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This is the first systematic study of Polish women's conversion to Islam in English. Through interviews with Polish female converts to Islam and ethnographic observation, we learn about their journey to Islam in a country where Muslims constitute less than 0,5% of the population and experience daily struggles related to maintaining their national and religious identities sometimes considered to be spoiled. The analysis presented in the book illuminates different factors that shape the converts' religious lives: attempts to establish "Polish Islam" with its unique cultural flavor; a new hybrid language that includes Polish, English and Arabic elements; intersectional identities as women, Muslims, Poles, and Eastern European immigrants among those who live outside of Poland. This study offers a fascinating window into the lives of Muslims in a sociopolitical context that is considered to be on the margins of the "Muslim world."

During the 1920s and 1930s the wordless novel – stories told in black-and-white wordless woodcuts – was established as a narrative genre. The genre was most popular in Germany, but was as well known in other parts of Europé and in the US. The wordless novel was characterized by the absence of words, the use of woodcut and other relief printing techniques, as well as themes of social critique and serious existential issues.
The purpose of the book is to - through the wordless novels of the 1920s and 30s - explain the uniqueness of the wordless narrative and thus the autonomous narrative possibilities of the image. The method of the examination is a close reading of the German artist Otto Nückel's wordless novel Schicksal (Destiny 1926). A comparative material consists of the Czech artist Helena Bochořáková-Dittrichova's wordless novel Z Mého Dětství (From My Childhood, 1929). Wordlessness is studied through the image's characteristics as an intermediary of messages and narratives and through comparisons with other expressions - the silent film, cirkus, expressionist dance and visual art, as well as medieval woodcuts. Narratives – which are usually put together by verbal communication – are in this project a tool for seeing: the image sequences or the image groups that ""replace"" the words - not as a lack or implied meaning of words, but as a personal visual story.

This chapter explores how the BN had transformed the limited pool of mobilized votes into legislative dominance by tactical gerrymandering and malapportionment. Through the systematic analyses of an originally constructed GIS database of electoral boundaries, this chapter reveals that the optimal gerrymandering strategy under authoritarian party dominance deviates from the conventional wisdom of crack and pack. Specifically, the BN had cracked its supporting base and diffused opposition votes without packing. Moreover, the chapter also demonstrates that wide discretion over mapmaking enabled the leaders to selectively overrepresent their party's supporting base. It also considers the unexpected negative consequences of redistricting.

Disability justice and ecojustice are rarely considered together but are in constant conversation in our world. Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice, combining poetry and the lyrical essay, doesn't contain just one point of view but encompasses dialectical perspectives which often exist in contradiction to each other. A disabled person is in need of plastic cups and concerned about the overwhelming plastic in our ecosystems. Ortiz expands on and complicates who is seen as an environmentalist and what being in relationship with the land can look like.

This book is an offering to explore the spiritual question of how to witness. It serves as a companion to those also grappling with the difficult and often unanswerable questions posed by climate change in the borderlands. By exploring the ways body, mind, and cultures both clash with and long for ecojustice, Rituals for Climate Change offers an often-overlooked perspective on climate-grief, interdependence, and resilience. Disabled people know how to adapt to a world that is ever changing without considering them.

Der Band versammelt Beiträge aus verschiedenen wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen, die sich mentalen Konzepten, d.h. Vorstellungen oder Imaginationen der westeuropäischen mittelalterlichen Stadt widmen, die epochenübergreifend in unterschiedlichsten narrativen, diskursiven und visuellen Repräsentationen in Erscheinung treten. Stadt wird in den Beiträgen nicht nur als Teil der historischen Realität der Vormoderne betrachtet, sondern auch als fester Bestandteil des kulturellen Wissens und der kulturellen Erinnerung in den Blick genommen. In einer interdisziplinären Zusammenschau von Beiträgen aus den Bereichen Germanistik, Theologie, Archäologie, Geschichtswissenschaft und Kunstgeschichte werden mentale Konzepte der Stadt in unterschiedlichen medialen Formaten untersucht, darunter Stadtchroniken, säkulare Malerei, biblische Texte, mittelalterliche Stadtpläne und höfische Romane.

