Open Access Books

Lesen ist ein komplexer Prozess, der ein weites Spektrum von Fähigkeiten abdeckt. Dieser Band widmet sich insbesondere zwei zentralen Teilbereichen des Lesens: der Entwicklung von Leseflüssigkeit zu Beginn des Lesenlernens sowie dem lesestrategischen Vorgehen geübter Leserinnen und Leser beim Umgang mit multiplen Dokumenten. Er umfasst dabei empirische Beiträge mit Fokus auf Wortlesen und Leseflüssigkeit im Grundschulbereich sowie Studien mit jungen Erwachsenen, die mehrere Texte lesen und diese später schriftlich im Rahmen von komplexen Arbeitsaufträgen weiterverarbeiten.

Published

Providing an innovative approach to understanding and addressing anti-gender hate speech, this book focuses on its effects on everyday life, how it is handled within legal frameworks, and how it challenges democratic principles. Unlike previous research, which is often limited to currently regulated forms of hate speech, this book is focused on gender-based hate speech, demonstrating its broader social and ideological impacts. By contextualising freedom of expression within democratic values, it offers a new framework for addressing anti-gender hate speech as a threat to both individual dignity and societal diversity. Through this lens, the authors highlight how anti-gender hate speech represents not only a breach of individual rights but also a structural challenge to democracy, requiring responses that reflect these dual dimensions. The book provides a unique contribution to both legal scholarship and democratic theory by rethinking the balance between gender equality and freedom of expression as cooperative as well as inherently contextual and inclusive. Rethinking Online Anti-Gender Hate Speech will be of great interest to students and scholars of Criminology, Law, Media and Communication, Sociology, and Women’s and Gender Studies.

Japan's Failed Revolution: Koizumi and the Politics of Economic Reform asks why, despite all the high expectations, the Japanese public's desire for economic reform, and leadership of a majority coalition in a parliamentary democracy, the reformer Prime Minister Koizumi has not achieved the economic reforms expected of him since he surprisingly attained power over a year ago. To unravel this 'puzzle’, Aurelia George Mulgan eschews the simplicities of both cultural and rational choice explanations and systematically tests the propositions in the comparative literature on 'failed reform’. The result is one of the best books ever written about contemporary Japanese politics. It explains how, despite British-style parliamentary institutions, Japan’s very ‘un-Westminster’ traditional policymaking process involving the ruling party and the bureaucracy’s structure and linkage has stymied and will probably continue to stymie even a sincere and active Prime Minister’s best reform intentions. This book should be read by all political scientists, journalists, economists, and students interested in contemporary Japan. Ellis S. Krauss Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies University of California, San Diego. The author takes a scalpel to dissect Japan’s dysfunctional political system. She shows with wonderful clarity and depth of knowledge why the Koizumi reforms are not succeeding, and why revolutionary political change is needed as a precondition for economic recovery. The book should be required reading for anyone involved with contemporary Japan. J.A.A. Stockwin University of Oxford.

Violent conflict, climate change, and poverty present distinct threats to women worldwide. Importantly, women are leading the way creating and sharing sustainable solutions.Women’s security is a valuable analytical tool as well as a political agenda insofar as it addresses the specific problems affecting women’s ability to live dignified, free, and secure lives. First, this collection focuses on how conflict impacts women’s lives and well-being, including rape and gendered constructions of ethnicity, race, and religion. The book’s second section looks beyond the scope of large-scale violence to examine human security in terms of environmental policy, food, water, health, and economics.Multidisciplinary in scope, these essays from new and established contributors draw from gender studies, international relations, criminology, political science, economics, sociology, biological and ecological sciences, and planning.

This article discusses sources and methods to analyze the dynamics of social mobility in the ancient régime, focusing on the case of Bergamo between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. After a brief methodological reflection, the evolution of Bergamo’s economic and demographic context over the centuries examined is outlined. Thanks to the analysis of fiscal sources (tax-land registers) and the registers of municipal deliberations, two indicators are then proposed to measure social mobility in relation to the distribution of wealth and to the access to local political institutions. Finally, by selecting some exemplary cases among the local kinships, the possible relationship between the two mobility dynamics examined is considered.

