of tropical forest have been destroyed. Alongside this deforestation comes forest degradation, which in some regions of the world, such as the Amazon, affects an area just as large as deforestation. Safeguarding tropical forests has therefore become nothing less than a priority for the survival of humanity. One way forward involves setting aside forests as protected areas, thereby limiting the use of their resources by humans. The other is to manage them sustainably, so that they continue to provide vital goods and services to local communities and society as a whole. Foresters favour this second method, based on the idea that a forest that is valued for the goods and services it provides to populations, the State and society will be protected and conserved. Yet reality on the ground tells a different story. Illegal logging, which is still widespread in many tropical countries, causes significant damage to forest stands, undermining their ability to regenerate and withstand the effects of climate change. Timber harvesting is thus often blamed for a host of ills and widely regarded as the main driver of deforestation. This book does not set out to justify logging. Instead, it offers a clear, factual and accessible account of its true environmental impacts. More importantly, it reveals how timber harvesting, rather than being an enemy, could become a powerful ally in the fight to conserve the world’s tropical rainforests.

Thomas Chiu’s book is one of the first to look at the impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) on K-12 education in two areas: AI education, and AI in education. AI education refers to teaching AI, and AI in education refers to using AI to support learning and teaching. Chiu examines the opportunities and challenges of these impacts for teachers and students, proposes a framework and a set of principles for the two areas with examples, and suggests learning outcomes. AI in K-12 education is one of the most important global strategic initiatives since it has made and continues to make impacts on education and the job market. Including AI technology and topics in K-12 education not only helps children understand what AI technologies are and how they work, but also inspires future workplace readiness and potential AI researchers, ethical designers, and software developers. However, educators and AI experts in general realize that planning AI-related education is very challenging. It involves integrating the topics or technologies into the curriculum, necessitating teacher development to address the gaps in knowledge, addressing educational inequity, and securing equipment and resources. Understanding student and teacher opportunities and challenges is crucial. This book is an essential and thought-provoking read for researchers, teacher educators, and school teachers and leaders who wish to embrace AI to prepare K-12 students for their future education and the workforce.

As a team of upcoming and established scholars from Kenya, Ethiopia and Belgium, we propose this book with oral folktales accompanied by strong visuals. Through performative learning procedures the book invites young people to meaningfully engage with living traditions of oral storytelling. The book aims to: 1) (re-)value the educational potential of popular storytelling in dealing with crisis situations; 2) (re)connect adolescent audiences with oral literatures; As the interest in oral literatures is on the decline, especially among adolescents in Africa and elsewhere, we see a real need in offering folktales that are attractive and relevant to youthful audiences. The book features 11 oral narratives in 5 languages from Kenya and Ethiopia, accompanied by high-quality images that will speak to young people. Each chapter starts with a full transcription of the story in the original language, followed by a well-written and attractive translation to English. The visual section highlights the narrative’s features in different manners, after which metadata on the narrative are offered, explaining the performance context, background of the narrator and audience. The final section of each chapter consists of a profound analysis with full educational guidelines for teachers/trainers to engage discussion with (African) youth.

This open access book explores the highly topical issue of environmental rights through national, European and international perspectives. The growing awareness of an impending environmental crisis coupled with a series of national and regional environmental disasters led, in the 1960s and 1970s, to the birth of the global environmental movement and the widespread recognition of the need to protect the environment for both current and future generations. Against this backdrop the concept of ‘environmental rights’ surfaced as a means by which claims relating to the environment could be formulated in legal terms and thereby safeguarded. In the decades that followed, this concept has come to encompass many different variations of legal rights, which this book seeks to investigate and assess. 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 the Swedish Studies Network.

Soldgeschäfte waren eine grundlegende Komponente schweizerischer und europäischer Geschichte der Frühen Neuzeit. Sie förderten einerseits den Klientelismus und provozierten andererseits Korruptionskritik. Die Autoren und Autorinnen untersuchen vor diesem Hintergrund die wirtschaftlichen und politischen Aktivitäten der 1799 ausgestorbenen Zuger Familie Zurlauben. Gleichzeitig veranschaulichen einzelne Beiträge zu Klientelismus, Patronage und Korruptionskritik und zu den länderübergreifenden Gewaltmärkten des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts die europäischen Aspekte der Thematik in ihren unterschiedlichen ökonomischen, politischen und sozialen Dimensionen. Der vorliegende Band erscheint im Zusammenhang mit dem Abschluss der Edition der Acta Helvetica der Familie Zurlauben.

For the first time this volume makes Jean-Pierre Meunier’s insightful thoughts on the film experience available for an English-speaking readership. Introduced and commented by specialists in film studies and philosophy, Meunier’s intricate phenomenological descriptions of the spectator’s engagement with fiction films, documentaries and home movies can reach the wide audience they have deserved ever since their publication in French in 1969.

