Search results for ""Uniwersytet Jagiellonski, Wydawnictwo""

The volume is an introduction to one of the key concepts in Tibetan Buddhist epistemology, namely the object of cognition. The volume provides an overview of the notion of cognizable objects in Sa Skya Paṇḍita (1182–1251), a short summary of Western research on that concept, followed by an edited translation of the first chapter of his fundamental work Tshad ma rigs gter together with the canonical commentary by Go rams pa (1429–1489). Both texts are translated into a European language for the first time.

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The book documents an exceptional event - the first conference joining Polish and Chinese art historians, organized by the Polish Society of Oriental Art, now the Polish Institute of World Art Studies in Warsaw and Confucius Institute of Jagiellonian University in 2009. The outcome of this meeting is a collection of texts covering various topics. They include syntheses of different periods and phenomena through the history of Polish and Chinese art; the rarely investigated matters of the artistic contacts between both countries, especially as researched and presented from the Chinese point of view; and the reflections on affinities and common tendencies in modern and contemporary art of China and Poland. The whole volume allows the comparison of the areas of interest and approaches presented by art historians of both countries, as well as insight into the Polish research on the Chinese art, now developing very dynamically. It is worth mentioning that the Chinese version of the volume will appear soon.

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The work presents a study of the linguistic and pragmatic response to the taboo of death in Egypt. The analysis leads the author to the conclusion that the experience of death in Egyptian society is mediated by religion. The reaction to death announcements includes a number of strategies to protect both the author of the utterance and its recipient against the effects of the taboo related to this topic. The most important feature of the studied communication is formulaicity, which is at the same time the central idea and the methodological frame of the work presented here.The discourse analyzed here fits within the Arab-Muslim rhetorical framework. In the daily utterances of the Egyptians, divine agency is believed to be constantly present, which is attested in numerous ritual practices. As part of the quantitative study and the structural analysis of the material, a pattern was distinguished in which individual types of formulas occur in their fixed places and a specific order. Qualitatively, many of the statements in the material are strongly emotional. To enhance the pragmatic effect, phrases are combined with each other, repetitions, prayers, poetic attempts and quotes from the Quran/ Hadith appear. Most of the phrases used in response to the taboo of death are prefabricated items recalled from memory almost automatically. Further analysis proposes to look at the formulae in the context of taboo and strong emotions related to it. Using formulaic sequence instead of generating novel language enables. the author of the utterance to convey emotional support to the suffering person and, at the same time, eliminates ambiguity. The methodology proposed here offers a new insight into the language of everyday communication, through the lens of its pragmatic usefulness and linguistic etiquette, taking into account the cultural framework in which the analyzed utterances are performed.

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The publication Places and Spaces of Crime in Popular Imagination is part of the Topographies of (Post)Modernity: Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature in English Series. The text reflects growing interest in popular literary genres not only among the readers, but mainly in literary research. This still rather under-researched area is now representing fertile grounds for various theoretical approaches. As the publication mainly declares its interest in crime-related genres, its focus on place is justifiable: it reflects the postmodern "spatial turn", manifested in an increased emphasis on the location of crime, not necessarily in the sense of the crime scene itself, but as a socio-geographical place and space. The setting of crime has a specific and well-defined role in the traditional crime genres, but this role has been redefined in the modern versions of crime-related fiction. ranging from educating the reader in certain areas, bringing up current problems, deepening the psychological aspect of individual characters etc. The published volume brings forth various aspects of this new role of place in popular genres centering on crime and gives space to its deeper analysis. It is not the researchers? objective to provide overviews of the history of the theoretical discussion of place and space in literature in general. Instead, although the essays do employ a variety of critical approaches, the collection strives to show practically how place and space is employed in the specific material of the selected works.The seven chapters are written by scholars from the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia. Two essays represent London as a topos and a chronotope in the works by contemporary British writers of crime fiction. The selection is to show how varied the literary London can be, albeit in the often rather formulaic popular genre. The essays also document a shift from the country setting typical for the British Golden Age of detective fiction to the more recent urban focus. One contribution focuses on the genre of spy novel to show how rendering of place and space can contribute to the genre's typical atmosphere of suspense, secrets and disquiet. Four more essays analyze a variety of places and spaces in American crime fiction, crime comics and crime film. All of the places are in some way specific to American milieu – the suburbia, the university campus, the wilderness, a holiday resort with a state park. These essays are designed to show the contemporary variety of places where crime literature (or film) is set and to document a shift from the traditional urban setting of American hard-boiled fiction to a far greater recent diversity.The volume brings together most recent central European research on the topic of place and community in popular imagination. Thus, it represents a unique insight into this growing phenomenon, which can no longer be overlooked by the academic community.

