bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Aristotle’s Rhetoric as Political Philosophy
Authors: Yack Bernard
Published: September 2022

This chapter argues that the lack of interesting theoretical accounts of Aristotle’s Rhetoric reflects the limitations of the questions that we bring to the text, rather than the limitations of Aristotle’s arguments. In particular, it suggests that we are bound to miss the Rhetoric’s most important insights as long as we expect it to provide us with a response to Plato’s devastating critique of rhetorical skill. Once one stops asking what Aristotle does to defend rhetoric against Plato’s assault, interesting substantive arguments emerge from this text, arguments about the place of rhetoric in moral and political life rather than its value.
Military Technology and Mughal Warfare in the South Asian Context
Authors: Charney Michael W.
Published: September 2022

This chapter examines the entrance of the Mughal army onto the North Indian plains and the successful military expansion that built the subcontinent’s largest precolonial empire. This success was due to both the early Mughals’ adoption of firearms and their coordination of mounted archers. The ruler Akbar instituted a system that would provide men for the Mughal army without draining the resources of the Mughal state, but this changed the army’s composition so that it came to reflect more the India the Mughals ruled. The army grew in size, added elephants and a large court that moved with it, adopted increasingly larger artillery, and on the whole, slowed down. Over time, corruption and economic change impoverished the Mughal court and the aristocracy alike, and the army became increasingly a shadow of the powerful force it had once been. In the eighteenth century, Mughal armies would experience decisive defeats at the hands of other Indian armies and against the English East India Company.
Expression and Technologies of Perception in Zosha Di Castri and David Adamcyk’s Phonobellow
Authors: Mason William
Published: September 2022

This chapter considers the legacy of the spectral school regarding their uses of and attitude towards technology. Spectralism is a musical practice fundamentally mediated by technology, and the ways in which this mediation is manifest are highly diverse, exposing the heterogeneous assemblage that constitutes “technology.” The chapter considers excerpts from pieces by Grisey and Murail against Zosha Di Castri and David Adamcyk’s 2015 piece Phonobellow, an evening-length music theatre work for five performers and electronics which centers around a massive wooden bellows. That structure, the phonobellow, is part musical instrument, part spectacle; it transforms repeatedly through the piece, from a comically large evocation of early cameras to a monstrous structure with viscera comprised of musical instruments. Though familiar pitch-centric hallmarks of spectralism are not central to the piece, the author argues that it emerges from a tradition of musical inquiry into technology and expression that characterizes the particular strand of modernism that included the spectralists.
Literacy and Orality in Traditional Irish Song
Authors: Henigan Julie
Published: September 2022

This chapter discusses the Irish song tradition. It describes the evolution of the author’s interest in the tradition, as both a singer and scholar, and in the issues she has engaged with in the course of her research. She reviews her introduction to sean-nós singing and the subsequent ethnographic work she undertook over a period of several decades in both Ireland and the United States on the subject—as well as the publications and lectures based on this research. She further explains her interest in the social historical context of the song tradition (including the phenomenon of ‘hedge schoolmaster poetry’) and how that, in combination with ethnographic and theoretical questions about the relationship between different spheres of Irish society, led to her 2012 book Literacy and Orality in Eighteenth-Century Irish Song.
Irish Song of the Early Nineteenth Century, as Transcribed by James Cody
Authors: Moloney Colette
Published: September 2022

James Cody, a piper and Irish teacher, was employed by the music collector Edward Bunting (1773–1843) to transcribe music and lyrics in the early nineteenth century. The output of Cody’s collection work for Bunting is preserved in the Bunting collection (QUB MS 4) in the library of Queen’s University Belfast, manuscript NLI MS G569 in the National Library of Ireland, and manuscript BPL MS XXXI in the McAdam-Bryson Collection in the Belfast Public Libraries. In addition, James Cody contributed to the manuscripts of Patrick O’Neill (1765–1832), Owning, Co. Kilkenny which are preserved in the National Library of Ireland (NLI MS 44,806). This chapter discusses Cody’s Irish song contribution to both the Bunting and O’Neill manuscripts, and the nature of Irish song in the era, as evidenced by the Cody transcriptions.
Ancestry and Crisis
Authors: Whyte Kyle
Published: September 2022