Durch die Vielfalt der untersuchten medialen Formate sowie der divergenten hermeneutischen Auseinandersetzungen wird deutlich, dass die kulturellen Vorstellungen von Stadt und Urbanität durch historische Spezifika, aber auch durch überzeitliche Muster, Topoi und Bedeutungskonzepte geprägt sind, die vielfach in der Antike und in christlichen Traditionen wurzeln.

Dass die politische Ordnung der Moderne tragisch verfasst sei, ist eine Diagnose, die sich wie ein roter Faden durch die Ideengeschichte der politischen Philosophie zieht. Sie wurde aber kaum je mit dem anderen dramatischen Gattungsmodell der Poetik kontrastiert: der Komödie. Auf Grundlage einer demokratietheoretischen Lektüre der Ästhetik Hegels, der die Komödie als höchste Form des Dramas ausweist, erschließt das Buch von Leonie Hunter das Verhältnis poetischer Ordnungsbildung zur demokratischen Moderne auf überraschende Weise neu. Hegels Differenzierung zwischen Tragödie und Komödie bedeutet, dass auch auf demokratietheoretischer Ebene zwischen zwei Modellen unterschieden werden muss: der tragischen Handlungsordnung der politischen Gegenwart und der komischen Zukunft einer selbstreflexiven Demokratie. Ein Blick auf die Poetik Hegels zeigt eine strukturelle Parallele zwischen seiner Gattungslehre und der radikaldemokratischen Bestimmung politischer Differenz. Politische Transformationsprozesse beruhen ebenso auf Momenten der Störung, der Subversion und daran anschließenden Prozessen der Neuformierung wie die poetischen Gattungen: Von Epos und Lyrik bis zum Drama, in Tragödie und Komödie aufgegliedert, lassen sie sich als unterschiedliche Modelle der Unordnung subjektiver Freiheit (als dem Politischen) und den Normen, Formen und Gesetzen der objektiv geltenden Ordnung (als der Politik) verstehen. Leonie Hunter zeigt, wie bei Hegel Gattungsformen und Vollzüge politischer Differenz Hand in Hand gehen. Dadurch eröffnen sich neue Perspektiven sowohl für die politische als auch für die ästhetische Theorie.

While the Netherlands is still struggling with the question of how serious and widespread the violence was in the Indonesian War of Independence, that history can be found everywhere in Indonesia. Monuments and burial grounds are the silent witnesses of the battle and the stories of the war are still circulating. Remco Raben and Peter Romijn argue in this book that the way the Netherlands has long viewed the war in Indonesia has its origins in the language and the manipulation of information during that war. They investigate the mentality of administration and politics in Indonesia and the Netherlands and trace the path that knowledge about violence has taken, from the villages and fields in Indonesia to the desks of administrators, politicians and journalists in the Netherlands. This book shows how the cover-up of violence in Indonesia worked. It explains why war crimes and other large-scale violence against the Indonesian population were tolerated, how the army was able to dominate the provision of information about the war, how administrative mechanisms and mentalities promoted the concealment, how Dutch politicians looked away, and how Indonesian voices were systematically were ignored.

Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology explores the relationship between narra¬tive, race, and ethnicity in the United States. Situated at the intersection of narrative theory and context-oriented approaches in race, ethnic, and cultural studies, it interrogates the complex and varied ways in which ethnic American authors use narrative form to engage readers in issues related to race and ethnicity. The book's international group of contributors covers a wide range of primary texts that belong to the literary traditions of Latinx, African American, Native American, Asian American, Jewish American, and Arab American communities. They demonstrate that paying attention to the formal features of these texts changes our under¬standing of narrative theory and that narrative theories can help us to think about their representations of time and space, the narration of trauma and other emotional memories, and the importance of literary (meta)paratexts, genre structures, and author functions.

