Books

The climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic remind us that we cannot face down our challenges alone—our solutions must be global. The European Investment Bank is at the heart of the push to turn EU policy initiatives into real development solutions on the ground. This report provides insights into our vital projects and initiatives outside the European Union, data on their impact and ideas for the future of development through a series of expert essays.

In this volume, the law of parental responsibility in Europe is examined on a comparative basis for Belgium, Germany, England and Wales, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden. This closes a gap in the research, as there is currently no such current study available. A presentation of the main features of the law of parental responsibility is followed by a comparative typification and analysis of the rules regarding the exercise of joint parental responsibility and the legal representation of the child in cases of parental separation; those rules are explored from the point of view of the tension between parental autonomy and enforced parental cooperation. The legal solutions to parental conflicts are a further focal point; this is dealt with in depth regarding parental conflicts over the child’s place of residence and legal rules about alternating residence of the child in Australia, Belgium and Sweden. Volume 21 of the series “Göttinger Juristische Schriften” (Göttingen Legal Writings) The series is published by the Faculty of Law of the Georg-August-University and makes faculty activities accessible to an interested public.

The COVID-19 outbreak upended normal life and forced us to rethink the way we went about our day-to-day activities. In spite of the many challenges we faced in 2020, we offered many advisory solutions that shortened the path to recovery. We also did not stop our work on climate change. Our advisory services have been key to helping clients keep their long-term investment plans on track, laying the foundations for a green and digital recovery.

The European Union’s COVID-19 recovery plan could be the impetus businesses need to invest in climate measures and prepare for the transition to a net-zero carbon economy. Our newest climate report looks at how firms’ view these twin challenges and their preparedness to meet them. Firms are more aware of the physical risks posed by climate change, but less aware of the risks caused by the transition to clean energy. Almost half of EU firms surveyed are investing in climate change measures, compared with roughly one-third of US firms. Uncertainty over regulation and taxation continues to hamper climate investments. To green its economy, Europe needs a comprehensive strategy that will provide businesses with the guidance they need to invest in climate preparedness and the energy transition.

Taking an early lead on digitalisation is crucial to Europe’s lasting competitiveness. Our newest digitalisation report sheds light on the state of digitalisation in European countries: The adoption of digital technologies by firms in the European Union is improving, but it has not yet closed the gap with the United States; While some EU countries are at the global forefront of digital transformation, others risk being left behind. Digitalisation provides a unique opportunity to improve European firms’ global competitiveness. To close the digital divide, Europe needs to increase investment and to create ecosystems that support innovation.

The European Investment Bank is helping African, Caribbean and Pacific countries in parts of society that are sometimes forgotten — young people, women and girls, small companies, rural villages. We are creating opportunities for everyone. In this report, you can meet the people who are making a difference for themselves and for others. There are stories on the COVID-19 pandemic as well as a wider range of healthcare challenges. We speak to the head of the United Nations Development Programme about the Sustainable Development Goals. There are stories about female entrepreneurs in the Dominican Republic and the financing of farmers in Malawi. What all the people and places have in common is the need for good advice and investment. Please read this annual report in conjunction with the financial statements.

Attend a university? Get married? Graduate? 500 years ago, young men saw themselves already confronted with these questions, however compared to our days, under different social circumstances. Johannes Eck (1486–1543), Johannes Kingsattler (1486–1534) and Willibald Pirckheimer (1470–1530) were part of a precarious generation since they had to find their social positions in a rapidly changing society. How did they become the men, they themselves represented in their „self-narratives“ and that we know today? Ingo Trüter examines the conditions which enabled the protagonists of this study to attain certain positions in the field of learning without assuming a biographical telos. Based on multiple types of sources and following a micro-historical approach, the study draws an illustrative image of men of learning around the year 1500, ranging from philosophical questions in the Wegestreit to the learned men’s furniture and interior fittings of their houses.

