Natural Water Treatment Systems for Safe and Sustainable Water Supply in the Indian Context is based on the work from the Saph Pani project (Hindi word meaning potable water). The book aims to study and improve natural water treatment systems, such as River Bank Filtration (RBF), Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR), and wetlands in India, building local and European expertise in this field. The proj…
'A fascinating portal into arguments about why we need to get beyond money' - Harry Cleaver
From the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance against the Dakota Access pipeline to the Nepalese Newar community’s protest of the Fast Track Road Project, Indigenous peoples around the world are standing up and speaking out against global capitalism to protect the land, water, and air. By reminding us of the fundamental importance of placing Indigenous politics, histories, and ontologies …
This book is an ethnographic study of the internal dynamics of a subcultural community that defines itself as a social movement. While the majority of scholarly studies on this movement focus on its official face, on its front stage, this book concerns itself with the ideological and practical paradoxes at work within the micro-social dynamics of the backstage, an area that has so far been negl…
The authors define the term presbycusis and discuss the prevalence of hearing loss in elderly people, its etiology, and methods of diagnostics (anamnesis, evaluation of the peripheral and central parts of the hearing system). The authors emphasize that central auditory processing disorder (CAPD) significantly impairs speech perception in elderly people and makes difficult the rehabilitation of …
Beyond the Black-and-White of Autism: How Cognitive Performance Varies with Context
A consideration of the perception of beauty immediately bridges the subjective and objective. To what extent is beauty residing in the object and to what extent is it a property of the subjectivity of the perceiver? Is beauty an objective feature of the object, like color, for example, which nonetheless needs to be perceived and therefore configured by the observer? Or is there some more comple…
This chapter analyses the role of the mass media in people’s perceptions of beauty. We summarize the research literature on the mass media, both traditional media and online social media, and how they appear to interact with psychological factors to impact appearance concerns and body image disturbances. There is a strong support for the idea that traditional forms of media (e.g. magazines an…
This chapter is a discussion and reflection of how beauty is perceived through the lens of four different athletes over four different decades. Two basketball players, a gymnast and a skater, reflect on the language of their sport and how beauty is perceived and manipulated through language and coaching techniques. The experiences affect athletes over a lifetime, both positively and negatively.
Aging is an enormously complicated process. Despite a great many of theories (among them “Program Theories”, “Combined Theories”, “Damage Theories”, “Inflamm-Aging”, “Garb-Aging” and the “Rising Deleteriome”), so far there is none which is able to explain this phenomenon satisfactorily and completely. A different approach to address the complexity of aging is to characte…