Bücher veröffentlicht von Springer International Publishing AG

This book seeks to better understand the meaning and implications of the UKs calamitous encounter with the COVID-19 global pandemic for the future of British neoliberalism.Construing COVID-19 as a political pandemic and mobilising a novel applied political philosophy approach, the authors cultivate fresh intellectual resources, both analytical and normative, to better understand why the UK failed the COVID-19 test and how it might ¿fail forward¿ so as to strengthen its resilience. COVID-19 they argue, has intercepted the UK government¿s decades-long experimentation with neoliberalism at what appears to be a threshold moment in this model¿s life course. Neoliberalism has served as a key progenitor of the country¿s vulnerability: the pandemic has cruelly unveiled the failings of neoliberal logics and legacies which have placed the country at elevated risk and hampered its response. The pandemic in turn has attenuated underlying systemic maladies inherent in British neoliberalism and served as a great disruptor and potential accelerant of history; a consequential episode in the tumultuous life of this politico-economic model. To meaningfully ¿build back better¿, a true renaissance of social democracy is needed. Drawing upon the neorepublican tradition of political philosophy, the authors confront neoliberalism¿s hegemonic but parochial concept of human freedom as non-interference and place the neorepublican idea of freedom as non-domination in the service of building a new UK social contract.This book will be of interest to political philosophers, political geographers, medical sociologists, public-health scholars, and epidemiologists, to stakeholders engaged in the public inquiry processes now gathering momentum globally and to architects of build back better programmes, especially in western advanced capitalist economies.

This book explores how young Cuban filmmakers have expanded the range of sexual subjectivities on screen. It analyzes cine joven (films made by young directors) from the late 1980s to the early 2020s, film reviews, articles, and materials from the Cinematheque of Cuba's archive to illustrate the confluence of sexuality, cinema, and discourses of youth. While sexual and cinematic cultures have their own unique relation to the public sphere, state institutions, and transnational flows, this book explores tensions, debates, and expressions that unite them. In an investigation of how young filmmakers employ queer strategies of self-making to bring sexual diversity to the screen, Margaret G. Frohlich shows us how cine joven takes part in the socialization of power in Cuba.

This book tells the story of the German Democratic Republic from ¿the inside out,¿ using the lens of generational change to deconstruct an intriguing array of social identities that had little to do with the ¿official GDR¿ version authoritarian rulers regularly sought to impose on their citizens. The author compares the ¿identities¿ of five societal subgroups (GDR writers and intellectuals; pastors and dissidents; women; youth; and working-class men), exploring the policies defining their lives and status before/during/after the 1989 Wende, as well as the diverging ¿exit, voice and loyalty¿ dilemmas encountered by each. The ¿dialectical¿ components treated in this work center on the extent to which eastern identities were lost, found and reconfigured across three generations, from 1949 to 1989, from 1990 to 2005, then up to 2020. It explores how the existence of a separate East German state and the socialization processes imposed on each subculture has not only complicated the search for national unity since 1990 but also -- perhaps more controversially¿invoked new challenges directly related to ongoing East-West structural disparities since unification and the treatment of eastern Germans by often more privileged western Germans.

This book explores the issues and challenges of gender and development in Africa. The current needs of women in Africa are connected with the possible future emancipation of women from institutions and processes that perpetuate poverty to overcome gendered development processes and patriarchal economic policies at work. The role of legal, political, cultural, religious, and economic institutions in development are examined to highlight marginalisation within uneven development processes embedded with capitalism. Broader development issues, such as property rights, food security, accessibility of resources, and environmental change, are also discussed.This book aims to reimagine African development from an issue-based perspective that moves beyond gender stereotypes and narrow silo of patriarchal development. The volume is relevant to students and researchers interested in the political economy, development and feminist economics.

This book consists of an account of the creation of the Palestine Film Unit (PFU) and its founding members, from the photography department in the early years of the Palestinian revolution (1967-1968), to its evolution in the mid-1970¿s into the Palestinian Cinema Institution. Khadijeh Habashneh weaves her own memories into excerpts from letters and other communications of survivors, friends and PFU family members, with writings by scholars who analyzed the work and the contributions of this remarkable film movement (from the late 1960¿s to early 1980¿s). As such it offers a unique perspective on this aspect of Palestine film history that ended in the loss of its archive in the mid 1980¿s, providing details that have not been previously published in English.

Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania: Life under the Totalitarian Gaze offers personal accounts and theoretical insight into the Cold War era when little information about life beyond the Iron Curtain could transpire to the West. Adriana Cordali develops a unique visual rhetorical theory for analyzing communist totalitarian propaganda and the resistance to it, and reveals the deliberate, strategic in/visibilities the rhetoric of power engaged in. Building upon the local history, ideology, and politics of the regime imposed after WWII, she identifies propagandäs rhetorical features, visual tropes, and symbols and examines striking photographs and print materials from Ceau¿escu¿s regime (1966-1989) and the time of regime change (1989-1990), as well as an award-winning Romanian film that depicts women¿s life at the time. Converging visual rhetoric and culture with history and politics, Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania is a first book of this kind and will interest readers of rhetoric and communication, visual rhetoric, and political discourse in the region.

This book explores how migrant construction workers in Southern Europe faced unemployment and precarious work conditions during and after the Great Recession. By drawing on rich qualitative data, it investigates the experiences of Albanian men within and beyond the workplace, and sheds light on the capacity of migrant builders to deal with economic hardships and the role of their families and masculine identities in shaping their coping practices. This book suggests a new framework for the study of coping practices among migrant (construction) workers, and adds to the study of integration processes in Southern European countries by comparing the narratives of settled migrants in Italy and Greece. This book also looks at the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on migrant builders¿ lives in Southern Europe. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this book is of interest both to students and researchers in the field of migration studies and those working in the fields of sociology, geography, anthropology, political science and economics.

This book compares the Victorian British poet Robert Browning and the twentieth-century Ghanaian poet and novelist Kojo Laing¿two writers whose texts frequently foreground multi-scalar transregional cartographies, points of connection and translation, and imaginative kinships between different linguistic and cultural communities. Starting from the numerous and surprising points of connection and resemblance between both authors¿ texts, this book puts pressure on critical practices that would keep writers like Laing and Browning separate, positing instead the importance of paying attention to the transnational, cross-cultural, and cross-temporal imaginative relationships texts themselves generate. By comparing two writers whose texts represent different points of view on a number of shared and congruent contexts, this book seeks an original way of understanding the relationship between texts and (post-) colonial contexts, texts and other texts. Browning¿s and Laing¿s shared tendencyto foreground trans- and post-national cartographies of relation and difference, and their similarly translational aesthetics, both demand a probing of the disciplinary separation between ¿English Literature¿ and ¿Comparative Literature¿, as well as ¿literature¿ and ¿comparison¿, and a fresh awareness of the ways in which literature itself makes comparisons and affiliations. It also involves a version of ¿world literature¿ intent on accentuating the relational worlds (linguistic, imaginative, ethical) that texts themselves generate; a criticism sensitive to the ways in which writers from different times and places can still be seen to overlap.

This book provides a nuanced account of cultural competence, knowledge and skills illustrated in distinctive taste in the middle and upper classes in Dublin, Ireland (Bourdieu, 1984, 1986). It highlights how the development of cultural taste at a young age is linked to cultural participation in later life. Inspired by work that captures the textured social cartography of distinctive cultural taste (Bennett, Emmison & Frow, 1999; Bennett, Savage, Silva, Warde, Gayo-Cal & Wright, 2009), this research charts the changing nature of cultural participation in Dublin, Ireland and shows how cultural consumption has broadened from the narrow range of traditional high art forms towards one which grazes across the general register of culture. As elsewhere, this omnivorous, broad and pluralistic cultural palette has not altered patterns of distinction in cultural participation, rather it belies an emerging cultural capital profile - one where art form boundaries have collapsed but social boundaries and cultural distinction remains intact. Through interviews with two age cohorts (18-24yrs) and (45-54yrs) in Dublin in 2019, this research shows how the dominant class, through histories of cultural exposure have developed cultural taste and competence that is remarkably enduring. Reviewing available data on arts attendance and cultural participation in Ireland today, this text highlights how years of cultural familiarity allow individuals to exert a cultural dominance that facilitates class to be performed obliquely. It also demonstrates how existing surveys reinforce traditional ways of seeing with 'art' considered highbrow, formal and valued while culture is domestic, informal and less valued in the eyes of polity. This view informs Irish arts strategy and policy, ultimately reinforcing that 'ways of seeing' and policy perspectives, do matter (Berger, 1972).

This book explores the significance of flight to Romantic literature. Although the Romantic movement and the age of ballooning coincided, there has been a curious and long-time tendency to forget that flight was not impossible during this period. This study details the importance of this new technology to Romantic authors, primarily English Romantic poets. It combines accounts of the exploits and experiences of early balloonists with references to Romantic texts, using ballooning lore to illuminate a range of Romantic writings. The balloonists are seen as not just supplying these writers with a new code of metaphors, but as colleagues engaged in similarly imaginative enterprises. The book uncovers an ¿aerial imagination¿ shared by a large number of writers in the Romantic period that has its origins in the balloon adventures of the 1780s and following two decades. It will appeal to scholars and students of Romantic cultural history, as well as those interested in Romantic poetry andthe history of early aeronautics.