Ecocentrism refers to a family of approaches to environmental ethics that offer various reasons why moral responsibilities should aim at protecting some kinds of ecological organization as opposed to other kinds. Ecological organization refers to any collective entities signaled by concepts like ecosystems, biotic communities, ecological contexts, and landscapes. Ecocentric ethics furnish theories of intergenerational ethics. The theories take the significance of ecological organization as the basis of establishing moral responsibilities to past, present, and future generations of diverse beings and entities, including humans but also beyond humans to encompass plants, landscapes, fungi, mountains, animals, and rivers, among others. The author reviews a number of different approaches to ecocentrism, including those based on kinship, wildness, ecological context, and sentiment. The author then suggests that there is a key topic to discuss regarding how these approaches view their connections to ancestral generations in terms of the environmental ethics the present generation may have inherited and how such ethics frame approaches to today’s crises like climate change and biodiversity loss.
Kaitiakitanga
Authors: Watene Krushil
Published: September 2022

Contemporary challenges require transformation of current theories and practices in profound, perhaps even unimaginable, ways. Many mainstream assumptions (property ownership, individual rights, and the notion of the environment as a resource without limit) fail under the weight of contemporary realities. Society needs different foundations to take it into the future. Pathways are needed through which new ideas, fresh perspectives, and different socioenvironmental practices can be nurtured. This chapter traces one of the ways that Māori philosophy (sitting at the intersections of knowledge, memory, and imagination) motivates rich intergenerational connections. For Māori communities, notions such as kaitiakitanga frame theories of intergenerational justice that prioritize the pursuit and realization of thriving intergenerational relationships. As this chapter will show, kaitiakitanga does this not only by recognizing prevailing structural injustices and their legacy or by harnessing the intimate moments of connection so often overlooked in interactions but also by enabling the transformation of these ideas toward new imaginaries.
Criterialism
Authors: Lawrence Gavin
Published: September 2022

This section focuses on Anscombe’s paper ‘Brute Facts’ and its Wittgensteinian background. The introduction (section 7.1) sketches later Wittgenstein’s approach to language as embedded in life and culture (‘language-games’). Section 7.2 then outlines two traps in practical philosophy: the fact-value distinction and the practicality of evaluation. Concentrating on the first, section 7.3 contrasts Anscombe’s position with Hume’s and draws out three central aspects: that one predicate is brute relative to another, i.e., criteria-governed; that this relation iterates; and that it relies on a wide contextual background that gives life and point to such language-games. Section 7.4 then expands on Wittgensteinian criterialism: the incomplete specifiability of defeating conditions and of criteria; its manifestation in teaching such predicates; the variety of criteria, their family resemblance, changes, and open-ended, creative exploration, with as much attention to the role of qualification as of defeasibility. Section 7.5 briefly outlines Wittgenstein’s double strategy against the Frege-Plato objection that language must have clear fixed boundaries to be usable. Section 7.6 concludes by turning from the rules of language-games briefly to consider aspects of the points or goals at issue in them.
Life and Other Basic Rights in Anscombe
Authors: Nieswandt Katharina
Published: September 2022

Following Elizabeth Anscombe, rights exist within practices. A right consists in a bundle of possible and impossible moves within the relevant social ‘game’, e.g., the practice of private property. What becomes of basic rights on such a social-constructivist conception? Metaphysically, basic rights do not differ from other rights. The right not to be murdered, however, enjoys a transcendental status within Anscombe’s moral philosophy, and this construction might extend to other basic rights: since practical reasoning is directed at the good life, there can be no sound practical inference concluding in murder. Anscombe’s argument for this presupposes a particular conception of human dignity, which is quite similar to the dominant conception in contemporary human rights literature.
Ethics and Action Theory
Authors: Sandis Constantine
Published: September 2022

This chapter compares the general form and state of moral philosophy during the first half of the twentieth century (section 21.1) to how it stands today (section 21.3). These two overviews serve as the bread of a GEMA-filled sandwich. Section 21.2 accordingly considers Anscombe’s criticisms of ‘modern moral philosophy’ from Sidgwick to Ross. Anyone in sympathy with the general line of her criticisms must concede that the state of moral philosophy was in far better shape in the decades before she wrote her seminal 1958 paper than it has been ever since. Ironically, contemporary moral philosophy has become what it is partly due to Anscombe’s own unintended role in influencing (i) the formation of ‘virtue theory’ as yet another position within normative ethics and (ii) the fashioning of ‘moral psychology’ as an altogether distinct—and increasingly empirical— branch of moral philosophy.
Hypothesis Testing
Authors: Albrecht Joshua
Published: September 2022

Hypotheses are crucial to all types of research, but too often the use of formalized hypothesis-testing is overlooked in music research. This chapter defines hypotheses, discusses how to properly test hypotheses, and argues for an increased focus on hypothesis testing in music corpus research while also highlighting how prevalent exploratory research was in early corpus studies. The chapter concludes with a meta-analysis of corpus studies over the past several decades. The results are consistent with a field dominated early by ad hoc exploratory work that focused on simple descriptive statistics of a tested sample, but also a field with a recent and growing trend of incorporating a priori hypothesis testing in corpus research.
A Corpus Analysis of Harmony in Country Music
Authors: de Clercq Trevor
Published: September 2022