African sexualities are dynamic, multi-faceted and resilient. However, people with non-heterosexual sexualities and gender variant identities are often involved in struggles for survival, self-definition, and erotic rights. Queer in Africa forms an entry point for understanding the vulnerabilities of queer Africans as shaped by social, cultural and political processes, aiming to provide innovative insights about contentious disagreements over their lives. The volume mediates Southern and Northern scholarship, directing attention toward African-centred beliefs made accessible to a wide audience. Key concerns such as identity construction and the intersections between different social forces (such as nationalist traditionalism and sexualities) are addressed via engaging chapters; some empirically based and others providing critical cultural analysis.
Highly interdisciplinary in nature, Queer in Africa provides a key resource for students, academics, and activists concerned with the international support of sex and gender diversity. It will appeal to those interested in fields such as anthropology, film studies, literary studies, political science, public health, sociology, and socio-legal studies.

World Literature and Dissent reconsiders the role of dissent in contemporary global literature. Bringing together scholars of world and postcolonial literatures, the contributors explore the aesthetics of resistance through concepts including the epistemology of ignorance, the rhetoric of innocence, the subversion of paying attention, and the radical potential of everydayness.
Addressing a broad range of examples, from the Maghrebian humanist Ibn Khaldūn to India’s Facebook poets and examining writers such as Langston Hughes, Ben Okri, Sara Uribe, and Merle Collins, this highly relevant book reframes the field of world literature in relation to dissenting politics and aesthetic. It asks the urgent question: how critical practice might cultivate radical thought, further social justice, and value human expression?

The Work of Communication: Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism revolves around a two-part question: “What have work and organization become under contemporary capitalism—and how should organization studies approach them?” Changes in the texture of capitalism, heralded by social and organizational theorists alike, increasingly focus attention on communication as both vital to the conduct of work and as imperative to organizational performance. Yet most accounts of communication in organization studies fail to understand an alternate sense of the “work of communication” in the constitution of organizations, work practices, and economies. This book responds to that lack by portraying communicative practices—as opposed to individuals, interests, technologies, structures, organizations, or institutions—as the focal units of analysis in studies of the social and organizational problems occasioned by contemporary capitalism. Rather than suggesting that there exists a canonically “correct” route communicative analyses must follow, The Work of Communication: Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism explores the value of transcending longstanding divides between symbolic and material factors in studies of working and organizing. The recognition of dramatic shifts in technological, economic, and political forces, along with deep interconnections among the myriad of factors shaping working and organizing, sows doubts about whether organization studies is up to the vital task of addressing the social problems capitalism now creates. Kuhn, Ashcraft, and Cooren argue that novel insights into those social problems are possible if we tell different stories about working and organizing. To aid authors of those stories, they develop a set of conceptual resources that they capture under the mantle of communicative relationality. These resources allow analysts to profit from burgeoning interest in notions such as sociomateriality, posthumanism, performativity, and affect. It goes on to illustrate the benefits that investigations of work and organization can realize from communicative relationality by presenting case studies that analyze (a) the becoming of an idea, from its inception to solidification, (b) the emergence of what is taken to be the “the product” in high-tech startup entrepreneurship, and (c) the branding of work (in this case, academic writing and commercial aviation) through affective economies. Taken together, the book portrays “the work of communication” as simultaneously about how work in the “new economy” revolves around communicative practice and about how communication serves as a mode of explanation with the potential to cultivate novel stories about working and organizing. Aimed at academics, researchers, and policy makers, this book’s goal is to make tangible the contributions of communication for thinking about contemporary social and organizational problems.

Focusing on contexts of accelerated economic and political reform, this volume critically examines the role of slogans in the contemporary projects of populist mobilization, neoliberal governance, and civic subversion. Bringing together a collection of ethnographic studies from Greece, Slovakia, Poland, Abu Dhabi, Peru, and China, the contributors analyze the way in which slogans both convey and contest the values and norms that lie at the core of hegemonic political economic projects and ideologies.

