Open Access Books

Hinterlands and Regional Dynamics in the Ancient Southwest is the first volume dedicated to understanding the nature of and changes in regional social autonomy, political hegemony, and organizational complexity across the entire prehistoric American Southwest. With geographic coverage extending from the Great Plains to the Colorado River, and from Mesa Verde to the international border, the volume’s ten case studies synthesize research that enhances our understanding of the ancient Southwest’s highly variable demographic, land use, and economic histories. For this volume, “hinterlands” are those areas whose archaeological records do not disclose the ceramic, architectural, and network evidence that initially led to the establishment of the Hohokam, Chaco, and Casas Grandes regional systems. Employing a variety of perspectives, such as the cultural landscapes approach, heterarchy, and the common-pool resource model, as well as technical methods, such as petrographic and stylistic-attribute analyses, the volume’s contributors explore variation in hinterland identities, subsistence ecology, and sociopolitical organization as regional systems expanded and contracted between the 9th and 14th centuries AD. The hinterlands of the prehistoric Southwest were home to a substantial number of people and were often used as resource catchments by the inhabitants of regional systems. Importantly, hinterlands also influenced developments of nearby regional systems, under whose footprint they managed to retain considerable autonomy. By considering the dynamics between hinterlands and regional systems, the volume reveals unappreciated aspects of the ancient Southwest’s peoples and their lives, thereby deepening our awareness of the region’s rich and complicated cultural past.

This open access book provides insights into the novel Locally Refined B-spline (LR B-spline) surface format, which is suited for representing terrain and seabed data in a compact way. It provides an alternative to the well know raster and triangulated surface representations. An LR B-spline surface has an overall smooth behavior and allows the modeling of local details with only a limited growth in data volume. In regions where many data points belong to the same smooth area, LR B-splines allow a very lean representation of the shape by locally adapting the resolution of the spline space to the size and local shape variations of the region. The iterative method can be modified to improve the accuracy in particular domains of a point cloud. The use of statistical information criterion can help determining the optimal threshold, the number of iterations to perform as well as some parameters of the underlying mathematical functions (degree of the splines, parameter representation). The resulting surfaces are well suited for analysis and computing secondary information such as contour curves and minimum and maximum points. Also deformation analysis are potential applications of fitting point clouds with LR B-splines.

This edited volume brings together for the first time international research approaches from the field of figurational and processual sociology at the intersection of gender studies. It assembles current research on the change of gender relations in formal and informal structures. By using Norbert Elias’s process-sociological oeuvre selected gender figurations in the western and non-western world are discussed. This book is anchored, on the one hand, in a socio-historical understanding of the trajectory of gendered societies over a wide area and range of centuries in the Process of Civilization. On the other hand, the immediate impulse for this volume is the critical discussion of Eliasian thinking concerning dynamic gender relations in different empirical case studies and process-theory. It will be crucial reading for sociologists interested in the Elias school, as well as sociologists of gender more broadly.

The first part of this open access book sets out to re-examine some basic principles of trade negotiation, such as choosing the right representatives to negotiate and enhancing transparency as a cure to the public’s distrust against trade talks. Moreover, it analyses how the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) might impact on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership's (RCEP) IP chapter and examines the possible norm setters of Asian IP. It then focuses on the People's Republic of China's (PRC) trade and IP strategy against the backdrop of the power games between the PRC, India and the US. The second part of the book reflects on issues related to investor–state dispute settlement and its relationship with IP, such as how to re-calibrate the balance in international investment arbitration, and whether compulsory license of IP constitutes expropriation in India, the PRC and select ASEAN countries. The third part of the book questions and strives to improve some of the proposed IP provisions of CPTPP and RCEP and to redefine some aspects of international IP norms, such as: pre-grant patent opposition and experimental use exception; patent term extension; patent linkage and data exclusivity for the pharmaceutical sector; plant variety protection; pre-established damages for copyright infringement; and the restructuring of copyright limitations in the public interest. The open access edition of this book is available under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Applied Research Centre for Intellectual Assets and the Law in Asia, School of Law, Singapore Management University.

