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Open Access
Surveillance and Control of Dengue Vectors in the United States and Territories
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-07-04) Barrera, Roberto
'Surveillance and Control of Dengue Vectors in the United States and Territories' offers a comprehensive exploration of the challenges and strategies involved in managing dengue vectors, particularly Aedes mosquitoes, in the US and its territories. With over 13 million dengue cases reported in the Americas in 2024 alone, this timely book synthesizes critical information on vector species, transmission cycles, and effective surveillance and control methods. Dr. Roberto Barrera, a seasoned expert in mosquito ecology and Vector-Borne diseases, presents evidence-based recommendations for public health officials, researchers, and community stakeholders. This essential guide not only addresses the complexities of dengue transmission but also emphasizes the importance of integrated vector management and community engagement in preventing outbreaks. Whether you are a public health professional, a student, or simply interested in vector ecology, this book serves as a vital resource for understanding and combating dengue in an ever-evolving landscape.
Open Access
Characters in Film and Other Media: Theory, Analysis, Interpretation
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-07-29) Eder, Jens
Characters are central to the creation and experience of films and other media. Their cultural significance is profound, but they also raise a wide range of questions. This book provides a comprehensive theory that guides the analysis and interpretation of characters across four dimensions: as represented beings with physical, psychological, and social characteristics; as artefacts with aesthetic structures; as meaningful symbols; and as symptoms of socio-cultural origins and effects. Integrating insights from film, media, and literary studies as well as philosophy, psychology and sociology, the book offers a broad range of approaches for understanding characters and the emotional responses they evoke. Richly illustrated and offering practical tools, along with case studies of numerous characters from different genres of films, this book will be invaluable to scholars and students of film and media studies and related disciplines, as well as artistic practitioners.
Open Access
Historiographies of Game Studies: What It Has Been, What It Could Be
(punctum books, 2025-07-25) Vossen, Emma; Karabinus, Alisha; Kocurek, Carly A.; Mejeur, Cody
Historiographies of Game Studies offers a first-of-its-kind reflection on how game studies as an academic field has been shaped and sustained. Today, game studies is a thriving field with many dedicated national and international conferences, journals, professional societies, and a strong presence at conferences in disciplines like computer science, communication, media studies, theater, visual arts, popular culture, and others. But, when did game studies start? And what (and who) is at the core or center of game studies? Fields are defined as much by what they are not as by what they are, and their borderlands can be hotly contested spaces. In this anthology, scholars from across the field consider how the boundaries of game studies have been established, codified, contested, and protected, raising critical questions about who and what gets left out of the field. Over more than two dozen chapters and interviews with leading figures, including Espen Aarseth, Kishonna Gray, Henry Jenkins, Lisa Nakamura, Kentaro Matsumoto, Ken McAllister, and Janet Murray, the contributors offer a dazzling array of insightful provocations that address the formation, propagation, and cultivation of game studies, interrogating not only the field’s pasts but its potential futures and asking us to think deliberately about how academic fields are collectively built.