Harmony in country music is in some ways similar to that in rock music (defined broadly) while in others ways different, just as it is in some ways similar to common-practice music while in other ways different. The empirical work presented here implies that the conventions of country music lie somewhere between those found in rock music and those in common-practice music. If country music can be considered a substyle of rock defined broadly, then, presumably, we would find that harmonic practice in rock defined narrowly would be even further afield of common-practice norms. In addition, some aspects of harmony seem particularly distinctive to country music (at least in comparison to rock and common-practice styles). The strong avoidance of the minor tonic is one striking feature. We also found support for the notion that country music, more so than other styles, relies heavily on just three chords.
Internalized Oppression in the Clinician
Authors: Harris Brian T.
Published: September 2022

Music therapists with minority identities may experience internalized oppression in ways that can negatively affect their clinical work. To help prevent this, clinicians can engage in self-inquiry practices such as supervision and therapy. Using music in these practices can prove a powerful tool, allowing clinicians to illuminate and work with hidden internalized negativity. This chapter provides an overview of internalized homonegativity and follows my journey through self-examination using clinical case examples to help illustrate the process. I demonstrate how to use creative engagement as a component of self-reflection, which can then be applied to self-inquiry with other types of internalized oppression.
Decolonizing Brazilian Popular Percussion
Authors: Santana Chico
Published: September 2022

This chapter discusses socio-cultural and historical aspects of samba, based on a decolonial vision of Brazilian Popular Percussion (BPP). Samba schools are cultural manifestations that reveal diverse perspectives on musical practices, in which percussion plays a central role. Different analytical possibilities point to plural paths for theoretical and epistemological understanding of the samba and its percussive practices, especially with regard to its rhythmic fundamentals. The chapter advocates that the study of Brazilian samba foreground the knowledge of the percussionists themselves. Recognizing that the recommended methodological approaches to this music are in tension with some Eurocentric paradigms of music teaching and learning, emphasis is placed on corporeality as an axis of Afro-Diasporic musical practices. The chapter concludes with some proposals for a decolonial pedagogy of BPP, which can contribute to reflections and practices of public music theory.
Governing AI Systems for Public Values
Authors: Chen Yu-Che , Ahn Michael
Published: September 2022

This chapter develops a framework of process governance for public artificial intelligence systems (PAIS) and proposes relevant governance recommendations. This chapter starts by outlining its focus on public AI systems and public values where the guiding governance design principles for the framework are characterized as human-centered, stakeholder-focused, and lifecycle-scoped. The four phases of the development and implementation of AI systems are (1) goal setting; (2) iterative development decisions on data, models, and results; (3) decisions on public service; and (4) the assessment of the impacts made by PAIS. For goal setting, the articulation and inclusion of societal values and broad stakeholder participation are key dimensions to consider for PAIS. For iterative development decisions, public value perspective and the social logic should be considered as the main development logic and an audit on data and algorithmic characteristics should be implemented. For public service decision-making, governance needs to focus on promotion of human autonomy, inclusion of equity and fairness, and stakeholder involvement. For the assessment of the impacts, governance needs to include a public value impact analysis involving various stakeholders. Transparency is expected to be a core and necessary condition for all phases of PAIS development. Moreover, an AI governance structure consisted of diverse stakeholder groups should be organized to ensure effective implementation of phase-specific governance solutions and coordinate efforts at different phases.
Mitigating Algorithmic Biases through Incentive-Based Rating Systems
Authors: Turner Lee Nicol
Published: September 2022

Increased use of machine-learning algorithms in all aspects of society has worsened the impact of online behavioral biases on historically disadvantaged populations, enabling discriminatory practices in hiring, loan approvals, child welfare determinations, access to public benefits, policing, and more. While companies have sought to self-regulate such problems, they have failed to enact concrete change. To address this problem, an incentive-based rating system, which is modeled, in part, after the United States federal government’s Energy Star program, is proposed to better identify and mitigate online biases. Rating systems can implore computer and data scientists, as well as the industries that license and disseminate algorithms, to improve their interrogation of algorithms’ sociological implications and incorporate non-technical actors and practices to inform their design and execution. Such incentives can differentiate the developers and companies who seek transparency and feedback around their concerns for more fair, inclusive, and ethical artificial intelligence systems. In addition to promoting the use of rating systems, this chapter offers a framework for them when applied to AI, including a set of questions that can be asked of internal and external stakeholders, like those assessing the diversity of the work team, data quality, transparency, and feedback from user groups. The chapter concludes with a discussion around the role of public policies and potential regulatory enforcements that can make AI rating systems more formidable, especially in use cases that have adverse impact on users.
Social Determinants of Health in Africa
Authors: Amzat Jimoh , Aminu Kafayat , Muchabveyo Brenda
Published: September 2022

