Open Access Books - Social Sciences and Humanities - 2022

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Browsing Open Access Books - Social Sciences and Humanities - 2022 by Title

  • Publication
    50 Years World Heritage Convention: Shared Responsibility – Conflict & Reconciliation
    ( 2022)
    Marie-Theres Albert, Roland Bernecker, Claire Cave, Anca Claudia Prodan, Matthias Ripp (editors)
    This open access book identifies various forms of heritage destruction and analyses their causes. It proposes strategies for avoiding and solving conflicts, based on integrating heritage into the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It reflects on the identity-building role of heritage, on multidimensional conflicts and the destruction of heritage, and considers conflict-solving strategies and future perspectives. Furthermore, it engages theoretically and practically with the concepts of responsibility, reconciliation and sustainability, relating mainly to four Sustainable Development Goals, i.e. SDGs 4 (education), 11 (e.g. World Heritage), 13 (climate action) and 17 (partnerships for the goals).More than 160 countries have inscribed properties on the UNESCO World Heritage list since the World Heritage Convention came into force. Improvements in the implementation of the Convention, such as the Global Strategy for a Representative, Balanced and Credible World Heritage List, have occurred, but other conflicts have not been solved. The book advocates for a balanced distribution of properties and more effective strategies to represent the global diversity of cultural and natural heritage. Furthermore it highlights the importance of heritage in identity building.
  • Publication
    A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism
    ( 2022)
    Brons
    In the early twentieth century, Uchiyama Gudō, Seno’o Girō, Lin Qiuwu, and others advocated a Buddhism that was radical in two respects. Firstly, they adopted a more or less naturalist stance with respect to Buddhist doctrine and related matters, rejecting karma or other supernatural beliefs. And secondly, they held political and economic views that were radically anti-hegemonic, anti-capitalist, and revolutionary. Taking the idea of such a “radical Buddhism" seriously, A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism asks whether it is possible to develop a philosophy that is simultaneously naturalist, anti-capitalist, Buddhist, and consistent. Rather than a study of radical Buddhism, then, this book is an attempt to radicalize it. The foundations of this “radicalized radical Buddhism" are provided by a realist interpretation of Yogācāra, elucidated and elaborated with some help from thinkers in the broader Tiantai/Tendai tradition and American philosophers Donald Davidson and W.V.O. Quine. A key implication of this foundation is that only this world and only this life are real, from which it follows that if Buddhism aims to alleviate suffering, it has to do so in this world and in this life. Twentieth-century radical Buddhists (as well as some engaged Buddhists) came to a similar conclusion, often expressed in their aim to realize “a Buddha land in this world." Building on this foundation, but also on Mahāyāna moral philosophy, this book argues for an ethics and social philosophy based on a definition of evil as that what is or should be expected to cause death or suffering. On that ground, capitalism should be rejected indeed, but utopianism must be treated with caution as well, which raises questions about what it means – from a radicalized radical Buddhist perspective – to aim for a Buddha land in this world.
  • Publication
    A Genealogy of Bamboo Diplomacy: The Politics of Thai Détente with Russia and China
    ( 2022)
    Poonkham, Jittipat
    "In 1975, M.R. Kurkrit Pramoj met Mao Zedong, marking the eventual establishment of diplomatic relations and a discursive rupture with the previous narrative of Communist powers as an existential threat. This book critically interrogates the birth of bamboo (bending with the wind) diplomacy and the politics of Thai détente with Russia and China in the long 1970s (1968-80). By 1968, Thailand was encountering discursive anxiety amid the prospect of American retrenchment from the Indo-Pacific region. As such, Thailand developed a new discourse of détente to make sense of the rapidly changing world politics and replace the hegemonic discourse of anticommunism. By doing so, it created a political struggle between the old and new discourses. Jittipat Poonkham also argues that bamboo diplomacy - previously seen as a classic and continual 'tradition' of Thai-style diplomacy - had its origins in Thai détente and has become the metanarrative of Thai diplomacy since then. Based on a genealogical approach and multi‑archival research, this book examines three key episodes of Thai détente: Thanat Khoman (1968-71), M.R. Kukrit Pramoj (1975-76), and General Kriangsak Chomanan (1977-80). This transformation was represented in numerous diplomatic/discursive practices, such as ping‑pong diplomacy, petro‑diplomacy, trade and cultural diplomacy, and normal visits."
