Open Access Books

The diversification and politicisation of the mass media within itself and also societal pressure created by the mass media at a social level have caused changes to our social structure. The first change began with the contextual changes to the mass media, and this change led to visible changes in societies. That transformation has almost erased the distinction between the private and the public spheres, especially as social media has entered our lives. Now, things that occur in the private sphere are easily transported into the public sphere and others’ private spheres. Therefore, the virtual public sphere has emerged through social media and all other practices on the internet. It appears that activist movements have either been founded in the cyberworld or that existing activist movements have been strengthened by finding supporters via social media and blogs. The public sphere and activist movements that come into existence in the virtual environment, such as social media, are a new experience in terms of societies, and they are the sign of how the future will be shaped. It is obvious that social media is now an integral part of our daily lives. It is a place where political and secular ideas spread. In this social area each individual has the opportunity to make political statements as if they were standing in an agora. Shared content represents the position within the virtual life that individuals have built for themselves. This study defines the virtual public sphere together with virtual activism and the network society in the light of the public sphere – private sphere debates.

This study is the first to analyse the manifold interrelations between armed conflicts and the human and natural environments both historically and sociologically. While most research to date has dealt with this topic primarily with regard to environmental destruction caused by acts of war or armament in peacetime, this publication goes one step further by highlighting the historical changes to this complex interrelationship with concrete examples: from the Second World War in Europe and Asia via the classic proxy war in Vietnam to the current asymmetric wars in South Asia. At the same time, it focuses on systematic questions: How do environments influence armed conflicts? How do wars change environments? And how do complete ‘war landscapes’ (warscapes) emerge, in which war and militarisation permanently change the relations between people and their environment?

With contributions by:

Detlef Briesen, Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud, David Pickus, Sarada Prasanna Das, Nguyen Thi Hanh, Nguyen Thi Thuy Hang, Dao Duc Thuan/Nguyen Van Ngoc, Tim Kaiser, Dam Thi Phuong Thuy/Nguyen Van Bac, Brigitte Sébastia, Manish Tiwari, Babu Rangaiah/Kumaresan Raja, Martin Dinges.

This book explains how mathematical tools can be used to solve problems in signal processing. Assuming an advanced undergraduate- or graduate-level understanding of mathematics, this second edition contains new chapters on convolution and the vector DFT, plane-wave propagation, and the BLUE and Kalman filters. It expands the material on Fourier analysis to three new chapters to provide additional background information, presents real-world examples of applications that demonstrate how mathematics is used in remote sensing, and includes robust appendices and problems for classroom use.

The history of the novel is also a history of shifting views of the value of novel reading. This study investigates how novels themselves participate in this development by featuring reading as a multidimensional cultural practice. English novels about obsessive reading, written in times of medial transition, serve as test cases for a model that brings together analyses of form and content.

The year 2014 saw the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s downfall – and the restauration of the French monarchy under the house of Bourbon. With this as a starting point, Volker Sellin shows how the European monarchies restored and prolonged their reigns by giving their countries constitutions. This new angle results in an astonishing history of the 19th century in Europe from Spain to Russia.

The well-known challenges of international migration have triggered new departures in academic approaches, with ‘diaspora studies’ evolving as an interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary field of study. Its emerging methodology shares concerns with another interdisciplinary field, the study of the relations between law and literature, which focuses on the ways in which the two cultural practices of law and literature mutually negotiate each other and on the question after the ontological commensurability of the domains. This volume offers, for the first time, an attempt to provide an interface between these overlapping interdisciplinary endeavours of literary studies, legal studies, and diaspora studies. In doing so, it explores new approaches and invites new perspectives on diasporas, migration and the disciplines that study them, hopefull also adding to the cultural resources of coping with a swiftly changing social landscape in a globalizing world.

It is estimated that only a small fraction, less than 1 per cent, of ancient literature has survived to the present day. The role of Christian authorities in the active suppression and destruction of books in Late Antiquity has received surprisingly little sustained consideration by academics. In an approach that presents evidence for the role played by Christian institutions, writers and saints, this book analyses a broad range of literary and legal sources, some of which have hitherto been little studied. Paying special attention to the problem of which genres and book types were likely to be targeted, the author argues that in addition to heretical, magical, astrological and anti-Christian books, other less obviously subversive categories of literature were also vulnerable to destruction, censorship or suppression through prohibition of the copying of manuscripts. These include texts from materialistic philosophical traditions, texts which were to become the basis for modern philosophy and science. This book examines how Christian authorities, theologians and ideologues suppressed ancient texts and associated ideas at a time of fundamental transformation in the late classical world.

