This anthology brings together a diversity of key texts in the emerging field of Existential Risk Studies. It serves to complement the previous volume The Era of Global Risk: An Introduction to Existential Risk Studies by providing open access to original research and insights in this rapidly evolving field. At its heart, this book highlights the ongoing development of new academic paradigms and theories of change that have emerged from a community of researchers in and around the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. The chapters in this book challenge received notions of human extinction and civilization collapse and seek to chart new paths towards existential security and hope.
When Augustus De Morgan died in 1871, he was described as ‘one of the profoundest mathematicians in the United Kingdom’ and even as ‘the greatest of our mathematicians’. But he was far more than just a mathematician. Because much of his voluminous written output on various subjects was scattered throughout journals and encyclopaedias, the breadth of his interests and contributions has been underappreciated by historians. Now, renewed interest in De Morgan’s life and work has coincided with the digitization of his extensive library, revealing the extent to which he pioneered and influenced the development of not merely mathematics but also logic, astronomy, the history of mathematics, education, and bibliography.
Ce livre, publié par Open Book Publishers, est disponible gratuitement au format PDF. La décision des auteurs de rendre ce livre en libre accès est remarquable, d’autant plus que cela permet d’attribuer à l’ouvrage une importance majeure dans le domaine de la conservation et de la biodiversité en Afrique et par les africains. Je recommande ce manuel aux étudiants africains, au personnel chargé de la conservation, aux responsables politiques et à toute personne intéressée par la conservation de la nature. La distribution gratuite assure un large lectorat parmi les universitaires, chercheurs et autres professionnels africains de l'environnement. Ce volume offre une rare opportunité d'accès à la recherche sur la biodiversité en Afrique, et les informations fournies peuvent être utilisées non seulement pour améliorer la collaboration intra-africaine en matière de recherche mais également pour renforcer les capacités locales et régionales en matière de recherche sur le continent. Cet ouvrage est actuellement la publication la plus complète sur la conservation en Afrique. Il constitue un point de référence pour les spécialistes de l'environnement, les biologistes de la faune et vie sauvage, les conservateurs et les responsables politiques qui travaillent sur l'environnement ainsi que sur la faune et vie sauvage en Afrique ; il est appelé à devenir un classique.
Discussions about the ‘crisis of representative democracy’ have dominated scholarly and public discourse for some time now. But what does this phrase actually entail, and what is its relevance today? How do citizens themselves experience, feel and respond to this ‘crisis’? Bitter-Sweet Democracy grapples with the complexities of these questions in the context of citizens’ relations to politics in Belgium—a nation that has experienced political instability and protests as well as social mobilization and democratic vitality in recent years.
Johannes de Ecclesia was a prominent medieval-era scribe known to have worked for a largely Catalan-speaking clientele in late fourteenth century Bruges.
This short-form book highlights the extent of de Ecclesia’s little-acknowledged influence on the scribal practice of Late Medieval Europe; an in-depth exploration of the scribe’s art, it undertakes a considered analysis of two of his major surviving works, as well as a third manuscript he may have authored. Interrogating de Ecclesia’s under-studied role in the aesthetic development of the prayer book genre during the late fourteenth century and beyond, this book submits evidence for the emergence of bilingual text, a variety of unusual letterforms, and ornamental textual features as product of de Ecclesia’s possible exposure to a wide range of courtly and ecclesiastical texts in as diverse locations as Avignon, Paris, and England.
Characters are of crucial importance for the creation and experience of films and other media. Their cultural significance can hardly be overestimated, but they also raise manifold questions. This book provides a comprehensive theory that guides the analysis and interpretation of characters in four dimensions: as represented beings with physical, psychological, and social characteristics; as artefacts with aesthetic structures; as meaningful symbols; and as symptoms of socio-cultural origins and effects. Integrating insights from film, media, and literary studies as well as philosophy, psychology and sociology, the book offers a variety of means to better understand characters and emotional responses to them.
Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast examines the conservation histories and concerns of one of southern Africa’s most iconic conservation regions: the variously connected ‘Etosha-Kunene’ areas of north-central and north-west Namibia. This cross-disciplinary volume brings together contributions from a Namibian and international group of scholars and conservation practitioners, working on topics ranging from colonial histories to water management, perceptions of ‘wildlife’ and the politics of belonging. Together, these essays confront a critical question: how can the conservation of biodiversity-rich landscapes be reconciled with historical injustices of social exclusion and marginalisation?
The shift from monochrome to coloured motion picture famously provided moviegoers the dazzling opportunity to more fully engage their senses, all the while opening new modes of affective possibilities for filmmakers. Set against the intersection of media studies, emotion theory, biology, and digital humanities, Feeling Colour: Chromatic Embodiment in Film Culture (1950s-1960s) delves into the role colour played in the oft-fraught relationship between cinema and its audiences. This transnational analysis of an extensive range of midcentury cinematography examines the multilayered effects which extend beyond the silver screen, offering a high-level theoretical elaboration and in-depth historical exploration of both experimental and mainstream movies.