  • Publication
    A Greek State in Formation: The Origins of Civilization in Mycenaean Pylos
    ( 2022)
    Davis, Jack L.
    A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Although the Mycenaean civilization of the Greek Bronze Age was identified 150 years ago, its origins remain obscure. Jack L. Davis, codirector of excavations at the Palace of Nestor at Pylos, takes readers on a tour of the beginnings of Mycenaean civilization through a case study of this important site. In collaboration with codirector Sharon R. Stocker, Davis demonstrates that this ancient place was a major node for the exchange of ideas between the already established Minoan civilization, centered on the island of Crete, and the residents of the Greek mainland. Davis and Stocker show how adoption of Minoan culture created an ideology of power focused on a single individual, celebrating his military prowess, investing him with divine authority, and creating a figure instantly recognizable to readers of Homer and students of Greek history. A Greek State in Formation makes the powerful case that a knowledge of the Greek Bronze Age is indispensable to the classics curriculum.
  • Publication
    A History of Scientific Journals: Publishing at the Royal Society, 1665-2015
    ( 2022)
    Moxham, Noah; Røstvik, Camilla Mørk; Fyfe, Aileen; McDougall-Waters, Julie
    "Modern scientific research has changed so much since Isaac Newton's day: it is more professional, collaborative and international, with more complicated equipment and a more diverse community of researchers. Yet the use of scientific journals to report, share and store results is a thread that runs through the history of science from Newton's day to ours. Scientific journals are now central to academic research and careers. Their editorial and peer-review processes act as a check on new claims and findings, and researchers build their careers on the list of journal articles they have published. The journal that reported Newton's optical experiments still exists. First published in 1665, and now fully digital, the Philosophical Transactions has carried papers by Charles Darwin, Dorothy Hodgkin and Stephen Hawking. It is now one of eleven journals published by the Royal Society of London. Unrivalled insights from the Royal Society's comprehensive archives have enabled the authors to investigate more than 350 years of scientific journal publishing. The editorial management, business practices and financial difficulties of the Philosophical Transactions and its sibling Proceedings reveal the meaning and purpose of journals in a changing scientific community. At a time when we are surrounded by calls to reform the academic publishing system, it has never been more urgent that we understand its history. "
  • Publication
    A Ming Confucian’s World: Selections from Miscellaneous Records from the Bean Garden
    ( 2022)
    Lu Rong
    "A forgotten century marks the years between the Ming dynasty's (1368-1644) turbulent founding and its sixteenth-century age of exploration and economic transformation. In this period of social stability, retired scholar-official Lu Rong chronicled his observations of Chinese society in Miscellaneous Records from the Bean Garden (Shuyuan zaji). Openly expressing his admirations and frustrations, Lu provides a window into the quotidian that sets Bean Garden apart from other works of the biji genre of ""informal notes."" Mark Halperin organizes a translated selection of Lu's accounts from Miscellaneous Records from the Bean Garden to create a panorama of Ming life. A man of unusual curiosity, Lu describes multiple social classes, ethnicities, and locales in his accounts of political intrigues, farming techniques, religious practices, etiquette, crime, and family life. Centuries after their composition, Lu's words continue to provide a richly textured portrait of China on the cusp of the early modern era."
  • Publication
    A Perfect Storm in the Amazon Wilderness: The Conventional Economy and the Drivers of Change: Success and Failure in the Fight to Save an Ecosystem of Critical Importance to the Planet
    ( 2022)
    Killeen, Timothy J.
    Vital reading for all those interested in the conservation of the world’s most important ecosystem. In a lucid style backed by encyclopaedic knowledge, Killeen unpicks the extremely complex ecological and socio-political threads that comprise the recent history and the vital future of the Pan Amazon region. The fight to save the Amazon is a fight for sustainability that is emblematic of the entire future of human co-existence with Nature on Earth. Killeen is an authoritative and impassioned guide, eschewing soundbites in favour of a clearsighted and highly nuanced picture of the realities on the ground. Only in understanding present realities and how they came to pass, he argues, can we proceed hopefully into the future. Events of the last ten years are discussed in detail, because future events will have to build upon – or modify – the cultural and economic forces driving events in the Pan Amazon. Nonetheless, the text provides a longer historical perspective to show how policies create legacies that reverberate over decades, long after they have been recognised as being fundamentally flawed.