This book examines the links between public policy and Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technological developments in Africa. It broadly assesses three key areas ¿ policy entrepreneurship, policy tools and citizen participation ¿ in order to better understand the interfaces between public policy and technological transformations in African countries. The book presents incisive case studies on topics including AI policies, mobile money, e-budgeting, digital economy, digital agriculture and digital ethical dilemmas in order to illuminate technological proliferation in African policy systems. Its analysis considers the broader contexts of African state politics and governance. It will appeal to students, instructors, researchers and practitioners interested in governance and digital transformations in developing countries.

This book offers an accessible and rigorous introduction to the context, diplomacy, and law of the European Union¿s response to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The book explores how the EU responded to the war in the initial months, and is based on research carried out on Russian and European political, diplomatic, and legal texts. Presenting a unique interdisciplinary perspective, the book delves into topics such as the EU diplomatic response, the Ukrainian application for membership of the EU, the policy and legal aspects of EU sanctions against Russia and Belarus. Additionally, the book examines the significance of the EU¿s unprecedented political response for the constitutional structure of the EU, and for the strategy toward the Russia of the future.

This book is a pragma-stylistic study of Ian McEwan's fiction, providing a qualitative analysis of his selected novels using (im)politeness theory. (Im)politeness is investigated on two levels of analysis: the level of the plot and the story world (intradiegetic level) and the level of the communication between the implied author and implied reader in fiction (extradiegetic level). The pragmatic theory of (im)politeness serves the aim of internal characterisation and helps readers to better understand and explain the characters' motivations and actions, based on the stylistic analysis of their speech and thoughts and point of view. More importantly, the book introduces the notion of "the impoliteness of the literary fiction" - a state of affairs where the implied author (or narrator) expresses their impolite beliefs to the reader through the text, which has face-threatening consequences for the audience, e.g. moral shock or disgust, dissociation from the protagonist, feeling hurt or 'put out'. Extradiegetic impoliteness, one of the key characteristics of McEwan's fiction, offers an alternative to the literary concept of "a secret communion of the author and reader" (Booth 1961), describing an ideal connection, or good rapport, between these two participants of fictional communication. This book aims to unite literary scholars and linguists in the debate on the benefits of combining pragmatics and stylistics in literary analysis, and it will be of interest to a wide audience in both fields.

This book provides a multidisciplinary analysis of the links between migration and remittances. The role of remittances in influencing migration decision is explored in relation to economic development, education, the labour market, and social factors. The impact of remittances on migration is examined from a global perspective, with a focus on both specific countries and larger regions, such as the European Union and the former Soviet states. The challenges in managing migration flows are also discussed, alongside the impact of COVID-19 on migration, and policy suggestions are made for the efficient management of labour migration.This book aims to offer a comparative analysis of the impact of remittances resulting from labour migration and foreign direct investment on the economic growth. It will be relevant to researchers and policymakers interested in labour and migration economics.

This book examines how educational equity is affected during crises ¿ specifically the COVID-19 pandemic. Three key concerns emerge for children¿s and young people¿s education: material needs, emotional wellbeing, and access to learning. The evidence highlights how pre-existing educational inequalities were exacerbated as well as altered during the global pandemic. Critical reviews of educational vulnerability and of significant crises over the past century provide the book¿s foundation. Then, drawing on empirical research from Australia and extensive analysis of international documentation, the book demonstrates significant detriments that pandemic responses caused to formal learning and the broader support role of schools and also addresses promising educational innovations. The book is important not only for scholars in education, but also for practitioners and governments to inform how to better support learning as well as material and emotional wellbeing during and after crises, especially for children and young people experiencing disadvantage.

This book reconsiders audiovisual culture through a focus on human perception, with recourse to ideas derived from recent neuroscience. It proceeds from the assumption that rather than simply working on a straightforward cognitive level audiovisual culture also functions more fundamentally on a physiological level, directly exploiting precise aspects of human perception. Vision and hearing are unified in a merged signal in the brain through being processed in the same areas. This is illustrated by the startling ¿McGurk Effect¿, whereby the perception of spoken sound is changed by its accompanying image, and counterpart effects which demonstrate that what we see is affected by different sounds accompanying sounds. This blending of sound and images into a whole has become a universal aspect of culture, not only evident in films and television but also in video games and short Internet clips. Indeed, this aesthetic formation has become the dominant of this period. The McGurk Universe attends to how audiovisual culture engages with and mediates between physiological and psychological levels.