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Take a look at the political map of the world and you will see that almost every piece of land belongs to a state. This division – in contrast, for example, to the split created by a valley between two mountains – is man-made, imaginary, and arbitrary, and therefore can be easily questioned. Indeed, in addition to the multiple disputed borders that permeate the world map, some countries are not recognized or partially recognized. Other states decide whether a certain political unit can be recognized as sovereign. Again, even though their decision concerns imaginary divisions created by borders, accepting or rejecting them has far-reaching consequences in real life. The unrecognized country stays outside of a club of sovereign states, which makes cooperation with its members very difficult or even impossible. It has no choice but to invent novel ways to conduct external relations. Moreover, this specific international situation has a major impact on its politics, people’s lifestyles, culture, etc.This book is about just such an exceptional entity in the international community of states – Taiwan. It explains how the island’s specific international situation influences the developments in its external and internal affairs.Taiwan’s Exceptionalism shines the spotlight on two areas that are heavily influenced by Taipei’s unique status – its external and internal affairs. Additionally, each chapter of the book addresses the active role of Taiwanese society in shaping their international fate. First, it introduces the reader to Taiwan’s international legal status; next, it turns to the consequences of the island’s specific situation for international relations in the South China Sea, as well as in the US-China-Taiwan triangle. Having set the historical and political background for the following chapters, the volume draws attention to important phenomena in Taiwan’s internal affairs that are closely related to the status of the island. They examine Taiwan’s democratic development and challenges, civil society activism, indigenous tourism clusters, eco-tourism and the image of the island in Polish dailies. The authors believe that all of these facets are exceptional in the sense that they all bear the imprint of the island’s distinct international situation.

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This book examines the image of home as experienced and expressed by the men and women who are affected by the crisis of homelessness and live in specialized institutions. Inga B. Kuzma focuses on describing and interpreting the stories of people from homeless centers who speak about the ups and downs of their lives.

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This book considers Łódź as the capital of the Polish nineteenth century, and the history of this former textile hub, which now finds itself in central Poland, as one of struggle with modern change in Eastern Europe. The authors boldly challenge the romantic and noble-based Polish cultural imaginary, offering instead a revolutionary path to understanding confrontation with modernity in the region. The book examines local press debates during four pivotal periods, each of which stimulated self-reflection on the idea of the modern city: Rapid industrial growth in the tsarist borderlands; State crafting after WWI; Socialist restructuring after 1945; Transition and deindustrialization after 1989. Together these insights constitute a multifaceted portrait of twentieth-century urban experience beyond the metropolis, in different historical contexts. This innovative, interdisciplinary work deftly integrates urban and cultural history, historical sociology and discourse research. It will be of great value to Polish and Jewish studies specialists, as well as those in the field of Eastern European and Slavic studies. The book also addresses core intellectual debates within urban studies, modernity studies, and historical discourse analysis worldwide.

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This book presents an analysis of the social organization of escort agencies in Poland. Izabela Ślęzak focuses on the actions of female sex workers, who are seen as active participants co-creating their working conditions. She analyzes the interactions between sex workers and their clients. Furthermore, she discusses the relationships between employees of the premises, namely the women providing sex services, the managers of the agencies, and security workers.The conclusions of the publication are the result of long-standing ethnographic research carried out in escort agencies, as well as unstructured interviews with their employees and clients. The book is addressed to people who are interested in qualitative sociology, interpretative sociology, and those who would like to understand contemporary escort agencies which operate in Poland. It will be also important for employees of organizations that work with people who provide sex services.

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This methodologically sound psychometric tool has been handed to Ecuadorian psychologists and teachers as a guide in the career counselling field. The tool will have a significant impact on the democratization of youth, assisting them to make well-targeted choices when planning their education and career. The authors’ study may be viewed as pioneering work, due to its consideration of the significant cultural and geographic regional differentiation among graduates from the Pacific coast, the Andes, the Amazon rainforest and the Galapagos Islands. Reaching to the classics of literature on the subject, the authors have performed a momentous work, which is the construction of a psychometric tool that will be helpful in diagnosing career interests in the entire population of Ecuadorian youth. Worth additional acknowledgement are the high reliability indicators of the career interests questionnaire conducted on a representative and large study group, as well as the defined psychometric accuracy of the scale. This publication makes a civilizational quantum leap in the education of Ecuadorian youth, guaranteeing them a career choice that corresponds to their interests and ambitions. This pioneering publication on the Polish and world markets confirms the fact that Polish psychologists have the capability to “export” the psychometric school of thought to the Latin American region, with all of the scientific, social and humanitarian consequences involved.

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The book is about a new paradigm in social sciences, contemplative inquiry. It concerns theory, methods of research,and practical applications. Deep contemplation of a situation could be an epistemological choice for social scientists. It is a fundamentally different approach to research, whereby the investigator is researching not only the object, but also the situation of research and herself/himself in it. Contemplating is a dual way of approaching the truth. It does not mean that the researcher is mentally divided; on the contrary she/he wants to be complete and achieve the unity of being as a researcher-human being and as an element of the situation (psychosocial and historical). Contemplating enables researchers to see how the mind works and create images and reports from the field: What is available for the mind and what is silent or repressed because of the dominating rhetoric of description and rhetoric of feeling? Contemplation is not only analysis, it is also an ethical choice of stopping here and now to see the situation clearly and reporting it together with all th reservations that could result from the mindfully observed interaction of mind, self, and situation at one historical moment.

