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2
The nature observer's handbook: Learning to appreciate our natural world. Globe Pequot Press, 1986.
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Wills, Garry. Outside looking in: Adventures of an observer. Thorndike Press, 2010.
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6
ill, Chewning Randy, ed. Glow-in-the-dark constellations: A field guide for young stargazers. Grosset & Dunlap, 1989.
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Almost everything there is to know: The complete Rudiments of Wisdom from the Observer colour magazine : the antidote to boring reference books. Pyramid Books, 1988.
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Pendziwol, Jean. Attention, dragon!: Consignes à observer en présence d'étrangers (pour enfants et dragons). Éditions Scholastic, 2006.
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Dupré, Sven, Anna Harris, Julia Kursell, Patricia Lulof, and Maartje Stols-Witlox, eds. Reconstruction, Replication and Re-enactment in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Amsterdam University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/9789463728003.
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Performative methods are playing an increasingly prominent role in research into historical production processes, materials, bodily knowledge and sensory skills, and in forms of education and public engagement in classrooms and museums. This book offers, for the first time, sustained, interdisciplinary reflections on performative methods, variously known as Reconstruction, Replication and Re-enactment (RRR) practices across the fields of history of science, archaeology, art history, conservation, musicology and anthropology. Each of these fields has distinct histories, approaches, tools and research questions. Researchers in the historical disciplines have used reconstructions to learn about the materials and practices of the past, while anthropologists and ethnographers have more often studied the re-enactments themselves, participating in these performances as engaged observers. In this book, authors bring their experiences of RRR practices within their discipline into conversation with RRR practices in other disciplines, providing a basis for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization.
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Lovino, Orazio, Sara Migaleddu, and Giovanni Pescarmona, eds. Per un’altra Firenze. Firenze University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.36253/978-88-5518-164-8.
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The Covid-19 pandemic has had unprecedented and dramatic consequences on the cultural activities and the development of tourism in italian cities. In the midst of this scenario, the Department of History, Archeology, Geography, Art, and the Performing Arts (SAGAS) of the University of Florence organized three days of online conferences in which representatives of political and cultural institutions, along with qualified observers, expressed their views on the future of cultural policy after the health crisis. This book is a collection of all those “voices on the future of our heritage” that spoke in this series of videoconferences. This publication aims at ensuring that they can be heard by a wider audience, to start a reflection on the possibility of redesigning Florence’s cultural and touristic offerings. To bring about such a change, it is necessary to think within a new framework, one that aims at integrating itineraries capable of embracing the entire city, its histories, and its communities.
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Borzyh, Stanislav. Theory of the possible. INFRA-M Academic Publishing LLC., 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.12737/1074108.
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In this book, we are talking about a single principle that permeates every organized entity, regardless of what sphere it belongs to. Everywhere and always, and in accordance with the current circumstances, the process of formation, support and regulation of any complex complexes and ensembles is guided and controlled by the concept of the realizable, which postulates that only what is stable and stable will be realized, and everything else will be discarded as untenable and unbalanced. These patterns and patterns can be traced resolutely at all levels of existence. And the universe, and life, and consciousness, and mind, and culture are arranged and assembled according to these schemes, because it is difficult, if possible, for them to be any other. This paper provides an overview of this type of layout in these areas, as well as the theory of the achievable and accessible itself. Using examples and theoretical considerations, it is shown that the configuration of all reliable and long-lasting structures is approximately the same or very similar, because it obeys a single end-to-end logic of the formation of any similar substances, whatever they touch and wherever they are found. In addition, it is demonstrated that if something in this spirit is objectified in practice, then its nature and properties must be fundamentally the same as what we observe around or extremely close to it. Finally, the view is argued and developed, according to which everything consists of matter, is constituted by it, is reduced only to it, including any non-physical phenomena. It is concluded that all the wealth of the world is subject to the same laws of its construction, and all this construction observes the universal rules of the functioning of complex things, no matter what they are aimed at. For all those interested in philosophy.
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Yoler, Yusuf A. Perception of Natural Events by Human Observers : Books I & II (3rd Ed.). 3rd ed. Unipress, 1996.
