Humanities & Social Sciences

This report constitutes the main outputs of the project “Pathways to a Nordic food system that contributes to reduced emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants”. The overall goals are to present the baseline data regarding the Nordic agricultural sector, its greenhouse gas and ammonia emissions, the regulatory framework and support systems, and conflicts of interest. The report aims to describe pathways to a Nordic food system that contributes to achieving the climate target of below 2 (or 1.5) degrees of warming and the air pollution target of zero exceedance of critical loads and critical levels regarding ammonia emissions. The Nordic region has diverse geological and climatic conditions that make certain types of agricultural production more vulnerable than others. The policy recommendations aim to serve as input to different policies at EU, Nordic and national level.

"This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life. Jan Ziolkowski tracks the poem from its medieval roots to its rediscovery in late nineteenth-century Paris, before its translation into English in Britain and the United States. The visual influence of the tale on Gothic revivalism and vice versa in America is carefully documented with lavish and inventive illustrations, and Ziolkowski concludes with an examination of the explosion of interest in The Juggler of Notre Dame in the twentieth century and its place in mass culture today. The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity is a rich case study for the reception of the Middle Ages in modernity. Spanning centuries and continents, the medieval period is understood through the lens of its (post)modern reception in Europe and America. Profound connections between the verbal and the visual are illustrated by a rich trove of images, including book illustrations, stained glass, postage stamps, architecture, and Christmas cards. Presented with great clarity and simplicity, Ziolkowski's work is accessible to the general reader, while its many new discoveries will be valuable to academics in such fields and disciplines as medieval studies, medievalism, philology, literary history, art history, folklore, performance studies, and reception studies."

This Handbook aims to provide a comprehensive, international cartography of Queer Death Studies, offering broad, in-depth insights into the field and its emergence through tentacular transdisciplinary networking. Taking research and art-making on death, dying, mourning, and afterlife into new directions, it explores the multiple effects of contemporary necropolitics and the proliferation of death-worlds during the current period of Earth’s history, ‘The Anthropocene’ or ‘the Age of Man’. Informed by queer, critical posthumanist, decolonial, and feminist approaches, the Handbook presents a unique variety of both critical and affirmative reflections upon the world’s intersecting necropowers, and ethico-political potentials for social and environmental change. Contributors speculate on ways to reimagine life/ death-relations as vibrant entanglements. They also investigate modes of mourning differently, resisting necropolitical regimes that deem human and non-human individuals and populations to be disposable and non-grievable when they differ too much from the normative modern subject, Universal Man, in terms of intersections of gender, racialisation, class, sexuality, embodiment, embrainment, geopolitical positioning, or species. A thought provoking read, this Handbook is intended for broad global audiences of researchers, artists, teachers, students, death-professionals, (health)careworkers, activists, and NGOs interested in tools to rethink and reimagine death, dying, mourning, and afterlife from intersections of queering, decolonising, posthumanising, and feminist perspectives.

The presence of non-Western material heritage in Western museum collections poses one of the most significant challenges today, raising critical questions about provenance, ownership, and the concept of “art”. This collective volume, structured as an ABC of arts and museums, offers an overview of the intersections between art history and postcolonial studies. In response to ongoing debates about the decolonization of museums, it provides a space for critical reflection on topics such as 'ethnographic' collections, colonial narratives, and Indigenous perspectives. Bringing together researchers, artists, activists, and committed experts, the book serves as a forum for exchange, blending scholarly articles, artistic contributions, and essays. Through these diverse voices, this Abécédaire rethinks the history of art and museums as an experimental space, transcending disciplinary and geographical boundaries. It offers a fresh, nuanced perspective on contemporary issues in the study of the past while paving new pathways for the future.

Algorithms have risen to become one, if not the central technology for producing, circulating, and evaluating knowledge in multiple societal arenas. In this book, scholars from the social sciences, humanities, and computer science argue that this shift has, and will continue to have, profound implications for how knowledge is produced and what and whose knowledge is valued and deemed valid. To attend to this fundamental change, the authors propose the concept of algorithmic regimes and demonstrate how they transform the epistemological, methodological, and political foundations of knowledge production, sensemaking, and decision-making in contemporary societies. Across sixteen chapters, the volume offers a diverse collection of contributions along three perspectives on algorithmic regimes: the methods necessary to research and design algorithmic regimes, the ways in which algorithmic regimes reconfigure sociotechnical interactions, and the politics engrained in algorithmic regimes.

Many teens today who use the Internet are actively involved in participatory cultures—joining online communities (Facebook, message boards, game clans), producing creative work in new forms (digital sampling, modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction), working in teams to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (as in Wikipedia), and shaping the flow of media (as in blogging or podcasting). A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these activities, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, development of skills useful in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. Some argue that young people pick up these key skills and competencies on their own by interacting with popular culture; but the problems of unequal access, lack of media transparency, and the breakdown of traditional forms of socialization and professional training suggest a role for policy and pedagogical intervention.This report aims to shift the conversation about the "digital divide" from questions about access to technology to questions about access to opportunities for involvement in participatory culture and how to provide all young people with the chance to develop the cultural competencies and social skills needed. Fostering these skills, the authors argue, requires a systemic approach to media education; schools, afterschool programs, and parents all have distinctive roles to play.The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning

