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Assistive Technology (AT) is the term used to describe products or technology-based services which support those with disabilities or other limitations to their daily activities, enabling them to enjoy a better quality of life. This book presents the proceedings of the 13th European Conference on the Advancement of Assistive Technology (AAATE 2015), held in Budapest, Hungary in September 2015. This biennial conference has established itself as a leading forum in the transdisciplinary area of Assistive Technology, providing a unique platform for the gathering of experts from around the world to review progress and challenges in the interdisciplinary fields which contribute to AT, such as rese...
The majorconflicts between the Global North and the South can be expected toresult from the confrontation of alternative conceptions of democracy,mainly between liberal or representative democracy and participatorydemocracy. The hegemonic model of democracy, while prevailing on aglobal scale, guarantees no more than low-intensity democracy. Inrecent times, participatory democracy has exhibited a new dynamic,engaging mainly subaltern communities and social groups that fightagainst social exclusion and the suppression of citizenship. In thiscollection of reports from the Global South—India, South Africa,Mozambique, Colombia, and Brazil—De Sousa Santos and his colleaguesshow how, in some cases, the deepening of democracy results from thedevelopment of dual forms of participatory and representativedemocracy, and points to the emergence of transnational networks ofparticipatory democracy initiatives. Such networks pave one of the waysto the reinvention of social emancipation. This is volume 1 of the Reinventing Social Emancipation project, edited by Boaventura de Sousa Santos.
Democratic institution-building experiences, innovative forms of social organization, and the development of multiple state-society interfaces represent a significant political phenomenon in Latin America in the last half-century. By comparing the two largest countries of the subcontinent, Brazil and Mexico, Democratizing the State examines social accountability and social control regimes. These regimes are conceived configurations of relationships between actors, organizational structures, norms, and resources, all arranged in a stable and institutionalized manner to exert social control over state actors and functions. The book addresses the contrasting characteristics and different functions through which the citizenry and civil society exert control over state action in both countries. Characterizing these experiences broadly as regimes is novel and enlightening regarding the work of practitioners and scholars on political participation, social accountability, and democracy in the global South and the global North.
This book is an unprecedented attempt to analyze the role of the law in the global movement for social justice. Case studies in the book are written by leading scholars from both the global South and the global North, and combine empirical research on the ground with innovative sociolegal theory to shed new light on a wide array of topics. Among the issues examined are the role of law and politics in the World Social Forum; the struggle of the anti-sweatshop movement for the protection of international labour rights; and the challenge to neoliberal globalization and liberal human rights raised by grassroots movements in India and indigenous peoples around the world. These and other cases, the editors argue, signal the emergence of a subaltern cosmopolitan law and politics that calls for new social and legal theories capable of capturing the potential and tensions of counter-hegemonic globalization.
As Brazil and other countries in Latin America turned away from their authoritarian past and began the transition to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, interest in developing new institutions to bring the benefits of democracy to the citizens in the lower socioeconomic strata intensified, and a number of experiments were undertaken. Perhaps the one receiving the most attention has been Participatory Budgeting (PB), first launched in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in 1989 by a coalition of civil society activists and Workers&’ Party officials. PB quickly spread to more than 250 other municipalities in the country, and it has since been adopted in more than twenty countries world...
Provides a description about biomaterials, classification and fabrication technologies used in the development of nanostructured biomaterials. Provides a brief account of physicochemical attributes of nanoparticles and its role in summarizing applications of nanobiomaterials. Includes an integrated approach that is used to discuss both the biological and engineering aspects of nanostructured biomaterials. Presents an up-to-date and highly structured reference source for students, researchers and practitioners working in biomedical, biotechnological and engineering fields. Proposes novel opportunities and ideas for developing or improving technologies in nanomedicine/nanobiology and nanoremediation.
This text offers a selection of papers on singularity theory presented at the Sixth Workshop on Real and Complex Singularities held at ICMC-USP, Brazil. It should help students and specialists to understand results that illustrate the connections between singularity theory and related fields. The authors discuss irreducible plane curve singularities, openness and multitransversality, the distribution Afs and the real asymptotic spectrum, deformations of boundary singularities and non-crystallographic coxeter groups, transversal Whitney topology and singularities of Haefliger foliations, the topology of hypersurface singularities, polar multiplicities and equisingularity of map germs from C3 to C4, and topological invariants of stable maps from a surface to the plane from a global viewpoint.
The book reports on advanced topics in the areas of neurorehabilitation research and practice. It focuses on new methods for interfacing the human nervous system with electronic and mechatronic systems to restore or compensate impaired neural functions. Importantly, the book merges different perspectives, such as the clinical, neurophysiological, and bioengineering ones, to promote, feed and encourage collaborations between clinicians, neuroscientists and engineers. Based on the 2018 International Conference on Neurorehabilitation (ICNR 2018) held on October 16-20, 2018, in Pisa, Italy,, this book covers various aspects of neurorehabilitation research and practice, including new insights int...
This handbook provides an extensive overview of traditional and emerging research areas within the field of intermediality studies, understood broadly as the study of interrelations among all forms of communicative media types, including transmedial phenomena. Section I offers accounts of the development of the field of intermediality - its histories, theories and methods. Section II and III then explore intermedial facets of communication from ancient times until the 21st century, with discussion on a wide range of cultural and geographical settings, media types, and topics, by contributors from a diverse set of disciplines. It concludes in Section IV with an emphasis on urgent societal issues that an intermedial perspective might help understand.