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Yoler, Yusuf A. Perception of Natural Events by Human Observers: Books I & II & III (4th ed). 4th ed. Unipress, 1998.
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19
Mashhoon, Bahram. Nonlocal Gravity. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198803805.001.0001.
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A postulate of locality permeates through the special and general theories of relativity. First, Lorentz invariance is extended in a pointwise manner to actual, namely, accelerated observers in Minkowski spacetime. This hypothesis of locality is then employed crucially in Einstein’s local principle of equivalence to render observers pointwise inertial in a gravitational field. Field measurements are intrinsically nonlocal, however. To go beyond the locality postulate in Minkowski spacetime, the past history of the accelerated observer must be taken into account in accordance with the Bohr-Rosenfeld principle. The observer in general carries the memory of its past acceleration. The deep connection between inertia and gravitation suggests that gravity could be nonlocal as well and in nonlocal gravity the fading gravitational memory of past events must then be taken into account. Along this line of thought, a classical nonlocal generalization of Einstein’s theory of gravitation has recently been developed. In this nonlocal gravity (NLG) theory, the gravitational field is local, but satisfies a partial integro-differential field equation. A significant observational consequence of this theory is that the nonlocal aspect of gravity appears to simulate dark matter. The implications of NLG are explored in this book for gravitational lensing, gravitational radiation, the gravitational physics of the Solar System and the internal dynamics of nearby galaxies as well as clusters of galaxies. This approach is extended to nonlocal Newtonian cosmology, where the attraction of gravity fades with the expansion of the universe. Thus far only some of the consequences of NLG have been compared with observation.
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Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (October Books). The MIT Press, 1992.
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24
Thompson, C. E. Glow-In-The-Dark Constellations: A Field Guide for Young Stargazers. Tandem Library, 1999.
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25
McCarroll, Christopher. Personal Memory and the Perspectival Mind. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190674267.003.0007.
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This chapter draws together the different strands of the book and it also resolves some outstanding issues, responding to some questions that were left unanswered. If autobiographical memory can involve memories of repeated or more generic events, can the field and observer perspective distinction be usefully applied in these cases? If autobiographical memory becomes semanticized over time, do observer perspectives involve more semantic information? What does remembering from-the-outside tell us about the nature of personal memory and the ways we have of getting outside of ourselves? This chapter answers questions such as these and summarizes the progress made by the book on understanding the nature of personal memory and the perspectival mind.
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I. Waxman, Chaim. Social Change and Halakhic Evolution in American Orthodoxy. Liverpool University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781906764845.001.0001.
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The author of this book is one of the keenest observers of American Jewish society. In illustration of how Orthodoxy is adapting to modernity, the author presents a detailed discussion of halakhic developments, particularly regarding women's greater participation in ritual practices and other areas of communal life. The book shows that the direction of change is not uniform: there is both greater stringency and greater leniency, and it discusses the many reasons for this, both in the Jewish community and in the wider society. Relations between the various sectors of American Orthodoxy over the past several decades are also considered.
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Fridman, Ofer. Russian "Hybrid Warfare". Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190877378.001.0001.
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During the last decade, 'Hybrid Warfare' has become a novel yet controversial term in academic, political and professional military lexicons, intended to suggest some sort of mix between different military and non-military means and methods of confrontation. Enthusiastic discussion of the notion has been undermined by conceptual vagueness and political manipulation, particularly since the onset of the Ukrainian crisis in early 2014, as ideas about Hybrid Warfare engulf Russia and the West, especially in the media. Western defense and political specialists analyzing Russian responses to the crisis have been quick to confirm that Hybrid Warfare is the Kremlin's main strategy in the twenty-first century. But many respected Russian strategists and political observers contend that it is the West that has been waging Hybrid War, Gibridnaya Voyna, since the end of the Cold War. In this highly topical book, Ofer Fridman offers a clear delineation of the conceptual debates about Hybrid Warfare. What leads Russian experts to say that the West is conducting a Gibridnaya Voyna against Russia, and what do they mean by it? Why do Western observers claim that the Kremlin engages in Hybrid Warfare? And, beyond terminology, is this something genuinely new?