Befindet sich ein Gut in der Verfügungsgewalt eines Nichtberechtigten, gewährt die Rechtsordnung dem Berechtigten primär einen Anspruch auf Übertragung des Gutes, beispielsweise in Gestalt von § 985 BGB. Um dem Nichtberechtigten auch den Vorteil zu entziehen, den er durch die Nutzung des Gutes erlangt hat, bedarf es eines ergänzenden Anspruchs auf Nutzungsausgleich. De lege lata ordnet das BGB zu diesem Zweck an unterschiedlichen Stellen eine Verpflichtung zur Herausgabe oder Vergütung von Nutzungen i.S.v. § 100 BGB an. Ausgehend von einer kritischen Analyse des geltenden Rechts und einer rechtsvergleichenden Umschau geht Erik Röder der Frage nach, unter welchen Voraussetzungen ein Anspruch auf Nutzungsausgleich gewährt und wie er inhaltlich ausgestaltet sein sollte. Auf dieser Grundlage entwickelt er einen Vorschlag für ein rationales Nutzungsausgleichssystem.

This book offers a comprehensive interpretation of Dawn, Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. In this in-depth commentary, Simonin shows that Dawn is fundamental to our understanding of the shake-up of our worldview that began at the end of the nineteenth century and is more relevant than ever in the “age of ‘post’-truth.”

Why have Latin American democracies proven unable to confront the structural inequalities that cripple their economies and stymie social mobility? Brian Palmer-Rubin contends that we may lay the blame on these countries’ systems of interest representation, which exhibit “biased pluralism,” a system in which the demands of organizations representing economic elites—especially large corporations—predominate. A more inclusive model of representation would not only require a more encompassing and empowered set of institutions to represent workers, but would also feature spaces for non-eliteproducers—such as farmers and small-business owners to have a say in sectoral economic policies. With analysis drawing on over 100 interviews, an original survey, and official government data, this book focuses on such organizations and develops an account of biased pluralism in developing countries typified by the centrality of patronage—discretionarily allocated state benefits. Rather than serving as conduits for demand-making about development models, political parties and interest organizations often broker state subsidies or social programs, augmenting the short-term income of beneficiaries, but doing little to improve their long-term economic prospects. When organizations become diverted into patronage politics, the economic demands of the masses go unheard in the policies that most affect their lives, and along the way, their economic interests go unrepresented.

This collection of studies focuses on the translation of the language of art and cultural heritage in a wide variety of text types from the Renaissance to the present, following different theoretical and methodological approaches ranging from corpus linguistics to lexicography, terminology, and translation studies. This book is meant for a wide audience including scholars and students of languages for special purposes, as well as professional translators and experts in the international communication of cultural heritage. These studies have been carried out as part of the Multilingual Cultural Heritage Lexicon research project (Lessico plurilingue dei Beni Culturali). An initiative which first originated at the University of Florence, now involving multiple Italian and international universities, this project is dedicated to compiling textual databases and plurilingual dictionaries through comparable and parallel corpora.

The South African UNESCO world heritage site of Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape became the site of a conflict in 2011, when a coal mine was built in close proximity. The area of tension evolved around matters of conservation of culture, socio-economic development, environmental and nature protection, as well as the generation of identity. Following the conflict and its actors, the author shows the valorisation/valuation of Mapungubwe's resources as well as processes of propertisation against the backdrop of the special obstacles after the end of apartheid. Utilising interdisciplinary research approaches and an understanding of resource as a relational assemblage, the author follows the shifting of discourses between conservation of culture and extraction of resources from the local to the international level. She shows that power of interpretation is bound to time, place and actors when it comes to constituting cultural property.

In a seminal study, Cur cantatur?, Anders Ekenberg examined Carolingian sources for explanations of why the liturgy was sung, rather than spoken. This multidisciplinary volume takes up Ekenberg’s question anew, investigating the interplay of New Testament writings, sacred spaces, biblical interpretation, and reception history of liturgical practices and traditions. Analyses of Greek, Latin, Coptic, Arabic, and Gǝʿǝz sources, as well as of archaeological and epigraphic evidence, illuminate an array of topics, including recent trends in liturgical studies; manuscript variants and liturgical praxis; Ignatius of Antioch’s choral metaphor; baptism in ancient Christian apocrypha; and the significance of late ancient altar veils.

The University of Florence has always maintained very close relationships with the city's cultural institutions: libraries, museums, archives, research institutes. These relationships have been particularly significant with regards to the artistic heritage, even if sometimes the large museums of the city, on the one hand, and the university, on the other, have developed research independently without finding forms of collaboration. However, these relationships have strengthened in recent decades, enhancing the central role of the university in the city's cultural production.

Biotechnology

The here collected contributions relating to the 46th International Conference of the Representation Disciplines Teachers, organized jointly by Sapienza University of Rome, Roma Tre University, and San Raffaele Roma University, aim to offer the scientific community a reflection on the theoretical and methodological aspects related to the concept of èkphrasis, a term that, in the field of representation, concerns descriptive, analogical, and digital activities that generate new knowledge in several areas of application. The Conference aims to place at the center of the discussion an interpretation of the concept of research that, without neglecting an idea of study, protection, and enhancement of environmental and cultural heritage, focuses on the needs of contemporary society and its possible developments, making use of innovative theoretical, methodological, and operational activities, including those characterized by an interdisciplinary approach. According to this interpretation, research can also be seen as a foreshadowing of the definition and testing of experimental proposals aimed at exploring new areas of investigation: this opens up imaginative and utopian perspectives in the relationship between the sciences, the arts, and the disciplines that contribute to common goals, through the experimentation of methods, techniques, and languages for conceiving, prefiguring, designing, and representing.