Open Access
'Wisdom and Greatness in one Place': The Alexandrian Trader Moses ben Judah and his Circle
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-07-22) Wagner, Esther-Miriam; Arad, Dotan
The manuscript collections of the Bodleian Library contain a corpus of dozens of documents from the archive of Moses ben Judah. A leader of the Jewish community in Alexandria, he was also a prominent businessman and in contact with individuals from Cairo to Sicily. This collection of documents at the Bodleian likely did not emerge from the Cairo Genizah, but from another depository, and appears to have been buried at some point. The documents, which include letters and deeds, shed light on the world of the Jewish elite of a Mediterranean city at the end of the Middle Ages, their communal and business life, connections between Jewish communities, and intellectual trends and tastes among educated Jews. They improve our understanding of the lives of Alexandrian Jews in the late Middle Ages and provide new data about the local leadership and its relations with the Nagidate (the central Jewish leadership) in Cairo, the cantors, the poll tax and its effects, and more. We hear about tensions within this society and the growing presence of European (Italian, Greek, Iberian, and conversos) Jews within the complex social mosaic of Egyptian Jewry in the late Mamluk period. The documents inform us about Alexandria’s Jewish community and the commercial networks of the Mediterranean world, in which Jews traded alongside Christians and Muslims. This volume makes an important contribution to the study of Judaeo-Arabic at a watershed moment. Sources from the late Mamluk period show Judaeo-Arabic at a linguistic border between Classical and Late Judaeo-Arabic. The volume will therefore further readers’ knowledge of historical linguistics of Arabic in general, and Judaeo-Arabic in particular. The phrase ‘Wisdom and Greatness in One Place’ in the title of the book is a quotation from the Babylonian Talmud (Giṭṭin 59a), the meaning of which is that it is rare to find combined in one man political leadership and intellectual pre-eminence.
Open Access
Stories of Hope: Reimagining Education
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-07-02) Madhok, Rajan; Heller, Richard F.; Abegglen, Sandra; Burns, Tom; Neuhaus, Fabian; Sandars, John; Sinfield, Sandra; Gitanjali Singh, Upasana
Higher education is in crisis. Students are disengaged, lecturers are burned out, and universities seem more preoccupied with rankings and revenue than with knowledge and wellbeing. But rather than dwell on the problems, this book focuses on solutions—on hope. Bringing together a diverse range of educators and practitioners, this collection showcases real-world innovations that challenge the status quo and offer glimpses of a more humane and inspiring educational future. From rethinking systems and curriculum design to fostering imaginative collaboration and exploring the role of technology, the book highlights practical, hopeful interventions that are already making a difference. This is not a manifesto of complaints but an invitation to reimagine education. The contributors offer fresh perspectives from around the world, illustrating how small but meaningful changes can transform learning spaces, empower educators, and inspire students. For academics, teachers, administrators, and anyone invested in the future of education, this book serves as both a source of inspiration and a call to action. It is an evolving ecosystem of ideas—grounded in practice, rich with possibility, and rooted in radical hope. Now is the time to create the change we wish to see.
Open Access
Reading: Performance and Materiality in Hebrew and Aramaic Traditions
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-07-21) Patmore, Hector M.; Najman, Hindy; Schorch, Stefan; Verrijssen, Jeroen; van der Schoor, Hanneke
This volume contains the proceedings the 'Reading: Performance and Materiality in Hebrew and Aramaic Traditions' colloquium, hosted at the University of Oxford in 2023, and jointly sponsored by the Oriel Centre for the Study of the Bible and the European Research Council project, 'TEXTEVOLVE.' The aim of the colloquium was to investigate Jewish approaches to the reading of texts, with a focus on reading practices that were applied to Hebrew and Aramaic texts in antiquity and the early Middle Ages. It explored, in particular, how these were shaped by material and non-textual aspects (oral traditions, performative context, philological values, etc). Among the questions it addressed were: How did non-textual components determine reading? To what extent did materiality shape or limit readings? How did reading practices shape the texts themselves? What values guided how texts were modified and variant texts evaluated? What determined which form or version of a text was read and according to what conventions? The responses to these questions collected in this volume highlight the tensions between authority and creativity, preservation and innovation, understanding and misapprehension, knowledge and ignorance, which shaped Jewish practices of reading.