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Fratzscher, Marcel. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190676575.003.0001.
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Germany is in a state of euphoria about its economy. The German media and many government officials would have observers believe that the nation’s economy is booming and has become stronger than it ever was. As a prelude to this book’s careful examination of what the author argues is an illusion, this chapter, firstly, provides an introduction to and an overview of Germany’s economic, social, and political strengths and weaknesses; secondly, the chapter looks closely at why Germany has turned from a decisive architect of European integration to a reluctant hegemon that is disillusioned with Europe and its own role therein.
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Ker-Lindsay, James. The Cyprus Problem. Oxford University Press, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/wentk/9780199757169.001.0001.
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For nearly 60 years--from its uprising against British rule in the 1950s, to the bloody civil war between Greek and Turkish Cypriots in the 1960s, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in the 1970s, and the United Nation's ongoing 30-year effort to reunite the island--the tiny Mediterranean nation of Cyprus has taken a disproportionate share of the international spotlight. And while it has been often in the news, accurate and impartial information on the conflict has been nearly impossible to obtain. In The Cyprus Problem, James Ker-Lindsay offers an incisive, even-handed account of the conflict. Ker-Lindsay covers all aspects of the Cyprus problem, placing it in historical context, addressing the situation as it now stands, and looking toward its possible resolution. The book begins with the origins of the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities as well as the other indigenous communities on the island (Maronites, Latin, Armenians, and Gypsies). Ker-Lindsay then examines the tensions that emerged between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots after independence in 1960 and the complex constitutional provisions and international treaties designed to safeguard the new state. He pays special attention to the Turkish invasion in 1974 and the subsequent efforts by the UN and the international community to reunite Cyprus. The book's final two chapters address a host of pressing issues that divide the two Cypriot communities, including key concerns over property, refugee returns, and the repatriation of settlers. Ker-Lindsay concludes by considering whether partition really is the best solution, as many observers increasingly suggest. Written by a leading expert, The Cyprus Problem brings much needed clarity and understanding to a conflict that has confounded observers and participants alike for decades.
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McCarroll, Christopher. Remembering From-the-Outside. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190674267.003.0001.
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This chapter sets out some key issues related to a philosophical analysis of point of view in memory. It does so by looking at examples of psychological, philosophical, and literary accounts of the phenomenon, as well as examples of the author’s own observer perspective memories. The chapter provides an overview of some of the empirical evidence related to visual perspective in memory. Despite these consistent empirical findings, however, a number of doubts and misconceptions about remembering from-the-outside still linger, especially concerning the status of observer perspectives in memory. This chapter outlines some of the skepticism to the possibility of remembering from-the-outside and points to a possible diagnosis of why such skepticism arises. This chapter points to a way of thinking about memory—to be developed through the course of the book—which eases the worries about remembering from-the-outside.
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Mong, Sherry N. Taking Care of Our Own. Cornell University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501751448.001.0001.
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Mixing personal history, interviewee voices, and academic theory from the fields of care work, the sociology of work, medical sociology, and nursing, this book introduces us to the hidden world of family caregivers. Using a multidimensional approach, the book seeks to understand and analyze the types of skilled work that family caregivers do, the processes through which they learn and negotiate new skills, and the meanings that both caregivers and nurses attach to their care work. The book is based on sixty-two in-depth interviews with family caregivers, home and community health-care nurses, and other expert observers to provide a lens through which in-home care processes are analyzed, while also exploring how caregivers learn necessary procedures. Further, the book examines the emotional labor of caregiving, as well as the identities of caregivers and nurses who are key players in the labor process, and gives attention to the ways in which the labor is transferred from medical professionals to family caregivers.
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Hamilton, Tom. Drolleries of the League, 1589‒1598. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198800095.003.0006.
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Following the defeat of the League, L’Estoile kept an increasingly detailed record of his collecting activities. This chapter demonstrates how L’Estoile’s responses to the books he collected were characterized by exchanges in the society surrounding the Palais de Justice, made up of its printers, bookbinders, scribes, office-holders, and the erudite humanists whose legal training drew them into its orbit. It sets out how L’Estoile managed his library, how he read books with erudite, Gallican friends, and then how he inherited and passed them on within his family. At the end of the civil wars, L’Estoile was no passive observer of Parisian erudition, but a key figure in its intellectual culture whose collection attracted visits from friends and family, as well as collectors from across Europe.
