DOAB - Directory of Open Access Books
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French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn
No full textFrench Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn traces a genealogy of thinking and writing about technology, which takes us from the French avant-gardes to the contemporary ‘nonhuman turn’ in Anglo-American theory via the Surrealists, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze. Tracking the unruly transition from Catholic vocabularies of grace, potentiality, and actuality to the modern and contemporary secular lexicon of agency, virtuality, and affect, this book explores technology as a source of subject matter and conceptual metaphors, but also probes how ideas and words are modes of technicity through which we shape and reshape the world. Fusing literature, philosophy, and theology, it offers readers new contexts – and questions – for the egalitarian ontological commitments of contemporary post- and nonhuman thinking
Palaeontology in Public
No full textSince the establishment of concepts of deep time in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, palaeontology has been one of the most high-profile sciences. Dinosaurs, mammoths, human ancestors and other lost creatures from Earth’s history are some of the most prominent icons of science, and are essential for our understanding of nature and time. Palaeontology and its practitioners have had a huge impact on public understandings of science, despite their often precarious and unsteady position within scientific institutions and networks.
Palaeontology in Public considers the connections between palaeontology and public culture across the past two centuries. In so doing, it explores how these public dimensions have been crucial to the development of palaeontology, and indeed how they conditioned wider views of science, nature, the environment, time and the world. The book provides a history of vertebrate palaeontology through a series of compelling case studies. Dinosaurs feature, of course, including Spinosaurus, Winsor McCay’s ‘Gertie the Dinosaur’ and the creatures of Jurassic Park and The Lost World. But there are also the small mammals of the Mesozoic, South American Glyptodons, and human ancestors like Neanderthals and Australopithecines. This book shows how palaeontology is defined by its relationship with public audiences and how this connection is central to our vision of the past and future of the Earth and its inhabitants.
Praise for Palaeontology in Public
‘Surely there is a one-way traffic from science to the media? In this remarkable collection of papers, Chris Manias and the authors explore palaeontological themes from the origin of life to interpretations of human culture, through dinosaurs (of course) and many other fossil taxa.’
Michael J. Benton OBE, FRS, FRSE, University of Bristol
‘Palaeontology is a strange science, at times arcane yet so accessible that many children dream of hunting for dinosaurs among sun-beaten badlands. Palaeontology in Public digs into the overlap of these two realms, and offers a much-needed exploration of how prehistoric beings emerge from stone and enter our collective imagination.’
Riley Black, author of Last Days of the Dinosaurs and When the Earth Was Green
‘In this sweeping multi-authored compilation, reviews consider how ancient animals have been presented to the public, for good or for ill. From Lucy the australopithecine to Gertie the dinosaur and Jurassic Park, never before has so much scholarly content on palaeontology’s popularisation been amassed in a single volume.’
Darren Naish, vertebrate palaeontologist and autho
Citizens’ Observatories on Geohazards
No full textThis open access book shows how citizens' involvement in geohazard risks prevention can strengthen regional and national risk management systems, to demonstrate a new form of engagement between civil society and local authorities. The lessons learned in in this book, where the local communities were engaged to actively participate in risk preparedness and monitoring and incorporate local capacities into risk management systems, are reported. A cooperation and resource platform on geohazards risk assessment, preparedness, mitigation, and prevention was used as interface between the citizens and the risk management system. A more efficient uptake of Copernicus data, products, and services on regional level is discussed, to improve geohazard risk prevention and resilience to natural disasters. Recommendations for the creation of future observatories in response to the widest range of hazards (both natural and human-induced) in Europe and in the world are provided
The Art of Becoming Infinite
No full textMou Zongsan is arguably the most important Chinese philosopher of the twentieth century. This work delves into the philosopher's exploration of self and subjectivity, setting Mou Zongsan’s theories against Western paradigms. Mou contrasts Western ‘horizontal’ model, based on the separation of subject and object, and aimed at cognitive enhancement, with the ‘vertical’ view dominant in the Confucian and Daoist tradition. The vertical model has, at its core, a practical-performative interpretation of the subject, based on the moral self-cultivation. This spiritual cultivation enables the finite human being to ‘become infinite,’ embodying the original unlimited moral mind that constitutes the Self and the universe. In addressing fundamental questions of self-consciousness and self-identity, the book contextualizes Mou's philosophy within contemporary discussions in neuroscience and cognitive science. By placing Mou's ideas in dialogue with Western thought—examining thinkers like Husserl, Kant, Hegel, and Lévinas—as well as with Daoist and Confucian vision of mind, this work opens a pathway to understanding selfhood beyond purely epistemological boundaries. This book will be of interest to readers and scholars interested in the contemporary debate about mind and the Self, as well as those intrigued by the new horizons opened by a cross-cultural Western-Chinese approach to subjectivity
Erwachsene Menschen in prekären Lebenslagen
No full textDas vorliegende Werk ist der zweite Teil einer Buchreihe, in der verschiedene prekäre Lebenslagen mit unterschiedlichen Lebensphasen in Relation gesetzt werden. Die spezifischen Bewältigungsaufgaben im Erwachsenenalter der betroffenen Menschen werden aus sozialarbeiterischer Perspektive sowohl theoretisch als auch praxisorientiert gerahmt, um eine Verbindung von prekären Lebensverhältnissen im Erwachsenenalter mit entsprechenden Handlungsfeldern der Sozialen Arbeit herzustellen. Auf diese Weise entstehen vielfältige und höchst unterschiedliche Einblicke ins Themenfeld, die in und von der Sozialen Arbeit genutzt werden können