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This book contains chapters based on presentations and debates that were held during a panel session entitled “Anthropology as Opinion-Maker: A Dilemma of Analysis versus Application” as part of the “Anthropology in the World” conference in London (June 8–10, 2012). The aim of this book is to discuss the relevance of anthropological findings beyond disciplinary boundaries and to examine means of making these findings accessible and useful for a wider public, including decision makers. The book is founded on the belief that the world would benefit greatly from the application of anthropological knowledge and anthropological opinions and the concern that anthropologists are not doing enough to make their expertise heard and understood.

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The book addresses contemporary ideological discourses concerning education in the United Kingdom. It provides a synthetic analysis of the roots of the political changes in education in the UK from the tenth to the first decade of the twenty-first century, with particular emphasis on the last hundred years. It presents British political and education thought during the tenth through the sixteenth centuries, then in the Age of Enlightenment, showing the roles of the positivist current in British education, the Chartist movement, and educational changes related to them. The remainder of the book focuses on the trends and stages of educational development up to World War II, the postwar reform of the education system in England and Wales, the neoliberal trend in the educational policy of Britain, and the genesis of the 1998 educational reforms in England and Wales and their consequences up to 2013.

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This volume contains revised and updated editions of articles by Andrzej Krzanowski coming from different periods of his forty-year-long research activities in Peru, from the first expedition to the Huaura Valley up to the most recent research on the Central Coast. Krzanowski is the first Pole to have conducted archaeological research in the Andes and led the 1978–1987 Polish Scientific Expedition to the Andes, which carried out interdisciplinary research (archaeology, geography, ethnography) on settlements in the high mountain region of Huaura-Checras. Since 2009, he has been focusing on pre-Columbian fortifications on the Peruvian Central Coast.

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?The spiral of global dependency created by China calls for a comparative approach that draws upon local perspectives in every region of the world. The contributors to this volume analyze the similarities and relations between China and Central and Eastern European countries. These articles demonstrate the similarities in processes of transformation in both regions, and they address the challenges of socio-cultural and economic developments that have occurred in China and the Central and Eastern Europe countries.

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This book takes on critical problems in current Macedonistics, with a special emphasis on text linguistics and linguistics of discourse. It focuses on the language of modern Macedonian discourses, including scientific, political, parliamentary, and media, and on the Macedonian literary text and the language in public communication. Particular attention is dedicated to the conditions in which the Macedonian standard language was born.

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This book provides a comprehensive overview of major issues in the expanding and multifaceted field of translation studies. Intended as an essential and introductory textbook for undergraduate students, the volume contains 14 chapters featuring such wide-ranging and diverse topics as: equivalence, translation procedures, linguistic and cultural barriers in translation, cognitive approaches to translation, corpora and descriptive translation studies, multimodal communication and multidimensional translation in audiovisual contexts, machine translation, CAT and localization, literary translation, legal and medical translation, interpreting, translation competence and borrowing from English.

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A growing number of companies are implementing modern cost accounting systems, such as activity-based costing (ABC). This book analyzes the general development and diffusion of ABC and its effect on Polish companies. It analyzes ABC literature in Polish journals and its implementation, structure, and benefits. It also compares general surveys and case studies with similar research conducted in Poland and throughout the world.

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This book follows the treatment of a mentally disabled person from an institutional perspective, in which a unit is presented as an objectified subject of other people's actions, revealing a situation of isolation and personal dependence, and from a personnel perspective, as they respect the autonomy and self-determination of their charges. The text highlights how to create, maintain, and reconstruct social order within a nursing home and achieve internal balance and stabilization within a care institution.

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The treatise was meant as an analysis of problems connected with the monumental work of Samuel Pufendorf on the reign of Charles X Gustav, King of Sweden. Printed in Nuremberg in 1696, it has not been systematically explored so far. The book of Pufendorf continues to surprise, allows one to re-read the great conflict, known as the Second Northern War, which influenced a large part of Europe. Many legends and myths relate to this dramatic era, some of which are supported by the data contained in the Pufendorf's book, and others may be challenged on the basis of his account. Wojciech Krawczuk's study is mainly devoted to the military history, but it also touches upon other topics, to wit the history of diplomacy and bureaucracy or the research on the early modern cultural landscape.

