In the following, I would like to present some central aspects of Hannah Arendt’sthinking and work that identify her as a non-academic and non-intellectual.In do-ing so,I would like to take up the criticism often levelled at her and turn it in a pos-itive way.The criticism not only concerns her reportEichmanninJerusalem,her sup-posedly conservative nostalgia for the Greek polis, or her critiq…
This book sets out with a programmatic agenda to find new ways of “speaking for the social” in projects of technical and infrastructural change. It takes as its starting point the ongoing challenge of com-munication between scholars in the social sciences and humanities who study the social dimensions of technical and infrastructure projects, and those working in engineering and policy who …
Humans are a walking species. We tread on the surface of the Earth. Without this primary mobility we would not be here and even when other means of getting around have become accessible, we don’t cease to walk. Our walking leaves traces. This is inevitable. No culture or civilisation or society can escape from this primordial mark-making. Some of these traces cluster and congregate into patte…
Language politics has always been inherently interdisciplinary, as highlighted by the range of disciplines contributing to and represented in the field — and linguistics and political science are not always the primary ones. The scope of the field is further enlarged by the two different ways that the phrase ‘language politics’ can be parsed: th…
Chinese intellectuals like to blame things on institutions. After all, Chinese people areindustrious, prudent, and entrepreneurial. Yet modern Chinese history since theopium war has been characterized by one humiliation after another, and althoughthe founding of communist China gave the country independence, it came at the costof being self-isolated from the world and having a poor economy. Wha…
In the millions of words written about the pandemic that entered global consciousness in 2020, masculinities featured in contradictory ways. On the one hand, some commentators expressed concerns that the characteristics of masculinity make boys and men poorly suited to managing the pandemic well. They were considered at risk of poor mental h…
Caring is Sharing? explores why and how mixed-sex couples make decisions around parental leave at the transition to parenthood, and how these decisions shape their work and family care practices during and after the leave period. It does this through a longitudinal qualitative comparative analysis of mixed-sex parent couples in England who do and do not share parental leave after the birth of t…
Packaged Plants offers an absorbing ethnography and cultural history of how the production and consumption of plants for food and medicine has gone through ‘metabolic rifts’, increasingly processed into commodities with adverse impact on health and aggravating existing economic and social inequities. The book also describes ultra-processed foods that are linked to metabolic syndrome, includ…
South-South Cooperation (SSC) is both an old concept and a new idea, an old analysis and a new policy directive. Although the notion has existed for decades, it has grown in importance and function, especially since the early 2000s. It has transformed global economic structures, forcing us to redefine traditionally understood words, most notably “region” and “development.” It h…
In recent years, rapid growth in practice and scholarship at the intersection of environment, conflict, and peace has given rise to the new field of environmental peacebuilding (Ide etal., 2021). Much of the work and research has focused on the environmental dimensions of conflict, peace, and peacebuilding. At the same time, interest has grown in the conflict, peace, and peacebuilding dimension…
There were a few pages about Peñón de los Baños on the internet, and my guide-book also briefly mentioned it. I had thought it would be more important, con-sidering the presence of Peñón in the historical documents I was collecting in the archives downtown. Real hot springs in the middle of Mexico City—naturewas difficult to locate amidst the densest …
In A Very Short Introduction to Politics, Kenneth Minogue begins with a discussion of issues arising from a historical account of politics, and goes on to offer chapters dealing with the Ancient Greeks and the idea of citizenship; Roman law; medieval Christianity and individualism; freedom since Machiavelli and Hobbes; the challenge of ideologies; democracy, oligarchy, and bureaucracy; power an…
Base isolation is an effective approach for reducing damages to structures and their contents under severe earthquake excitations. It is generally implemented by using special isolators, such as laminated rubber bearings (e.g., Kelly, 1986; Kikuchi & Aiken, 1997; Skinner et al., 1993; Yamamoto et al., 2009) and friction pendulum (FP) bearings (e.g.…
Long recognized as one of the main branches of political science, political theory has in recent years burgeoned in many different directions. Close textual analysis of historical texts sits alongside more analytical work on the nature and normative grounds of political values. Continental and post-modern influences jostle with ones from economics, history, sociology, and the law. Feminist conc…
Responding to the victimisation of children is a key societal challenge to which nations are increasingly committed. As victims, children have rights and needs that require services from both the justice and welfare sectors. In Europe, the Barnahus (“Children’s House”) model has been introduced as a way to strengthen children’s access to j…
For much of human history, actively sensing and being in resonance witheach other was part and parcel of social cohesion, was part of play, produc-tion, and reproduction. Such ways of deeply listening and attending to eachother have been significantly reduced or changed by contemporary modes ofdaily life and social organisation.Moving from the deep tissues of our humanbodies, this book suggests…
In 1969, an influential volume arising from a conference at LSE began with a declaration phrased to echo Marx and Engels: ‘A spectre is haunting the world: the spectre of populism’ [1]. More than half a century has gone by, and the warning re-mains timely. Donald Trump may be gone from the White House, but populism is still a powerful force in world politics. …