  • Publication
    A Vehicle for Change: Popular Representations of the Automobile in 20th-Century France
    ( 2022)
    Ó Cofaigh, Éamon
    Since its invention, the automobile has been systematically 'consumed', to become part of the fabric of twentieth- and twenty-first-century society, its impact and perception making the car an accurate gauge of changing cultural norms and values. As it grew in popularity, the automobile conditioned the very texture of modern life, and the particularly car-centred society of contemporary France is an especially apt locus for examination. The ubiquity of the automobile across all social strata provides us with a defined lens through which to examine the evolution of French society in the modern and post-modern eras. Taking the Second World War as a pivotal moment in recent French history, this book demonstrates how the automobile was both consumed and fetishized in distinct ways before and after this conflict. The ways in which society evolved from the pre- to the post-war period allow us to view French culture through the prism of the automobile as it embodied technological and social progress in twentieth-century France. The present volume seeks to explore and interrogate the processes of representation and mediation inherent in the evolving patterns of automobile consumption, and their subsequent impacts on local and national identity, framed by a detailed case study centred on France from the late-nineteenth century to the oil crisis of the early 1970s.
  • Publication
    A World Without Hunger: Josué de Castro and the History of Geography
    ( 2022)
    Davies, Archie
    An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM. Drawing on the rich personal archive of the geographer Josué de Castro, this book tells a new history of geography by following one of the twentieth century's most influential and creative Brazilian intellectuals from the estuarine city of Recife to the halls of the UN, the chambers of Brasília, and exile amid the political fervour of the universities of Paris in 1968. This is the first English language book on the absorbing life of Josué de Castro. It follows modern anticolonial geographical thought in formation, re-reading Castro's metabolic, humanist geography as the anchor of a utopian practice of freedom: the demand for a world without hunger. Starting from Castro's life and work, the book offers new takes on the history of nutrition, translation in geography, Brazilian modernist art and practice in post-war internationalism, the radical geographical intellectual, the problem of the region in the Brazilian Northeast, and the birth of political ecology and critical environmental thought. At once a biographical intellectual history and a work of geographical theory, this innovative book tells the story of 20th century geography from a new angle and in new company.
  • Publication
    Abruptly Dogen
    ( 2022)
    Smith
    In the thirteenth century Dogen brought Zen to Japan. His tradition flourishes there still today and now has taken root across the world. Abruptly Dogen presents some of his pith writings—startling, shifting, funny, spilling out in every direction. They come from all seventy-five chapters of his masterwork, the Eye of Real Dharma (Shōbōgenzō 正法眼藏), and roam through mountains, magic, everyday life, meditation, the nature of mind, and how the Buddha is always speaking from inside our heads. An excerpt from chapter 1, “A Case of Here We Are": Human wisdom is like a moon roosting in water. No stain on the moon, nor does the water rip. However wide and grand the light, it still finds lodging in a puddle. The full moon, the spilling sky, all roosting in a single dewdrop on a single blade of grass. A man of wisdom is uncut, the way a moon doesn’t pierce water. Wisdom in a man is unobstructed, the way the sky’s full moon is unobstructed in a dewdrop. No doubt about it, the drop’s as deep as the moon is high. How long does this go on? How deep is the water, how high the moon?
  • Publication
    Absent Presences in the Colonial Archive: Dealing with the Berlin Sound Archive's Acoustic Legacies
    ( 2022)
    Hilden, Irene
    "The Berlin Sound Archive (Lautarchiv) consists of an extensive collection of sound recordings, compiled for scientific purposes in the first half of the 20th century. Recorded on shellac are stories and songs, personal testimonies and poems, glossaries and numbers. This book engages with the archive by consistently focusing on recordings produced under colonial conditions. With a firm commitment to postcolonial scholarship, Absent Presences in the Colonial Archive is a historical ethnography of a metropolitan institution that participated in the production and preservation of colonial structures of power and knowledge. The book examines sound objects and listening practices that render the coloniality of knowledge fragile and inconsistent, revealing the absent presences of colonial subjects who are given little or no place in established national narratives and collective memories."