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Bindemann, Markus, ed. Forensic Face Matching. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198837749.001.0001.
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Person identification at passport control, at borders, in police investigations, and in criminal trials relies critically on the identity verification of people via image-to-image or person-to-image comparison. While this task is known as ‘facial image comparison’ in forensic settings, it has been studied as ‘unfamiliar face matching’ in cognitive science. This book brings together expertise from practitioners, and academics in psychology and law, to draw together what is currently known about these tasks. It explains the problem of identity impostors and how within-person variability and between-person similarity, due to factors such as image quality, lighting direction, and view, affect identification. A framework to develop a cognitive theory of face matching is offered. The face-matching abilities of untrained lay observers, facial reviewers, facial examiners, and super-recognizers are analysed and contrasted. Individual differences between observers, learning and training for face recognition and face matching, and personnel selection are reviewed. The admissibility criteria of evidence from face matching in legal settings are considered, focusing on aspects such as the requirement of relevance, the prohibition on evidence of opinion, and reliability. Key concepts relevant to automatic face recognition algorithms at airports and in police investigations are explained, such as deep convolutional neural networks, biometrics, and human–computer interaction. Finally, new security threats in the form of hyper-realistic mask disguises are considered, including the impact these have on person identification in applied and laboratory settings.
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Hume, Robert D. Authorship, Publication, Reception (2). Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199580033.003.0002.
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This chapter examines the period between the mid-1680s and 1740, long considered to be the time ‘the rise of the novel’ occurred. Scholars have difficulty separating fiction from factual narrative during this era, as the authors and readers of the time thought of fiction not as the ‘novel’ but rather as a congeries of disparate and overlapping types: ‘history’, ‘letters’, ‘tale’, ‘romance’, ‘secret history’, ‘memoirs’, ‘true relation’, and the like. Only in the 1740s could one find a publishing environment more familiar to modern observers. Moreover, a recurrent theme of this era is price, to which book historians are usually sensitive, but which literary critics have not tended to consider important. Price is a crucial factor in relation to the length of the book, the author's remuneration, the publisher's profit, and the audience that can be reached.
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McCarroll, Christopher. Remembering from the Outside. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190674267.001.0001.
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When recalling events that one personally experienced, one often visualizes the remembered scene as one originally saw it: from an internal visual perspective. Sometimes, however, one sees oneself in the remembered scene: from an external “observer perspective.” In such cases one remembers from-the-outside. This book is about such memories. Remembering from-the-outside is a common yet curious case of personal memory: one views oneself from a perspective one seemingly could not have had at the time of the original event. How can past events be recalled from a detached perspective? How is it that the self is observed? And how can we account for the self-presence of such memories? Indeed, can there be genuine memories recalled from-the-outside? If memory preserves past perceptual content then how can one see oneself from-the-outside in memory? This book disentangles the puzzles posed by remembering from-the-outside. The book develops a dual-faceted approach for thinking about memory, which acknowledges constructive and reconstructive processes at encoding and at retrieval, and it uses this approach to defend the possibility of genuine memories being recalled from-the-outside. In so doing it also elucidates the nature of such memories and sheds light on the nature of personal memory. The book argues that field and observer perspectives are different ways of thinking about a particular past event. Further, by exploring the ways we have of getting outside of ourselves in memory and other cognitive domains, the book sheds light on the nature of our perspectival minds.
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Small, Cathy A., Jason Kordosky, and Ross Moore. The Man in the Dog Park. Cornell University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501748783.001.0001.
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This book offers the reader a rare window into homeless life. Spurred by a personal relationship with a homeless man who became the book's co-author, the author takes a compelling look at what it means and what it takes to be homeless. Interviews and encounters with dozens of homeless people lead us into a world that most have never seen. We travel as an intimate observer into the places that many homeless frequent, including a community shelter, a day labor agency, a panhandling corner, a pawn shop, and a Housing and Urban Development (HUD) housing office. Through these personal stories, we witness the obstacles that homeless people face, and the ingenuity it takes to negotiate life without a home. The book points to the ways that our own cultural assumptions and blind spots are complicit in US homelessness and contribute to the degree of suffering that homeless people face. At the same time, the book shows us how our own sense of connection and compassion can bring us into touch with the actions that will lessen homelessness and bring greater humanity to the experience of those who remain homeless.