Managing Digital Records in Africa draws on the research work of the InterPARES Trust (ITrust) project that investigated interrelated archival issues focusing on legal analysis, infrastructure, trust, authentication, and education within the African context. This research-focused book provides a legal analysis and systematic assessment of how African institutions manage digital records in four countries (i.e., Botswana, Kenya, South Africa, and Zimbabwe). It also examines the extent to which records are managed using Internet-based applications, trust in such records, and digital record authentication to support the auditing process. Finally, it provides a curriculum analysis in digital records at institutions of higher learning in 38 African countries. The book's case studies illustrate the threads of discussion, which span the ITrust domains of legislation, infrastructure, authentication, trust, and education in archives and records management. The book can be used as a premier reference source by private and public organizations, researchers, educators, archivists, records managers, and postgraduate students to make informed decisions about digital records, records management systems, cloud-based services, authenticating records, and identifying universities on the continent that offer archival programmes. The book may also find expression to practitioners in other fields such as law and auditing.

This chapter discusses the use of digital tools—in particular, language technology—to study the history of emotions. There are a growing number of annotated text corpora for ancient languages large enough to benefit from computational analysis. This chapter focuses on the cuneiform Akkadian texts available in the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc) and applies two language-technological methods, Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) and the fastText implementation of the Continuous Skip-gram model, to a dataset of 7,346 texts. To illustrate the potential of these methods, they are used to analyze the semantic domains of the verb râmu, "to love," and its derivatives in Akkadian. Because the usage and semantic domains of a word can vary greatly between different genres, the dataset is divided into several genres and the analysis focuses on royal inscriptions, letters, and literary text genres. The results show that, like the word love in English, râmu can denote different aspects of affection and love. It refers, for example, to erotic and sexual relationships between people, affection between family members, the king's love of justice, and the gods' pleasure with and acceptance of the king who fulfills divine expectations.

The Introduction will discuss secondary writings on temples as a place for public worship of the deity which is done through several daily, monthly and annual rituals performed in different spaces in the temple complex. Moving away from the ethnographic and textual studies of Hindu rituals which focus on contemporary ritual praxis, this chapter examines temple rituals in a historical context within the different spaces in the temple precinct such as the various tanks, courtyards and mandapas. The chapter also examines the changing context of temple rituals by studying the materiality of temple spaces and argues how the temple complex itself was organized and renovated to accommodate the varied rituals. The chapter will finally explore how through the practice of rituals the temple is embedded in its surrounding cultural landscape.

Professionals and Marginals in Slavic and Jewish Cultural Traditions is the annual publication of the Slavic & Jewish Cultures: Dialogue, Similarities, Differences's project for 2022. It includes papers from the international conference of the same name held in Moscow on December 1–3, 2021. The book includes twelve articles by Russian and Israeli scholars who work on the social and cultural role of professionals and marginals in various ethno-confessional traditions. The question of the perception of professionals in culture falls under the opposition "one's own/another's," where belonging to "one's own" or a "foreign community or class" becomes a defining marker. Traditionally, "social strangers," to which representatives of various professions belong, were assigned a special role in calendar, magical, and occasional rites. Thus, professionals and social marginals were not considered outcasts: society assigned them a particular place and role, delegating special cultural functions to them. Like previous publications in this series, Professionals and Marginals in Slavic and Jewish Cultural Traditions is notable for the large amount of field and archival material that it makes publically available for the first time.

Memory perspectives on past events allegedly take one of two shapes. In field memories, we recall episodes from a first-person point of view, while in observer memories, we look at a past scene from a third-person perspective. But this mere visuospatial dichotomy faces several practical and conceptual challenges. First, this binary distinction is not exhaustive. Second, this characterization insufficiently accounts for the phenomenology of observer memories. Third, the focus on the visual aspect of memory perspective neglects emotional, agential, and self-related social aspects. Fourth, the focus on the time of recall neglects the fact that visual, emotional, agential, and social aspects of perspective can also be dissociated in the original experience. In this chapter, we move away from the standard visual dichotomy. Instead, we propose that memory perspective is better understood along four lines: visual, agential, emotional, and social. Drawing on empirical research, we argue that these dimensions predict a disposition to recall a past event based on the present situation of the memorizer. This account supports seeing episodic memory as a natural kind, supported by scenario construction mechanisms and minimal memory traces. By remapping the classic distinction between field and observer perspectives along four dimensions, our proposal provides explanatory advantages and secures practical gains by enabling testable hypotheses.