This volume explores the importance of inter-generational oral culture and stories that transcend time, space, and boundaries transmitted historically from one generation to the next through proverbs, idioms, and folklore tales in different geographical and spatial contexts. These important stories and their embedded life lessons are introduced, explained, and supplemented with pre and post educational activities and lesson plans to be used as learning resources. The centering of orality as a tool and medium for educating the future generation is a reclamation and reaffirmation of Indigeneity, Indigenous knowledges. and non-hegemonic approaches to support students in a socio-culturally sustaining manner. Through this understanding, this book explores the interconnectedness between culture, traditions, language, and way of life through oral storytelling, sharing, and listening.

This book sheds light on how the public engage with, make sense of, and discursively evaluate news media constructions of people from asylum seeking backgrounds. As a case study, the author discusses her recent research combining Critical Discourse Analysis with a cultural studies Audience Reception framework to examine the perspectives of 24 Western Australians who took part in semi-structured interviews. During their interviews, participants were asked open-ended questions about: their general views on people seeking asylum, including Australiäs policy responses, their media engagement habits and preferences, and their views concerning how the Australian media represents people seeking asylum. The author compares and contrasts this research with broader interdisciplinary discussion, and the book will therefore appeal to students and scholars of migration, political communication, sociology, audience reception, critical media studies and sociolinguistics.

This book is based on the postmedieval journal special issue Critical Confessions Now. These chapters on confessions exhibit great diversity and take up different disciplinary approaches by scholars who stand at various stages of their careers. They address not only different time periods but also various linguistic and cultural contexts. Contributors deploy a wide array of methods, critical approaches, and narrative voices, and contributors assumed the confessional voice with a whole host of affective responses ¿ from enthusiasm to cautious hesitation to outright discomfort. Previously published in postmedieval Volume 11, issue 2-3, August 2020.

This book examines the social entrepreneurship strategies of nonprofit organizations (NPOs), with a focus on the Caribbean social sector. In addressing the conceptual ambiguities from an academic and experiential perspective, it aims to provide a much-needed reflection on social entrepreneurship (SE), including in developing contexts. Through a comparative analysis of the experiences of NPOs from the Caribbean, the authors demonstrate the applicability of SE for NPO sustainability and as an opportunity for social sector performance improvement. Blending both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, this work is a useful base for researchers wanting to advance the mission of theory and methodological development toward maturing the field of social entrepreneurship.

This book explores the issue of salinization in the context of contemporary conflicts about irrigation, water, and the environment in Australia, considering the Murray-Darling Basin in particular. It provides an environmental and social history charting the transformation of rural communities in the basin through the salinization of soils and water. Focusing on the Goulburn-Murray Irrigation district in the southwest of the Murray-Darling basin ¿ the largest irrigation district in Australia ¿ it explores the history of state-directed, large-scale engineering in the district, where the environment has been altered dramatically to facilitate white agricultural settlement inland. Changes to the landscape led to extensive salinization, however ¿ a significant environmental threat in Australia. This book traces the impact of these changes on rural communities, taking a ¿bottom-up¿ approach, highlighting the connections between environmental, social, and political change. It provides an important reflection on the importance of environmental history for facing the challenges posed by anthropogenic climate change.

This open access book responds to the urgent need to improve how we prevent and resolve conflict. It introduces Adaptive Peacebuilding through evidence-based research from eight case studies across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. It also considers how China and Japan view and practice peacebuilding. The book focuses on how peacebuilders design, implement and evaluate programs to sustain peace, how interactions between external and local actors have facilitated or hindered peacemaking, and how adaptation to complexity and uncertainty occurred in each case study.

This book draws upon diverse approaches and understandings of sustainability transformations, social transitions and environmental accountabilities. It presents case studies that highlight real-world consequences of changing ideas about how best to achieve effective and durable sustainability transformations and examines how environmental accountabilities and social transitions influence sustainability transformations. Each chapter provides insights regarding how new knowledge and perspectives matter for whether, when, and how people, governments, corporations and international organisations seek and pursue solutions to social-ecological challenges and sustainability dilemmas. It pays sustained attention to whether and how understandings and applications of accountability can improve international sustainability transformations. The chapters presented in this book consider some pressing questions concerning social transitions and environmental accountabilities: how can they contribute to sustainability transformations, how do they influence the scalability of sustainability transformations, and, how can such sustainability transformations become durable?

