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The State and the Imperative for Social Policy Reform in Africa
No full textThis concise and interdisciplinary open access volume explores the imperative of social policy reform in Sub-Saharan Africa and the potential nature of such a reform. Its chapters study social policy changes that have been made before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and those that need to be made towards better protecting individuals, families, and communities against exposure to insecurity, poverty, and other vulnerabilities throughout their lifecycle. As argued, for this to happen, the state needs to play a pivotal role in building harmonised and coordinated social policy systems. The chapters also stress the need for a holistic social policy reform that spans key areas including health, education, disability, gender, and migration policies. Besides this, the volume considers the role of automatic stabilisers and novel issues such as the impact of social media. Finally, the volume draws our attention to the respective roles of state actors, national non-state actors, and transnational actors
Public Involvement and Community Engagement in Applied Health and Social Care Research
No full textThe ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online. This edited collection brings academics, researchers and practitioners/public from a range of subject and discipline areas together with a view to providing insight into critical concerns and innovative practices on the process of developing and delivering Public Involvement and Community Engagement (PICE work) in a range of research settings. Delivering powerful reflections and insights from professional groups, marginalised communities and people with lived experience as research partners/participants each chapter will present from “real life” illustrative practice examples and each will engage in a sympathetic critical appraisal of a concern or innovation. Chapters will also provide methodological, theoretical and practice insight into the process of PICE work and each will explore the implications and lessons that can be learned in and across different subject and discipline areas. It is important to recognize here that this is a collection of work that will call for intuitive and informed professional practice that creates space for individuals to reflect on their own practice (involvement) and how they consider, conceptualise, learn, manoeuvre, and position themselves in relation to “doing PICE work”. Bridging a lack of knowledge and concern about the more critical and innovative aspects of PICE work in relation to representation, epistemic injustice, positionality, ethically informed and sustainable practice, this is pioneering reading for those who are interested in or concerned with the ever-pertinent issue of public involvement and community engagement in applied research practice
Building Digital Twins
No full textThis open access book gathers peer-reviewed contributions presented at the Building Digital Twin International Congress (BDTIC), held in Kaunas, Lithuania on May 14-15, 2025, as part of the SmartWins project. Focusing on digital twins to ensure the transition to a smart, sustainable, resilient and carbon neutral built environment, the contributions highlight the latest findings in this fast-growing field, addressing topics such integral components of smart buildings digitised assessment, indoor environmental quality assessment with smart sensors, IoT and digital twins for assessing the performance of smart buildings, and energy assessment of smart buildings in BIM environment
Bridging the Gap Between AI and Reality
No full textThis open access book constitutes revised selected papers from the Second International Conference on Bridging the Gap between AI and Reality, AISoLA 2024, which took place in Crete, Greece, in October/November 2024. The papers included in this book extend the presentation in the AISoLA 2024 on-site proceedings. They focus on the following topics: AI-Assisted Programming; health care approaches using formal methods and AI; responsible and trusted AI: an interdisciplinary perspective; statistical model checking; and verification for neur-symbolic artificial intelligence
Voting and Eligibility Age in Sweden, 1866-1921
No full textThis open access book explores the background to the electoral reforms of 1907-1921 in Sweden, when the voting age was raised from 21 years to 23 for the second chamber and the municipalities, and to 27 for the county councils and the first chamber. This increase in voting ages was unique in an international context. Previous research and contemporary conservative and liberal rhetoric argued that the increase in the voting age was socially and politically neutral. This book questions that view. The liberal and conservative parties launched universal suffrage reforms and raised the voting age to exclude the young, unestablished and unmarried parts of the population. The ambition was to limit the increasing political influence of the cities and the working class. A higher voting and eligibility age would limit the negative effects of universal suffrage. The changes were also an effect of the tension between town and country and the consequence of a long-term demographic transformation with profound effects on the social and pollical structure of the nation
Inclusion Organisation in Universities
No full textThis open access book questions whether universities ‘walk the talk’ when it comes to diversifying their student and staff bodies towards including historically underrepresented social groups in higher education. Universities talk inclusion in terms of formally committing to principles of inclusion, equality and diversity and by joining equality charters and engaging with equality legislation and other inclusion-oriented organisations. Using the case study of the UK university sector, the author notes that whilst the empirical evidence for whether commitments work to make universities more demographically diverse is scant, organisational commitments play a role in helping universities meet the demands of a world where individual empowerment and organisational proactiveness are valued. The book proposes that organisational commitments have a ‘two-way function’ i.e., that of including people in universities (Function 1) and that of including universities in the organisational fields in which they operate (Function 2). A theoretical framework and an empirical research programme for investigating these two functions, the synergies and the tensions between them, is outlined. The book draws on a range of primary and secondary statistical data and on sociological institutionalist and organisational theories to move the discussion surrounding the talk and the walk of inclusion beyond rhetoric. It informs academic research in the fields of sociology, organisational studies, higher education and social inequalities. Additionally, the book offers practitioners a tool to understand and evaluate the perceived gap between the talk and the walk in universities when it comes to pursuing inclusion, but also in other settings where organisations formally commit to societal goals