Open Access Books

Over three years, dialogue groups from the Global South and North collaborated in a transnational »Global Campus Online,« a laboratory uniting scientists with activists from arts, culture, and civil society. Together, they developed practical, small-scale projects addressing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. This volume presents initiatives with disadvantaged communities, including Roma in Hungary, marginalized women in South Africa, and Guaraní in South America. The contributions promote climate justice, inclusive cities, and empowering education for all ages. A concise exploration of Global Citizenship Education from the grassroots, highlighting how local action and global exchange can drive sustainable change.

Video games are temporal artifacts: They change with time as players interact with them in accordance with rules. In this study, Federico Alvarez Igarzábal investigates the formal aspects of video games that determine how these changes are produced and sequenced. Theories of time perception drawn from the cognitive sciences lay the groundwork for an in-depth analysis of these features, making for a comprehensive account of time in this novel medium. This book-length study dedicated to time perception and video games is an indispensable resource for game scholars and game developers alike. Its reader-friendly style makes it readily accessible to the interested layperson.

The idea of toleration as the appropriate response to difference has been central to liberal thought since Locke. Although the subject has been widely and variously explored, there has been reluctance to acknowledge the new meaning that current debates on toleration have when compared with those at its origins in the early modern period and with subsequent discussions about pluralism and freedom of expression. This collection starts from a clear recognition of the new terms of the debate. It recognises that a new academic consensus is slowly emerging on a view of tolerance that is reasonable in two senses. Firstly of reflecting the capacity of seeing the other's viewpoint, secondly on the relatively limited extent to which toleration can be granted. It reflects the cross-thematic and cross-disciplinary nature of such discussions, dissecting a number of debates such as liberalism and communitarianism, public and private, multiculturalism and the politics of identity, and a number of disciplines: moral, legal and political philosophy, historical and educational studies, anthropology, sociology and psychology. A group of distinguished authors explore the complexities emerging from the new debate. They scrutinise, with analytical sophistication, the philosophical foundation, the normative content and the broadly political implications of a new culture of toleration for diverse societies. Specific issues considered include the toleration of religious discrimination in employment, city life and community, social ethos, publicity, justice and reason and ethics. The book is unique in resolutely looking forward to the theoretical and practical challenges posed by commitment to a conception of toleration demanding empathy and understanding in an ever-diversifying world.

The book offers eight case studies, covering selected problems and works from Renaissance up to the present day. Each chapter draws on a literary text(s) or problems, examining its historical context, as well as its Polish reception and presence in contemporary (pop)culture. The volume delineates a dual perspective, combining original readings of key texts with discussions of their relationship to contemporary theories of literary and linguistic studies, and important phenomena in Polish history.

The Royal Institute of Signore Montalve alla Quiete was born between 1885 and 1886, by the union of the two congregations founded by the venerable Eleonora Ramirez de Montalvo: the Montalve di Ripoli and the Montalve alla Quiete. From them inherits the principles and the educational action carried out for over two centuries, bringing them to the threshold of the new millennium. In this analytical inventory are described the papers produced by the new Institute. The core relating to female education is only one of the subjects that this archive can offer: architectural and social transformations, the two world wars, customs and traditions of population are just some examples of the researchs offered and the Tuscan historical frame that the cards draw in a well-defined way.

Through a genealogy of photosensitive elements in media devices and artworks, this book investigates three dichotomies that impoverish debates and proposals in media art: material/immaterial, organic/machinic, and theory/practice. It combines historical and analytical approaches, through new materialism, media archaeology, cultural techniques and second-order cybernetics. Known media stories are reframed from an alternative perspective, elucidating photosensitivity as a metonymy to provide guidelines to art students, artists, curators and theoreticians – especially those who are committed to critical views of scientific and technological knowledge in aesthetic experimentations.

In Migrating Fictions, Manzella turns to U.S. Women’s literature that represents internal migrations in the US in the twentieth century. This project situates itself within the “spatial turn” of literary studies to analyze the way the U.S has displayed a history of spatial colonization, which we see as a pattern we turn to a variety of seemingly disconnected forced migrations. With chapters that focus on migrations related the Dust Bowl, the Great Migration, the migration of peoples placed in Japanese American internment camps, and the migration of Southwestern migrant labor, Manzella makes some fascinating connections across narratives that would not typically be brought together. Ultimately, this project lays bare the oppressive practices of U.S. policy and reveals the resistance individual groups accessed as they completed these internal migrations.

Die Untersuchung der aktuellen Transformation des Kapitalismus und der Neuordnung des Sozialen erfordert eine gesellschaftstheoretisch fundierte und empirisch gesättigte Schärfung sozialwissenschaftlicher Perspektiven. Diese bleibt unvollständig ohne die systematische Einbeziehung von Sorge und sozialer Reproduktion. Nur durch die Aktualisierung und sorgeorientierte Erweiterung kann kritische soziologische Forschung zu gesellschaftspolitischen Veränderungen beitragen. Dieses Erkenntnisinteresse hat Brigitte Aulenbachers wissenschaftliche Arbeiten bis heute geprägt. Die vorliegende Festschrift ist der Debatte und Weiterführung ihrer Analysen gewidmet.

Was bedeutet uns »das Bauhaus« heute - im Nachspann der Postmoderne unter den Bedingungen von Globalisierung, weltweitem Daten- und Kapitalaustausch, medialer Vernetzung, Umkodierung von Nationalgrenzen, Weltmigration und ebensolchen planetarischen Entwicklungen, die sich in der Gründungszeit der modernen Weltbaubewegung gerade erst abzuzeichnen begannen? Der Band inszeniert »das Bauhaus« als eine Doppelfigur, die der Immobilie, dem Haus, der Bleibe und dem Bauen ebenso verpflichtet ist wie der Mobilität, dem Reisen, dem Exil und der Heimatlosigkeit, wofür die Figur eines Schiffes namens »Bauhaus« steht.