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Struck, Peter T. Iamblichus on Divination. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198767206.003.0005.
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This chapter argues that Iamblichus draws a distinction between two opposed types of divination: on the one hand, ‘true’ or ‘divine’ or ‘authentic’ divination, which is anchored solely to divine power; on the other, ‘non-divine’ divination, which is enmeshed in the material world, attributable to lower-order human cognitive power, and akin to what modern observers would call human ‘intuition’. A closer look at the third book of Iamblichus’ De mysteriis not only reveals the philosopher’s particular reshaping of the powers of the divine in new and more remote ways, but also brings into sharper focus the fact that, before him, the notion of human intuition had been left without designation, being referred to under the large and robust Greek cultural form of divination.
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Ram-Prasad, Chakravarthi. Conclusion. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198823629.003.0006.
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The conclusion sums up the book chapter by chapter and observes how each exemplifies the idea of ecological phenomenology. Together they form a wide-ranging depiction of it as a disciplined methodology with the potential to be applied to other genres and other saliences to do with the bodily nature of being human. If the idea of ecological phenomenology as a way of thinking about the nature of experience and its analysis has emerged with any plausibility from this book, then that would be the most encouraging sign that thinking across cultures (rather than always defending why and how one might and should) is comprehensible and worth undertaking.
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Chafer, Tony, and Alexander Keese, eds. Francophone Africa at fifty. Manchester University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9780719089305.001.0001.
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2010 marked the 50<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the ‘Year of Africa’. All France’s colonies in sub-Saharan Africa gained their independence in that year. This book brings together leading scholars from across the globe to review ‘Francophone Africa at Fifty’. It examines continuities from the colonial to the post-colonial period and analyses the diverse and multi-faceted legacy of French colonial rule in sub-Saharan Africa. It also reviews the decolonization of French West Africa in comparative perspective and observes how independence is remembered and commemorated fifty years on.
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Saward, Michael. Democratic Design. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198867227.001.0001.
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The twenty-first century poses serious challenges to democratic ideals and institutions. Democratic Design argues that to respond effectively—to remake and renew democracy––democrats need to think and work in new ways, using a new and versatile toolkit of concepts and practices. Drawing together, and moving beyond, the best of existing theories and models, the author builds, defends, and illustrates the democratic design framework—a new set of tools for politicians, reformers, and observers to explore creative and hybrid forms of democracy. The book encourages idealism and practicality, demanding special attention to the history and politics of diverse countries and contexts. Bringing theory and practice into close conversation, the chapter fuses insights of design thinking and the future of politics and government, showing how a comprehensive and robust approach to rethinking democratic governance is both feasible and essential.
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Kerby, Lauren R. Saving History. University of North Carolina Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469658773.001.0001.
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Millions of tourists visit Washington, D.C., every year, but for some the experience is about much more than sightseeing. Lauren R. Kerby’s lively book takes readers onto tour buses and explores the world of Christian heritage tourism. These expeditions visit the same attractions as their secular counterparts—Capitol Hill, the Washington Monument, the war memorials, and much more—but the white evangelicals who flock to the tours are searching for evidence that America was founded as a Christian nation. The tours preach a historical jeremiad that resonates far beyond Washington. White evangelicals across the United States tell stories of the nation’s Christian origins, its subsequent fall into moral and spiritual corruption, and its need for repentance and return to founding principles. This vision of American history, Kerby finds, is white evangelicals’ most powerful political resource—it allows them to shapeshift between the roles of faithful patriots and persecuted outsiders. In an era when white evangelicals’ political commitments baffle many observers, this book offers a key for understanding how they continually reimagine the American story and their own place in it.
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Zbíral, Robert, ed. The Cradle of Laws. Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5771/9783748905899.