This chapter examines the social determinants of health (SDH) in Africa. It highlights some theoretical perspectives relevant to understanding the SDH, including the production of health and structural and system approaches. The chapter argues that the high prevalence of both communicable and noncommunicable diseases in Africa is a consequence of adverse social forces that predispose people to various diseases. Africans live in challenging social situations and have a comparatively high disease burden. Most are disadvantaged because the resources required for healthcare are insufficient. The high prevalence of poverty on the continent is significantly associated with poor population health caused by impoverished living and working conditions that negatively impact nutritional status, access to clean water, hygiene, healthcare services, and health status. In Africa, unequal healthcare access and outcomes among social groups are common, and vulnerable populations disproportionately bear the brunt of the disease burden.
Managing Uncertainty, Creating Stability
Authors: Madhavan Sangeetha , Stoebenau Kirsten , Kim Seung Wan
Published: September 2022

The role of kin in contemporary Africa is closely linked to both the marriage process and the rearing of children. Kin recognition of the union is essential for legitimizing it in the eyes of the community and securing support for the children it produces. Kin also play a critical role in the monetary and material exchange between the partners and their families, including the eventual payment of bride wealth. Whereas much of the extant scholarship on family formation in Africa has examined on the challenges of attaining a modern marriage, the focus here is on the process through which women and men aspire to achieve social and economic stability. The chapter draws on sociological theories of risk and intimacy and analyzes existing survey data along with qualitative data collected in a low-income community in Nairobi, Kenya. Examining this process shows how people are combining “modern” resources, such as the state, with “traditional” institutions, such as kinship, in distinctly gendered ways. It identifies not only the risks and benefits for the health and well-being of children but also the longer-term intergenerational effects. This analysis should encourage policymakers to move away from interventions that are rigidly prescriptive about the timing of childbearing and union formation and instead to support couples and their children as they navigate the process of attaining economic and social stability.
Historical Political Economy of Legislative Power
Authors: Cox Gary W.
Published: September 2022

This chapter reviews the historical political economy of separating and delegating legislative power in Europe. The separation of power has been a familiar theme since Montesquieu’s (1989 [1748]) Spirit of the Laws. However, the delegation of legislative power predated the separation of power and created durable local governmental units whose successors still exist throughout Europe. This chapter reviews work on the congruence of legislative procedures across levels of government, as well as on the use of separation of power (co-legislation) and delegation of power (especially co-administration) to constrain executive power in premodern Europe.
The Historical Political Economy of Globalization
Authors: O'Rourke Kevin Hjortshøj
Published: September 2022

Globalization has a long history, although how long depends on how you define it. That history teaches us that globalization is not irreversible: that it ebbs and flows over time, and that it would be foolish to assume that today’s hyper-globalization is necessarily here to stay. This chapter argues that one cannot understand the history of globalization without taking political factors into account – both domestic political forces and geopolitics shape, and are shaped by, international economic integration. It also argues that one cannot understand the history of comparative economic development without taking globalization into account. Globalization compels observers to take geography seriously and to think more like historians.
Historical Political Economy of Autocracy
Authors: Grzymala-Busse Anna , Finkel Eugene
Published: September 2022

Autocracy is the most widespread and durable regime type since the emergence of early states. This chapter surveys the literature on key questions that dominate the autocracy research: how autocratic regimes emerge, how they are sustained, how autocracies die, and the legacies autocratic regimes leave behind. The chapter argues that historical political economy (HPE) approaches that adopt a broader temporal lens are especially well positioned to make important contributions to the better understanding of nondemocratic regimes. This chapter also shows how a mixed-method approach utilized by many HPE studies brings us closer to identifying the causal pathways to and from autocracy. Finally, the chapter suggests directions for further HPE research on autocratic regimes.
Job Quality Matters
Authors: Warhurst Chris , Mathieu Chris , Dwyer Rachel E.
Published: September 2022

This chapter outlines the purpose of and rationale behind The Oxford Handbook of Job Quality. The chapter explains why job is important and why it is posited as a solution to social, economic and political challenges. It then flags the difficulties in conceptualizing job quality and explains why job quality is likely to remain important amongst policymakers in the US, Europe and elsewhere. It then provides a short overview of the Handbook’s structure and its chapters’ contents. Throughout the chapter we identify lessons from the Handbook for both future research on job quality and the future policy interventions to support job quality that we hope the Handbook will contribute to inspiring. Job quality matters as a framework for understanding the world and as a goal for organizing societies to enable all people to thrive.
The Great Recession and Job Quality Trends in Europe
Authors: Erhel Christine , Guergoat-Larivière Mathilde , Leschke Janine , Watt Andrew
Published: September 2022