Open Access
The Economics of Cultural Loss: Harm and Resilience in North American Indigenous Communities
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-07-28) Eswaran, Mukesh
Why do North American Indigenous Peoples face such grave conditions in health, poverty, and mortality—including alarmingly high rates of suicide, alcoholism, and drug abuse? In this groundbreaking book, Mukesh Eswaran confronts these urgent questions through the lens of economics, focusing deeply on an underexplored aspect: the erosion of Indigenous culture. While empirical studies have shed some light on Indigenous struggles, Eswaran argues that mainstream economic theory fails to grasp the unique realities of Indigenous communities. His work introduces innovative models that incorporate cultural and communal values—particularly the sacredness of land and the importance of extended family and communal life—as foundational components of Indigenous well-being. Eswaran emphasizes that policies rooted in conventional economics, which often ignore culture, are ill-suited to address Indigenous issues, in particular, what has been identified as ‘Deaths of Despair’ among Indigenous Peoples. Drawing from Indigenous scholars and Elders, he shows how historical trauma—passed through generations—has systematically dismantled cultural and communal supports. His theoretical framework helps explain the rise in substance abuse and suicide, and points toward new, culturally sensitive policy approaches. While advancing economic theory relevant to Indigenous issues, the book also proposes a meaningful path toward healing and justice for Indigenous communities. It is a vital read for economists, policymakers, students, and anyone concerned with Indigenous history, well-being, equity and reconciliation.
Open Access
Barge Life: On Jean Vigo's "L'Atalante"
(punctum books, 2025-07-03) Deroo, Florian
Waves washing up against the hull, a bed and a small stove, the deck hatch sealed shut — the vessel is the ultimate dwelling. How to live together in cramped quarters? How to create a microcosm against hostile surroundings? In Barge Life, Florian Deroo tackles these question by looking at a mythical classic of French cinema: Jean Vigo’s 1934 film L’Atalante. A work brimming with the energies of surrealism and anarchism, L’Atalante follows a young couple, two shipmates, and a clowder of cats who dwell in the belly of a river barge. Deroo offers a wide-ranging essay on the film, revealing how it invokes a small group that withdraws from the rhythm of modern life to establish a different kind of existence elsewhere. In L’Atalante’s most riveting moments, the river barge becomes a vehicle for a powerful fantasy: a flexible collective life, lived in sensuous interdependence. Combining film criticism, philosophy, and biography, this book reconsiders a forerunner of the French New Wave and the early death of its director. Drawing readers into the living spaces of L’Atalante, Deroo explores the allure of retreating into a self-sufficient shelter, along with its intractable problems.
Open Access
Executive Orders
(punctum books, 2025-06-09) Organism for Poetic Research; Wilson, Rachael Guynn; Gorin, Andrew Michael
After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, a group of poets, artists, and activists conceived of a project wherein they could respond to the sudden and seemingly relentless barrage of Trump’s dystopian executive orders with a series of their own orders. The project, titled “Executive Orders,” was envisioned as a collaborative, freeform, “emergency” prose poem that would generate real-time responses to current events and the emerging American political landscape. The result was a poetic catalog of the people’s executive orders—orders that are at turns serious, absurd, satirical, philosophical, critical, utopian, and so on. Executive Orders began as one community’s effort to cope with and respond to the tidal wave of reactionary policies enacted or proclaimed during the years of Trump’s first administration. As an index of historical happenings that charts events in rough chronological order (including the Muslim-country travel ban, Black Lives Matter protests, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, the youth climate march, the January 6th riot at the US Capitol, and many other events), it stands as a documentary record of this historical period from the perspective of artists, writers, leftists, progressives, and other contributors, many of them anonymous. Executive Orders is also an experiment in crowdsourced collaborative making that tells a story about the ways we can—and can’t—come together to form a collective that could have a voice in political deliberations.