Michael Hughes’s groundbreaking new biography provides a vivid history of this notable but hitherto neglected figure of both the political and literary worlds. Based on ten years of research in archives across the world and drawing on sources in multiple languages, this masterful biography explores how Feliks Volkhovskii’s life illuminates broader intellectual and historical questions about the Russian revolutionary movement. It is essential reading for anyone interested in late Imperial Russia and the Russian revolution.
Traditional livelihoods and the ecosystems that sustain them are dying out around the world. This book is a collection of research on the relationships between people, their environment, their expertise and their languages along the ecologically fragile coasts of the Arabian Peninsula.
These studies are the outcome of many years of collaborative fieldwork with local communities in three main regions of southern and eastern Arabia: the Musandam Peninsula, Dhofar and al-Mahrah, and the island of Soqotra. Bringing together oral literature, traditional scientific knowledge, and marine subsistence at the peripheries of the Arabian seaboard, the volume makes a major contribution to the documentation of the indigenous Modern South Arabian languages (MSAL), regional Arabic, and the Kumzari language, as well as to a greater understanding of their speakers’ mastery in harvesting the seas.
Human evolutionary demography is an emerging field blending natural science with social science. This edited volume provides a much-needed, interdisciplinary introduction to the field and highlights cutting-edge research for interested readers and researchers in demography, the evolutionary behavioural sciences, biology, and related disciplines.
Nel saggio Il 'Gabinetto Armonico' di Filippo Bonanni, l'organologa ed etnomusicologa italiana Cristina Ghirardini offre una visione senza pari della metodologia di Bonanni. L’idea di fondo dell’autrice, secondo cui il trattato ci consente di storicizzare l'approccio della critica occidentale alla descrizione degli strumenti musicali, e più specificamente della musica dell'"Altro", è supportata dal suo attento esame delle fonti di Bonanni, che rivela una rete di conoscenze sugli strumenti musicali consolidatasi quasi due secoli prima della nascita della moderna organologia.
Paradoxes, such as the Liar (‘What I am saying is false’), fascinated medieval thinkers. What I said can’t be true, for if it were, it would be false. So it must be false—but then it would be true after all. Attempts at a solution to this contradiction led such thinkers to develop their theories of meaning, reference and truth.
A popular response, until it was attacked at length by Thomas Bradwardine in the early 1320s, was to dismiss such self-reference as impossible: no term (here, ‘false’) could refer to (or in medieval terms, “supposit for”) a whole, e.g., a proposition, of which it is part.
Based on Danielle Navarro’s widely acclaimed and prize-winning book Learning Statistics with R, this elegantly designed textbook offers undergraduate students a thorough and accessible introduction to jamovi, as well as how to get to grips with statistics and data manipulation.
Meta-Xenakis offers readers a comprehensive collection of insights into the history, works and legacy of Iannis Xenakis, one of the twentieth century’s most significant creative figures. It presents a transcontinental engagement with his life and output, focusing as much on the impact of the questions he posed as on the accomplishments of his body of work.
The composer Sir James MacMillan has often referred to music as ‘the most spiritual of the arts’, and for many people, regardless of religious affiliation, this rings true. In listening to music, we are drawn to dimensions of human experience beyond the material. This collection brings together leading scholars from various disciplines – including Christian theology, musicology, and psychology and neuroscience – to interrogate the intimate relationship between music and spirituality.
In only 50 years, from the 1870s to the early 1920s, Japanese people laid the foundations for the country’s post-war rise as a musical as well as an economic power. Meanwhile, new types of popular song, fuelled by the growing global record industry, successfully blended inspiration from the West with musical characteristics perceived as Japanese.
Navigating Our Way to Solutions in Marine Conservation reflects the broader insights and diverse voices revolutionizing marine conservation. Crowder has assembled scholars, practitioners, and experts in their disciplines, who also work across disciplines, creating a network of trans-disciplinary and multi-cultural insights to solve complex problems in marine conservation.
The discipline of world literature has traditionally focused on written literatures, particularly the novel, with little emphasis placed on the unwritten verbal arts, despite the significance of oral literary expressions around the world, in the past as in the present. This volume redresses this gap by putting the discipline of world literature into dialogue with scholarship on orature and folklore. It asks, what does world literature look like if we start from orature, from oral texts and utterances, and from the performances and audiences that support it?
This book features recent research on the psychology of music from the Western Balkans, foregrounding its specific topics, methods, and influences by bringing it into productive conversation with complementary research from Western Europe and further afield.
