Open Access Books

The legacies of Old Egyptian society range from monumental pyramids to the microscopic traces of human activity, from stone inscriptions to novels. How can these things be put into a meaningful context, and what methods and questions would this require? This book brings together 28 contributions written in honor of Stephan J. Seidlmayer that try to provide up-to-date answers to these questions.

The focus of this book is on the phenomenon of cursing in shamanic practice and everyday life in Tuva, a former Soviet republic in Siberia. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork where the author interacted with a wide range of people involved in cursing practices, the book examines Tuvans’ lived experience of cursing and shamanism, thereby providing deep insights into Tuvans’ intimate and social worlds. It highlights especially the centrality of sound: how interactions between humans and non-humans are brought about through an array of sonic phenomena, such as musical sounds, sounds within words and non-linguistic vocalisations, and how such sonic phenomena are a key part of dramatic cursing events and wider shamanic performance and ritual, involving humans and spirits alike. Overall, the book reveals a great deal about occult practices and about social change in post-Soviet Tuva.

The discoveries of Coptic books containing “Gnostic” scriptures in Upper Egypt in 1945 and of the Dead Sea Scrolls near Khirbet Qumran in 1946 are commonly reckoned as the most important archaeological finds of the twentieth century for the study of early Christianity and ancient Judaism. Yet, impeded by academic insularity and delays in publication, scholars never conducted a full-scale, comparative investigation of these two sensational corpora—until now. Featuring articles by an all-star, international lineup of scholars, this book offers the first sustained, interdisciplinary study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Codices.

"Research, politics and activism have traditionally emphasized gender in understanding and combating domestic violence. In recent years, however, increasing attention has been placed on other social factors. This anthology presents new research that elucidates domestic violence from more diverse perspectives. In the nine chapters, the contributors analyze how types and degrees of violence and abuse can vary depending upon the interplay between such different factors as class, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. An overarching theme is how we understand and talk about equality, difference and diversity. The book does not provide an exhaustive analysis of violence in today’s multi-cultural Norway, yet it is the first Norwegian book about domestic violence that has diversity as a primary them. The book will be of interest to researchers, students, employees in social services and support organizations and anyone concerned about domestic violence and abuse."

Community policing has often been promoted, particularly in liberal democratic societies, as the best approach to align police services with the principles of good security sector governance (SSG). The stated goal of the community policing approach is to reduce fear of crime within communities, and to overcome mutual distrust between the police and the communities they serve by promoting police citizen partnerships. This SSR Paper traces the historical origins of the concept of community policing in Victorian Great Britain and analyses the processes of transfer, implementation, and adaptation of approaches to community policing in Imperial and post-war Japan, Singapore, and Timor-Leste. The study identifies the factors that were conducive or constraining to the establishment of community policing in each case. It concludes that basic elements of police professionalism and local ownership are necessary preconditions for successfully implementing community policing according to the principles of good SSG. Moreover, external initiatives for community policing must be more closely aligned to the realities of the local context.

This Open Access book uses the concept of ‘euphoria’ to investigate when, why and how marginal gender, sex and sexuality groups have positive experiences of their diverse variations even within repressive and disordering contexts. Drawing on data from multiple online surveys including a study of 2,407 LGBTQ+ people and a study of 272 people with intersex variations, it names and offers a new ecological framework for understanding participants’ influences on and barriers to euphorias, asserting the subversive possibilities of being euphorically queer, as opposed to euphoric and queer. The author argues that it is the particularities of negative internal, socio-cultural and institutional contexts for a marginal group or groups that contributes towards the possibilities that shape their potential euphoric feelings and experiences. Ultimately, she calls for a more expansive focus in gender and sexuality studies to show the complex effects of dysphoria and repression on the possibilities of pleasure and joy. This book will be of interest to scholars across Gender, Sexuality and Queer Studies.

Why do so many sports teams have losing records, year after year? Why do others win big, but only every 20 or 30 years? And why is it that so few teams enjoy sustained, continual success? This book gives the answer. Providing a blueprint or "playbook" for success in sports at every level, it lays out a clear step-by-step plan for building a team culture that will lead to winning consistently. With each step, the book introduces real-world tools that can be easily implemented by every sports organization and coach to achieve success, including team charters, individual athlete plans, player accountability systems, and team communication strategies. It offers expert advice and practical guidance on key areas, such as aligning individuals with a clear team plan, resolving conflicts proactively, and learning from every game and every season to develop a smarter and more consistent culture of success. The Sports Playbook: Building Teams that Outperform, Year after Year will help every team fulfill its true potential through leadership, focus, and performance. It is essential reading for coaches, sport management professionals, and leaders of every kind of team, inside and outside of sports.