Notre société a une tendance grandissante à vouloir que quelqu’un soit tenu pénalement responsable lorsqu’une atteinte est causée à autrui. L’opinion a du mal à accepter que certains dommages puissent être expliqués en termes d’accident ou de risque inhérent à la vie. En matière non intentionnelle cependant, le seuil de la répression ne peut être fixé qu’en cherchant le délicat point d’équilibre entre, d’une part, la sanction des comportements qui attestent une véritable indifférence blâmable à l’égard d’autrui et, d’autre part, la préservation d’une certaine liberté d’agir, nécessaire tant à la vie en société qu’au développement de la science et de la technique. De manière traditionnelle, le seuil de la répression s’établit par référence à ce qui est interdit, c'est-à-dire en analysant la façon dont le fait non intentionnel est incriminé et l’interprétation qu’en donnent les juges répressifs. Contrairement au droit suisse, le droit français de l’imprudence a fait l’objet de trois réformes successives, lesquelles n’ont toutefois pas permis d’aboutir à une prévisibilité satisfaisante des solutions pénales en la matière. Dans le droit des deux pays, les incriminations de la non-intention gardent un caractère « ouvert », de telle sorte qu’elles peuvent toujours être interprétées de manière extensive par les juges. Pour mieux fixer le seuil de la répression, la présente étude adopte une nouvelle approche, inspirée du droit suisse, qui complète la première. L’auteur cherche à déterminer quels comportements non intentionnels doivent être considérés comme pénalement admissibles, indépendamment de leurs conséquences. Compte tenu de la possibilité d'erreurs humaines et du risque associé à l'exercice de certaines activités utiles, une part de risque doit être acceptée en droit pénal. Cette solution s’impose car en décider autrement conduirait inéluctablement à causer un trouble plus grand à la société que celui induit par le risque lui-même. Partant, un regard nouveau sur le fait non intentionnel devient possible en sciences criminelles.

If talking about women's work in relation to employment issues and in a statistical way confronts us with problems, inequalities, long-term discrimination, something that seems to have never changed, a look that follows the evolution of the dilemma versus work makes us more aware of the multiplicity of phenomena and changes that have originated from its deconstruction, both in a vindictive sense and in the direction of a different recognition. We have seen, following Joan Scott, that the discursive construction of "the working woman" has carried with it and at the same time has produced the categories and motivations for the legitimacy of an inevitable difficulty on the part of women to fit fully into the world of work. By following this discursive construction through the fields of tension opened up in the field of feminist studies and politics in two specific periods of the movement's history, we have tried to highlight the positive outcomes of processes of renaming the experience of work and of working.

Die kapitalistische Produktionsweise ist abhängig von einem Außen, das sie über das Hineinholen von Ressourcen und Auslagern von Kosten in Anspruch nimmt. Anna Saave unternimmt eine theoretisch versierte und elaborierte Analyse der komplexen Externalisierungs- und Einverleibungsprozesse des Kapitalismus. Sie leistet einen anspruchsvollen Beitrag zu einer kritischen Analyse kapitalistischer Dynamiken samt der in Dienst genommenen, unsichtbar gemachten konstitutiven Außenbereiche und verdeutlicht, dass der Kapitalismus nur als big picture in den Blick genommen werden kann. Die Diskussion bietet anschlussfähige Impulse für feministische, ökologische und andere soziale Politiken.

In Europe the social economy employs almost 15 million workers. During the crisis years, unlike other sectors, it has often generated an increase in jobs. The aim of this comparative study is to investigate how to allow the supply and demand for young people to meet in the different types of social economy bodies. In particular, it concentrates on the problem of how to bring into line initial university training and the skills required by these organizations. The focus is placed on the varied family of training workers present in at least 75% of the organizations, whose professionalism is nevertheless rarely acknowledged. The papers proposed in this book try to identify the most suitable solutions at the level of curriculum, career development and accompanying measures, while drawing solutions from objective findings and not from training system needs or convictions.

A Queer Reading of Nawabi Architecture and the Colonial Archive explores the architectural production of nawabs Asaf-ud-Daula and Wajid Ali Shah and reveals the colonial bias against queer expression. It offers methods of using queer strategies to read archival evidence against the grain and rewrite erased, overlooked, and suppressed histories. The book provides its readers a unique queer postcolonial architectural history of Lucknow from 1775–1857. It highlights the nawabs’ non-normative expressions, which not only offered a fierce resistance to the colonial enterprise but also were instrumental in furthering Lucknow as a cultural center. It simultaneously extracts parameters from queer studies and redefines them to illustrate ways in which queer architecture can be characterized. It reconstructs the footprint of nawabi architecture erased by the colonial enterprise and places it back on map—an exercise not undertaken meticulously until now. A Queer Reading of Nawabi Architecture and the Colonial Archive is intended for scholars and students of queer studies, postcolonial studies, architectural history, and the global south, as well as the citizens of Lucknow.

This Open Access book explores the multifaceted nature of agricultural and rural development in Asia and examines the extent to which the Asian experience is being replicated in contemporary Africa. This volume compiles the works of top scholars who provided analyses and evidences from household-level surveys collected for many years in several parts of Asia and Africa. The most important finding presented in this book is that African agricultural development has evolved following the pathways of Asian agricultural development. The common pathways are borrowed technology from abroad and adaptive research in rice farming; secured property rights on natural resources; adoption of ICTs; investments in human capital, including training; and launching of the high-value agriculture. In both continents, agricultural development started in the crop sector, which had a strong tendency to induce the dynamic development of other sectors in rural areas.

Waldorf-Ganztagsgrundschulen und -Horte sind Lebensräume, die über den Unterricht hinaus die Persönlichkeitsbildung von Kindern anregen. Rhythmische Tagesabläufe, die Bereitstellung von entwicklungsförderlichen Räumen für Spiel und Bewegung, Zusammensein und Entspannung, gesunde Ernährung und sinnhafte künstlerisch-handwerkliche Projekte sind von Erzieherinnen und Erziehern gestaltete Bereiche, in denen das Kind sich selbstwirksam erleben und entwickeln kann. Die Publikation bietet fundierte Hintergründe und praktische Ideen zur Entwicklung von Konzepten und deren Umsetzung im Alltag.