Böcker utgivna av Amsterdam University Press

This book critically reflects on the role and usefulness of big data, challenging overly optimistic expectations about what such information can reveal.

Determinedly forward-looking and optimistic, though never straying from hard facts, The Tesla Revolution paints a striking picture of our global energy future.

This book explores the future of modern higher education by looking at it on a global scale.

Presents and discusses a treasure trove of early color film images from the archives of EYE Film Institute Netherlands, bringing to life their rich hues and forgotten splendor.

From a semio-pragmatic perspective and drawing on an interdisciplinary and intermedial approach, this book analyses how the audiovisual thinking process manifests itself in essay films. It explores how issues of subjectivity and identity, whether individual, social, political or cultural, prompt thought through the medium of cinema. The volume discusses the European Francophone essay film from its first appearance in cinematic modernity to the present. The study is developed in three stages. The first analyses the intermedial forms that are used: the letter, the (self-)portrait, the dialogue, the diptych, etc. The second examines the audiovisual materials that are mobilised. The third addresses the audiovisual procedures that are generated. In its analysis of works by Marker, Godard, Akerman, Varda and others, this book offers a new and detailed understanding of the production, evolution and achievements of the essay film in Francophone Europe.

This book explores early modern Italian women as agents of doubt. While women were often considered prone to doubt as a result of their natural "weakness," the essays gathered here reverse this view, demonstrating how women were able to embrace doubt as a means to expand their agency. Using doubt to contest both official narratives as well as religious and civil practices, women were able to carve out a space of their own in contemporary culture and society. The volume covers a period from the late fifteenth to the mid seventeenth centuries, offering critical insight into early modern doubt and investigating how doubt, like other categories of thought, could be gendered. Contributors address the topics of doubt and the Querelle des Femmes, religion, writing, and social networks. The volume offers a multidisciplinary approach to early modern doubt, combining gender studies with religious history, the history of literature, social history, and the history of science.

Digital technologies have rapidly become integral to communities and societies, bringing both significant benefits and serious concerns. Issues such as misinformation, disinformation, online polarization, discrimination, and widening inequalities have prompted a critical and urgent debate: Can digital societies still be effectively governed? This book brings together insights from various disciplines to address the pressing question: "How can we develop and apply principles of (good) governance in digital societies that are organized democracies?" Governing the Digital Societypresents a range of governance approaches, focusing on online platforms, artificial intelligence, and the public values that underpin these technologies. The authors position themselves at the forefront of their disciplines, offering perspectives from law, critical data studies, urban studies, science and technology studies, computational linguistics, and the political economy of media. Expert interviews provide additional insights into ongoing efforts to tackle the challenges of governing digital societies. The book demonstrates that governance is not just a technical or legal process but a complex societal one, embedding norms, values, and morality into our institutions and daily lives.

This volume examines the emerging exhibition complex on Chinese art in early twentieth-century China, and from the mid-1950s onwards, the cultural politics involved in Asia with the exhibitions of traditional and modern Chinese art in Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore. It also scrutinizes the curatorial practices that have influenced the interpretation and display of Chinese art amidst the advance of media technology and heritage engagement in the twenty-first century. Situated within ongoing debates on global art history, the volume is inclusive of multiple geo-cultural perspectives, and the dynamic practices that relate art tradition or heritage to more universal spatiotemporal art experience and engagement. It extends the understanding of exhibitions of Chinese art not only as multiple historical processes culturally and politically negotiated and contested by contending forces and diverse actors in the region, but also as creative interventions to engage people around the globe in the present.

This volume significantly expands current understandings of both disability and sanctity in the Middle Ages. Across the collection, heterogeneous constructions, and experiences, of disability and holiness are excavated. Analyses span the tenth to the fourteenth century, with discussion of holy men and holy women, Western Christian and Buddhist traditions, hagiographic texts, images, and artefacts. Each chapter underscores that disability and sanctity co-exist with a vast array of connotations, not just fully positive or fully negative, but also every inflection in between. The collection is a powerful rebuttal to the notion of the integral relationship of disability-medieval and otherwise-with sin, stigma, and shame. So doing, it recentres medieval disability history as a lived history that merits exploration and celebration. In this way, the volume serves to reclaim sanctity in disability histories as a means to affirm the possibility of radical disability futures.

The identification of ceramic imports within prehistoric and historic assemblages has long been the primary indicator for identifying connections between different sites and regions. Yet this has fostered a presence/absence diagnosis for contact between different communities. Approaches such as post-colonial perspectives and network analysis, which focus on the nature of the connections, are now beginning to offer more meaningful ways of considering past interactions. These approaches can bridge the traditional divide between "prehistoric" and "historic" and offer a valuable contribution to the wider study of past interactions in the ancient Mediterranean. The geographical or topographical setting of an archaeological site is often acknowledged as an important factor in their significance or how well connected the community was within the cultural landscape. But to what extent do geographical categories such as "island," "coast," "mainland" or "hinterland" influence modern ideas on the dynamics of these ancient communities? This volume uses ceramic studies across multiple spatial and diachronic scales to provide new insights into the connectivity of ancient Mediterranean communities.

Human beings have always been concerned with fundamental questions about their selves, including the deeply personal nature of human experience, the persistence of the self over time, the relation between mind and body, and the interdependence between self and community. The goal of this volume is to rethink these questions against the backdrop of Chinese philosophical traditions, covering the ideas of major thinkers from Classical to late imperial China, with a particular focus on the fact that human experience is necessarily characterized by the first-person perspective. The contributors to this volume employ different methods (historical, comparative, phenomenological), but they all aim at bringing the rich resources of Chinese philosophy to life in our global present.