  • Publication
    Academic Brands: distinction in global higher education
    ( 2022)
    Edited by Mario Biagioli, Madhavi Sunder
    The study of academic brands intersects trademark law with critical university studies around questions both empirical and conceptual, from very mundane things like universities' trademark policies and lawsuits over t-shirts and hoodies carrying university insignia all the way to the cultural, political, and economic tensions that frame the conflicted identity of the modern university. Straddling the line between knowledge and business, public and private, or between its local ties to the state and its reach toward the global economy of higher education, the modern university seems to have found in brands a tool to construct a coherent and attractive image, if perhaps only skin deep, of itself, its role, and its "excellence." These are developments that can be fully grasped only by bringing multiple disciplinary perspectives to focus on them, from legal studies to the humanities and the social sciences
  • Publication
    Access to Medicines and Vaccines
    ( 2022)
    Carlos M. Correa, Reto M. Hilty (editors)
    This open access book is the outcome of a Global Forum on Innovation, Intellectual Property and Access to Medicines held in December 2019 at the Max Plank Instititute in Munich, organised by the South Centre and the Max Plank Institute. The academics and experts from international organisations participating have contributed chapters to this book. The book is for policy makers (in Ministries of Health, Ministries of Trade, Ministries of Foreign Affairs, patent offices), but also relevant for academics (law, trade, public health), on the flexibilities available in the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) of the World Trade Organization to promote access to medicines.
  • Publication
    Accidental Holy Land: The Communist Revolution in Northwest China
    ( 2022)
    Esherick, Joseph W.
    A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Yan'an is China's "revolutionary holy land," the heart of Mao Zedong's Communist movement from 1937 to 1947. Based on thirty years of archival and documentary research and numerous field trips to the region, Joseph W. Esherick's book examines the origins of the Communist revolution in Northwest China, from the political, social, and demographic changes of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), to the intellectual ferment of the early Republic, the guerrilla movement of the 1930s, and the replacement of the local revolutionary leadership after Mao and the Center arrived in 1935. In Accidental Holy Land, Esherick compels us to consider the Chinese Revolution not as some inevitable peasant response to poverty and oppression, but as the contingent product of local, national, and international events in a constantly changing milieu.
  • Publication
    Achieving Access to Justice in a Business and Human Rights Context: An Assessment of Litigation and Regulatory Responses in European Civil-Law Countries
    ( 2022)
    Rouas, Virginie
    "Achieving Access to Justice in a Business and Human Rights Context explores the interplay between access to justice and business and human rights- a growing area of international human rights law- in European civil-law countries. Multinational enterprises (MNEs) can contribute to economic prosperity and social development in the countries where they operate. At the same time, their activities may directly or indirectly cause harm to humans and to the environment. However, MNEs are rarely held accountable for their involvement in human rights abuses and environmental damage. In recent years, activists have challenged corporate impunity by introducing innovative claims seeking to hold parent companies directly liable for the harm caused by their group's activities. They have also strategically used this type of litigation to trigger corporate accountability reforms at international, regional, and national levels. Using national litigation experiences as a starting point and focusing on European civil-law countries, the book evaluates the extent to which litigation against MNEs has been effective in achieving access to justice and corporate accountability. It also considers whether ongoing regulatory developments, such as the adoption of mandatory human rights due diligence norms and the negotiations for a business and human rights treaty, can contribute to the realisation of access to justice and corporate accountability in the future."
  • Publication
    Acquired Alterity: Migration, Identity, and Literary Nationalism
    ( 2022)
    Mack, Edward
    A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. This is the first book-length study in English of the Japanese-language literary activities of early Japanese migrants to Brazil. It provides a detailed history of Japanese-language bookstores, serialized newspaper fiction, original creative works, and critical apparatuses that existed in Brazil prior to World War II. This case study of the reading and writing of one diasporic population challenges the dominant mode of literary study, in which texts are often explicitly or implicitly understood through a framework of ethno-nationalism. Self-representations by writers in the diaspora reveal flaws in this prevailing framework through what Edward Mack calls "acquired alterity," in which expectations about the stability of ethnic identity are subverted in surprising ways. Acquired Alterity encourages a reconsideration of the ramifications (and motivations) of cultural analyses of texts and the constructions of peoplehood that are often the true objects of literary knowledge production.