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In almost all states, laws (statutes) serve as the most important instruments to prompt social, economic or institutional change. Parliaments traditionally used to be considered as the locus of law-making, yet observers of politics pointed out that it had rather been the government (executive) that affects the outputs of the legislative game more prominently. Statistical data reveal that in most cases the governmental bills submitted to parliaments are adopted unchanged. Despite that little attention has been aimed at the previous phase of the legislative process: drafting and negotiating of bills within the executives. This book narrows the knowledge gap and analyse in detail who and how prepare the bills in their “cradle”. Six countries of Central Europe were selected for the analysis to provide comparable knowledge. The chapters, written by experienced scholars with local knowledge, have both descriptive and analytical dimensions and evaluate also practical functioning of the system in each state.
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Mangold, Michael, Peter Weibel, and Julie Woletz, eds. Vom Betrachten zum Gestalten. Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5771/9783845296968.
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As a consequence of the digital revolution, the tasks and challenges facing museums also have to be redefined. In order to cope with these issues constructively, explanations of the basic theoretical concepts in this respect are equally as necessary as the development of new strategies and models of communication by museums seen against the backdrop of critical reflections on their day-to-day workings. As media use has become commonplace in daily life, people’s expectations of museums have also changed. Visitors to museums are becoming increasingly used to being involved in them as active contributors rather than merely as passive observers, which means that appropriate and attractive ways of meeting these expectations have to be found in line with the educational role of museums. Based on theories of art, culture, education and civilisation, the second and substantially updated edition of this book therefore presents innovative communication strategies from the day-to-day workings of museums.
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Tabatabai, Ariane M. No Conquest, No Defeat. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197534601.001.0001.
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In early 2019, the Islamic Republic of Iran marked its fortieth anniversary, despite decades of isolation, political pressure, sanctions and war. Observers of its security policies continue to try and make sense of this unlikely endurance. Though there are significant disagreements about the Islamic Republic’s thinking and intentions, virtually everyone agrees that its policies are fundamentally different from those pursued by their monarchical predecessors. No Conquest, No Defeat offers a historically grounded overview of Iranian national security. Tabatabai argues that Iranian strategic thinking is perhaps best characterised by its dynamic yet resilient nature, one that is continually evolving and whose foundations were laid out decades ago. To understand Iran’s national security thinking and policies today, one must examine them in their historical context. As the Islamic Republic enters its fifth decade, this book sheds new light on Iran’s controversial nuclear and missile programmes, and its involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.
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Blake, Jonathan S. Contentious Rituals. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190915582.001.0001.
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Why do people participate in controversial symbolic events that drive wedges between groups and occasionally spark violence? This book examines this question through an in-depth case study of Northern Ireland. Protestant organizations perform over 2,500 parades across Northern Ireland each year. Protestants tend to see the parades as festive occasions that celebrate Protestant history and culture. Catholics, however, tend to see them as hateful, intimidating, and triumphalist. As a result, parades have been a major source of conflict in the years since the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. This book examines why, given the often negative consequences, people choose to participate in these parades. Drawing on theories from the study of contentious politics and the study of ritual, the book argues that paraders are more interested in the benefits intrinsic to participation in a communal ritual than the external consequences of their action. The book presents analysis of original quantitative and qualitative data to support this argument and to test it against prominent alternative explanations. Interview, survey, and ethnographic data are also used to explore issues central to parade participation, including identity expression, commemoration, tradition, the pleasures of participation, and communicating a message to outside audiences. The book additionally examines a paradox at the center of parading: while most observers see parades as political events, the participants do not. Altogether, the book offers a new perspective on politics and culture in the aftermath of ethnic violence.
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Kleege, Georgina. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190604356.003.0001.
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The introduction gives an overview of the book as a whole with a summary of all the chapters. The author positions herself in relation to the topic as the blind daughter of two visual artists, therefore both a potential consumer of museum access programs, while simultaneously critical of their shortcomings. She observes that museum access programs typically seem designed either for blind children or else for blind adults who have led such isolated lives that they are unfamiliar with terms associated with vision and visual art. The author also speculates on how this study of one minority—blind and visually impaired people—and one cultural site—the art museum—could serve as a model for future inquiry.