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This book stands at the intersection of two topics: the decidability and computational complexity of hybrid logics, and the deductive systems designed for them. Hybrid logics are here divided into two groups: standard hybrid logics involving nominals as expressions of a separate sort, and non-standard hybrid logics, which do not involve nominals but whose expressive power matches the expressive power of binder-free standard hybrid logics.The original results of this book are split into two parts. This division reflects the division of the book itself. The first type of results concern model-theoretic and complexity properties of hybrid logics. Since hybrid logics which we call standard are quite well investigated, the efforts focused on hybrid logics referred to as non-standard in this book. Non-standard hybrid logics are understood as modal logics with global counting operators (M(En)) whose expressive power matches the expressive power of binder-free standard hybrid logics. The relevant results comprise: 1. Establishing a sound and complete axiomatization for the modal logic K with global counting operators (MK(En)), which can be easily extended onto other frame classes, 2. Establishing tight complexity bounds, namely NExpTime-completeness for the modal logic with global counting operators defined over the classes of arbitrary, reflexive, symmetric, serial and transitive frames (MK(En)), MT(En)), MD(En)), MB(En)), MK4(En)) with numerical subscripts coded in binary. Establishing the exponential-size model property for this logic defined over the classes of Euclidean and equivalential frames (MK5(En)), MS5(En)).Results of the second type consist of designing concrete deductive (tableau and sequent) systems for standard and non-standard hybrid logics. More precisely, they include: 1. Devising a prefixed and an internalized tableau calculi which are sound, complete and terminating for a rich class of binder-free standard hybrid logics. An interesting feature of indicated calculi is the nonbranching character of the rule (¬D), 2. Devising a prefixed and an internalized tableau calculi which are sound, complete and terminating for non-standard hybrid logics. The internalization technique applied to a tableau calculus for the modal logic with global counting operators is novel in the literature, 3. Devising the first hybrid algorithm involving an inequality solver for modal logics with global counting operators. Transferring the arithmetical part of reasoning to an inequality solver turned out to be sufficient in ensuring termination.The book is directed to philosophers and logicians working with modal and hybrid logics, as well as to computer scientists interested in deductive systems and decision procedures for logics. Extensive fragments of the first part of the book can also serve as an introduction to hybrid logics for wider audience interested in logic.The content of the book is situated in the areas of formal logic and theoretical computer science with some elements of the theory of computational complexity.

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To maintain competitiveness in the market, today's organizations have to take numerous actions, which fall into two categories: competing and cooperating. Parallel competition and cooperation can be regarded as an element of a current paradigm in management sciences (named "coopetition"). This volume features an analysis of selected activities by organizations oriented towards competition and cooperation.

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This volume offers a collection of thirteen studies on the subject of intercultural contact and exchange in the medieval and early modern periods. The aim of the authors was to approach this phenomenon as broadly as possible, and the resulting volume is, therefore, a fusion of different approaches to a variety of historical sources and texts. Geographical areas that are often studied separately – including the Middle East, the Caucasus, the Latin West and Central Europe (especially Poland, Germany and Hungary) – are here presented together in order to allow for cross-period and cross-regional comparisons. The chronological scope is also unusually broad, beginning with Late Antiquity and encompassing both the Renaissance and its immediate aftermath.

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Mass media play a significant role in the production and reproduction of identities and lifestyles, values and world-views. They also convey information about the world we live in, as they reflect elements of the broader context within which they come into being. This volume, the first on this topic to be published in Poland, brings together eleven essays that offer a complex approach to both media in the PRC and the way China and the Chinese are presented in the media of other countries. Individual chapters discuss images constructed, persuasive techniques employed, political undertakings and official stances reflected, as well as popular feeling expressed in the Chinese official and popular press, information websites, Internet forums, mainstream Western press, Polish and Italian media, Zambian Internet forums, and Indonesian cinema. Media in China, China in the Media. Processes, Strategies, Images, Identities will be stimulating reading for students and scholars of media and mass communication, political studies, cultural and gender studies, interested in the following topics: the Chinese media discourse, transparency as to government activities, Chinese nationalism, the Chinese diaspora, Sino-African relations.

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In the years after the breakthrough events of 1989, the concept of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) came to be widely used as a synonym for the group of ten countries from the former Eastern Bloc aspiring to EU membership. This book is an attempt to demonstrate and assess the changes resulting from the EU enlargements of 2004 and 2007 and European integration processes, identifying both the similarities and the differences in the countries of the region.This volume is addressed to those interested in Central and Eastern Europe. It has two main aims: first, to present the recent alterations in the region resulting from the processes of European integration; second, to offer an account of the process of Europeanisation in the countries occurring after accession to the EU that goes beyond just conditionality mechanisms. The collection also attempts to reflect on and contribute to the discussion on how the changes taking place in CEE influence theorisation on Europeanisation -- a concept initially constructed in order to tackle the changes taking place in response to the processes of European integration in the old member states.The book is divided into four parts, each concentrating on an area where the changes seem to be most profound and most interesting from the point of view of theorising on the impact of the European integration processes: democratic consolidation in the region, collective identity construction, functioning of civil society and studies on foreign policy and international relations.

