Open Access Books

Liveable Lives examines what makes life liveable for LGBTQ+ people beyond equality reforms. It refuses the colonizing narrative of surviving in a ‘regressive’ Global South and thriving in a ‘progressive’ Global North. By linking the concept of liveability with the decolonial literature on sexualities, this open access book draws on individual's stories, art and writing to examine how lives become liveable across India and the UK, providing a multifaceted investigation of two divergent contexts where activists refuse local framings of exclusion/inclusion and LGBTQ+ lives are continually re-envisioned. Embracing diverse methodologies, including workshops, in-depth interviews, street theatres, and web surveys, the book stands as an example of a queer collaborative praxis that refuses the familiar Global North / Global South practices of theorizing and data gathering. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com.

This open access book provides an updated and integrated analysis of the Advocacy Coalition Framework, more than thirty years after its conception. First devised in the 1980s to help explain change within public policy processes, the framework has been widely applied, criticized and revised over the last three decades, implemented by policy scholars across the globe, and in hundreds of different languages. Edited by the two foremost ACF scholars, this book analyses the current state and future directions of the Advocacy Coalition Framework. The first section provides a concise overview of the purpose of the framework, as well as its application in previous research. This is followed by eleven cross-section case studies that showcase some of the most exciting developments in ACF scholarship around the globe. It concludes with recommendations for adapting the ACF for future use, as well as new directions of research.

Conventional notions of avant-garde art suggest innovative artists rebelling against artistic convention and social propriety, shocking unwilling audiences into new ways of seeing and living. Viewers in Distress tells a different story. Beginning in the tumultuous 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and in the wake of the Los Angeles riots, rebellious spectators in American and British theaters broke with theater decorum and voiced their radical interpretations of shows that were not meant to be radical. In doing so, audiences tried to understand the complex racial, gender, and religious politics of their times, while insisting that liberal societies fulfill their promise of dignity for all. Stefka Mihaylova argues that such non-conforming viewing amounts to an avant-garde of its own: a bold reimagining of how we live together and tell stories of our lives together, aimed to achieve liberalism’s promise. In telling this story, she analyzes the production and reception politics of works by Susan-Lori Parks, Sarah Kane, Forced Entertainment, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, and Young Jean Lee, as well as non-theatrical controversies such as the conflict over Halloween costumes at Yale in 2015. At the core of spectators’ discontent, this book suggests, is an effort to figure out how to get along with people different from ourselves in the diverse U.S. and British societies in which we live.

This book provides an account of how rectificatory justice for climate change loss and damage can be realized by bridging the worlds of political philosophy, climate science and climate policy together. The book focuses on three fundamental questions: what kinds of climate impacts should count as loss and damage, how climate science can help us identify them and who should bear the burdens of providing reparations for loss and damage. Laura García-Portela argues that loss and damage occur after people’s capabilities have fallen below a threshold of sufficiency due to the negative impacts of climate change, thereby infringing people’s human rights. She argues for a historical responsibility principle for reparations for loss and damage (the Polluter Pays Principle, PPP) grounded in her Continuity Account. According to this account, responsibility for reparations is based on the duty to refrain from emissions-generating activities that would infringe people’s human rights. A new duty to provide reparations arises when human rights are infringed by climate change-inducing activities. Importantly, she examines how the latest developments in attribution science can help in developing a rectificatory account for loss and damage, an approach that has not been considered in depth by climate justice scholars so far. Striving to improve the reader’s understanding of loss and damage as outlined by The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate justice, environmental justice, and environmental ethics.