How to reckon with the staggering volume of television materials, past and present? And how to comprehend all the potential, complex scales at which to grapple with television, from its tiniest units of audiovisual content to its most massive industrial coordinates and beyond? In Television Scales, Nick Salvato demonstrates how the problem of scale in the field of television may be turned into a resource and a method for a television studies that would pay better attention to messy medial complexities, peripatetic critical practices, and vulgar psychogeographies. Modeling his investigative practice on the meta-critical writing of social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern in Partial Connections and elsewhere, Salvato composes surprising, partial constellations of television’s elements. In the process, his consideration ranges from classic television sitcoms like I Love Lucy to contemporary reality series such as The Biggest Loser, Iron Chef, and House Hunters International. He simultaneously pores over a number of key television phenomena, including technological mystification, performers’ charismatic displays, binge viewing, and devoted fandom. An experiment in style and form, Television Scales maps, weighs, and rules television, while also undoing these very strategies for evaluating the medium.

This open access book serves as a compact source of information on sine cosine algorithm (SCA) and a foundation for developing and advancing SCA and its applications. SCA is an easy, user-friendly, and strong candidate in the field of metaheuristics algorithms. Despite being a relatively new metaheuristic algorithm, it has achieved widespread acceptance among researchers due to its easy implementation and robust optimization capabilities. Its effectiveness and advantages have been demonstrated in various applications ranging from machine learning, engineering design, and wireless sensor network to environmental modeling. The book provides a comprehensive account of the SCA, including details of the underlying ideas, the modified versions, various applications, and a working MATLAB code for the basic SCA.

How are images made, and how should we understand the capacities of digital images? This book investigates images as well as the technologies that host them. Its three chapters discuss the boundaries that images cross and blur between humans, machines, and nature and the ways in which images are political, material, and visual. Exploring these boundaries of images, this book places itself at the limits of the visual and beyond what can be seen, understanding these as starting points for the production of new and radically different ways of knowing about the world and its becomings.

We all know that sex involves a quest for pleasure, that sexual palates vary across people’s lifespans, and that playful experimentations play a key role in how people discover their diverse sexual turn-ons and turn-offs. Yet little attention has been paid to thinking through the interconnections of sex and play, sexuality and playfulness. In Many Splendored Things from Goldsmiths Press, Susanna Paasonen considers these interconnections. Paasonen examines the notions of playfulness and play as they shed light on the urgency of sexual pleasures, the engrossing appeal of sex, and the elasticity of sexual desires, and considers their connection to categories of identity. Drawing on a broad range of scholarship on sexuality, play, and the media, Paasonen moves from the conceptual to the concrete, examining advice literature on sexual play, the vernacular aesthetics of the Fifty Shades series, girls’ experiences of online sexual role-playing, popular media coverage of age-play, and Jan Soldat’s documentary films on BDSM culture. Paasonen argues that play in the realm of sexuality involves experimentation with what bodies can feel and do and what people may imagine themselves as doing, liking, and preferring. Play involves the exploration of different bodily capacities, appetites, orientations, and connections. Occasionally strained, dark, and even hurtful in the forms that it takes and the sensory intensities that it engenders, sex presses against previously perceived and imagined horizons of embodied potentiality. Play pushes sexual identifications into motion

This book on Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman contains eighteen new scholarly chapters on the director’s work, mainly in the cinema. Most of the contributors—some Swedish, others American or British—have written extensively on Bergman before, some for decades. Bergman is one of the most written-about artists in film history and his fame still lingers all over the world, as was seen in the celebrations of his centenary in 2018. The book was specifically conceived at that time with the aim of presenting fresh angles on his work, although several chapters also focus on traditional aspects of Bergman’s art, such as philosophy and psychology. Ingmar Bergman: An Enduring Legacy thus addresses a number of essential topics which have not featured in Bergman studies before, such as the director’s relations with Hollywood and transnational film production. It also deals at length with Bergman’s highly sophisticated use of film music and with his prominence as a writer of autobiographical literature, as well as with the intermedial relations to his films that this perspective inevitably entails. Finally, the book addresses Bergman’s complex relations to Swedish politics. Many different approaches and methods are employed in the book in order to show that Bergman remains a relevant and important artist. The analyses generally focus on some of his most memorable films, like Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Persona, and Fanny and Alexander; but some rarer material, including Hour of the Wolf, The Lie, and Autumn Sonata, is discussed as well.

Save the Womanhood is a fascinating new history about promiscuity, prostitution and the efforts of local social purists to ‘save’ working-class women from themselves. The book examines how the work of the Liverpool Vigilance Association was supplemented by others, such as the Women Police Patrols, the Liverpool House of Help and the local branch of the Catholic Women’s League. It argues that though these organizations helped many lost and stranded women, their work also enacted a form of moral surveillance on the streets. As such, the book uncovers how important twentieth-century anxieties about changing sexual practices, female immigration, white slavery and the rise of new consumer cultures played out at local level and with what consequences for women in Liverpool. The book also brings together a wide range of local and national sources to show that when female-run, local organizations concerned about immorality went into decline in the post-war years, it was because official institutions and local law enforcement had increasingly taken up their cause. Consequently, Save the Womanhood argues that young, working-class women who travelled through Liverpool in search of work and adventure continued to arouse moral anxiety even as the city’s social purists battled to maintain their influence.