The building sector is a major consumer of energy, making it essential to explore innovative strategies for reducing its environmental impact. As we shift our focus toward decarbonization and electrification, the need for advanced building operation techniques and equipment becomes increasingly urgent. These advancements are crucial for maintaining or enhancing indoor environmental quality while simultaneously minimizing energy consumption. This Special Issue aims to showcase cutting-edge technologies in building energy management, alongside effective measurement and verification methods. It will also address fault detection and diagnosis approaches, leveraging both simulation and experimental studies. The ultimate goal is to highlight solutions that not only reduce CO₂ emissions but also improve indoor environmental quality, creating healthier and more sustainable living and working spaces. By presenting a diverse array of research contributions, this Special Issue will provide valuable insights into the latest advancements in building energy technologies. It will drive the discussion around effective strategies for energy efficiency and environmental sustainability in the building sector. These efforts can help transform buildings from energy consumers into more efficient spaces that contribute to reducing our overall carbon footprint.

»Digital Health and Law«: This volume approaches digital health from a legal perspective, enriched by contributions from the fields of ethics and bioinformatics. The electronic patient record and other regulatory innovations such as digital health applications (DiGAs) are examined in detail. Issues of solidarity and individualisation, liability and privacy are also explored. The central finding of the volume is that digital health law needs to be interdisciplinary, creative, flexible and conducive to innovation.

No period in Latin American history has been as thoroughly studied as the 1960s. Amid this proliferation of texts, Claudia Gilman's Between the Pen and the Rifle stands out as a singular work: comprehensive yet exhaustive, intelligent yet entertaining, and as accessible as it is sophisticated. The author dissects the “fourteen prodigious years” between the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the fall of Salvador Allende's government in 1973. Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Havana, Mexico City, and Montevideo, the nerve centers of the period, are the axes around which the central debates revolve. Gilman analyzes the functioning of the cultural market, the connections between literary genres and social transformations, and, especially, the vicissitudes of magazines such as Marcha, Mundo Nuevo, Casa de las Américas, and Libre, which reflect different facets of literary and cultural life. It is the survival of the “critical ideal” (against the subordination of truth to politics) that allows the author to narrate history and unfold it before our eyes in order to construct a genealogy of the specificity of critical independence and the affirmation of intellectual autonomy in Latin America.

Originally published in 1986. Martin A. Miller, author of the definitive biography of the exiled revolutionary Peter Kropotkin, traces the history of the first generations of Russians who went to Western Europe to devote their lives to anti-tsarist politics. Refusing to assimilate abroad and unable to return home, the émigrés political orientations were influenced by intellectual and social currents in both Russia and Europe. Miller undertakes a major reassessment of the émigré contribution to the Russian revolutionary movement. Starting with Nikolai Turgenev, who in 1825 was declared the first "émigré" by a special act of the Russian government, the exiles formed a unique social and political group. Miller takes a biographical approach in tracing the progression from a disparate community of intellectuals, unable to act together to promote their own program for change, to a more cohesive second émigré generation that provided the foundation for collective action and the development of a revolutionary ideology. The creation of the Russian émigré press, Miller argues, gave identity and momentum to the émigrés and helped promote their program of revolution and a new social order. The Russian Revolutionary Emigres, 1825-1870 concludes with the death in 1870 of the leading émigré figure, Alexander Herzen, and with an analysis of the impact upon the émigrés of the emergence of the populist revolutionary movement within Russia. The émigrés overcame the loss of their homeland through their version of a future Russia, one transformed into a new society where their ideals could be realized. When, two generations later, Lenin returned to Russia after decades in Europe and made this vision a reality, his actions built on the foundation laid by his nineteenth-century predecessors.

This book includes papers in cross-disciplinary applications of mathematical modelling: from medicine to linguistics, social problems, and more. Based on cutting-edge research, each chapter is focused on a different problem of modelling human behaviour or engineering problems at different levels. The reader would find this book to be a useful reference in identifying problems of interest in social, medicine and engineering sciences, and in developing mathematical models that could be used to successfully predict behaviours and obtain practical information for specialised practitioners. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the new developments of applied mathematics in connection with epidemics, medical modelling, social issues, random differential equations and numerical methods.