In2019,agraffitiartistsprayedamuralofFridaKahloonthebackofagunshopin Greensboro, North Carolina. The Mexican artist is shown with an ammunitionbelt around her hips, leaning back against the wall. In her hand, she holds a gunpointing downward,as if ready to lift her arms and shoot at the viewer.The mural copied a photograph of Kahlo which has long become a commodity.Itsdepictionof»Frida«reiter…
Cats and Conservationists is the first multidisciplinary analysis of the heated debate about free-roaming cats. The debate pits conservationists against cat lovers, who disagree both on the ecological damage caused by the cats and the best way to manage them. An impassioned and spirited conflict, it also sheds light on larger questions about how we interpret science, incorporate diverse perspec…
The fact that the tagline culminates in the emboldening of‘again’highlights therepetitionofdeath,whichprovidesthemotionpicture’sforwardmomentum.Inthefilm, protagonist and quintessential final girl, Teresa “Tree” Gelbman finds herselfcaptured in a Groundhog Day-esque loop in which she keeps being murdered, onherbirthday(Mondaythe18th),onlytowakeupagainthemorningofthatverysameday.The es…
Stalin's Quest for Gold tells the story of Torgsin, a chain of retail shops established in 1930 with the aim of raising the hard currency needed to finance the USSR's ambitious industrialization program. At a time of desperate scarcity, Torgsin had access to the country's best foodstuffs and goods. Initially, only foreigners were allowed to shop in Torgsin, but the acute demand for hard-currenc…
This volume features ten articles, each dealing with a particular aspect of the relationship between the Korean people and foreigners. It is a work conducted with a comparative/structuralist approach, which comprises a time span of over 1500 years and intends to give Korean studies that transnational aspect which is still neglected today.
The well-known challenges of international migration have triggered new departures in academic approaches, with 'diaspora studies' evolving as an interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary field of study. Its emerging methodology shares concerns with another interdisciplinary field, the study of the relations between law and literature, which focuses on the ways in which the two cultural prac…
Drawing on twenty-first-century French-language literature, this study shows how literature can not only serve as a means of "personal development", but also help repair the "brokenness" implied in victimhood, and redress individual and collective traumas. As it reflects on discourses of repair (and reparations), it questions the canonical theories on the functions of literature and proposes a …
Rwanda is a small land-locked country in the Great Lakes Region of central Africa. Bordering Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (see image 1 below), it is the most densely populated country in sub-Saharan Africa with a population of 12 million in July 2015.1 The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) won the parliamentary election in 2003 and continues…
Nuclear safety and security—the protection of nuclear facilities, weapons, technologies, and materials against accidents or attacks—is an under-studied area of international security studies.1 Periodically, the subject has received high levels of attention. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, for example, scholars and policymakers worried intense…
Security Sector Reform (SSR) is at a crossroads. SSR concepts and practices are embedded in international efforts to promote peace, security and development. They are widely considered an essential element of many multilateral and bilateral stabilization efforts and are a standard feature of the post-conflict toolkit.1 SSR is routinely commended for the way it can integrate siloe…
Although the vital importance of drinking water provision, and with this the core task of drinking water organisations, has essentially been stable for the past few decades, the challenges water companies meet, the way they operate, and certainly also thecitizens they serve, have undergone significant changes (Geldof et al. 2000; Tonkens 2008). For instance, over the past few decades the water …
In 2002, the world was astonished by the appearance of the new opera star Anna Netrebko at the Salzburg Opera Festival. She was young, incredibly talented and smashingly glamorous, almost akin to the legendary Maria Callas. She quickly became the face of the world new opera and also the face of the new Russia and of the post-Soviet space. Like a speeding ro…
On January 1, 2016, the Baltimore Sun marked the end of the city's "deadli-est year." In 2015, Baltimore counted 344 homicides-nearly 90 percent of them caused by gun violence.1 The historically high number of deaths drew condemnation nationwide. Decrying that "too many continue to die on our streets," the mayor fired the chief of police. Maryland's governor called the murde…
Historically, polytechnic schools rose to prominence in many national settings dur-ing the second half of the nineteenth century (Fox and Guagnini 2004). Over time, new areas of technology have been developed and incorporated into their repertoire, and waves of academisation have swept over the former polytechnics, transforming some of them into technical universities (Christensen and E…
Since the last decades of the twentieth century, most coun-tries, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, have beenseeking to transform their economies from depending onprimary natural resources to a knowledge-based one, pro-viding a permanent source for economic growth, and thusachieving sustainable development, and helping in diversi-fying the national economic framework, and multiplyingincome…
It is now widely accepted that for a country to thrive in the knowledge economy, it must develop high-level skills and competencies (human capital), as well as its scientific research, innovation and technological development capacity. Higher education, and universities in particular, are regarded as key to delivering these knowledge capabilities for development, based on the…
What happens when the idea of religious progress propels the shaping of modernity? In The Ahmadiyya Quest for Religious Progress. Missionizing Europe 1900 – 1965 Gerdien Jonker offers an account of the mission the Ahmadiyya reform movement undertook in interwar Europe. Nowadays persecuted in the Muslim world, Ahmadis appear here as the vanguard of a modern, rational Islam that met with a cons…