This chapter focuses on the consequences of the Great Recession on job quality in Europe. It relies on European survey data (European Working Conditions Survey, Labour Force Survey, EU-SILC). It first shows that on average in the EU there was a marginal decline in job quality between 2005 and 2010 according to the ETUI Job Quality Index. Improvements are visible with regards to working conditions, working-time and work–life balance while involuntary non-standard employment increased and wages displayed a pronounced deterioration. A second step builds on dynamic indicators calculated at the individual level (transitions in terms of job quality between 2007 and 2009), using EU-SILC panel data. It shows that some socioeconomic groups were more affected by decreasing trends in job quality (other things being equal), especially youth, older workers and low-educated workers. In terms of gender, women were more likely than men to become unemployed or inactive over the period. At the same time, comparing national labour market institutions, employment protection legislation (as defined by the OECD) seems to have prevented transitions to non-employment (with no direct effect on job quality) while public expenditure per unemployed slightly reduced the risk of job quality deterioration.
Trade Unions and Job Quality
Authors: Simms Melanie
Published: September 2022

This chapter reviews links between trade unions and debates about job quality. It argues that job quality should be understood as a dynamic outcome of give and take within the employment relationship. The chapter starts with a review of how job quality is measured, focusing on the centrality of worker voice and emphasizing the importance of institutions of collective bargaining in securing decent work. It moves on to review evidence of how those institutions link to company-level arrangements of job regulation, thereby affecting job quality. The third section presents studies showing how, in some settings, employers can use poor quality work to push down job quality more generally. The fourth explores the ways that union strategies have sometimes had the consequence of increasing job quality for core staff, while reducing job quality for others. The fifth section considers evidence of the opportunities for unions to organize to promote and improve job quality, including in precarious occupations. The chapter concludes by noting that although there is wide literature on the roles of employers and unions in affecting job quality, there is very little attention to the potential role of the state, clearly requiring further research.
Quantitative Approaches to Assess Job Quality
Authors: de Bustillo Rafael Muñoz , Fernández-Macías Enrique , Antón José-Ignacio
Published: September 2022

This chapter offers an up-to-date account of different alternative approaches to the measurement of job quality from a quantitative perspective. With that aim we review different theoretical strategies: subjective (job satisfaction) and objective methods, with different levels of aggregation, that can be used for the measurement of job quality, presenting some of the methodological dilemmas that need to be confronted for such measurement. With that background, the chapter surveys more than twenty proposals of indicators and models of job quality of different origins and ambitions. The chapter concludes with some reflections with respect to the feasibility of measuring job quality and the adequacy of the existing job quality indicators.
Job Polarization
Authors: Goos Maarten , Rademakers Emilie , Salomons Anna , Vandeweyer Marieke
Published: September 2022

Starting from the debate on job quality, this chapter first gives an overview of the literature on job polarization: the idea that job markets are polarizing into lovely and lousy jobs at the expense of middling jobs originates from the early 1980s. During the following decades, the phenomenon of job polarization was documented for many advanced economies and its drivers became better understood. To summarize the intuition that economists currently have about these drivers, the chapter then provides a simple intuitive framework and some empirical evidence in support of it. The contribution of this framework is that it illustrates the interplay of various channels determining labour and product market outcomes for understanding job polarization: the direct substitutability between differently skilled workers and new digital technologies in production and scale-effects driven by technology-induced changes in the prices of goods and services for consumers. We connect the latter channel to the well-known phenomenon of Baumol’s cost disease. Finally, the importance of these channels is documented by empirical evidence from 13 advanced economies. We find evidence consistent with our framework and compare this with other possible drivers such as globalization. Our analyses imply that job polarization is not a natural law that must hold at all times and in all places but that it critically depends on the nature of technological progress and how it affects equilibria on labour and product markets.
The German Legal System and Courts
Authors: Miller Russell A.
Published: September 2022

The German legal system and courts have roots in ancient, barbarian Germania. That cultural tradition passed through the feudal medieval period, the Holy Roman Empire, the Prussian Empire, and the democratic and tyrannical convulsions of the twentieth century. The contemporary judicial framework of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) still bears many characteristics accumulated over that long journey. It is a legal culture aligned with the continental or civil law tradition. This has produced jurisdictional—or subject matter—specialization. Germany’s deep-seated federalism is reflected in the judiciary’s decentralization, pursuant to which the federation and states share responsibility for administering justice. Two courts help illustrate these features: the Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court of Justice) and the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court). This era’s contribution to the long story of German law might be the German legal system’s new openness to international legal regimes and to cooperating with extra-jurisdictional courts based in the European systems, including the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).
The ‘Old Five’
Authors: Patton David F.
Published: September 2022

