Agricultural Technology & Environmental Technology

This series of publications is aimed at both academics and practitioners. It deals with all communication processes in and around organisations and examines subject areas such as external communication, marketing and public relations, internal corporate communication and communication within associations among many others. It also particularly reflects current developments such as the use of social media in organisations. The series is keen to publish studies from a variety of disciplines written in different languages.

The series of publications entitled “Ethik in den Sozialwissenschaften” (Ethics in Social Science) provides a forum for academic contributions to the debate on the current moral problems affecting social structures and systems. From an ethical point of view, this series focuses on addressing the question of what ef-fects social institutions and regimes have on human dignity and the welfare of communities. It discusses moral dilemmas so as to highlight general acceptable solutions to them. It takes up the challenge of using normative theories to ana-lyse sociological problems in order to develop ethical criteria for developing operable solutions to them. As a result, the series welcomes contributions from the entire range of subjects related to social science and ethics. Its goal is to constructively criticise structural contexts to which no satisfactory solutions have been found so far.

This publication series is dedicated to advancing the research on terrorism and extremism, to fleshing out possible countermeasures, and to discussing policy responses on national and international levels. By combining the different perspectives and methodologies of scientific fields like political science, psychology, religious and cultural studies or sociology, the series analyses the issue of terrorism and extremism in all its complexity. Each publication adheres to high scientific standards and presents new results in its respective academic field. At the same time, they offer relevant insights into various aspects of terrorism and extremism, and are therefore directed not only at a professional audience but equally at readers who share an interest in these important topics.

The book series addresses topical political, economic and social developments in China. It seeks to offer new insights gained from in-depth social science research undertaken by a growing community of political scientists and economists specialized on China to a larger audience in academia, business and politics. As such, the series highlights the global relevance of this emerging country for understanding and addressing the political and economic challenges of our time.

The series will deal with the socio-political development and transformation processes of Turkish society in the 20th and 21st century. The process of modernization, initiated from above, in the late Ottoman phase, has brought about the movement of entire social fields and actors and continues in conflict-laden processes in the neoliberal age until today. The series would like to take a closer look at the developmental paths, the course forms and the contradictions of this modernization process in political, social and cultural terms. To achieve this goal, it is planned to use different methodological and theoretical perspectives. The series is open in this respect for various scientific accesses to these subject areas. A special focus is the analysis of the current transformation processes, which have taken place in neo-liberal traits in Turkey since the 1980s and produce overall social effects.

Volumes 1–48 published with VS-Verlag, volumes 49–80 published with VISTAS Verlag. The Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia ensures the protection of four key elements of society: human dignity, young people, media users and diversity in the private media in North Rhine-Westphalia. It fulfils this duty by regulating and overseeing existing media content on the one hand, while instructing people how they can use the media fairly and autonomously and by promoting journalism in the region on the other. The findings of research projects conducted on behalf of the Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia appear in this series of publications.

Anyone who talks about animals makes human beings their subject. Turning to animals as an object of research in various contexts certainly does not only facilitate a better understanding of animals, but also of humans and society. In animals, researchers discover themselves and their world. This ‘animal turn’ now encompasses many academic disciplines and often begins or ends with ethical questions. This series of books deals with different developmental paths in animal ethics, which should not be understood as an isolated field of ethics, but rather as a specific perspective in an interdisciplinary discourse on moral questions of human–animal relations. The series is open to all disciplines in the humanities and natural sciences. It is bilingual (German/English) and is supervised by its editors in conjunction with an academic advisory board. A peer review process is carried out on all submissions to ensure their quality.

The series Philosophische Theorie (Philosophical Theory) contains works dealing with the core disciplines of theoretical philosophy: logic, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, metaphysics and ontology. It will appeal to both academics and all those interested in philosophy who would like to learn more about the respective fields.

Philosophy and literature have been related to each other since the dawn of history, and it seems extremely difficult to draw a clear dividing line between them. At the point where philosophy raises fundamental questions about the world and human existence, it encroaches onto a topic area also addressed by poetry and literature, although they use different means in doing so. This means that the relationship between philosophy and literature is not limited to a collection of related or mutual themes, questions and issues, but that it also particularly involves the reciprocal exchange of forms and formats of philosophical and poetic spoken and written expression. This series of publications intends to shed greater light on the fascinating interconnections between philosophy and literature, their affinity, mutual complementarity and differences, and in doing so to investigate both the literary dimensions of philosophy and the philosophical dimensions of literature using relevant case studies and selected problems.

The series entitled ‘klang-reden. Schriften zur Musikalischen Rezeptions- und Interpretationsgeschichte’ (Tonal Discussions. Studies on the history of the reception and interpretation of music) was founded by the Institute for the History of Musical Reception and Interpretation in 2008. To date, the series has focused on Mozart, modern classical music, baroque music, popular music and methods used in musical interpretation research. One of its significant incentives in studying this field is, in particular, to place topics relating to musical practice in a clear context.

Monographs, anthologies and conference proceedings that address subjects from the fields of dance, theatre studies and musical theatre studies are published in the series entitled Scenae, which was founded in 2013. In view of the multifaceted variety of the performing arts and media, it examines issues from an interdisciplinary perspective and constantly bears in mind the fascinating interplay between theory and practice and between academic study and art.

While the ecclesial, theological and social history of modern Catholicism, which has developed since 1800, has been researched extensively, its manifestations with regard to literary and cultural history have tended to receive merely sparse attention and be regarded with extreme reservation. In this regard, the series entitled ‘Catholica’ breaks new ground, primarily in German-speaking research into this field. By being the first series to raise awareness of the broad spectrum of the image of literary Catholicism since 1800 in terms of literary aesthetics, historical assessment, cultural appraisal, the history of piety and intellectualism, and the intensive interdependence between and permeation of authors and milieus, plus their mutual distancing from each other, it shows that Catholic literature is also part of the plural modernity of the 19th and 20th centuries, which abounds with self-contradictions.

Dying, death and grief have to be regarded as fundamental aspects of cultural coexistence because humans cannot avoid dealing with them when they live with others. A diminishing circle of friends and family, the pain of loss, the transformation of a living being into a dead body, the symbols and rituals of saying farewell to the deceased, plus the contribution of medical, religious and other forms of expertise along with many other aspects reveal, on the one hand, the potential of the utter devastation a person’s death can trigger. On the other, these forms of expression and modes of behaviour also underline that dying and death are not purely natural occurrences. They transpire amid societal mechanisms which reflect a large and, at times, contradictory variety of reflective processes in addressing the finite nature of life. Death is a human’s greatest certainty in life. In this respect, the series of publications Thanatological Studies provides a forum for both theoretical and empirical works which address the social, normative, aesthetic, spiritual, bodily, psychological and other facets of death and dying, and by extension grief and remembrance, from the perspectives of different academic disciplines.