Like ancient Rome, the medieval metropolis on the Tiber is also a landscape of transmission due to the diversity of its epigraphic legacy. This legacy had a lasting impact on the municipal area of the urbs and provides contemporary researchers with information about the practices of communication that developed in the city. This volume examines this multifaceted medieval epigraphic culture with help from new methodological impulses.

"Yeats Annual No. 18 is another special issue in this renowned research-level series offering a tribute to the pioneering Yeats scholar, A. Norman Jeffares. Memories of the man are shared by Seamus Heaney, Christopher Rush and Colin Smythe, who compiles a bibliography of Jeffares’s work. Terence Brown, Neil Corcoran, Warwick Gould, Joseph M. Hassett, Phillip L. Marcus, Ann Saddlemyer, Ronald Schuchard, Deirdre Toomey and Helen Vendler offer essays on such topics as Yeats and the Colours of Poetry, Yeats’s Shakespeare, Yeats and Seamus Heaney, Lacrimae Rerum and Tragic Joy, Raftery’s work on Yeats’s Thoor Ballylee, Edmund Dulac’s portrait of Mrs George Yeats, The Tower as an anti-Modernist monument, with close studies of ‘Vacillation’, ‘Her Triumph’, and ‘The Cold Heaven’. Throughout, the essays are inflected with memories of Jeffares and his critical methods. The volume is rounded with further essays on A Vision by Neil Mann and Matthew de Forrest, while reviews of recent editions and studies are provided by Matthew Campbell, Wayne K. Chapman, Sandra Clark, Denis Donoghue, Nicholas Grene, Joseph M. Hassett, and K.P.S. Jochum. Yeats Annual is published by Open Book Publishers in association with the Institute of English Studies, University of London."

In an era of increasing religious diversity and fluid identities, this book challenges conventional understandings of faith, identity, and religious affiliation. Drawing from intercultural philosophy, theology, religious studies, and social sciences, Daan F. Oostveen examines how individuals navigate belonging to multiple religious traditions, from Christian-Buddhist dual belonging to more fluid spiritual practices. Through a comparative approach, the book explores Western and Chinese perspectives on religious hybridity, critiques the limitations of the world religions paradigm, and introduces rhizomatic belonging as a groundbreaking framework for understanding religious multiplicity. Engaging with Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, feminist and postcolonial critiques, and lived religion studies, it offers a fresh perspective on how religious identities are shaped in today’s interconnected world. This book is essential reading for scholars of religious studies, philosophy, anthropology, and theology, as well as anyone interested in the evolving landscape of religious belonging in a globalized society.

This open access book describes the world’s increasingly multicultural societies face the problem that more and more diverse lifestyles (LGBTQIA+ communities) are not universally accepted, and that today, in addition to xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism, there is substantial homonegativity. This book explores this issue, reviews the empirical literature on the subject and provides new empirically based evidence on a global and European scale. Based on an analysis of The World Values Survey using the statistical software SPSS, it provides a scientifically sound answer to the question of which social groups in Europe and around the globe are more homophobic and which are less, together with insights into the multivariate relationships between homonegativity and religiously motivated political extremism. The extensive and representative statistical samples allow cautious conclusions to be drawn for smaller religious groups in the European Union and other countries around the world.

topoi; endoxa; political discourse; adversariness; polyphony; speech; debate; government; Greece; troika

