This book presents methods to evaluate sustainable development using economic tools. The focus on sustainable development takes the reader beyond economic growth to encompass inclusion, environmental stewardship and good governance. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a framework for outcomes. In illustrating the SDGs, the book employs three evaluation approaches: impact evaluatio…
This open access book covers comprehensive but fundamental principles and concepts of disaster and accident prevention and mitigation, countermeasures, and recovery from disasters or accidents including treatment and care of the victims. Safety and security problems in our society involve not only engineering but also social, legal, economic, cultural, and psychological issues. The enhancement …
This Special Issue is both experimental and comparative. It appropriates diverse disciplinary idioms from the distinctive fields our authors inhabit to focus on the ever-recurrent theme of the individual and the study of religion. Here the familiar topics of "belief", "practice" and "identity" come into conversation with each other from scholars in anthropology, sociology, African-American hist…
Digital technology already has permeated the physical world. Devices such as smartphones, tablets or wearables and online venues like virtual worlds and social networks have penetrated every part of our lives. The contributions to this volume apply innovative forms of ethnographic research to the digital realm. They examine the emergence of new online communities around Greenlandic news blogs o…
Per Thomas Andersen analyzes literary works by Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Hamsun, J.P. Jacobsen, Schoenberg and Knausgaard. Based on perspectives from literary studies, philosophy, cognitive psychology, neurobiology and media studies, professor Andersen analyzes characters in the novels, temporal and spatial aspects of the narratives, sources of emotional impulses, and different ways in w…
What constitutes a healthy diet? Mainstream media and advertisers would like you to think that the answer to this question is complicated and controversial. But science, fortunately, tells us otherwise. A Conversation about Healthy Eating brings together all the relevant science about healthy eating in one place, and it’s exactly that – a conversation; an informal discussion between a scien…
The computational theory of mind, which views the brain as an information processor that operates on cognitive representations, is central to modern cognitive psychology and is the dominant perspective from which brain function is conceptualized and studied. Evolutionary Psychology (EP) is the application of evolutionary theory to understanding human behaviour and cognition. Unlike other core P…
This volume focuses on the form of literary writing that is emerging from the lifeworld of young people. The »style« which is becoming increasingly evident in this context is innovative, and sometimes even avant-garde.
How to Read a Folktale offers the first English translation of Ibonia, a spellbinding tale of old Madagascar. Ibonia is a folktale on epic scale. Much of its plot sounds familiar: a powerful royal hero attempts to rescue his betrothed from an evil adversary and, after a series of tests and duels, he and his lover are joyfully united with a marriage that affirms the royal lineage. These fairytal…
Character can be defined as self-aware knowledge that helps the individual to set goals, values and ethical principles (Cloninger, 2004). This meta-cognitive dimension of human personality involves ‘Theory of Mind’, and is positively related to measures of well-being, mental health, and constructive behavior patterns. Research from at least three different fields, cultural (Shweder, Much, M…
In the field of higher education research, one of the most fascinating observations is the consistent and permanent expansion of higher education systems worldwide since the end of the Second World War. Undoubtedly, the predominant approach to address these developments has been through quantitative analysis, as well as international comparisons. The following work examines the particularities …
For 50 years, educator and sociologist Geoff Whitty resolutely pursued social justice through education, first as a classroom teacher and ultimately as the Director of the Institute of Education in London. The essays in this volume - written by some of the most influential authors in the sociology of education and critical policy studies - take Whitty’s work as the starting point from which t…
Islam in the Post-Secular Society: Religion, Secularity and the Antagonism of Recalcitrant Faith critically examines the unique challenges facing Muslims in Europe and North America. From the philosophical perspective of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory, this book attempts not only to diagnose the current problems stemming from a marginalization of Islam in the secular West, but also to…
his is a thoroughly updated and revised edition of a popular classic of modern anthropology. Avoiding geographical bias, the authors provide summaries of ‘Enlightenment’, ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’ anthropology, from the cultural theories of Morgan and Taylor to the often neglected contributions of German scholars. The ambiguous relationship between anthropology and national culture…
The Erotics of History challenges long-standing notions of sexuality as stable and context-free—as something that individuals discover about themselves. Rather, Donald L. Donham argues that historical circumstance, local social pressure, and the cultural construction of much beyond sex condition the erotic. Donham makes this argument in relation to the centuries-old conversation on the fetish…
Contemporary communication puts us not only in conversation with one another but also with our machinery. Machine communication—to communicate not just via but also with machines—is therefore the focus of this volume. Diving into digital communications history, Finn Brunton brings to the fore the alienness of computational communication by looking at network timekeeping, automated trolling,…
The practice of everyday life in Tana Toraja (South Sulawesi, Indonesia) is structured by a series of public events, of which funerals are the most important. Even after Indonesia was hit by an economic crisis in the late 1990s, thousands of extravagant funeral ceremonies, requiring huge expenditures, were still organized each year. To understand the paradoxes and complexities of Torajan liveli…
"Anglo-Saxon ‘things’ could talk. Nonhuman voices leap out from the Exeter Book Riddles, telling us how they were made or how they behave. The Franks Casket is a box of bone that alludes to its former fate as a whale that swam aground onto the shingle, and the Ruthwell monument is a stone column that speaks as if it were living wood, or a wounded body. In this book, James Paz uncovers the v…
Based on the words and experiences of the people involved, this book tells the story of the community arts movement in the UK, and, through a series of essays, assesses its influence on present day participatory arts practices. Part I offers the first comprehensive account of the movement, its history, rationale and modes of working in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales; Part II brin…
Thinking Media Aesthetics investigates the field between media studies and the aesthetic disciplines. It presents an interdisciplinary program for aesthetic analysis and theoretical reflection. It stages a conversation around basic concepts in the field, like «medium» and «media», and about how we might best go about studying these terms.