Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities Essen

This essay is a contribution to the question whether grounded theory methodology (in the variant of STRAUSS & CORBIN) contains an abductive research logic as developed in the work of Charles Sanders PEIRCE. After going through the works of STRAUSS and CORBIN I answer the question with a resounding yes. But it does not only contain the logic of abductive reasoning but also that of qualitative induction. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1001135

This essay is a contribution to the question whether grounded theory methodology (in the variant of STRAUSS & CORBIN) contains an abductive research logic as developed in the work of Charles Sanders PEIRCE. After going through the works of STRAUSS and CORBIN I answer the question with a resounding yes. But it does not only contain the logic of abductive reasoning but also that of qualitative induction. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1001135

In this essay, an attempt is made to re-present African Communitarianism as a discursive formation between the individual and community. It is a view which eschews the dominant position of many Africanist scholars on the primacy of the community over the individual in the ‘individual-community’ debate in contemporary Africanist discourse. The relationship between the individual and community is dialogical for the identity of the individual and the community is dependent on this constitutive formation. The individual is not prior to the community and neither is the community prior to the individual. Contemporaneity explains this dialogic relationship and to argue otherwise threatens the individual’s subjectivity to a vanishing point, or simply, to deny the individual a presence. On this Rajectory, the politics of common good within the African value system can neither be described nor represented through consensus or unanimity but through a realist perspectivism or a worldview not held in abstraction from living Raditions, cultures, and values that characterize the people(s) of sub-Saharan Africa.

Research on social memory phenomena is confronted with the problem that social memory has neither a substrate in the sense of a remembering subject nor a central organ of an operating memory in the sense of a human brain. As a consequence, social memory exclusively exists between subjects and not within them, its form of existence consists of communication. In its first part, the article presents examples of family conversations that show that family memory does not serve as storage for memories, but rather serves as a catalyst for the most different elements of the past to be specifically combined by the involved persons. On the basis of a replication of Bartlett’s classical experiment on remembering and re-narrating, the second part of the article demonstrates that the acquisition and transmission of imaginations of the past follows patterns that are specific to the respective generation. This leads to theoretical remarks on the constitutive viscosity of social memory.

Communication plays an important role in promoting sustainable consumption. Yet how the academic literature conceptualizes and relates communication and sustainable consumption remains poorly understood, despite growing research on communication in the context of sustainable consumption. This article presents the first comprehensive review of sustainable consumption communication (SCC) research as a young and evolving field of scholarly work. Through a systematic review and narrative synthesis of N = 67 peer-reviewed journal articles, we consolidated the research conducted in this field into four distinct types: communication as an approach to (1) behavior change, (2) self-empowerment, (3) systems change, and (4) reflection on current discourses and practices around sustainable consumption. Our findings reveal that most journal articles focus on incremental changes in individual consumer behavior (“weak” sustainable consumption) and employ communication as an intervention tool with little reference to communication science and theory. They also reveal integration challenges arising from the disciplinary diversity and fragmentation characteristic of the research field. Future research should develop shared frameworks and terminology, diversify its foci, synthesize relevant evidence, and innovate critical perspectives that go beyond one-way business-to-consumer communication. The results of our review can serve researchers engaged in sustainable consumption communication to better systematize their efforts and contribute more effectively to changing systems of consumption in the future.

ABSTRACT This article is divided into five parts. After a brief example in the first part, the second explains what historical sense‐generation is about. The third characterizes tradition as a pregiven condition of all historical thinking. With respect to this condition, the constructivist theory of history is criticized as one‐sided. The fourth part presents tradition as one of the four basic sense criteria of historical narration. The article concludes with a discussion of the role of tradition in the historical culture of modern societies. Historical sense‐generation is a mental procedure by which the past is interpreted for the sake of understanding the present and anticipating the future. This mental procedure is an anthropological universal in the cultural orientation of human practical life and will lead to a concept of the course of time as a necessary factor in the cultural orientation of human life. Today the dominant opinion in metahistory conceives of historical sense‐generation in a constructivist way. The sense of the past is understood as an ascription of meaning onto the past; the past itself has no impact on this meaning. But I hold that the past is already present (as a result of historical developments) in the circumstances and conditions under which historical thinking is performed and is obviously influenced by it. This presence can be called tradition. Before historians construct the past they themselves are already constructed by the present outcome of past developments in the world. Thus tradition is always at work in historical thinking before the past is thematized as history. Historical sense‐generation needs basic principles of sense and meaning. Using these principles transforms the experience of the past into a meaningful history for the present. Despite cultural differences, four sense criteria can be identified as basic for making historical sense of the past. One of the four principles is tradition. It is the most fundamental one upon which all other modes of making sense of the past are grounded. It presents temporal change in the human world such that the world's order is maintained despite all its changes. Since the emergence of the so‐called advanced civilizations, other types of historical narration have overshadowed the constitutive role of tradition. Historical narration has been supplemented by exemplary, genetic, and critical approaches to the past. Yet the traditional one has remained the most frequently used and is the most basic and popular.