The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Free Democratic Party (FDP), and the Greens, i.e. the former ‘Bonn parties’, had arisen in West Germany and been shaped by its institutions and norms. After unification, these ‘old five’ were joined by the ‘new two’, in the form of the Left Party and the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Even though unification lies more than three decades back, the ‘old five’ show disproportionate strength in the West, while the ‘new two’ show strength in the East. The former comprise the political centre; the latter are on the ideological wings. The ‘old five’ are the political mainstream; the ‘new two’ are the populist challengers. The former have governed at the national level; the newcomers have not. Since 1990, the ‘old five’ have confronted an increasingly volatile electorate, electoral and organizational weakness in the East, a more fragmented party system, and populism. While the five as a group have lost vote share, certain parties have fared much better than others. This chapter introduces the five parties—first the longstanding catch-all parties and then the two smaller niche parties—and examines their development and prospects.
The Merkel Era
Authors: Lankowski Carl
Published: September 2022

This chapter on the energy transition in Germany is a case-study of building consensus for change. That process rested on the opportunity given by electoral rules and demography for the articulation of a clear green vision in Germany’s competitive multi-party system. Bündnis 90-Die Grünen fulfilled that role, compelling other parties to adjust. Their vision was amplified by the European Union (EU), which elaborated a policy framework that encouraged Europe’s most highly industrialized country to embark on an ambitious decarbonization programme. This required inspired political leadership, which came in the person of Angela Merkel. Building her reputation as environment minister pushing successfully for adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, her chancellorship was marked by commitment to the European project. Germany’s adjustment to the post-carbon world would be enabled and channelled through the EU. Germany’s Energiewende has been re-framed as a local expression of the European decarbonization project.
Jewish Life and Politics in Post-War Germany
Authors: Cronin Joseph
Published: September 2022

This chapter provides an overview of the major developments in Germany’s Jewish community since the late 1970s, which saw the beginnings of a new self-confidence. It explores media events and social developments, including the ‘Fassbinder affair’ of 1985 and the migration of Jews from the former Soviet Union to Germany since 1990. It also considers how life for Jews in Germany has changed over the past four decades. While the threat posed by the far Right has been a persistent problem, the federal government’s treatment of Germany’s Jewish minority, as well as attitudes held in society more generally, have been the subject of intense debate. In that respect, little has changed between the late 1970s and the early 2020s. The development of two parallel trends: a burgeoning Holocaust memory culture alongside calls for Germany to ‘draw a line under’ its Nazi past are also analysed.
German Literature, Theatre, and Film since 1990
Authors: Braun Michael
Published: September 2022

After decades of mutual distancing of politics and art, the political space opened up in a fundamental way in 1989/90. The events of the fall of the Wall and reunification entered literature and film as a theme, but what is political about them is now measured by aesthetic strategies and historically-reflected narratives. The author appears as an unreliable contemporary witness, the licence to fictions of memory decouples good stories from bad history, the literary business multiplies the symbolic capital of attention. This essay summarizes significant phenomena of literature, theatre, and film since 1990. First, it deals with the debates ignited by public and autobiographical texts of authors (e.g. the first all-German literary controversy about Christa Wolf). Secondly, it deals with the discussion about the great German novel with its claim to national representation (e.g. Günter Grass’s Ein weites Feld). Third, the vocabulary of nation and unity largely disappears from political poetry after 1990. Fourth, in the field of drama, a re-theatricalization with post-dramatic means occurs (chorus and compassion dramaturgy in Elfriede Jelinek). And fifth, in German film, politics returns as classic genre cinema in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) comedies and in films about well-known figures from contemporary German history.
The Governmental System and Political History of the GDR
Authors: Glaeßner Gert-Joachim
Published: September 2022