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The present book is the fifth volume of the series Studies in the Philosophy of Law which has appeared since 2001. The previous three volumes had a monographic character, the last one being devoted to the various issues of bioethics, law, and philosophy and the previous one to the topic of the economic analysis of law. Both of these were published in English. This volume is part of a research project "Biojurisprudence" pursued from 2007 through 2010 by the Department of Philosophy of Law and Legal Ethics at the Jagiellonian University and sponsored by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education. Within the project our team has published many articles, monographs and edited works such as the Studies in the Philosophy of Law, vol. 4: Legal Philosophy and the Challenges of Biosciences (edited by J. Stelmach, M. Soniewicka and W. Zaluski, Jagiellonian University Press, 2010). One monograph, entitled Evolutionary Foundations of Law was written by Dr. Wojciech Zaluski and was published in both Polish and English in 2009. We have also prepared a joint monograph entitled Paradoxes of Legal Bioethics and which is forthcoming this year.

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This book presents an ongoing debate in cognitive linguistics about the modelling of prepositional polysemy, known as "the story of over." Additionally, it discusses a Polish counterpart - "the story of za(-)" (a preposition and a verbal prefix). Its further aim is to reveal a deep divergence of perspectives between the cognitive and hermeneutical approaches to the meaning of words. The argument could be summarised as follows: the issue of the representation of lexical senses (available out of context) presupposes the issue of distinct meanings of words in communal use, which in turn presupposes the question of the transformative power of words (in linguistics, articulated by Humboldt as energeia). In short, the book proposes to complement a post hoc static cognitive approach with a dynamic "expressive" one.

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In recent years, there has been intensive development of the Polish civil aviation sector, especially regional airports. Effective growth requires a diagnosis of their competitiveness in today's turbulent passenger transport market. The book compares regional airports in Poland with competitive European ports. It uses econometric analysis to model regional airport competitiveness, which is applicable to practical management of modern airports. The book also analyzes possible directions of the growth of Polish airports, taking into account the current economic and political situation as well as forecasts for passenger transport sector development.

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Basic Documents in Federal Campaign Finance Law presents the evolution of the relationship of money and politics in American governance, with a special focus on the regulations and norms which have shaped the current understanding of campaign finance in the United States. It emphasizes the main reasons for federal legislation on campaign finance, its outcomes, and the ways in which issues have been challenged in the courts, focusing especially on the changing attitudes of the Supreme Court towards the issue. The book contains a short introduction to every important piece of legislation or court decision, including the background of the legislation and its main purpose and substance, as well as the facts leading to legal disputes over the legislation's constitutionality. Each introductory piece is followed by the most crucial excerpts from legislative acts or Supreme Court opinions on campaign finance, so that readers are able to analyze for themselves the substance and form of the regulations on the issue.

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Thirteenth century A.D. was a time of many changes and reorganization in the ancient Pueblo world in the Mesa Verde region. Still unresolved are the causes of the migration of Pueblo people from the Mesa Verde region to the south and southeast in the end of the century. The theories most cited and most supported by scientific data include environmental changes, increasing conflict and violence, social changes, and the attraction of a new cult or ideologies from the south. However, it seems that none of these theories can fully explain the total depopulation of the region. One reason often cited for the depopulation of the area is increasing conflict and violence. Evidence of conflict is clearly visible archaeologically: sites located in places difficult to access; defensive buildings, and settlement layouts; human remains with evidence of a violent death; and rock art depicting violent interactions. During the thirteenth century A.D. many types of defensive architecture including towers, underground tunnels connecting structures in a settlement, loopholes, and massive stone walls that partly or fully enclosed villages were constructed in the central Mesa Verde region. These architectural changes were associated with population aggregation and relocation; during the thirteenth century, most people probably lived in large settlements situated such that they were difficult to access and easy to defend. In many villages, water sources were secured within the boundary of the settlement or were at least nearby. However, it is difficult to determine whether the defensive architecture and defensible locations were not enough of an obstacle against possible attackers as Pueblo Indians emigrated from the Mesa Verde region near the end of the thirteenth century A.D. into what are now northern and central Arizona and New Mexico.

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The cases of Poland and Slovakia present: the important tasks in implementing tourism policy in the EU faced by each European country, the differences in approach to tourism policy implementation in two selected European countries, despite the presence of the EU three-level system of tourism management in both of the chosen countries, the complexity and difficulty of the systematic monitoring process of national and regional tourism products' competitiveness in the context of creating the European tourist product.

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Western Sorkapp Land is a very remote and diverse region, which is representative of the European Arctic.This book describes the transformation of the environment and landscape of Western Sorkapp Land based on research data collected by Jagiellonian University scientific expeditions in the period 1980-1986 and 2008. Western Sorkapp Land has been experiencing dramatic natural changes such as glacial recession, the emergence of new landforms and Quaternary deposits as well as changes in the water drainage and network due to global warming. The establishment of South Spitsbergen National Park has led to a regeneration of the local reindeer herd and consequently the overgrazing of the local tundra resulting in altered plant communities. The transformation of Western Sorkapp Land will continue and its potential directions are outlined in the book.