This volume presents an exploration of Digital Humanities (DH), a field focused on the reciprocal transformation of digital technologies and humanities scholarship. Central to DH research is the practice of modelling, which involves translating intricate knowledge systems into computational models. This book addresses a fundamental query: How can an effective language be developed to conceptualize and guide modelling in DH? Modelling, with its historical roots, carries multifaceted meanings influenced by various disciplinary contexts. Modelling Between Digital and Humanities innovatively connects DH with the historical tradition of model-based thinking in the humanities, cultural studies, and the sciences. It endeavors to reshape interpretative frameworks by contextualizing DH's modelling practices within a broader conceptual landscape. Through an exploration of digital, visual and data models, the book asserts that DH holds the potential to be a cornerstone of a novel cultural literacy paradigm. By probing the interplay between technology and thought, the book ultimately positions DH as a catalyst for transformative cultural insights.

Through algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI), objects and digital services now demonstrate new skills they did not have before, right up to replacing human activity through pre-programming or by making their own decisions. As part of the internet of things, AI applications are already widely used today, for example in language processing, image recognition and the tracking and processing of data. This policy brief illustrates the potential negative and positive impacts of AI and reviews related policy strategies adopted by the UK, US, EU, as well as Canada and China. Based on an ethical approach that considers the role of AI from a democratic perspective and considering the public interest, the authors make policy recommendations that help to strengthen the positive impact of AI and to mitigate its negative consequences.

Fred Cahir tells the story about the magnitude of Aboriginal involvement on the Victorian goldfields in the middle of the nineteenth century. The first history of Aboriginal–white interaction on the Victorian goldfields, Black Gold offers new insights on one of the great epochs in Australian and world history—the gold story. In vivid detail it describes how Aboriginal people often figured significantly in the search for gold and documents the devastating social impact of gold mining on Victorian Aboriginal communities. It reveals the complexity of their involvement from passive presence, to active discovery, to shunning the goldfields. This detailed examination of Aboriginal people on the goldfields of Victoria provides striking evidence which demonstrates that Aboriginal people participated in gold mining and interacted with non-Aboriginal people in a range of hitherto neglected ways. Running through this book are themes of Aboriginal empowerment, identity, integration, resistance, social disruption and communication.

Computer science

What is moral progress? Are we striving for moral progress when we seek to "make the world a better place"? What connects the different ways in which moral agents, their actions, and the world can become morally better? This book proposes an explication of the abstract concept of moral progress and explores its relation to our moral lives.

The Politics of Preventing Violent Extremism explores how counter-radicalization policies have come to dominate European counterterrorism and security. Using interviews with practitioners across seven European nations, it documents how national security policies have been repurposed to identify individuals deemed ‘vulnerable’ to extremism and radicalization, and to provide targeted preventative interventions from welfare state agencies. Crucially, however, the methods (and limits) of preventing violent extremism (PVE) policies vary between nations. The Politics of Preventing Violent Extremism explores how political culture, the welfare state, and the conception of civil society in each nation shapes the type of counter-radicalization employed. While some European states have designed extensive pre-crime surveillance networks to identify those ‘radicalizing’ others, other states in Europe are bound by constitutional commitments to liberty of thought and speech which restrain them from using any type of pre-crime intervention. Accordingly, while PVE policies have been heralded as a novel solution to the problem of radicalization, they remain rooted in, and limited by, the political and social traditions of European democracies.

YouTube ist zu einem wichtigen Ort der Erinnerungen an die NS-Zeit und den Zweiten Weltkrieg geworden. Die öffentlich geteilten Erfahrungsberichte nichtverfolgter deutscher Zeitzeug:innen sind jedoch bislang kaum Gegenstand wissenschaftlicher Forschung. Josefine Honke analysiert diese Videos als glokale Erinnerungsmedien, die zwischen globaler Vernetzung und lokaler Verortung changieren. Anhand der Praktiken des Doing Glocal, Filming, Narrating und Commenting Memory zeigt sie, welche Erinnerungsdarstellungen und -narrative online kursieren. Dadurch betont sie die Bedeutung digitaler Formen des Erinnerns und legt zugleich Dynamiken gegenwärtiger Erinnerungskulturen offen. Der interdisziplinäre Ansatz verknüpft kultur- und medienwissenschaftliche Zugänge mit Perspektiven der Digital Humanities und liefert so neue Impulse für die Memory Studies.