This is the first monograph-length study that charts the coercive diplomacy of the administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford as practised against their British ally in order to persuade Edward Heath’s government to follow a more amenable course throughout the ‘Year of Europe’ and to convince Harold Wilson’s governments to lessen the severity of proposed defence cuts. Such diplomacy proved effective against Heath but rather less so against Wilson. It is argued that relations between the two sides were often strained, indeed, to the extent that the most ‘special’ elements of the relationship were suspended. Yet, the relationship also witnessed considerable co-operation. This book offers new perspectives on US and UK policy towards British membership of the European Economic Community; demonstrates how US détente policies created strain; reveals the temporary shutdown of US-UK intelligence and nuclear co-operation, and re-evaluates the US-UK relationship throughout the IMF Crisis.

Die migrantische Mobilität im Sommer 2015 hat die europäische Flüchtlingspolitik auf den Kopf gestellt. Rechte und konservative Kräfte wurden bestärkt, aber auch die Solidaritätserfahrungen hallen immer noch nach. Wie steht es nun um die Kämpfe der Migration? Welche Kräfte haben sich durchgesetzt und welche Verschiebungen haben sich diskursiv und politisch ergeben? Und was bedeutet dies für emanzipatorische, pro-migrantische Perspektiven? Die Forschungsgruppe »Beyond Summer 15« diskutiert diese Transformation des Migrationsregimes und zeigt u.a. in den Bereichen Recht, öffentliche Debatten, zivilgesellschaftliche Interventionen und Arbeitsmarkt auf, wie um Migration gerungen wird.

Die Brautgabe (mahr) ist eine Schlüsselfigur des klassischen islamischen Eherechts, die von allen islamischen Ländern rezipiert worden ist. Nadjma Yassari untersucht die Grundlagen dieses Rechtsinstituts, verfolgt ihre historische Entwicklung und kontextualisiert sie im Familienvermögensrecht von Ägypten, Iran, Pakistan und Tunesien. Obwohl die vermögensrechtlichen Beziehungen zwischen den Ehegatten stetig fortentwickelt worden sind, ist die Ausstrahlungskraft dieser Reformen schwach: Der Grundsatz der nachehelichen Solidarität ist kaum gefestigt; nennenswerte soziale Transferleistungen bestehen nicht. Die Brautgabe spielt somit weiterhin eine wichtige Rolle bei der Schließung der bestehenden Versorgungslücken. Diese Erkenntnis bildet in der Folge die Grundlage für eine Verortung der Brautgabe im Kollisionsrecht sowie für ihre Integration in das deutsche Familienrecht.

Die nicht-hegemonial verankerte EU-Interventionsstaatlichkeit im Herrschaftsmodus der (Selbst-)Disziplinierung stellt die Akteur*innen in der Europäischen Union vor große Herausforderungen. Johannes Gerken widmet sich, aufbauend auf den Traditionslinien kritischer Europaforschung, dem durch die Euro-Krise induzierten EU-Staatlichkeitsausbau und entwickelt ein eigenes begriffliches Verständnis der EU-Staatlichkeit. Auf Grundlage einer historisch-materialistischen Staatlichkeitsanalyse präsentiert er eine Einordnung der Politik zur Bewältigung der Euro-Krise in den Gesamtzusammenhang der EU-Staatlichkeitsgenese.

Die Ökologie warnt vor der Erderwärmung, die Soziologie vor sozialer Ungleichheit: beides bedroht das Überleben der kommenden Generationen. Alexander von Pechmann behandelt aus rechtsphilosophischer Perspektive die Frage, welche künftigen Formen des Eigentums diesen globalen Herausforderungen gewachsen sind. Er kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass weder das kapitalistische Privateigentumsrecht noch das nationale Souveränitätsprinzip in der Lage sind, die globalen Zukunftsprobleme zu lösen. Dies vermag, so die These, nur die Menschheit als Gesamteigentümer in der Rechtsgestalt »Vereinter Nationen«.