Mastering a rich repertoire of motor behaviors, as humans and other animals do, is a surprising and still poorly understood outcome of evolution, development, and learning. Many degrees-of-freedom, non-linear dynamics, and sensory delays provide formidable challenges for controlling even simple actions. Modularity as a functional element, both structural and computational, of a control architecture might be the key organizational principle that the central nervous system employs for achieving versatility and adaptability in motor control. Recent investigations of muscle synergies, motor primitives, compositionality, basic action concepts, and related work in machine learning have contributed to advance, at different levels, our understanding of the modular architecture underlying rich motor behaviors. However, the existence and nature of the modules in the control architecture is far from settled. For instance, regularity and low-dimensionality in the motor output are often taken as an indication of modularity but could they simply be a byproduct of optimization and task constraints? Moreover, what are the relationships between modules at different levels, such as muscle synergies, kinematic invariants, and basic action concepts? One important reason for the new interest in understanding modularity in motor control from different viewpoints is the impressive development in cognitive robotics. In comparison to animals and humans, the motor skills of today’s best robots are limited and inflexible. However, robot technology is maturing to the point at which it can start approximating a reasonable spectrum of isolated perceptual, cognitive, and motor capabilities. These advances allow researchers to explore how these motor, sensory and cognitive functions might be integrated into meaningful architectures and to test their functional limits. Such systems provide a new test bed to explore different concepts of modularity and to address the interaction between motor and cognitive processes experimentally. Thus, the goal of this Research Topic is to review, compare, and debate theoretical and experimental investigations of the modular organization of the motor control system at different levels. By bringing together researchers seeking to understand the building blocks for coordinating many muscles, for planning endpoint and joint trajectories, and for representing motor and behavioral actions in memory we aim at promoting new interactions between often disconnected research areas and approaches and at providing a broad perspective on the idea of modularity in motor control. We welcome original research, methodological, theoretical, review, and perspective contributions from behavioral, system, and computational motor neuroscience research, cognitive psychology, and cognitive robotics.

Die Südosteuropa-Studien werden von der in München ansässigen Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft, der wichtigsten Wissenschaftsorganisation der Südosteuropa-Forschung im deutschsprachigen Raum, herausgegeben. Sie dienen der vertieften und interdisziplinären wissenschaftlichen Darstellung wichtiger Themen aus der Südosteuropa-Forschung. Auch Fragen zur aktuellen politischen und sozio-ökonomischen Entwicklung in der Region Südosteuropa werden aufgegriffen. Herausgeber der Einzelbände sind renommierte Repräsentanten der deutschen und internationalen Südosteuropa-Forschung.

Im Rahmen des Projekts Duncker & Humblot reprints heben wir Schätze aus dem Programm der ersten rund 150 Jahre unserer Verlagsgeschichte, von der Gründung 1798 bis zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs 1945. Lange vergriffene Klassiker und Fundstücke aus den Bereichen Rechts- und Staatswissenschaften, Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften, Geschichte, Philosophie und Literaturwissenschaft werden nach langer Zeit wieder verfügbar gemacht – und zwar sowohl gedruckt als auch in elektronischer Form. Einige Titel sind bereits erschienen. Täglich kommen weitere hinzu. Bis Ende des Jahres wird das »Duncker & Humblot reprints«-Programm auf ca. 1.500 Bände anwachsen. Möchten Sie regelmäßig über Neuerscheinungen aus dem reprints-Programm informiert werden? Dann abonnieren Sie unseren E-Mail-Benachrichtigungsdienst.

This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: frontiersin.org/about/contact

An edited collection that explores the ways in which the global south reimagined the future world order at the end of the Second World War, and the cultural and intellectual breakthroughs that these new narratives created.

Kyoto, where world-class high-tech industries exist alongside heritage industries. Achieving highly competitive strength by keeping a step ahead of the global standard while maintaining the spirit of harmony that distinguishes Japanese style management. What is the essence of this style of management? How has Kyoto’s living traditional culture as a part of daily life been preserved? A thorough study of various unique approaches, based on interviews with managers and craftspeople, Murayama’s work covers everything from distinct management styles aimed at increasing workforce motivation to the development of capabilities that yield products with high cultural value, and innovation for the sake of business continuity. This book is packed with valuable hints for the future management of not only Japanese firms but also businesses worldwide.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Water is the element that, more than any other, ties human beings in to the world around them – from the oceans that surround us to the water that makes up most of our bodies. Exploring the cultural and philosophical implications of this fact, Bodies of Water develops an innovative new mode of posthuman feminist phenomenology that understands our bodies as being fundamentally part of the natural world and not separate from or privileged to it. Building on the works by Luce Irigaray, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, Astrida Neimanis’s book is a landmark study that brings a new feminist perspective to bear on ideas of embodiment and ecological ethics in the posthuman critical moment.

This book celebrates Professor Margaret Brazier’s outstanding contribution to the field of healthcare law and bioethics. It examines key aspects developed in Professor Brazier’s agenda-setting body of work, with contributions being provided by leading experts in the field from the UK, Australia, the US and continental Europe. They examine a range of current and future challenges for healthcare law and bioethics, representing state-of-the-art scholarship in the field.