The monetisation of exchanges tends to favour economic development, yet many forms of payment persisted throughout the preindustrial era despite rapid growth. Services in particular were remunerated in a variety of forms which depended on the particular relationship between the employer and the worker. The evolution in the composition of wages impacted social relations and structures as much as standards of living. Through an extensive examination of its account registers as well as local legislation, this paper analyses the variety of ways the Holy Spirit Hospital of Marseille remunerated individuals it employed as doctors, surgeons, scribes, wet-nurses, domestic servants, artisans and casual laborers. Workers who lived separately from the hospital were usually paid only in cash, while employees who were part of the household could receive cloth, shoes, clothing, meals, housing and medical care in addition to a cash salary. Contrary to what historians have observed in other regions, the share of in-kind payments did not increase after the Black Death for casual agricultural workers, who were paid in cash through this period. Only construction workers started to receive meals in addition to wages in the 1360s. Domestic and agricultural servants, however, received fewer in-kind payments after the epidemic. More importantly, this study reveals the numerous services that were provided by individuals for strikingly below-market rates. It is argued that the hospital was able to significantly lower operating costs by offering individuals social currency, intangible benefits instead of cash or in-kind payments, in exchange for numerous and valuable services. After the Black Death, however, the value of social currency decreased relative to other forms of payment.

solidarity in Europe; transnational solidarity; political sociology; citizen responses to crisis; asylum policies; refugee crisis; attitudes towards European Union

This open access book collects 11 reimagined judgments from the UK and challenges anthropocentrism in legal decision-making across a range of legal areas. It draws from a range of Earth law approaches including rights of nature, animal rights, environmental human rights, well-being of future generations, ecocide, and reinterpretations of existing legal principles. There is an urgent need to transform our legal institutions and cultures to foster healthier relationships between people and planet. The book explores how relationships between people, place, and the more-than-human world are produced, transformed, and destroyed through law, the limits of current law and the potential for positive transformation. A paradigm shift towards planetary, ecological and multispecies approaches offers possibilities for envisioning what the future of legal decision-making could look like. Beyond the judgments, the book critically reflects on the developing field of Earth law and its potential for reshaping legal reasoning in the UK and beyond. It also offers possibilities for the future of Earth law from scholarly, educational, and policy perspectives within legal practice, training and education. The book is a must read for scholars, students, legal practitioners and activists questioning the role of law and courts as mechanisms for change. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

This book is conceived with the desire to dialogue with the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea about some great current challenges in the fields of urban design and territorial planning. In this perspective, the authors identify six themes at the basis of the Italian disciplinary tradition, from which to extract suggestions for future projects. Some specific strategies emerge: the structuring role of the non-artificialized open space; the ordering function of the collective public space; the centrality of public action in the governance of transformations; the importance of multidisciplinary and integrated approach to problems; the heritage intended as a living repository of ideas for the project. Finally, the evocation of a limit between anthropogenic and natural factors that gives measure and dimension to our world.

This book sets the grounds for Global Literary Studies as an emergent field. It innovatively looks at cross-border cultural phenomena through the concepts of space, scale, time, connectivity and agency, channeling the cross-fertilization of ideas across 4 lines: global translation flows, the global novel, global literary environments and global cinema. The book targets readers interested in a global critical approach in the humanities and beyond.

When gay couples become parents, they face a host of questions and issues that their straight counterparts may never have to consider. How important is it for each partner to have a biological tie to their child? How will they become parents: will they pursue surrogacy, or will they adopt? Will both partners legally be able to adopt their child? Will they have to hide their relationship to speed up the adoption process? Will one partner be the primary breadwinner? And how will their lives change, now that the presence of a child has made their relationship visible to the rest of the world? In Gay Dads: Transitions to Adoptive Fatherhood, Abbie E. Goldberg examines the ways in which gay fathers approach and negotiate parenthood when they adopt. Drawing on empirical data from her in-depth interviews with 70 gay men, Goldberg analyzes how gay dads interact with competing ideals of fatherhood and masculinity, alternately pioneering and accommodating heteronormative “parenthood culture.” The first study of gay men's transitions to fatherhood, this work will appeal to a wide range of readers, from those in the social sciences to social work to legal studies, as well as to gay-adoptive parent families themselves.