Open Access Books

La diversité de trajectoires de vie, d'appartenances et de ressources est une réalité peu prise en considération dans les fonctionnements institutionnels. En proposant cet ouvrage, alors que la littérature sur les concepts de diversité et de genre abonde, Monique Eckmann et Àgnes Földhazi offrent des pistes de réflexion et des outils pratiques pour aborder les questions de diversité et de genre dans les établissements d'enseignement tertiaire, voire dans d'autres institutions ou organisations. Un examen du cadre légal à disposition en la matière et l'étude de dispositifs existant dans les institutions de divers pays procurent des exemples de mesures qui fonctionnent. A nous d'adapter celles-ci et d'en inventer d'autres pour garantir à toutes et à tous un accès égal aux droits et aux ressources dans une perspective de non-discrimination.

Historical scholarship is currently undergoing a digital turn. All historians have experienced this change in one way or another, by writing on word processors, applying quantitative methods on digitalized source materials, or using internet resources and digital tools. Digital Histories showcases this emerging wave of digital history research. It presents work by historians who – on their own or through collaborations with e.g. information technology specialists – have uncovered new, empirical historical knowledge through digital and computational methods. The topics of the volume range from the medieval period to the present day, including various parts of Europe. The chapters apply an exemplary array of methods, such as digital metadata analysis, machine learning, network analysis, topic modelling, named entity recognition, collocation analysis, critical search, and text and data mining. The volume argues that digital history is entering a mature phase, digital history ‘in action’, where its focus is shifting from the building of resources towards the making of new historical knowledge. This also involves novel challenges that digital methods pose to historical research, including awareness of the pitfalls and limitations of the digital tools and the necessity of new forms of digital source criticisms. Through its combination of empirical, conceptual and contextual studies, Digital Histories is a timely and pioneering contribution taking stock of how digital research currently advances historical scholarship.

In a rapidly evolving world, the Design discipline emerges as a powerful and interdisciplinary culture capable to address the social and environmental challenges of our time. In this scenario, the role of universities and their international collaboration is paramount to identify and address promising research avenues needed to generate liveable living conditions that are both inclusive and sustainable. By proposing a collection of essays and projects made by students from four European universities, “Innovation Design for Social Inclusion and Sustainability: Design Cultures and Creative Practices for Urban Natural Heritage” explores the transformative role of design in social inclusion and sustainability, offering an innovative perspective on how design practices can contribute to a more equitable and environmentally respectful future. To overcome functionalism and the mere product-centred design cultures, this book outlines both cultural reflections that are today important for the Discipline and the results of a teaching and learning project funded by the Erasmus+Blended Intensive Programme in the academic year 2023/2024. This volume is structured into three main parts. The first part analyzes design cultures that promote social inclusion and sustainability, highlighting how design can serve as a reflective creative practice. In the second part, readers are guided through creative design practices, focusing on eight innovative solutions developed for the natural areas of Pescara. Finally, the book concludes with reflections from universities involved in the project, highlighting the importance of a collaborative and shared approach to design innovation. Designed for scholars, professionals, and students alike, this volume offers a valuable resource for anyone seeking to explore the intersections of design, social inclusion, and sustainability, proposing an integrated and multidisciplinary approach to addressing the challenges of our time.

How interventions based on objects—including chemicals, financial products, and consumer goods—offer a path to rethink European integration. Interventions based on objects, Brice Laurent claims, have become a dominant path for European policy-making. In European Objects, Laurent analyzes the political consequences of these interventions and their democratization. He uses the term “European objects” to describe technical entities that are regulated—and thereby transformed—by European policies. To uncover the bureaucratic and regulatory intricacies of European governance, Laurent focuses on a series of these objects, including food products, chemicals, financial products, consumer goods, drinking water, and occupational environments. Laurent argues that taking European objects seriously offers a way to rephrase the dreams of harmonization and, eventually, rethink the constitutional strength of European integration. Laurent doesn't just clarify how European regulation works, but also explores ways to realize long-term objectives for European integration, such as a harmonized market or an objective expertise. Regulation is best understood as “regulatory machinery” bringing together various types of legal constraints, material interventions on objects, and the imagining of desirable futures. Analyzing European objects enables Laurent to explore what regulation has become after years of evolution have made it a central component of the European policy world. He offers practical illustrations of how the regulatory machinery functions today. If Europe succeeds at reinventing the terms of its legitimacy with objects that matter for the European publics, it will provide a telling demonstration that the opposition of expertise and populism is not the unavoidable fate of liberal democracies.