Open Access
Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry
(punctum books, 2025-06-17) Sachs, Lynne; Olesker, Lizzie
Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry is a collection of writings and images from a performance and film set within a neighborhood laundromat, a microcosm of service work within our urban reality. With a focus on the people who are paid to wash and fold, Hand Book explores the convergence of dirt, stains, money, identity, and desire. Informed by both theory and history, filmmaker-poet Lynne Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker construct a model for making a site-specific work incorporating both live performance and film. From conversations with workers in laundromats around New York City, they develop a play that magnifies forms of manual labor that often go unrecognized. The core of Hand Book is Sachs and Olesker’s hybrid play-script which grew out of documentary material they collected in New York City over several years. Within this theatrical construct, the actors themselves navigate the dynamic between their laundry worker characters and who they are in their own lives. Images also engage with text to create an evocative graphic experience. Turning a page becomes an interactive, quasi-cinematic encounter, calling to mind the intimacy of touching other people’s clothes, almost like a second skin, the textural care for things kept close to the body. Hand Book includes essays, interviews, memoirs, and poetry that look at the relationship between art and social engagement. Observation, historical research, and fiction intersect, creating a patchwork of “what is” with a speculative, imagined “what was.” Historian and author Tera Hunter speaks to the importance of The Washing Society, a group of 3,000 Black women laundry workers who organized in Atlanta in 1881 for better pay and working conditions. Feminist historian Silvia Federici engages in a conversation about the meaning of reproductive labor and its relationship to laundry. Two leaders of a grassroots organization share their experience of immigration and activism. A dancer creates a gestural map of her choreography. An actor deconstructs the charged significance of her Civil War-era costume. Ultimately, Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry presents an illuminating dialogue between the documentary arts, feminism, film, immigration, labor history, and theater. Throughout, a playwright and filmmaker contemplate how art-making can alter our understanding of the social structures of city life. Sachs and Olesker’s short documentary film The Washing Society will be available via QR code upon release of the book.
Open Access
When Katherine Brewed, a Play: Telling the Story of the Peasants’ Revolt and Today’s New Radical Theatre
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-06-27) Cresswell, John
In the sweltering heat of 1381, England's feudal foundations trembled as the Peasants' Revolt erupted—a rebellion that would forever echo through history. Triggered by an oppressive poll tax but fuelled by deeper injustices, this uprising saw land workers, artisans, and commoners rise to challenge the authority of landowners, church, and crown. 'When Katherine Brewed' brings this momentous event to life on stage, blending historical fidelity with a bold, radical perspective. Drawing from chronicles and centuries of literary reinterpretation, this devised play reveals the struggles of the forgotten: those who dared to dream of a world free from exploitation and tyranny. Through the lens of class struggle and solidarity, the story of Wat Tyler, John Ball, and their fellow rebels unfolds, exposing the duplicity of rulers and the undying hope of those who resist. Echoing the spirit of radical theatre traditions, this play reimagines this medieval rebellion with contemporary relevance, urging audiences to reflect on enduring issues of inequality and power. Both an homage to the past and a rallying cry for the future, this production is as much a tribute to those who fought as it is an invitation to envision a world transformed. Witness history, and the lessons it still holds.
Open Access
Housing, Heritage and Urbanisation in the Middle East and North Africa
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-06-03) Makhloufi, Lilia
This book explores the interconnection between housing, heritage and urbanisation. Bringing together architects, archaeologists, urban sociologists, urban designers, urban planners and landscape architects, this multi-authored and interdisciplinary volume presents diverse case studies from the Middle East and North Africa, shedding light on the past, present and future of residential spaces. With its focus to traditional, modern and contemporary housing in Egypt, Iran, Morocco, Syria and Tunisia, Housing, Heritage and Urbanisation in the Middle East and North Africa explores the correlation between architecture, urban planning and society. The contributors critique the impact of rapid urbanisation and global architectural standardisation, which often goes beyond local identity. Instead, they advocate for a sustainable urban development rooted in community needs and cultural heritage. Ultimately, this volume argues that successful urban planning must balance modernity with tradition, ensuring that housing reflects the lived experiences of its inhabitants. A crucial read for scholars and practitioners, it reaffirms that sustainable cities must be shaped by local needs, not just global trends.