In 1949, five years after the end of the Second World War, the joint military regime over defeated Germany came to an end and two German states were founded, the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Both were part and parcel of the larger strategies of the two main powers, US and USSR. The foundation of two separate, semi-sovereign states in Germany was the result of the final collapse of the anti-war coalition. The political system established in East Germany reflected the interests of the Soviet Union to build a cordon sanitaire of socialist states in Eastern Europe, including the eastern part of Germany. From the early days until its end in 1990, the GDR remained a political system not of its own right but as a vassal of the Soviet Union. This chapter describes the development of the political system in the Soviet Zone of Occupation, the later GDR, which began immediately after the end of the war and laid the very foundations of a Stalinist regime, which, despite various changes, political turmoil, and ambivalent attempts of reforming the political, economic, and social system, was never overcome in the forty years the GDR existed. The ruling communist party, theSocialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED), was concerned with directing and controlling state and society. Its self-proclaimed omnipotence was not restricted simply to the state organization and the governmental system but included the economy, education, culture, and the way ordinary people could conduct their everyday life.
Transcranial brain stimulation and functional MRI
Authors: Windischberger Christian , Tik Martin , Thielscher Axel , Siebner Hartwig R.
Published: September 2022

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) complements non-invasive transcranial brain stimulation (NTBS) in multiple ways. Task or resting-state data acquired before NTBS can be used to identify or individualize stimulation targets. Individual network connectivity patterns have already been associated with differences in the treatment response to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and might be useful biomarkers for future personalized NTBS treatments. FMRI has also been used to characterize the aftereffects of stimulation on brain activity. This approach revealed effects in remote brain regions that are not directly targeted by NTMS. These remote network effects show a complex dependency on stimulation parameters and brain state. Finally, applying NTBS online during fMRI allows for the direct assessment of immediate stimulation effects, but online fMRI is technically more challenging. Online combinations of NTBS with fMRI have confirmed that NTBS induces changes in brain activity at the network level and might be useful to reveal the individual dependency of the induced activity changes on the NTBS stimulation dose. This may be particularly relevant for NTBS targeting nonmotor brain areas.
Conservation after conflict
Authors: Johnson Jessica S. , Lione Brian Michael
Published: September 2022

The Iraqi Institute for the Conservation of Antiquities and Heritage is a case study in how international cultural heritage professionals (archaeologists, conservators, architects, engineers) have been working to support the post-war recovery and redevelopment of the cultural heritage community in Iraq through a variety of educational and practical projects. Founded in 2008 with US government funding, and in collaboration with Iraqi government entities, the project has navigated the evolving public and heritage diplomacy environment over more than a decade. By working in the country, adapting educational programmes to on-the-ground realities, collaborating and partnering with governmental and academic Iraqi cultural heritage professionals in an constantly evolving political and cultural situation (often in crisis), the authors have supported (along with many others) capacity-building and sustainability of the Iraqi Institute for more than a decade.
De-centring museums in Indigenous community engagement
Authors: Osorio Sunnucks Laura
Published: September 2022

Museums have been critiqued for upholding colonial networks and asymmetrical power relationships, but critical museologies and Indigenous community action have resulted in interruptions to dominant paradigms. This chapter introduces some models that have been used to frame these developments, including the ‘contact zone’, noting, however, that multilingual world museologies outside of anglophone publications have frequently been overlooked. In the case of archaeological material ‘allochronism’ has often alienated contemporary people from their own histories and collections, de-politicizing their display through the spectacle of exotic and distant civilizations. How museums manipulate time and history is examined in this chapter with specific reference to the Maya. There have been few museum projects about the pre-contact Maya that position historical cultures within contemporary Maya theoretical frameworks. Two projects in which contemporary ancestral knowledge in the Yucatan is incorporated into museums with pre-contact Maya collections are presented here, highlighting how Indigenous archaeologies can overturn interpretational frameworks.
Photographic practices in museum archaeology
Authors: Klamm Stefanie
Published: September 2022

This chapter highlights the role of photographs as working objects in archaeological museums by elaborating on practices with and on them in a historical focus. It explores these themes with reference to case studies of German (classical) archaeology, including the Antikensammlung (Collection of Classical Antiquities), Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. First, it will address the very physical engagement with photographs by annotating, retouching, and cutting. Further, it focuses on the functions of photographs in archaeological exhibition displays in the past and today. It discusses how photo archives in archaeology are by no means innocent places: naming and cataloguing of photographs give evidence of the contested history of archaeology and its difficult heritage—a concern which transfers to the digital realm. Colonial legacies, for instance in classifying artefacts and in reference systems, continue into a digital image file’s metadata. In conclusion, the chapter reflects what happens to those collections of analogue photographs nowadays if they are subject to historization and digitization.
Introduction
Authors: Stevenson Alice
Published: September 2022