Amsterdam painter Dirk Valkenburg (1675–1721) created early depictions of Indigenous and enslaved people on Surinamese sugar plantations, as well as ornate hunting still lifes and portraits of colonial elites. Edited by Willem de Rooij and Karwan Fatah Black, this volume combines a catalogue raisonné developed in collaboration with the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History in The Hague – and a critical reader featuring newly commissioned essays by leading international scholars. It is conceived as a pendant to De Rooij’s installation Valkenburg, which opened at the Centraal Museum Utrecht in September 2025. This book and the exhibition together invite reflection on how 18th-century visual culture helped normalize colonial ideology.

This timely and urgent collection brings together cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship and ideas from around the world to present critical examinations of climate coloniality. Confronting Climate Coloniality exposes how legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism co-produce and exacerbate the climate crisis, create disproportionate impacts on those who contributed the least to climate change, and influence global and local responses. Climate coloniality is perpetuated through processes of neoliberalism, racial capitalism, development interventions, economic growth models, media, and education. Confronting climate coloniality entails decolonizing climate discourses and governance, challenging the dominant framings and policies, interrogating material, geopolitical, and institutional arrangements for tackling the climate crisis, and centering Global South and Indigenous knowledge, experiences, strategies, and solutions. Confronting Climate Coloniality: Decolonizing Pathways for Climate Justice provides critical insights and strategies for transformative action and fosters deeper understandings of the structural injustices entangled with climate change in governance, framings, policies, responses, and praxis. This collection offers pioneering interdisciplinary research on alternative frameworks for decolonized approaches for more meaningful climate justice. With originality, scholarly rigor, and emphasis on amplifying marginalized voices, this collection is an indispensable resource for interdisciplinary scholars, policymakers, and activists committed to advancing climate justice.

L'étude de la présence militaire dans les campagnes durant l'antiquité, essentiellement pour des raisons de police, tant aux époques hellénistique que romaine, n'attira pendant longtemps que fort peu l'attention de la communauté scientifique. Depuis quelques décennies toutefois, l'étude croisée de sources littéraires, épigraphiques, archéologiques et papyrologiques a permis de se rendre compte que ces soldats jouaient un rêle non négligeable dans la vie des communautés rurales avec qui ils étaient quotidiennement en contact. Si ces hommes apparaissent parfois comme des sauveurs face à un brigandage endémique, de nombreuses plaintes montrent que leur action pouvait avoir des effets pires que ceux imputables aux marginaux qu'ils étaient supposés combattre. La journée d'étude qui s'est tenue à Perpignan le 16 mai 2018 a réuni des spécialistes de ces questions afín de faire un premier bilan. Ce sont leurs contributions, concernant un espace géographique fort vaste aliant de l'Armorique à la Phrygie, qui sont présentées dans cet ouvrage collectif à l'attention des lecteurs.

Playful methodology for language education still finds some prejudice at school, especially when it targets students of the secondary school or adults. The book aims at discrediting such prejudices, considered the most recent neuroscientific and psychopedagogical theories, and at being a contribution for researchers of educational linguistics and for language teachers. The book has a theoretical approach but it offers operational indications for those who wish to use this methodology, which goes far beyond the simple presentation of games. The book is composed by two parts: the first part focuses on the concept of linguistic facilitation (and on the role of the teacher as a facilitator), the second one presents the playful methodology for language learning. The epistemological framework is Humanistic Language Teaching, which refers to the psychological and educational ‘revolution’ of the 1960s and 1970s, i.e., to the works of Chomsky, Arnold, Maslow, Bruner, Rogers, Neisser and many other researchers who claimed that knowledge, experience and education were the result of the way the human brain works and of the personal characteristics of each mind. The slogan used for this edulinguistic revolution was Focus on the Learner. In fact, the communicative approach used today includes a humanistic component as far as the role and nature of the learner are concerned. Yet, this debt to the humanistic revolution is more and more an implicit one, as the awareness of the role played by Humanistic Language Teaching is taken for granted. Within this framework, the book introduces the concept of ‘meaningful learning’, the difference between game and play; the difference between free play and didactic play; the use of play to enhance intercultural communication (fundamental in non-native language teaching) and intercultural education (which involves all humanistic parameters). The book also presents five methodologies that can be used to put the playful methodology into practice: Asher’s Total Physical Response, Gattegno’s Silent Way, Lozanov’s Suggestopedia, Di Pietro’s Scenario, and the use of drama.