Queer leben im Pfarramt
No full textDer Umgang mit Sexualität gilt als Schlüsselfaktor für die Anschlussfähigkeit der Kirche in der gegenwärtigen Gesellschaft. Ein wesentlicher Aspekt ist dabei die öffentliche Wahrnehmung vielfältiger Lebensformen. Im Pfarramt verdichtet sich die Frage nach der Vereinbarkeit von Beruf und Privatleben. Wie wirken sich Geschlecht und Begehren von queeren Pfarrpersonen auf deren Amtsverständnis aus? Florence Häneke analysiert die Zusammenhänge von Identität und Amt erstmals aus der Innenperspektive anhand von narrativen Interviews mit evangelischen Pfarrer*innen aus Ost- und Westdeutschland. Die daraus entwickelte Theorie erweitert die Diskussion um ein zukunftsfähiges Amtsverständnis und fragt nach Möglichkeiten einer pluralitätsfähigen Kirche
Chapter 1 To “Make a Fuss”
No full textThis innovative volume analyzes the historical entanglement of gender, technosciences, and government/governance. Situated at the crossroad of women and gender studies, science and technology studies, and political sociology, this volume shows the ever‑accumulating gendered mechanisms that have determined the careers of scientific women and their access to power positions. It underlines on different scales—from the lab to international organizations or states—how the masculine culture of technoscientific practices has assigned women to subaltern institutional positions, while social practices of legitimization and recognition ended up granting some women access to leadership positions outside of institutions. With a broad geographic, political, and disciplinary scope, the contributors draw on a variety of new sources including interviews, private collections, and archives to examine the institutions, structures, and policies that shaped the technosciences, as well as the individuals who developed practices and environments that gained agency for themselves and their contemporaries. This book will be of interest to students and scholars alike interested in women and gender studies, political studies, STS, history, and sociology of science and technology
Practical Machine Learning
No full textThe book provides an accessible, comprehensive introduction for beginners to machine learning, equipping them with the fundamental skills and techniques essential for this field. It enables beginners to construct practical, real-world solutions powered by machine learning across diverse application domains. It demonstrates the fundamental techniques involved in data collection, integration, cleansing, transformation, development, and deployment of machine learning models. This book emphasizes the importance of integrating responsible and explainable AI into machine learning models, ensuring these principles are prioritized rather than treated as an afterthought. To support learning, this book also offers information on accessing additional machine learning resources such as datasets, libraries, pre-trained models, and tools for tracking machine learning models. This is a core resource for students and instructors of machine learning and data science looking for a beginner-friendly material which offers real-world applications and takes ethical discussions into account. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license
Time in Education Policy Transfer
No full textThis open access book investigates a topic underexplored in policy transfer: time. Drawing on well-known theories from comparative education, public policy studies, political science, and sociology, but written in an easy-to-understand language, the author discusses seven temporalities of policy transfer: historical period, future, sequence, timing, lifespan, age, and tempo. The temporal dimension helps us understand when the current school reform, known as the school-autonomy-with-accountability reform, developed into a global script, why it conquered the globe, and how it was selectively adopted and translated into each local context. Also, for the first time in this book, the author demonstrates what exactly diffused and what “stuck,” that is, which features of the reform were eventually institutionalized. Internationally renowned for her seminal work on policy borrowing, the author systematically applies a comparative, transnational, and global perspective to capture the role of the OECD and the World Bank in advancing and accelerating the reform’s worldwide diffusion
Authoritarian Populism and the Challenges for News Journalism
No full textAuthoritarian Populism and the Challenges for News Journalism: A Discourse Approach is a cutting‑edge study of the practices of news journalism against the background of surging authoritarian populism. This book traces key challenges for news journalism when reporting on authoritarian populism or on topics (such as immigration and terrorism) that are typically leveraged by far‑right actors and platforms as a way of attracting media attention and boosting their popularity with national electorates. It also offers in‑depth analyses of how these challenges are responded to by news journalists in the actual, day‑to‑day practices of news production, as evidenced in the discourse of news. By placing qualitative, critical analysis of discourse at the heart of the systematic inquiry into authoritarian populism in the news media, this book applies a broad methodological framework for studying (a) political performances and their mediated representations, (b) the complex and, often contradictory, normalizing processes at work in the news media, and (c) the attendant challenges and critical tasks for contemporary news journalism. Based on detailed analyses of political and news discourse in various European contexts, and in the US, spanning a decade (2014–2024), this book makes a timely and relevant contribution – as liberal democracies could be facing a new turning point in the global rise of authoritarian populism. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of journalism, media studies, political communication, political science, sociology, and discourse studies who are interested in authoritarian and far‑right populism, related discourses of nationalism and xenophobia, populist communication, and the role of news media and journalism. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license