During the Great Depression, people from across the political spectrum sought to ground American identity in the rural know-how of “the folk.” At the same time, certain writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals combined documentary and satire into a hybrid genre that revealed the folk as an anxious product of corporate capitalism, rather than an antidote to commercial culture. In Real Folks, Sonnet Retman analyzes the invention of the folk as figures of authenticity in the political culture of the 1930s, as well as the critiques that emerged in response. Diverse artists and intellectuals—including the novelists George Schuyler and Nathanael West, the filmmaker Preston Sturges, and the anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston—illuminated the fabrication and exploitation of folk authenticity in New Deal and commercial narratives. They skewered the racist populisms that prevented interracial working-class solidarity, prophesized the patriotic function of the folk for the nation-state in crisis, and made their readers and viewers feel self-conscious about the desire for authenticity. By illuminating the subversive satirical energy of the 1930s, Retman identifies a rich cultural tradition overshadowed until now by the scholarly focus on Depression-era social realism.

In A Language of Song, Samuel Charters—one of the pioneering collectors of African American music—writes of a trip to West Africa where he found “a gathering of cultures and a continuing history that lay behind the flood of musical expression [he] encountered everywhere . . . from Brazil to Cuba, to Trinidad, to New Orleans, to the Bahamas, to dance halls of west Louisiana and the great churches of Harlem.” In this book, Charters takes readers along to those and other places, including Jamaica and the Georgia Sea Islands, as he recounts experiences from a half-century spent following, documenting, recording, and writing about the Africa-influenced music of the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean.
Each of the book’s fourteen chapters is a vivid rendering of a particular location that Charters visited. While music is always his focus, the book is filled with details about individuals, history, landscape, and culture. In first-person narratives, Charters relates voyages including a trip to the St. Louis home of the legendary ragtime composer Scott Joplin and the journey to West Africa, where he met a man who performed an hours-long song about the Europeans’ first colonial conquests in Gambia. Throughout the book, Charters traces the persistence of African musical culture despite slavery, as well as the influence of slaves’ songs on subsequent musical forms. In evocative prose, he relates a lifetime of travel and research, listening to brass bands in New Orleans; investigating the emergence of reggae, ska, and rock-steady music in Jamaica’s dancehalls; and exploring the history of Afro-Cuban music through the life of the jazz musician Bebo Valdés. A Language of Song is a unique expedition led by one of music’s most observant and well-traveled explorers.

Plutarch gives Plato’s philosophy of love a new direction by applying its basic ideas to marital love and by defending the significance of sexuality for personality development and human bonding. This work is presented here with a literary-oriented introduction, the Greek text has been checked carefully, the German translation aims to be readable and is supplemented by detailed notes. Four essays by various authors are included.

In the late nineteenth century, if ethnologists in the United States recognized African American culture, they often perceived it as something to be overcome and left behind. At the same time, they were committed to salvaging “disappearing” Native American culture by curating objects, narrating practices, and recording languages. In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, Lee D. Baker examines theories of race and culture developed by American anthropologists during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. He investigates the role that ethnologists played in creating a racial politics of culture in which Indians had a culture worthy of preservation and exhibition while African Americans did not.
Baker argues that the concept of culture developed by ethnologists to understand American Indian languages and customs in the nineteenth century formed the basis of the anthropological concept of race eventually used to confront “the Negro problem” in the twentieth century. As he explores the implications of anthropology’s different approaches to African Americans and Native Americans, and the field’s different but overlapping theories of race and culture, Baker delves into the careers of prominent anthropologists and ethnologists, including James Mooney Jr., Frederic W. Putnam, Daniel G. Brinton, and Franz Boas. His analysis takes into account not only scientific societies, journals, museums, and universities, but also the development of sociology in the United States, African American and Native American activists and intellectuals, philanthropy, the media, and government entities from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Supreme Court. In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, Baker tells how anthropology has both responded to and helped shape ideas about race and culture in the United States, and how its ideas have been appropriated (and misappropriated) to wildly different ends.