Open Access
Uncovering European Private Law: A Student Handbook
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-06-05) Bartl, Marija; Mak, Chantal; Burgers, Laura
Aimed at bridging a crucial gap in legal education, Uncovering European Private Law provides a comprehensive introduction to the evolving field of European private law. This innovative handbook addresses the interplay of national, European, and transnational rules governing relationships between private actors, including individuals and businesses. Designed with students in mind, this volume not only covers foundational concepts but also explores cutting-edge developments in areas such as contract, tort, property, and company law. What sets this handbook apart is its contextual approach. By integrating societal and theoretical perspectives, it encourages students to critically evaluate private law's role in addressing global challenges like digitalization, sustainability, and globalization. Gathering the expertise of over twenty international law scholars, the handbook reflects the expertise of academics deeply engaged in teaching and research. With structured chapters and accessible narratives, this handbook replaces piecemeal materials previously used in courses. It offers coherence and depth, making it an essential resource for understanding the legal frameworks that shape commerce, legal practice, and broader societal issues. Whether for mandatory or elective courses, this guide empowers students to navigate and critically assess the dynamic field of European private law providing an essential resource for the private lawyers of the future.
Open Access
Gender-Based Violence in Arts and Culture: Perspectives on Education and Work
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-06-23) Karttunen, Sari; Provansal, Mathilde; Buscatto, Marie
This book offers a groundbreaking exploration of the pervasive issue of gender-based violence (GBV) within the realms of art and cultural production. This collection of essays delves into both the overt and subtle forms of GBV. It spans sexual harassment, assault, and the everyday sexism ingrained in creative workplaces and art schools, in both professional and private dimensions. The book covers a wide array of artistic sectors—opera, visual arts, music, and theatre—across diverse global contexts, from Europe to Asia and North America. By incorporating feminist and sociological theories, the essays not only examine the structural power dynamics that perpetuate GBV but also highlight efforts to challenge and dismantle these systems. The book addresses both criminal acts of violence and the "ordinary" forms of sexism that pervade artistic spaces, making visible the normalized patterns of behavior that maintain gender inequality. The volume is divided into three parts: the production of GBV, its representations in cultural work, and the initiatives to counteract it. A crucial contribution to ongoing discussions of workplace and educational inequality, this timely volume fills a notable gap in research on gender-based violence within the arts. Its methodological rigor and international perspective ensure that it will serve as a key resource for scholars, practitioners, and advocates alike.
Open Access
'Thou Shalt Not Stand Idly By': Jews of Conscience on Palestine
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-06-25) Landau, Susan
This volume is a timely and powerful collection of Jewish dissent against Zionism and the impact of Israeli statehood on the indigenous Palestinian population. Bridging history, politics, theology, and conflict studies, this book traces a moral and intellectual tradition of resistance from within the global Jewish community—one rooted in values of justice, equality, and compassion. From early twentieth-century critics like Ahad Ha’am and Hannah Arendt to contemporary scholars, rabbis, journalists, and activists, the voices gathered here challenge the dominant narratives that conflate Judaism with Zionism. As violence escalates in Gaza and misinformation clouds public understanding, this book offers essential historical context and urgently needed counter-narratives. Through curated quotes, essays, and reflections, it documents how generations of Jews have spoken out—often at personal cost—against militarism, racism, and settler colonialism. In doing so, it reclaims an ethical tradition that links solidarity with Palestine with all struggles for justice throughout the world. This is an anti-war, anti-prejudice book for anyone seeking clarity amid polarization. In this unprecedented political moment, it is an essential resource for educators, activists, faith leaders, and all who value human rights. By amplifying voices of conscience, it deepens our understanding of Israel-Palestine relations and reminds us of the enduring power of moral dissent.