In accordance with the main goals of this collection of essays in honour of Massimo Quaini, the text focuses on a peculiar character of the Ligurian geographer’s sensibility, his attention to landscape protectionresearch activity developed in the context of the humanistic geography. Starting from a personal narrative based on his own reminiscences and neglected memories, the author tries to shed light on the relationships between civil commitment and cultural reflection which characterize environmental sensitivity, bringing together his interests with Quaini’s emotional geographies. Finally, some of Quaini’s everyday practicalities are highlighted as the easiest doorway to improve the cognitive procedures of cultural geography.

The usefulness of Contrastive Linguistics in language teaching is debatable, yet there is no doubt that linguistic contrasts play a role in language learning, particularly at the advanced level. For trainee teachers it is important to be aware of L1–L2 contrasts. This coursebook aims to acquaint students of English Studies with those contrastive linguistic concepts that have retained their significance over the years, and to focus on those English-Hungarian contrasts that have actually been found to impact learning. Short summaries of the most important principles and concepts proposed by classical Contrastive Analysis are followed by numerous exercises. The book is not a contrastive grammar: it takes a look at Hungarian–English contrasts at several linguistic levels, lexical, phraseological, textual and pragmatic, focusing on those that have been found to cause difficulty and/or error in teaching and translating practice. A key is provided to most exercises.

This open access book provides a comprehensive and informative overview of the current state of research about student perceptions of and student feedback on teaching. After presentation of a new student feedback process model, evidence concerning the validity and reliability of student perceptions of teaching quality is discussed. This is followed by an overview of empirical research on the effects of student feedback on teachers and instruction in different contexts, as well as on factors promoting the successful implementation of feedback in schools. In summary, the findings emphasize that student perceptions of teaching quality can be a valid and reliable source of feedback for teachers. The effectiveness of student feedback on teaching is significantly related to its use in formative settings and to a positive feedback culture within schools. In addition, it is argued that the effectiveness of student feedback depends very much on the support for teachers when making use of the feedback. As this literature review impressively documents, teachers in their work - and ultimately students in their learning - can benefit substantially from student feedback on teaching in schools. “This book reviews what we know about student feedback to teachers. It is detailed and it is a pleasure to read. To have these chapters in one place – and from those most up to date with the research literature and doing the research - is a gift.” John Hattie

In this study, we compare two economic models of urban gardening in Ljubljana, Slovenia. First is an avoided costs model (ACM) and the second one is a business model (BM). Comparison is made to exemplify the main economic differences between the two models. The difference is that producers under the BM sell surplus products, which is not the case under the ACM. The main aim of this study is to present an analysis of the phenomenon of urban gardening as a BM for small family home or allotment gardens. The survey was performed through Internet questionnaires and in some cases also with on-site interviews. Totally 127 urban gardeners from Ljubljana municipality participated in the research. The average ACM urban gardeners had on 1 m2 revenue of 4.86 EUR/m2, costs of 1.48 EUR/m2 and gross margin (savings) of 3.38 EUR/m2. Altogether, ACM brings savings of approximately 462.7 EUR per average size garden (136.69 m2) or 203 EUR per median size garden (60 m2) to the average gardener. The average BM gardener sold to the wholesale company approximately 107.0 kg of vegetables per year from 32.48 m2 of production area for an average retail price of 1.46 EUR/kg and earning revenue of 156.44 EUR/year. Costs were approximately 21.27 EUR/year. Therefore, the gross margin or earning from surpluses sold was approximately 135.17 EUR/year for the average BM gardener, which was 4.29 EUR/m2 or 1.26 EUR/kg of produce. The study offers evidence that the ACM can be upgraded with the BM. For example, if a family of two retired members have an average garden of 136 m2, they can produce vegetables for four people. Consequent surpluses for two family members can be sold for extra money. The BM should be more promoted among urban gardeners as it can offer additional income and in certain cases, when a hobby becomes a profession, also a full-time job.