  • Publication
    Adolescences
    ( 2022)
    Massimo Ingrassia, Loredana Benedetto (editors)
    The studies in this book focus on factors that challenge the developmental paths of adolescents. The themes are: online experience (i.e., the overuse of screens, the proliferation of inappropriate videos, or parental pressures for children to remain always connected), the difficulties of pandemic times (i.e., coping with anxiety or illness), and two conditions of great fragility (that of being a migrant refugee minor, or an adolescent with severe mental disorder). These topics illustrate the multiple adolescent development pathways that inspire the plural title of the volume: Adolescences. Each author suggests protective factors (personal, family, educational, and friendship-related) that can contribute to promoting a healthy developmental outcome.
  • Publication
    Advice in Conversation: Corpus Pragmatics Meets Mixed Methods
    ( 2022)
    Nele Põldvere, Rachele De Felice, Carita Paradis
    This Element is a contribution to a new generation of corpus pragmatics research by taking as its starting point the multifaceted nature of speech acts in conversation, and by adopting a mixed-methods approach. Through a unique combination of theoretical, qualitative, quantitative, and statistical approaches, it provides a detailed investigation of advice-giving and advice uptake in relation to (i) the range of constructions used to give advice in different discourse contexts and at different points in time, and (ii) their interaction with dialogic and social factors of advice uptake as key components of frames of advice exchanges in natural conversation. Using data from the London-Lund Corpora of spoken British English, the Element shows, firstly, that there are systematic differences in advising between discourse contexts over the past half a century, and, secondly, that who gave the advice and how they did it are the strongest predictors of the advisee's response
  • Publication
    Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Brazil: A work in progress
    ( 2022)
    Duque, Marília
    With people living longer all over the world, ageing has been framed as a socio-economic problem. In Brazil, older people are expected to remain healthy and autonomous while actively participating in society. Based on ethnographic research in São Paulo, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Brazil shows how older people in a middle-class neighbourhood conciliate these expectations with the freedom and pleasures reserved for the Third Age. Work is what bonds this community together, providing a sense of dignity and citizenship. Smartphones have become of great importance to the residents as they search for and engage in new forms of work and hobbies. Connected by a digital network, they work as content curators, sharing activities that fill their schedule. Managing multiple WhatsApp groups is a job in itself, as well as a source of solidarity and hope. Friendship groups help each to download new apps, search for medical information and guidance, and navigate the city. Together, they are reinventing themselves as volunteers, entrepreneurs and influencers, or they are finding a new interest that gives their later life a purpose. The smartphone, which enables the residents to share and discuss their busy lives, is also helping them, and us, to rethink the very representation of ageing.
  • Publication
    Ageless Arete: Selected Essays from the 6th Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Hellenic Heritage of Sicily and Southern Italy
    ( 2022)
    Reid, Heather; Serrati, John
    Arete is a crucial concept in ancient Greek culture that defies simple translation. In general, it indicates excellence—especially of human beings, but also of animals, institutions, even objects. It is linked to important concepts such as glory, justice, truth and harmony. It influences important activities such as religion, athletics, politics, and education. This collection demonstrates the length and breadth of arete’s importance in ancient Greek and Roman culture, from its prehistorical etymological roots to its mystification in pre-Christian theology and even its manifestation in the career of a modern archaeologist. Leaving aside Plato and Aristotle, to whom a companion volume has been dedicated, these essays explore arete in Presocratic philosophy, classical oratory, epinician poetry, tragic drama, ancient Sicilian history, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Neoplatonic thought. To many, arete was inherited by blood from the Homeric heroes, a birthright of social elites used to reinforce traditional hierarchies in the classical polis. To others, arete was an achievement distinct from social advantage but expected to advantage society. To understand arete philosophically, we must explore its wider cultural function—and vice versa. Arete is an enduring—even ageless—concept that, properly understood, may benefit humanity even today.