Open Access
The Singing Detainee and the Librarian with One Book: Essays on Exile
(punctum books, 2025-05-16) Beltran, Michael
In late 2019, journalist Michael Beltran found himself in the city of Utrecht, the Netherlands, deep in conversation with Filipino revolutionary leaders Jose Maria Sison and Julie de Lima. What was planned to be a feature article ended up as a collection of observations on what it means to live in exile. Sison and de Lima are maligned by governments and revered by activists worldwide, all while spending most of their time tucked away in a small Dutch neighborhood. What Beltran realized was that it was impossible to speak of their exile without understanding the history and community surrounding it. The Singing Detainee and the Librarian with One Book shares lesser known tales about two of the most well-known revolutionary exiles and their comrades. It speaks of a community and history behind the ordeal, weaving it into the Filipino diaspora. Sison passed away in December 2022, making this book a record of one of the last and arguably lengthiest interviews he ever gave. The essays track the couple’s prolonged stay as refugees, how the Philippine liberation movement found a home in Europe, and how migrants and activists alike gravitated toward each other while adrift from their homeland. “Exile,” Beltran says, “is imprisonment by displacement […] when people are condemned to leave their lands dressed in invisible chains.”
Open Access
Ontohackers: Radical Movement Philosophy in the Age of Extinctions and Algorithms, Part II: R/evolution Technologies
(punctum books, 2025-05-27) del Val, Jaym*/Jaime
Ontohackers redefines what movement, worlds, and bodies are through the sense of proprioception reconceptualized as formless fluctuation field, a movement matrix that is itself also thought, and which underlies all life forms and fields, including the inorganic. Our worlds are made of endless such entangled fields n-folding in neverending variation or enferance. The current planetary crisis has emerged due to an accidental evolutionary alignment, narrowing, and impoverishment of that matrix’s indeterminacy, that appeared gradually and eventually with bipedalism, and which created an imbalance between the larger proprioceptive field and its brain, and made the atrophied body extend itself technically in geometric fields gradually covering the planet, along with its fears, with disastrous consequences that are unleashing an unprecedented type of mass extinction and species suicide. The reply to this crisis – which is urgently due if we are to reduce even slightly the collapse coming up over the next decades – is in recovering a lost sensorimotor plasticity which is also cognitive, affective, and relational plasticity, through developing movement technes for cultivating Body Intelligence (BI), reversing and taking elsewhere the failed evolution culminating in AI, stepping down from humanist supremacist pedestals, undoing our dependency upon unsustainable killing machines of sedentary consumerism that impoverish experience, stopping the reproduction of a species that has become plague (by reversing heteronormative reproductive dogmas till we reach preagricultural population levels), and recovering the joys of moving with the world, in symbiotic mutation, towards unprecedented evolutionary variations: this is our cosmic responsibility for all life on Earth. The book’s structure expresses Enferance Theory with regard to how processes of becoming have a triple movement: an incipiency unfolding the field (Part I), a condensation-expansion where the field acquires full consistency (Part II), and a resonance or memory of the field relating to other fields (Part III). Part II, subtitled R/evolution Technologies, includes Books 4, 5, and 6 and is by far the longest volume, elaborating in depth the book’s proposals in a triple movement. It first exposes the technologies of variation in nature (Book 4), followed by the technologies of reduction in the Algoricene (Book 5), and finally the possibilities for overcoming the reductive fold (Book 6). Book 4 proposes a swarming chaosmology as theory of orgiastic evolution, culminating in the concept of metabiosis: life as indeterminate, symbiotic mutation. Book 5 diagnoses the regimes that have formatted movement and presents the theory of the Algoricene, or Age of Extinctions and Algorithms. It exposes a kinetic ontology, genealogy, and dynamics of power. An interlude discusses post-, trans-, and metahumanism, and a second part of the book unfolds a radical critique of the Planetary Holocaust. Book 6 unfolds metaformance aesthetics and metahuman politics, including the theory of metaformativity, the ontohacking pragmatics, and a choral Dionysian ontology, where the author also discusses at length hir own techniques and art projects, involving a radical challenge to human supremacism to face the extinction challenge now threatening all life on Earth, toward an Earth liberation and regeneration.
