Background: Empowerment is expected to have a beneficial effect on a woman’s well-being during the perinatal period and her readiness to face the challenges of motherhood. In the literature on pregnancy and childbirth, empowerment is used widely in different contexts, with different connotations and …

Since the early work on defining and analyzing resilience in domains such as engineering, ecology and psychology, the concept has gained significant traction in many fields of research and practice. It has also become a very powerful justification for various policy goals in the water sector, evident …

Following up on recent sociological attention to how futures are imagined and how views of the future influence economic and political action, this mini-conference aims to create an interdisciplinary dialog on time horizons presumed or articulated by theorists, professionals, activists, journalists, …

Over the past few decades the damage being done to global ecosystems by established development trajectories has become increasingly evident. In many sectors and regions sustainability transitions are gathering pace as new technologies, business models and social practices begin to transform existing …

Climate change is one of the key societal challenges of our times, and its debate takes place across scientific disciplines and into the public realm, traversing platforms, sources, and fields of study. The analysis of such mediated debates has a strong tradition, which started in communication science …

Political and commercial discourses on the environment

How do “human” prejudices reemerge in algorithmic cultures allegedly devised to be blind to them? To answer this question, this book investigates a fundamental axiom in computer science: pattern discrimination. By imposing identity on input data, in order to filter—that is, to discriminate—signals from …