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Mulqueen, John. 'An Alien Ideology'. Liverpool University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781789620641.001.0001.
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This book focuses on the strand of the Irish republican left which followed the ‘alien ideology’ of Soviet-inspired Marxism. Moscow-led communism had few adherents in Ireland, but Irish and British officials were concerned about the possibility that communists could infiltrate the republican movement, the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Another concern arose for British and American observers from 1969: would the Soviets resist the temptation to meddle during the Northern Ireland Troubles and cause trouble for Britain as a geo-political crisis unfolded? The book considers questions arising from the involvement of left-wing republicans, and what became the Official republican movement, in events before and during the early years of the Troubles. Could Ireland’s communists and left-wing republicans be viewed as strategic allies of Moscow who might create an ‘Irish Cuba’? The book examines another question: could a Marxist party with a parliamentary presence in the militarily-neutral Irish state – the Workers’ Party (WP) – be useful to the Soviets during the 1980s? This book, based on original sources rather than interviews, is significant in that it analyses the perspectives of the various governments concerned with subversion in Ireland. This is a study of perceptions. The book concludes that the Soviet Union had been happy to exploit the Troubles in its Cold War propaganda, but, excepting supplying arms to the Official IRA, it did not seek to maximise difficulties whenever it could in Ireland, north or south.
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Parker, John. In My Time of Dying. Princeton University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691193151.001.0001.
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This book is the first detailed history of death and the dead in Africa south of the Sahara. Focusing on a region that is now present-day Ghana, the book explores mortuary cultures and the relationship between the living and the dead over a 400-year period spanning the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. The book considers many questions from the African historical perspective, including why people die and where they go after death, how the dead are buried and mourned to ensure they continue to work for the benefit of the living, and how perceptions and experiences of death and the ends of life have changed over time. From exuberant funeral celebrations encountered by seventeenth-century observers to the brilliantly conceived designer coffins of the late twentieth century, the book shows that the peoples of Ghana have developed one of the world's most vibrant cultures of death. The book explores the unfolding background of that culture through a diverse range of issues, such as the symbolic power of mortal remains and the dominion of hallowed ancestors, as well as the problem of bad deaths, vile bodies, and vengeful ghosts. The book reconstructs a vast timeline of death and the dead, from the era of the slave trade to the coming of Christianity and colonial rule to the rise of the modern postcolonial nation. With an array of written and oral sources, the book richly adds to an understanding of how the dead continue to weigh on the shoulders of the living.
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Gleig, Ann. American Dharma. Yale University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300215809.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
The past couple of decades have witnessed Buddhist communities both continuing the modernization of Buddhism and questioning some of its limitations. This fascinating portrait of a rapidly changing religious landscape illuminates the aspirations and struggles of younger North American Buddhists during a period that the book identifies as a distinct stage in the assimilation of Buddhism to the West. The author observes both the emergence of new innovative forms of deinstitutionalized Buddhism that blur the boundaries between the religious and secular, and a revalorization of traditional elements of Buddhism such as ethics and community that were discarded in the modernization process. Based on extensive ethnographic and textual research, the book ranges from mindfulness debates in the Vipassana network to the sex scandals in American Zen, while exploring issues around racial diversity and social justice, the impact of new technologies, and generational differences between baby boomer, Gen X, and millennial teachers.
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Hodson, Sara S. The People of the Abyss. Edited by Jay Williams. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199315178.013.16.
Full textAbstract:
The People of the Abyss is Jack London’s study of the poor in the city of London, England, in 1902. This essay places the book in the context of earlier poverty studies by Joseph Tuckerman, Henry Mayhew, William Booth, Charles Loring Brace, Jacob Riis, Robert Blatchford, George Hawes, and others. The essay then considers four tensions within London’s book: between London’s roles as both observer and participant, between his affinity for the lower classes of his own origin and his new status as a successful writer and middle-class family man, between his feelings of both revulsion and sympathy for the poor, and between the docile and subservient poor and those who are spirited or rebellious in the face of charity. The interplay of these tensions enables London to portray vividly and examine fully the lives of the poor who inhabit the East End of the city of London.