International audience

Southeast Asia (SE Asia) undergoes major and rapid land cover changes as a result of agricultural expansion. Landscape conversion results in alterations to surface fluxes of moisture, heat, and momentum and sequentially impact the boundary layer structure, cloud-cover regime, and all other aspects of local and regional weather and climate occurring also in regimes remote from the original landscape disturbance. The extent and magnitude of the anthropogenic modification effect is still uncertain. This study investigates the biogeophysical effects of large-scale deforestation on monsoon regions using an idealized deforestation simulation. The simulations are performed using the regional climate model COSMO-CLM forced with ERA-Interim data during the period 1984–2004. In the deforestation experiment, grasses in SE Asia, between 20°S and 20°N, replace areas covered by trees. Using principal component analysis, it is found that abrupt conversion from forest to grassland cover leads to major climate variability in the year of disturbance, which is 1990, over SE Asia. The persistent land modification leads to a decline in evapotranspiration and precipitation and a significant warming due to reduced latent heat flux during 1990–2004. The strongest effects are seen in the lowlands of SE Asia. Daily precipitation extremes increase during the monsoon period and ENSO, differing from the result of mean precipitation changes. Maximum temperature also increases by 2°C. The impacts of land cover change are more intense than the effects of El Niño and La Niña. In addition, results show that these land clearings can amplify the impact of the natural mode ENSO, which has a strong impact on climate conditions in SE Asia. This will likely have consequences for the agricultural output.

This article proposes to measure the welfare effects of Austria's membership of the EU. In addition to the traditional sectoral reallocation effects of open trade, our computations take into account a number of effects not usually measured: expected capital accumulation, saving, and income redistribution across generations. EU membership involves trade integration (lower trade costs, a common external tariff), adopting the common agricultural policy, and membership contributions to the EU. The gains from trade integration and the adaption of the common agricultural policy are partly offset by the burden of contribution payments. The net welfare gain) measured in terms of an equivalent permanent income stream, is 1.21% of GDP. This aggregate figure masks sizeable distribution effects. As expected, agriculture is particularly hard hit. Moreover, membership has a tendency to favour the old as well as future generations at the expense of those entering economic lift at the time of accession. We conclude that the ultimate gains from EU membership will depend on how these distribution issues are solved and how the budgetary cost is financed.

Women’s movements in Western Europe are not dead, but they have altered their strategies in ways that require adaptation of investigative repertoires. Recent research highlights women’s movements’ pathways into institutions as well as the transnationalisation of activism. This article focuses on the shifting public communication repertoire associated with these developments. Communication and movement outreach across Europe are increasingly constituted online. The authors investigate the degree to which women’s networks in Germany and the UK mobilise constituencies via online means. Utilising network mapping tools as well as original data from women’s NGOs, they analyse the density and distribution of relationships in German and UK networks, as well as their interactive communication repertoires as indicators of their capacity to engage constituents. The findings show that information-focused means of communication are more prevalent than interactive mobilisation tools. Women’s NGOs in the UK utilise more public engagement features than those in Germany. The authors relate these findings to second-, third- and fourth-wave feminisms, focusing on their distinct mobilisation strategies.

This collection of essays examines how modern public spheres reflect and mask - often both simultaneously - discourses of order, contests for hegemony, and techniques of power in the Muslim world. It

The CO2 surgical laser was found to be a useful tool for the performance of endoscopic arytenoidectomy for bilateral vocal cord paralysis. The dog was found to be a less-than-perfect experimental model for human bilateral abductor vocal cord paralysis. Documentation by measurements of arterial blood gases and direct in vivo measurements of airway resistance following bilateral recurrent laryngeal nerve section and endoscopic arytenoidectomy was attempted.

edited book is based on an interdisciplinary memory symposium on neurosciences and the humanities that was held at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2007.In The Memory Process, Nalbantian, Matthews and McClelland put together many contributions from cognitive neuropsychologists, neurobiologists, psychiatrists, philosophers, and literary and cultural scholars, all of which were based on distributed and constructionist approaches to memory processes in the brain and the social and cultural world.The book begins with an overarching introduction written by one of the editors, Suzanne Nalbantian, in which she presents the general subject matter of the volume, that is, the distributed and constructionist features of cognitive memory processes that make memory a "multifaceted" process "prompted by inputs from different levels of functioning" (p.1).She asserts that new memory research lies in the convergence of neuroscience and the humanities.Hence, she claims that "the aim of the book is to forge