This reprint focuses on applications of machine learning models in a diverse range of fields and problems. It reports substantive results on a wide range of learning methods; discusses the conceptualization of problems, data representation, feature engineering, and machine learning models; undertakes critical comparisons with existing techniques; and presents an interpretation of the results. This reprint strives not only to showcase the prolific applications of machine learning, but also to provide insights into the methodologies and interpretations that underpin these advancements.

This book initiates multipolar climate/clime studies of the world’s altitudinal and latitudinal highlands with terrestrial, experiential, and affective approaches. Framed in the environmental humanities, it is an interdisciplinary, comparative study of the mutually-embodied relations of climate, nature, culture, and place in the Himalaya, Andes, and Arctic. Innovation-driven, the book offers multipolar clime case studies through the contributors’ historical findings, ethnographic documentations, and diverse conceptualizations and applications of clime, an overlooked but returning notion of place embodied with climate history, pattern, and changes. The multipolar clime case studies in the book are geared toward deeper, lively explorations and demonstrations of the translatability, interchangeability, and complementarity between the notions of clime and climate. “Multipolar” or “multipolarity” in this book connotes not only the two polar regions and the tectonically shaped highlands of the earth but also diversely debated perspectives of climate studies in the broadest sense. Contributors across the twelve chapters come from diverse fields of social and natural sciences and humanities, and geographically specialize respectively in the Himalayan, Andean, and Arctic regions. The first comparative study of climate change in altitudinal and latitudinal highlands, this will be an important read for students, academics and researchers in environmental humanities, anthropology, climate science, indigenous studies and ecology.

Los temas y las tesis que se desarrollan en esta obra constituyen, en numerosos aspectos, un estado de la reflexión sobre las políticas habitacionales y la integración de las colonias populares a la ciudad, con especial énfasis en el problema del acceso al suelo. Esta reflexión es particularmente rica en enseñanzas, no solamente porque se centra en una de las regiones del mundo donde la tasa de urbanización es de las más elevadas, sino también por que da cuenta, simultáneamente, de la diversi...

This work introduces a family of effective plate theories for multilayered materials with internal misfit. This is done for scaling laws ranging from Kirchhoff's theory to the linearised von Kármán one. An intermediate von Kármán-like theory is introduced to play a central interpolating role with a new parameter which switches between the adjacent regimes. After proving the necessary Gamma-convergence and compactness results, minimising configurations are characterised. Finally, the interpolating theory is numerically approximated using a discrete gradient flow and the relevant Gamma-convergence and compactness results for the discretisation are proved. This provides empirical evidence for the existence of a critical region of the parameter around which minimisers experience a stark qualitative change.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. This ground-breaking book explores ways to integrate environmental justice modules into courses across a wide variety of disciplines. Recommending accessible, flexible, and evidence-based pedagogical approaches designed by a multidisciplinary team of scholars, it centers equity and justice in student learning and course design and presents a model for faculty development that can be communicated across disciplines.

COST Action IE0601 "Wood Science for Conservation of Cultural Heritage" (www.woodculther.org) aims to improve the conservation (including study, preventive conservation and restoration) of European Wooden Cultural Heritage Objects (WCHOs), by fostering targeted research and multidisciplinary interaction between Researchers in various fields of Wood Science, Conservators of wooden artworks, other Scientists from related fields. This book of Proceedings contains most of the papers presented in the International Conference held in Florence (Italy) on 8-10 November 2007, dealing with several of the Action's themes, including structure and properties of historic wood, ageing and non-biological degradation of wood material, contributions from Wood Science to conservation issues.