This chapter outlines the rationale for a volume devoted to Museum Archaeology and argues that it is the concept of ‘archaeological context’ that provides a disciplinary centre. This entails a shift from curation of single objects to the curation of relationships among objects, archives, fieldsites, and people. Museum Archaeology can and should be a critical awareness of the histories and agencies that form assemblages, a reflexive practice for ongoing archaeological documentation and analysis, and a responsive, sensitive, and community-engaged approach to interpretation and access. How these principles are developed through the volume is presented here, alongside a summary of the seven themed sections: (A) collecting, categorizing, and challenging histories; (B) contemporary agencies of curation and communities of practice; (C) locating museums and collections; (D) alternative materialities: beyond finds; (E) fieldwork in the museum; (F) exhibitionary cultures; and (G) expanding and transcending the museum: social justice and digital frontiers.
Affective museums
Authors: Bezerra Marcia , Ferreira Luzia Gomes
Published: September 2022

This chapter discusses the practices of artefact collection by members of local communities living around archaeological sites. These phenomena have been traditionally studied through perspectives that emphasize preservation and physical conservation of patrimonial assets meaning those practices have generally been seen as acts of destruction. However, we argue that such practices would be better understood seen as sensitive acts. We look at such practices in local communities of the Brazilian Amazon, where collectors gather artefacts to create small collections. These are formed by a combination of archaeological objects, photographs, and personal belongings that, ultimately, end up forming ‘affective museums’. Nevertheless, there is a discrepancy between these practices and those adopted by museums, and national heritage legislation. We argue that a more sensitive analysis contributes to ensuring that the epistemic violence that ignores and erases other modes of thought will not be perpetuated within the discipline of archaeology and museums.
Participatory Action Research and the Study of Political Participation
Authors: Dawson Marcelle C.
Published: September 2022

This chapter offers a critical overview of participatory action research (PAR) as a means of studying political participation. Amidst growing concern that “parachute-style” research was further disempowering the communities it intended to uplift, there was a turn in the 1970s towards more participatory modes of research that recognized the importance of local knowledge and insights in shaping social change. In addressing the central tenets and underlying philosophies of PAR, this chapter emphasizes everyday politics as a legitimate site for the development of contemporary political subjectivities. Moreover, it suggests that PAR is, itself, a form of political participation in that it has the potential to bring about durable social change by amplifying the agency of research participants. In closing, the chapter addresses the intersection between PAR and Indigenous research methods, and briefly considers the implications of the decolonial turn for the study of political participation.
Bridging Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches in the Study of Political Participation
Authors: Nunes Ana I. , Henn Matt
Published: September 2022

In this chapter, we reflect on earlier sections of the book that address core theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches in the study of political participation, and consider the notion that the so-called quantitative–qualitative divide in this academic field is neither inevitable nor to be preferred. Taking as a starting point that it is possible to construct a bridge between quantitative and qualitative methodologies, we consider the potential value to be gained by adopting mixed methods approaches when studying how people choose to engage in politics. Such mixed methods approaches to research are flexible and pragmatic, reflecting the nature of the questions to be studied as well as the context in which such a project is to be conducted. Drawing upon a range of examples from the field, we address matters of ontology, epistemology, and methodology, as well as different methodological movements, before focusing on the purposes, forms, and sequences of the mixed methods approach (such as concurrent, transformative, and sequential mixed methods).
Political Consumerism and Lifestyle Activism
Authors: Lorenzini Jasmine , Forno Francesca
Published: September 2022

Political consumerism and lifestyle activism contribute to social change in Western democracies. Acts such as buying organic food, exchanging clothes, or cycling to work are part of contemporary action repertoires. Today, these forms of political participation define what it means to be a citizen. Yet, few studies question underpinning understandings of social change and democratic decision-making processes at the core of these forms of political participation. In this chapter, we ask: What are the mechanisms and procedural understandings of social change associated with political consumerism and lifestyle activism? First, we discuss how these forms of participation contribute to contemporary action repertoires. Then, we analyze mechanisms associated with social change and conceptions of collective decision-making processes. We argue that political consumerism and lifestyle activism are associated with unequal political participation and that they lack a procedural understanding of democracy that allows the inclusion of different segments of society in decision-making processes.
Institutional Context and Political Participation
Authors: Cinalli Manlio
Published: September 2022

This chapter engages with the notions of institutions and the political context with a view to retracing long-term scholarly developments as well as furthering a new reading of the relationship between institutions and the political context on the one hand and political participation on the other. In particular, the chapter puts a strong emphasis on a research agenda that focusses on fields of politics, embedding institutions and the political context in an analysis that also considers how they can be changed by political participation itself. Drawing on a large volume of empirical research about typically contentious fields such as migration, ethnicity, unemployment, youth, and precarity, the strongest argument is that scholarship is going beyond a conflict-ridden approach that is ubiquitous both within the neo-liberal and the neo-Marxist camp. Many fields of politics may depend upon norms and institutions in the policy sphere intersecting with bottom-up participation in the public sphere.