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The volume offers a valuable result of a joint intercultural project between two universities from the neighbouring countries of Poland and Ukraine. Among the mass of books on intercultural communication, the proposed volume distinguishes itself by three features: unusual format combining the work of both scholars and students, the focus on the intracultural approach, and practical designation. It also stresses the increasing awareness in the modern world that teaching/learning English serves the purpose of developing general intercultural competence and not building the knowledge about the English speaking world. The choice of topics indicates an interesting cultural difference - Ukrainiar inclination to focus on the characteristic and attractive aspects of their own culture and Polish on the problematic and the difficult.

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This study focuses on texts exploring human proclivity to violent behaviour. Building on the anthropological insights of Rene Girard, and on the premise that literature is a reflection of a cultural moment, Curyllo-Klag shows how early modernism registers symptoms of crisis which even the outbreak of World War I failed to resolve. Arranged in chronological order, the works of Conrad, Lewis and Lawrence reveal an unfolding pattern and form a triptych, indicative of the growing intensity of the epoch in which they were produced.

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In the midst of a pandemic, the Jagiellonian University's Institute of Sociology (in collaboration with its Interdisciplinary Center for Socio-Legal Analyses as well as the Polish Sociological Association) organized a series of Master Lectures. Presented virtually and open to the general public, these meetings with eminent Polish scholars addressed the most crucial and tenacious issues of our times. Active in their homeland as well as globally, the speakers are recognized specialists in sociology, jurisprudence, history, social work, and political science. The format encompassed a lecture followed by an online discussion with all interested attendees; the texts found herein comprise the fruits of those encounters. Disregarding geographic, temporal, and physical divides, this cyberagora created a space in which masters could find themselves amidst colleagues and students, sharing ideas, views, and experiences drawn from various academic disciplines and social milieux.

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The book Approaches to Death and Dying: Bioethical and Cultural Perspectives, edited by Marta Szabat and Jan Piasecki, is part of a still too narrow catalogue of works devoted to end-of-life themes. The volume consists of eleven articles arranged in four parts corresponding to a broad range of issues: law, ethics, philosophy, and cultural studies. The arrangement of the book is thus constructed around various perspectives upon which any reflection on death and dying must be based. This is perhaps indicative of how difficult it is to adopt an unambiguous attitude towards death–modernity, which introduces a multitude of possible choices and decisions regarding our own bodies, has enhanced individualism but at the same time done away with the order provided by old customs, cultural arrangements, strategies towards the inevitable and the power exerted by that order.

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Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a key technique in the medical imaging area, which allows to diagnose the organism functions and to track the tumor changes. In PET measurement the patient is injected with radiotracer, containing a large number of metastable atoms of radionuclide, that emmits positrons. As the result of positron annihilation, the two photons travelling off with nearly opposite directions are produced and registered by detection system positioned so that it surrounds the patient body. State-of-the-art PET scanners use scintillation crystals which are characterized by high detection efficiency of annihilation photons. In this context, it is worth to mention that the Jagiellonian PET (J-PET) Collaboration developed a novel whole-body PET scanner based on plastic scintillators. They are much cheaper than crystal scintillators, which gives the opportunity to reduce the high cost of PET scanners and make them more affordable. However, plastic scintillators have much lower detection efficiency of gamma quanta compared to inorganic scintillation crystals. This can be compensated by increasing the scanner field of view and improving the time resolution in the measurement of the time of flight of gamma quanta. The J-PET scanner consists of plastic scintillator strips read out at both ends by a pair of photomultipliers and arranged axially around a cylindrical tomograph tunnel. The axial coordinate of the annihilation photon interaction point in the scintillator strip is derived from the difference of the light propagation time measured with the pair of photomultipliers. The operational principles of the J-PET scanner are similar to conventional tomographs, except that the highly accurate time information is of paramount importance. Therefore, the J-PET scanner demands a preparation of novel methods on each step of the data processing. The goal of the work presented in this dissertation is a development of the signal and image processing algorithms taking into account uniqueness of the J-PET detector. The proposed methods include: signal recovery based on samples of a waveform registered on photomultiplier output, reconstruction of position and time of interaction of annihilation photon in the scintillator strip, classification of PET events types and image reconstruction that operates exclusively in the image space. Due to the dissimilarity from the conventional PET scanners, majority of the methods presented in this dissertation are innovative solutions in digital signal and image processing in tomography.