The book by Magdalena Lubanska examines the role of religious syncretism in the social and religious life of Muslim-Christian communities in the Western Rhodopes. The author is interested mainly in the origins and motivations of various beliefs and behaviors which at first sight may appear to be syncretic. She looks at syncretism in the context of anti-syncretic tendencies, particularly pronounced among the Muslim neophytes and young members of the Muslim religious elite, who are not interested in the local forms of post-ottoman Islam (“Adat Islam”), preferring instead a “pure” form of religion, a class of fundamentalist religious movements rooted in orthodox Islam and seeking to remain faithful to mainstream Islamic thought and tradition (“Salafi Islam”). Lubanska findings offer an insight into the fact that although certain actions may appear syncretic in nature, their underlying intentions are often not in fact motivated by syncretic tendencies. This is the first study to look at syncretism in Bulgaria from this perspective.

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

This widely researched study demonstrates convincingly that neither grandiose promises nor nightmare scenarios have much to do with actual care practices employing telecare. Combining detailed ethnographic studies of nurses and patients involved in telecare with a broad theoretical frameworky from various disciplines, the author concludes that these practices leads to more rather than less intense caring relations, resulting from a spectacular raise in the frequency of contacts between nurses and patients. Patients are much taken with this, not because they feel they are finally able to manage themselves, but because they can ‘leave things to the experts’. The patients find that caring is something that is best done for others. The book frames urgent questions about the future of telecare and the ways in which innovative care practices can be built on facts rather than hopes, hypes or nightmares.

Environmental challenges posed by wrong end of lifeplastic management drive the plastics recycling schemes for energy recovery and cutting emissions, penalties, energy consumption, non-renewable resources, and manufacturing costs. Plastic recycling has the lowest environmental impact on global warming potential and total energy use. However, under-utilised plastic wastes due to low value issues with sorting/contamination pose major challenges. Novel technologies drive innovation in a circular economy model for plastics and employ reuse, recycling and responsible manufacture solutions, support the development of new industries and jobs, reduce emissions and increase efficient use of natural resources (including energy, water and materials). Many economies are working towards achieving a zero plastic waste economy. This Special Issue covers the applications of recycled plastics in the areas of energy recovery/alternative fuels, economic analyses, bitumen additives, flame retardants, recycled polymer nanocomposites to enhance the mechanical property, thermomechanical recycling to improve physical properties, mechano-chemical treatment, cryogenic waste tyre recycling, application in decarbonizing technology, e.g., cement industry, waste characterization, improving agricultural soil quality, as smart fertilizers. The Editors express their appreciation to all the contributors across the world in the development of this reprint. This reprint gives different perspectives and technical ideas for the transformation of plastic wastes into value-added products and to achieve higher recycling rates in the coming years.

Associationism is a phenomenon has characterized the history of Ponticelli from the last years of 19th century until today. Since the end of the Second World War, for about three decades, the Italian Communist Party and, generally, the Left had a hegemonic role in the civil life of this Naples district of ancient farming and working-class traditions. In this context, in 1974, the House of People was born, which became the symbolic place of Neapolitan communists and the center of cultural initiatives with national resonance. Conferences, art exhibitions, theatrical and educational workshops were organized and directed by: «committed teachers», «avant-garde directors» and «aesthetic operators», that is, by intellectuals with an organic civil life reform project of the geographical and social suburbs. The crisis of Left Parties has led to a progressive rarefaction of the House of People’s activities, but not to the end of its spirit, as shown by the Arci Movie Association. The association, born in 1990, is still engaged in the diffusion of film culture inside and outside Ponticelli. In this book it is possible to trace facts and people of this recent cultural and political season, which has suddenly faded in the collective memory, with the goal to contain its disintegration also manifested in the loss of documentary tracks