Rāgs Around the Clock is a rich and vibrant compendium for the discovery and study of North Indian classical music. The theory and practice of rāg are explored through two interlinked resources: a handbook of essays and analyses offering technical, historical, cultural and aesthetic perspectives; and two online albums – Rāg samay cakra and Twilight Rāgs from North India – featuring khayāl singer Vijay Rajput and accompanists.
Leviticus 17–26, an ancient law text known as the Holiness Code, prescribes how particular persons are to behave in concrete, everyday situations. The addressees of the law text must revere their parents, respect the elderly, fear God, take care of their fellow, provide for the sojourner, and so on. The sojourner has his own obligations, as do the priests. Even God is said to behave in various ways towards various persons. Thus, the law text forms an intricate web of persons and interactions.
The short stories of Hector Hugh Munro, better known by his pen name Saki, have remained in print continuously for over a hundred years. This collection is the first of its kind to present his stories as they were originally published in newspapers and magazines, preserving their internal consistency and contemporary references lost in revisions for The Chronicles of Clovis and subsequent collected editions. A trove of annotations and carefully sourced bibliographical information illuminates the Edwardian context behind the thirteen selected stories, of which three (‘Mrs. Pendercoet’s Lost Identity’, ‘The Romance of Business’ and ‘The Optimist’) were only recently rediscovered.
This book contributes presenting examples of artistic research projects that are embedded within Higher Music Performance courses at universities and conservatoires across Europe.
Andrew Hobbs’s introduction and footnotes provide background and analysis of these valuable documents. This full scholarly edition offers a wealth of new information about reporting, freelancing, sub-editing, newspaper ownership and publishing, and illuminates aspects of Victorian periodicals and culture extending far beyond provincial newspapers.
Ukrainian-born Yankev Leshchinsky (1876-1966) was the leading scholarly and journalistic analyst of Eastern European Jewish socioeconomic and political life from the 1920s to the 1950s. Known as “the dean of Jewish sociologists” and “the father of Jewish demography,” Leshchinsky published a series of insightful and moving essays in Yiddish on Polish Jewry between 1927 and 1937. Despite heightened interest in interwar Jewish communities in Poland in recent years, these essays (like most of Leshchinsky’s works) have never been translated into English.
In the Middle Ages half of those who chose the religious life were women, yet historians have overlooked entire generations of educated, feisty, capable and enterprising nuns, condemning them to the dusty silence of the archives. What, though, were their motives for entering a convent and what was their daily routine behind its walls like? How did they think, live and worship, both as individuals and as a community? How did they maintain contact with the families and communities they had left behind? Henrike Lähnemann and Eva Schlotheuber offer readers a vivid insight into the largely unknown lives and work of religious women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Robert Fraser follows in the footsteps of the eighteenth-century musicologist Charles Burney (1726-1814) as he travelled across France, Switzerland and Italy in 1770 reporting on the European musical scene.
This landmark volume features over 45 prominent scholars from all over the world who assess knowledge of international folklore and ethnology in the twenty-first century and ways to enhance global cultural understanding in the future. They cover issues of globalism from the ancient past to the present, migration and diffusion, and comparative genres and traditional practices. It is the most comprehensive reference on international folkloristic and ethnological studies ever produced.
Thinking Blue/Writing Red interrogates contemporary culture across a range of texts, from the pandemic (‘Covid’ and ‘Trump Speak’) to high theory (Melville's narratives) and popular culture (Beyoncé's ‘Formation’ and Super Bowl performance, Twin Peaks , metamodern ‘cli-fi’ films).
In the late middle ages (ca. 1200-1520), both religious and secular people used manuscripts, was regarded as a most precious item. The traces of their use through touching and handling during different rituals such as oath-taking, public reading, and memorializing the dead, is the subject of Kathryn Rudy’s research in Touching Parchment.
This volume represents the first biography of Alice MacDonald Kipling Fleming (1868-1948), known as Trix. Rarely portrayed with sympathy or accuracy in biographies of her famous brother Rudyard, Trix was a talented writer and a memorable character in her own right whose fascinating life was unknown until now. In telling Trix’s story, Barbara Fisher rescues her from the misrepresentations, trivializations, and outright neglect of Rudyard’s many biographers.
Two Priors and a Princess presents a fresh assessment of the manuscript evidence with translations that are easily accessible to non-specialists. It is essential reading for students and scholars of medieval literature, as well as social and religious historians. It will be of particular value to readers interested in medical explanations and mental health in the Middle Ages; in the probative functions and stylistic development of the genres of hagiography and miracle collections; and in the function and definition of the ‘supernatural’ in medieval England.
The manuscript collections of the Bodleian Library contain a corpus of dozens of documents from the archive of Moses ben Judah. A leader of the Jewish community in Alexandria, he was also a prominent businessman and in contact with individuals from Cairo to Sicily. This collection of documents at the Bodleian likely did not emerge from the Cairo Genizah, but from another depository, and appears to have been buried at some point.