This book presents the first anthology of Flemish prose on the Congo, the former colony of Belgium, in English translation. Because of the Dutch language barrier, Flemish literature on the Congo has traditionally remained inaccessible to and thus neglected by international scholarship, as opposed to French or English prose on this part of the African continent. That this particular perspective has thus far remained underexposed, or even disregarded, is all the more regrettable in light of the...

Comedy entertainment is a powerful arena for serious public engagement with questions of German national identity and Turkish German migration. The German majority society and its largest labour migrant community have been asking for decades what it means to be German and what it means for Turkish Germans, Muslims of the second and third generations, to call Germany their home. Benjamin Nickl examines through the social pragmatics of humour the dynamics that underpin these questions in the st...

Hydraulic and lubrication systems have developed significantly in the past sixty years. The range of applications continue to expand. In modern systems, the application of proportional valves is a particularly important stimulus for the application of increasingly complicated and more accurate hydraulic drive systems.

With the availability of more accurate production techniques that enable the possibilities of minimal tolerances, the operating pressures have more than doubled in the last 25 y...

What is the gender of political power? Since the beginning of political thought, rule has been a male prerogative in European imagination. This is of course not to say that there never were women sovereigns. In-depth studies of women sovereigns have grown considerably in number in the past three decades and have added substantially to our understanding of the complexities of their rule of power.

Yet what is often obscured by such in-depth analyses is the fact that all women rulers throughout ...

Awarded a Golden medal from the Axiom Business Book Awards in the Business Theory category and shortlisted for Management Book of the Year

Organizations are currently in a new economy. They are either being disrupted or causing disruption. Continuity is no longer a given. Only one law applies: Strategy = Execution, because a strategy is only as brilliant as its execution. Strategy execution is the last competitive advantage, and strength, speed and agility in execution are more important than...

What is the most difficult thing about listening? The answer is, you need to be truly silent. You need to be able to eliminate any form of distortion like thoughts, emotions or lack of energy. And by doing so, you’ll receive the authentic message in someone else’s words and intentions. To a large extent, we process what we hear on a subconscious level. Though whoever has the courage to investigate the power of listening, to observe the distortion within him- or herself and work through it...

The confrontation between philosophy and psychoanalysis has had its heyday. After the major debates between Paul Ricoeur, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Henry, this dialogue now seems to have broken down. It has therefore proven necessary and gainful to revisit these debates to explore their re-usability and the degree to which they can provide new insights from a contemporary point of view. It can be said that contemporary philosophy suffers from an ‘exc...

This book is a special edition, compiled for to the MSc Course Research Methodologies as taught at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at Delft University of Technology. It is a compilation of useful chapters from several sources on how to structure, set up, carry out and write up your (thesis) research to aid you in writing your research plan. Next to that it acts as a companion during your thesis research. After introducing you to the philosophy of scientific research, subsequent chapters ...

Disasters and History offers the first comprehensive historical overview of hazards and disasters. Drawing on a range of case studies, including the Black Death, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Fukushima disaster, the authors examine how societies dealt with shocks and hazards and their potentially disastrous outcomes. They reveal the ways in which the consequences and outcomes of these disasters varied widely not only between societies but also within the same societies according to so...