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This book is an exploration of the scope and methods used by Germany in its extermination and Germanization policy aimed at Polish children in the years 1939 to 1945. Children were sent to prisons and concentration camps, pseudomedical experiments were conducted on them, they were sent into forced labor, and planned mass abductions of them were conducted for the purpose of Germanization. The German leadership remained firmly convinced that the crimes they committed on children would never see the light of day; they erased all traces of the children’s origins, changing first and last names, and dates of birth. This extermination and Germanization of Polish children was part of a long-term plan to secure the ultimate end of annexing the Polish lands to Germany. By means of the Germanization and extermination of Polish children, an “age-old problem” was meant to be solved; it was to be a measure to prevent a future generation of Poles from striving to regain the pillaged lands of their fathers.

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Resilience is founded primarily on positive psychology and health psychology, but the theoretical construct, which is analysed, is also present in interdisciplinary research perspectives: medicine, pedagogy and sociology. The authors of this monograph pay attention to the aspect of the relationship of the individual with their social context. Hence, being in a relationship, exchanging information with the social environment becomes the constitutive value of a person ( ).The monograph contains the observation, appearing indirectly in almost every chapter, that when undertaking any actions aimed at developing human mental resilience, it should be checked whether the undertaken interactions do not interfere with the natural resitance. Therefore, it is assumed that the activity focused on lasting support for the development of the individual should be carried out when there is a relatively high plasticity in shaping the individual. In addition, such activities should be adapted to the capabilities of people being at a certain stage of development and take into account cultural conditions. The factors affecting the increase in mental resilience are recognized in many aspects, and their source can be both the family and the wider social environment (...).The metaphor in which the accumulation of life experiences by a human being is compared to the act of packing luggage before a long and difficult to plan and predict journey is well known. All negative, painful life experiences constitute the overwhelming weight of metaphorical luggage; while positive experiences are meant to make this load lighter, and the travel - safer and more predictable. The presented metaphor indirectly describes the basic motive of the monograph, illustrating how the greatest simplification can characterize the formation of self-esteem and resilience in man, identifying them with the synergistic effect of experience (including primarily the impact of family and social environment) and biologically conditioned features. By experiencing positive relationships, the child develops those social skills that are necessary for safe functioning in a social group, negotiating by them the requirements of the environment and effective implementation of the challenges that the environment and the circumstances of future life will bring.

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The Monograph stands out positively from the items related to change management in the context of entrepreneurial opportunities and flexibility of the organization. The authors attempt to integrate retrospective and prognostic approaches, so they not only assess the current status, but also point to challenges for management science. The work has been prepared by people whose authority in management sciences is undisputed. With this book we try to provide the reader with information about miscellaneous parts of life and the social-economical environment. For this purpose, we have invited authors representing the leading scientific research centers in Poland but also specialists from foreign universities.

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The book presents the results of research carried out in recent years on the temples founded by the Birla family in northern and central India. The material gathered by the authors and the preliminary analysis based on it led to the creation of the first publication of this type, not only in Polish literature on the subject but also internationally. This is a monograph based on first-hand material, presenting the whole of the Birlas' sacral foundations – referring both to their importance in the context of national art, as well as their functioning in the social or political discourse on identity in pre-independence India. This project run for decades by successive Birla generations constitutes a highly coherent enterprise. The guiding idea was defined as building foundations for the spiritual and political power of modern India through a new reading of Indian tradition, in line with the challenges of the twentieth century. The book is therefore addressed to readers interested in India, particularly in the interpretation and recreation of tradition using the medium of art. The data presented in this book – representing only a small fragment of what was gathered – and the subsequent discussion open up new, extremely promising directions of research.

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Tsar Peter (927–969), this book’s protagonist, is all too frequently presented in modern scholarship as a weak ruler, devoid of any grander political aspirations, and focused on religious matters—pious, but neglecting the vital interests of his subjects. It was said that during his reign both his court and state became Byzantinized, that central authority was completely helpless in the face of Hungarian raids, and saw the spread of the Bogomilist heresy. According to the Tsar’s critics, it was as a result of his ineffectual rule that Boris II, his son and successor, was unable to defend Bulgaria’s sovereignty in 971.This book—the first monograph devoted to Peter—was written by Bulgarian (Miliana Kaymakamova, Georgi N. Nikolov, Angel Nikolov, and Nikolay Hrissimov) and Polish medievalists (Zofia A. Brzozowska, Mirosław J. Leszka, Kirił Marinow, and Jan M. Wolski). Thanks to a thorough analysis of the sources and an in-depth knowledge of the literature of the subject, they have constructed a comprehensive and balanced image of the reign of their protagonist and the role he played in the history of medieval Bulgaria.

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The book presents the biography of Maria, daughter of Christopher Lekapenos (the eldest son of emperor Romanos I). For about 35 years, she was the tsaritsa of the Bulgarians at the side of her husband, Tsar Peter (927-969). Her character is but dimly visible in the sources; interestingly, the few sources that do mention her are almost exclusively of Byzantine provenance. Most scholars who have dealt with her life—usually as a side note to studies on Peter’s reign—saw in her a representative of the interests of Constantinople and a propagator of Byzantine culture. Some have gone so far as to call her a Byzantine agent at the Bulgarian court.In this book, the first monograph on Maria ever to have been written, Mirosław J. Leszka and Zofia A. Brzozowska construct a balanced narrative of the tsaritsa’s life and her role in tenth-century Bulgaria through meticulous analysis of primary sources, putting aside biases. The publication is supplemented by a translation of the fragments of the Hellenic and Roman Chronicle of the second redaction devoted to Maria and Peter.