In their centuries-old history, the Roma (formerly known as Gypsies) experienced many difficult moments and cruel trials from their arrival in Europe until now. The history of the Roma in the USSR is no exception in this respect. Along with affirmative state policy towards them (at least until the end of the 1930s), they also fell victim to the massive political repressions of that time. In thi…
Over the past two decades, Canadian international history has slipped its traditional North Atlantic moorings. Studies of Canada’s postwar relation-ships with a waning United Kingdom or an ascendant United States have faded in popularity, replaced with a stream of publications on relations with the decolonized states of Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, countries whose citizens increasingly co…
he first statement above is extracted from an interview with China’s incumbent ambassador to the United States (US), former Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai, at the 24th Post Pacific Islands Forum Dialogue in Auckland in August 2012 (Liu & Huang, 2012). The second statement is taken from the outcome list of the eighth China–US Strategic and Econo…
The Nordic countries are among the highest spenders in Europe on legal aid, which provides people with legal services when they cannot other-wise afford legal assistance. Figures from 2012 provided by the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice CEPEJ (2014) show that, of 47 European countries, Norway spends the most on legal aid per inhabitant, Sweden comes sixth, Denmark eighth, Finl…
Internet voting has been an active topic of public discussions for many years. Itsproponents highlight the advantages of voting online, such as increased conve-nience and accessibility for voters who might have difficulty reaching a physicalpolling station.However, critics of Internet voting raise concerns about its security risks,including the potential manipulation of election results and vio…
Biocultural diversity refers to the dynamic interrelationship between the Earth’sbiological, cultural and linguistic diversity (Maffi2007). Proponents of the conceptespouse an ‘inextricable’ link between these three forms of diversity, drawing oninsights mostly from anthropology, ethnobiology, ethnoecology and human ecology (Maffi2005,2007; Posey1999). Biocultural diversity draws strength…
This collective volume celebrates that 75 years ago the foundation was laid for the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The contributions to this volume exemplify the evolution of the academic disciplines of anthropology and development studies at Radboud University in the course of its history. Radboud University itself celebrate…
With these cautions in mind—against positing a transcendent idea of academic freedom—I have written the present book. It discloses debates in which mutually exclusive ideas about academic freedom are in play. These debates have not achieved closure; the history of academic freedom is an accumulation of uncertainties. This approach difers from that of most commentators on acade…
I introduce this volume with distinct pleasure, since it marks the final step in a journey that started seven years ago, at the ICLA 2013 at the Sorbonne. The deci-sion to host the ICLA 2016 at the University of Vienna meant that, from 2013 to 2016, I had to face the biggest organizational challenge of my career, since I had the honour to support Achim Hölter, the chair …
A paradox, as the definition above suggests, refers to something that runs contrary to expectations or preconceived ideas. Recurring references to the ‘Bangladesh paradox’ in the development studies literature are shorthand for the unexpectedness of certain aspects of the country’s development experi-ence. Bangladesh has progressed on the social dimensions o…
In Among Women across Worlds, Suzy Kim explores the transnational connections between North Korean women and the global women's movement. Asian women, especially communists, are often depicted as victims of a patriarchal state. Kim challenges this view through extensive archival research, revealing that North Korean women asserted themselves from the late 1940s to 1975, before the Korean War be…
In his most provocative and practical book yet,one of the foremost thinkers of our time redefines what it means to understand the world, succeed in a profession, contribute to a fair and just society, detect nonsense, and influence others. Citing examples ranging from Hammurabi to Seneca, Antaeus the Giant to Donald Trump, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows how the willingness to accept one’s own ri…
It is a curious situation that technologies we now take for granted have, when first introduced, so often stoked public controversy and concern for public welfare. At the root of this tension is the perception that the benefits of new technologies will accrue only to small sections of society, while the risks will be more widely distributed. Drawing from nearly 600 years of technology histor…
I used to think I’d become famous for my music, not for activism. When I was just twenty, I released my fi rst album with the goth rock band BAAL. I played bass guitar and I was pretty good. We had a following. But then it became too hard to ignore what was happening in my country. The next thing I knew I was part of a student-led group that eff ectively took down Slobodan Mil…
Computation, modeling, and simulation practices are commonplace in the STEM workplace, yet formal training embedded in disciplinary practices is not as standard in the undergraduate classroom. Teaching and Learning in STEM With Computation, Modeling, and Simulation Practices: A Guide for Practitioners and Researchers gives instructors a handbook to ensure their curriculum bridges the gap betwee…
Who is involved and why in the linguistic landscapes in educational contexts? How are agency and activism reflected in educationscapes? These questions and more are addressed in the various contributions in this volume, thus expanding the boundaries of educationscapes through enquiries that focus on educational agency and activism. In particular, the collection sheds light on linguistic, semiot…