Die wahre Liberalität ist Anerkennung. Goethe 2 ABSTRACT Much international and intercultural discourse about historiography is influenced by a way of historical thinking deeply rooted in human historical consciousness and that works throughout all cultures and in all times: ethnocentrism. Ethnocentric history conceives of identity in terms of “master‐narratives” that define togetherness and difference as essential for identity in a way that causes tension and struggle. These narratives conceive of history in terms of “clashes of civilizations,” and they reinforce the idea that international and intercultural relations are merely struggles for power. The main elements of ethnocentrism are: asymmetrical evaluation, teleological continuity, and centralized perspective. This essay articulates possibilities for overcoming these three elements by replacing asymmetrical evaluation with normative equality; teleological continuity with reconstructive concepts of development that emphasize contingency and discontinuity; and centralized perspectives with multi‐perspectivity and polycentric approaches to historical experience. Adopting these possibilities would lead to a new mode of universal history rooted in a concept of humankind that can help solve the problem of ethnocentrism. This idea of humankind conceptualizes the unity of the human species as being manifest in a variety of cultures and historical developments. This is in fact the traditional concept of historicism, which can be further developed towards a historiography that responds to the challenges of globalization and cultural differences. The essay outlines theoretical and methodological means in historical studies that bring this idea of humankind into the work of historians, thus enabling them to contribute to a new culture of recognition. The article is based on the assumption that the creation of such a culture is the most important task of scholarly work in the humanities in general, and historical studies in particular, at the beginning of the twenty‐first century.

This theoretical article opens with the reconstruction of a value-critical argument which claims that capitalism is a form of society that is structurally unsustainable. The reason for this is the need for ever-increasing value production which stems from the core of capitalism (the commodity form, competition, profit maximization, private production) and its internal and external limits. Based on this, the article calls for a fundamental social transformation and positions the commons as a social form that has the potential to replace the commodity form as societal foundation. Constituted by social practices (commoning) that are based on voluntariness, autonomy and needs-satisfaction, commons do not have an inbuilt growth compulsion. Therefore, the article concludes, the commons may enable humanity to deal with the question of sustainability on the basis of social structures that include the possibility of a solution.

Die gesamte Bandbreite der Gedächtnisforschung. Ausgehend von den neurologischen und psychologischen Grundlagen betrachtet das Handbuch die vielfältigen Formen des Gedächtnisses darunter das autobiogr

Abstract The chapter gives an account of both opportunities and challenges of human–machine collaboration in citizen science. In the age of big data, scientists are facing the overwhelming task of analysing massive amounts of data, and machine learning techniques are becoming a possible solution. Human and artificial intelligence can be recombined in citizen science in numerous ways. For example, citizen scientists can be involved in training machine learning algorithms in such a way that they perform certain tasks such as image recognition. To illustrate the possible applications in different areas, we discuss example projects of human–machine cooperation with regard to their underlying concepts of learning. The use of machine learning techniques creates lots of opportunities, such as reducing the time of classification and scaling expert decision-making to large data sets. However, algorithms often remain black boxes and data biases are not visible at first glance. Addressing the lack of transparency both in terms of machine action and in handling user-generated data, the chapter discusses how machine learning is actually compatible with the idea of active citizenship and what conditions need to be met in order to move forward – both in citizen science and beyond.

This article deals with the question of how personal memories of the national socialist past in Germany are passed on to younger generations. Rather than viewing this process as an unidirectional handing down of memories from generation to generation, examination is made of how memories are negotiated and re-created in intergenerational discourse. Drawing on a series of case studies, there is discussion of how the meaning of past experiences is construed and organized within particular narrative genres. In order to understand the ways memories are recomposed in the course of social transmission, the analysis highlights the role of group concerns. Against this backdrop, Bartlett’s observations on the repeated reproduction of narratives and Halbwachs’ ideas on the collective memory of the family are presented and discussed as early versions of a sociocultural approach in psychology.

The authors consider only two great transformations in the history of human mankind to be comparable to the Great Transformation towards a global low-carbon economy faced now: the Neolithic Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. This paper discusses different social, economic, and cultural theories which might help to understand this far reaching socio-economic transformation and focus on specific arenas of change in which low-carbon dynamics occur. The authors argue that the technological, economic, and social main elements which will permit the transformation to be made to climate compatibility are already emerging. On the other hand the speed and geographical spread of the low-carbon dynamics are still not sufficient to avoid dangerous climate change.

Abstract. The "Great Frost" of 1740 was one of the coldest winters of the eighteenth century and impacted many countries all over Europe. The years 1740–1741 have long been known as a period of general crisis caused by harvest failures, high prices for staple foods, and excess mortality. Vulnerabilities, coping capacities and adaptation processes varied considerably among different countries. This paper investigates the famine of 1740–1741 in Ireland applying a multi-indicator model developed specifically for the integration of an analysis of pre-famine vulnerability, the Famine Vulnerability Analysis Model (FVAM). Our focus is on Ireland, because famine has played a more outstanding role in Irish national history than in any other European country, due to the "Great Famine" of 1845–1852 and its long-term demographic effects. Our analysis shows that Ireland was already particularly vulnerable to famine in the first half of the eighteenth century. During and after the experience of hardship in 1740–1741, many Irish moved within Ireland or left the country entirely. We regard migration as a form of adaptation and argue that Irish migration in 1740–1741 should be considered as a case of climate-induced migration.