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This book is an attempt to diagnose the condition of (post-)modern comparative literature and to formulate its role in the media society in a multicultural world. Andrzej Hejmej reviews the current situation of an “indiscipline” in the widest possible perspective, taking into account both the first concepts from the nineteenth century, including proposals from the French comparative literary scholars, Goethe's idea of Weltliteratur, and the institutional work of H. Von Meltzl, as well as the latest concepts from the comparative literary scholars from Western Europe and the U.S.The history of the formation of the main trends of comparative literary studies is explained through the use of metaphors: the Eiffel Tower, the World Trade Center, and the Tower of Babel. Tackling a variety of proposals from comparative literature scholars as well as proposals from researchers into intermedial and intercultural phenomena leads us to a new look at comparative literature and comparative literary studies. As a result, Hejmej understands modern comparative literature not so much as a further extension of the institutional dimension but more as an interpretative practice embedded in everyday life. This intercultural perspective opens new horizons for comparative literary studies in the twenty-first century.

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This book is about poverty in Poland during the transition to capitalism and in the decade that followed as documented in the life courses of women living in the disadvantaged neighborhoods in the post-industrial city. The authors analyze the life histories of four generations of women. The oldest are former workers in state-owned factories in which they worked until retirement and who used to be the leaders of the female working class during the socialist period. Their daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters became redundant on the capitalist labor market and survived on social benefits. The book goes beyond the feminization of poverty as traditionally considered in monetary terms. It searches for the causes that drive and maintain poverty that are embedded in changes in industrial relations, welfare regimes, and family structures and relations. It also discusses women' efforts and capabilities to cope with disadvantages.

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Resilience and Health in a Fast-Changing World draws on theoretical investigation as well as empirical research to provide answers to key questions concerning psychological resilience. What decides whether a person suffering misfortune bounces back quickly or falls into despair for years? Which processes and mechanisms constitute psychological resilience? Is there a particular model of human adaptation shaped by evolutionary processes that would enable a person to maintain mental health in unfavorable and changing circumstances? This volume is informative for both academics and practitioners.

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This book interprets the social significance of yoga in a world that emphasizes corporeality and the body. Immersing himself in the social world of hatha yoga participants, from an urban studio to a mountain retreat, the author's personal experience with positions and techniques, group meditation, and joint mantra is juxtaposed against interviews, photographs, video recordings on the social meaning of yoga, and philosophical analyses of where the physical and spiritual meet. This book's use of empirical qualitative research and participant observation allows for close analysis, even outright experiencing of the participants' world.

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This book is a voice in the ongoing discussion on the communicative nature and consequences of content and language integrated learning (CLIL). The innovative character of the present study rests upon its context on the one hand, and its perspective on the other. The numerous accounts available in international research literature on this topic typically concern naturally bilingual educational contexts, and focus on the effects of CLIL on the levels of subject knowledge attainment or improvement of second language skills (e.g. Várkuti, 2010; Pessoa, 2007; Jäppinen, 2005). The present study was designed as a comprehensive research into the effects of CLIL in the context of English as a foreign language teaching at lower primary level. Outside the naturally bilingual educational context, cross-curricular instruction is practiced at the level of secondary education but it is hardly ever present in primary school, and even more rarely in the lower primary classroom. Therefore, the author aims to fill the existing gap in literature on the subject in this particular context.The book attempts to provide a thorough qualitative and quantitative analysis offering a wider perspective on the nature and consequences of CLIL methodology on lower primary students' linguistic behavior and executive control. The former aspect is described and discussed on the examples of real language use in the classroom that is rich in multiple code switches characteristic for naturally bilingual contexts. The latter, being a psycholinguistic feature, was measured by means of a Stroop test and subjected to a statistical analysis. Executive control was measured through reaction times in conflict conditions against a control group. The discussion following the description of a longitudinal study led to a conclusion that, over time, young learners have developed a cognitive flexibility and inhibition control as a result of constant voluntary code-switching, displaying conscious control over selective inhibition of competing lexemes. The results suggest a considerable advantage of CLIL at lower primary level in EFL educational contexts.

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In this book one can find historical background of Rabbi Ozjasz Thon's various interests, and it examines closely the main fields in which he was active and creative. Ozjasz Thon was a fascinating figure in the Jewish-Polish arena at the first third of the twentieth century. He was present and active in almost any field of the Jewish life in Poland in those days. He was a preacher and a rabbi, a political leader, a philosopher, a sociologist, an essayist, and a publicist.

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