This open access book responds to the urgent need to improve how we prevent and resolve conflict. It introduces Adaptive Peacebuilding through evidence-based research from eight case studies across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. It also considers how China and Japan view and practice peacebuilding. The book focuses on how peacebuilders design, implement and evaluate programs to sustain peace, how interactions between external and local actors have facilitated or hindered peacemaking, and how adaptation to complexity and uncertainty occurred in each case study.

This book looks into different forms of social exclusion in different societies or contexts. It is important to note that in some cases, social exclusion is fueled by the deprivation of economic resources, political and social rights. In contrast, social constructs or cultural norms constitute significant factors in other cases. At the subject (macro) level, this book opens up an avenue where researchers from different subjects can look into how central issues of their subject can be understood through the lenses of social exclusion. For example, historical perspectives of social exclusion, sociological perspectives of social exclusion, religiosity and social exclusion, gender perspectives of social exclusion, educational perspectives of social exclusion, etc. At the thematic (micro) level, this book looks into how specific themes like racism, the corona virus pandemic, albinism, media, sexuality and gender intersect with social exclusion. In doing all these, the book also provides a much-needed multidisciplinary and methodological understanding of issues of social exclusion.

This book explores a common but almost forgotten historical argument that positions the Kurds as powerless victims of the First World War (WW1). To this end, the book looks critically at the unfavourable political situations of the Kurds in the post-WW1 era, which began with the emergence of three new modern nation-states in the Middle East¿Turkey, Iraq, and Syriäas well as related modernising events in Iran. It demonstrates the dire consequences of oppressive international and regional state policies against the Kurds, which led to mass displacement and forced migration of the Kurds from the 1920s on. The first part of the book sets out the context required to explain the historic and systematic sociopolitical marginalisation of the Kurds in the Middle Eastern region until the present day. In the second part, the book attempts to explain the formation of Kurdish diaspora communities in different European cities, and to describe their new and positive shifting position from victims in the Middle East to active citizens in Europe. This book examines Kurdish diaspora integration and identity in some major cities in Sweden, Finland and Germany, with a specific focus and an in-depth discussion on the negotiation of multiculturalism in London. This book uncovers the gaps in the existing literature, and critically highlights the dominance of policy- and politics-driven research in this field, thereby justifying the need for a more radical social constructivist approach by recognising flexible, multifaceted, and complex human cultural behaviours in different situations through the consideration of the lived experiences and by presenting more direct voices of members of the Kurdish diaspora in London, and by articulating the new and radical concept of Kurdish Londoner.

This edited volume focuses on challenges facing science education across three areas: curriculum, teacher education, and pedagogy. Integrating a diverse range of perspectives from both emerging and established scholars in the field, chapters consider the need for measured responses to issues in society that have become pronounced in recent years, including lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic, the environment, and persisting challenges in STEM teaching and learning. In doing so, the editors and their authors chart a potential course for existing and future possibilities and probabilities for science education.

This collective book offers a panorama of the history of tax evasion, tax avoidance and tax havens from the nineteenth century to the present day, based on the latest research in contemporary history. It aims to show that this phenomenon is at the heart of global capitalism, partly as a response of the ruling classes to the rise of progressive taxation, but for other reasons too: notably the development of a powerful tax evasion and avoidance industry in different countries. The book argues that tax competition between states has stimulated the development of tax havens. It discusses the notion of the ¿tax haven¿ and proposes a more rigorous concept - that of the ¿tax predator¿. Finally, the book sheds light on the socio-political conflicts that have developed around tax evasion and the way in which states have fought against or tolerated the phenomenon.

This book explores Takamure Itsue¿s (1894¿1964) intellectual odyssey as Japan¿s most notable pioneer in the study of women¿s history. When she embarked on a series of scholarly projects that investigated marriage patterns and kinship systems in ancient Japan, it was a response to crisis-ridden modernity. Relentless in her quest to dismantle patriarchy, this ¿woman from the Land of Fire¿ (a nickname for her birthplace, Kumamoto Prefecture) locked herself away in 1931 and spent the rest of her life conducting research on female-friendly societies with matrilocal arrangements under kinship-based communal systems. While dissecting the patriarchal norms undergirding the capitalist nation-state, she embraced matricultural paradigms that embodied life-sustaining and life-enhancing values through communal childrearing and matrilineal inheritance. Takamure, a visionary thinker, asked big-picture questions and addressed multifarious issues of contemporary relevance, including beautystandards, human trafficking, gross disparities in wealth, war and imperialism, science and religion, and humanity¿s relationship with nature.