This volume draws on the significance of the work of Marilyn Strathern in respect of its potential to queer anthropological analysis and to foster the reimagining of the object of anthropology.The authors examine the ways in which Strathern’s varied analytics facilitate the construction of alternative forms of anthropological thinking, and greater understanding of how knowledge practices of queer objects, subjects and relations operate and take effect. Queering Knowledge offers an innovative collection of writing, bringing about queer and anthropological syntheses through Strathern’s oeuvre. It will be relevant to scholars from anthropology as well as a number of other disciplines, including gender, sexuality and queer studies.*Winner of the 2020 Ruth Benedict Prize for Outstanding Edited Volume*

Posthumanism and Deconstructing Arguments: Corpora and Digitally-driven Critical Analysis presents a new and practical approach in Critical Discourse Studies. Providing a data-driven and ethically-based method for the examination of arguments in the public sphere, this ground-breaking book:Highlights how the reader can evaluate arguments from points of view other than their own;Demonstrates how digital tools can be used to generate ‘ethical subjectivities’ from large numbers of dissenting voices on the world-wide-web;Draws on ideas from posthumanist philosophy as well as from Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari for theorising these subjectivities;Showcases a critical deconstructive approach, using different corpus linguistic programs such as AntConc, WMatrix and Sketchengine.Posthumanism and Deconstructing Arguments is essential reading for lecturers and researchers with an interest in critical discourse studies, critical thinking, corpus linguistics and digital humanities.

The ideal of an inclusive and participatory Internet has been undermined by the rise of misogynistic abuse on social media platforms. However, limited progress has been made at national – and to an extent European – levels in addressing this issue. In England and Wales, the tackling of underlying causes of online abuse has been overlooked because the law focuses on punishment rather than measures to prevent such abuses. Furthermore, online abuse has a significant impact on its victims that is underestimated by policymakers. This volume critically analyses the legal provisions that are currently deployed to tackle forms of online misogyny, and focuses on three aspects; firstly, the phenomenon of social media abuse; secondly, the poor and disparate legal responses to social media abuses; and thirdly, the similar failings of hate crime to tackle problems of online gender-based abuses. This book advances a compelling argument for legal changes to the existing hate crime, and communications legislation.

In this accessible book, Delia Chiaro provides a fresh overview of the language of jokes in a globalized and digitalized world. The book shows how, while on the one hand the lingua-cultural nuts and bolts of jokes have remained unchanged over time, on the other, the time-space compression brought about by modern technology has generated new settings and new ways of joking and playing with language. The Language of Jokes in the Digital Age covers a wide range of settings from social networks, e-mails and memes, to more traditional fields of film and TV (especially sitcoms and game shows) and advertising. Chiaro’s consideration of the increasingly virtual context of jokes delights with both up-to-date examples and frequent reference to the most central theories of comedy. This lively book will be essential reading for any student or researcher working in the area of language and humour and will be of interest to those in language and media and sociolinguistics.

The power of stories to raise our concern for animals has been postulated throughout history by countless scholars, activists, and writers, including such greats as Thomas Hardy and Leo Tolstoy. This is the first book to investigate that power and explain the psychological and cultural mechanisms behind it. It does so by presenting the results of an experimental project that involved thousands of participants, texts representing various genres and national literatures, and the cooperation of an internationally-acclaimed bestselling author. Combining psychological research with insights from animal studies, ecocriticism and other fields in the environmental humanities, the book not only provides evidence that animal stories can make us care for other species, but also shows that their effects are more complex and fascinating than we have ever thought. In this way, the book makes a groundbreaking contribution to the study of relations between literature and the nonhuman world as well as to the study of how literature changes our minds and society. “As witnessed by novels like Black Beauty and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a good story can move public opinion on contentious social issues. In Human Minds and Animal Stories a team of specialists in psychology, biology, and literature tells how they discovered the power of narratives to shift our views about the treatment of other species. Beautifully written and based on dozens of experiments with thousands of subjects, this book will appeal to animal advocates, researchers, and general readers looking for a compelling real-life detective story.” – Hal Herzog, author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat : Why It’s So Hard To Think Straight About Animals