Open Access
Oral Poetry
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-05-28) Finnegan, Ruth
This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the vast field of 'oral poetry,' encompassing everything from American folksongs, contemporary pop songs, and Inuit lyrics, to the heroic epics of Homer, biblical psalms, and epic traditions in Asia and the Pacific. Taking a broad comparative approach, it explores oral poetry across Africa, Asia, Oceania, Europe, and the Americas. Drawing on global research, Ruth Finnegan, the author of the seminal Oral Literature in Africa, sheds light on key debates such as the nature of oral tradition, the relationship between poetry and society, the differences between oral and written forms, and the role of poets in predominantly non-literate contexts. Written from a primarily anthropological and literary perspective, this study contributes to the socio-cultural aspects of verbal art while also engaging with the literary dimensions of poetry which happens at any given moment to be unwritten. Finnegan's clear, non-technical language and extensive use of translated examples make this work accessible to a wide audience, appealing not only to sociologists and anthropologists but also to those with an interest in poetry, in comparative literature, and in global folk traditions. The re-issue of this classic study is now augmented by further illustrations and a newly written Introduction and Conclusion, situating it in the context of the contemporary study of literature.
Open Access
Bioethics: A Coursebook
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-05-12) Collective, COMPOST; Moormann, Emma; Hens, Kristien; Buyst, Nele; Devos, Ina; Kenis, Daan; Meinen, Lisanne; Mertens, Mayli; Ratajczyk, Yanni; Vulliermet, Franlu; Stadlbauer, Christina; Vandeput, Bartaku; Paleri, Varsha Aravind; Villafuerte, Ilya Gordon; Struyf, Joke
This coursebook offers an expansive exploration of bioethics, an interdisciplinary field examining ethical, social, and legal dilemmas in medicine, life sciences, and beyond. It challenges conventional boundaries, embracing Van Rensselaer Potter’s vision of bioethics as a global, holistic ethics of life—integrating human health, environmental considerations, and transdisciplinary insights. Through engaging discussions, thought experiments, and case studies, the book empowers students to critically reflect on ethical questions without dictating rigid answers. Topics range from the historical roots of ethical thought to cutting-edge debates in molecular biology, such as epigenetics and exposomics, demonstrating how interconnected human, animal, and environmental health truly are. Central themes include the limits of scientific knowledge, the biases shaping research, and the evolving interplay between moral philosophy and empirical science. Students will encounter key philosophical frameworks—ontology, epistemology, and ethics—woven into practical bioethical applications. Feminist philosophy, experimental bioethics, and embedded ethics enrich this perspective, urging readers to question assumptions, embrace diverse viewpoints, and connect ethical principles with real-world science. Targeted at students in philosophy, biology, biomedical sciences, and bioengineering, this book is a toolkit for future thinkers, fostering a nuanced understanding of how ethical science advances humanity in a complex, ever-changing world.
Open Access
Qur’an Translations in the Eastern Bloc and Beyond
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-05-21) Pink, Johanna; Yakubovych, Mykhaylo; Kulieva, Elvira
This book offers the first comprehensive exploration of Qur’an translations across the diverse landscapes of the former Eastern Bloc, from Uzbekistan to the German Democratic Republic. With a focus on how Islamic texts have been shaped by state policies, ideological shifts, and religious identities, it traces connections between these regions and the wider world, including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and China. This volume draws on perspectives from both Sunni and Shia traditions, as well as contributions by non-Muslim scholars. Through archival research and close textual analysis, the contributors demonstrate how translations of the Qur’an have served not only as religious texts but also as reflections of profound transformations in national and religious identities in communist and post-communist societies. Qur’an translations have gained prominence within the modern Muslim publishing world, and their analysis reveals a dynamic interplay between local politics and global Islamic discourse. They have become symbols of religious resurgence, cultural renewal, and intellectual exchange—but also objects of persecution and contestation. Based on multilingual sources, this collection is an essential resource for understanding Qur’an translations as a significant scholarly and cultural phenomenon in the modern era.