Martin Fuchs - Böcker

Religions in South Asia have tended to be studied in blocks, whether in the various monolithic traditions in which they are now regarded, thus Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Christian, or indeed in temporal blocks: ancient, medieval, modern. This volume seeks to look at relationships both within and between religions. It explores the diversity and the multiplicity within each tradition, the historical links between the various traditions which have crisscrossed the monoliths, but also the specific forms of their co-existence with each other, whether in accord or in antagonism. It views the interaction between 'reformed' and non-reformed branches within each of the modern monoliths, as for instance the Arya Samaj and the Sanatani positions within Hinduism. Its second major concern is to look for grounds shared in the process of modernizing. Though there has been much research to date on religious reform movements, there has been less concern with investigating and analyzing developments across the religious boundaries that so sharply divide Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism and Islam from each other today, and all of these from Christianity. And finally, it also looks at the changing social and political frames of reference shared by both religious and secularist strands of thought. The 'religions' targeted include Hindu discourses (Brahmo, Arya, Sanatana, and various traditional formations, the Aryan/Dravidian divide), Buddhist, Jain, Sikh and Islamic traditions, and Indian Christianity.

This volume brings together key findings of the long-term research project ‘Religious Individualisation in Historical Perspective’ (Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Erfurt University). Combining a wide range of disciplinary approaches, methods and theories, the volume assembles over 50 contributions that explore and compare processes of religious individualisation in different religious environments and historical periods, in particular in Asia, the Mediterranean, and Europe from antiquity to the recent past. Contrary to standard theories of modernisation, which tend to regard religious individualisation as a specifically modern or early modern as well as an essentially Western or Christian phenomenon, the chapters reveal processes of religious individualisation in a large variety of non-Western and pre-modern scenarios. Furthermore, the volume challenges prevalent views that regard religions primarily as collective phenomena and provides nuanced perspectives on the appropriation of religious agency, the pluralisation of religious options, dynamics of de-traditionalisation and privatisation, the development of elaborated notions of the self, the facilitation of religious deviance, and on the notion of dividuality.

This work illustrates two basic principles in the calculus of variations - the questions of existence of solutions, and closely related, the problem of regularity of minimizers. Chapter one studies variational problems for nonquadratic energy functionals defined on suitable classes of vector-valued functions where nonlinear constraints are also incorporated. Problems of this type arise for mappings between Riemannian manifolds or in nonlinear elasticity. Using direct methods for the existence of generalized minimizers is rather easy to establish, and it is then shown that regularity holds up to a set of small measure. Chapter two contains a short introduction into geometric measure theory, which serves as a basis for developing an existence theory for (generalized) manifolds with prescribed mean curvature form and boundary in arbitrary dimensions and co-dimensions. A major aspect of the book is that it concentrates on techniques, and presents methods which turn out to be useful for applications in regularity theorems, as well as for existence problems.

Variational methods are applied to prove the existence of weak solutions for boundary value problems from the deformation theory of plasticity as well as for the slow, steady state flow of generalized Newtonian fluids including the Bingham and Prandtl-Eyring model. For perfect plasticity the role of the stress tensor is emphasized by studying the dual variational problem in appropriate function spaces. The main results describe the analytic properties of weak solutions, e.g. differentiability of velocity fields and continuity of stresses. The monograph addresses researchers and graduate students interested in applications of variational and PDE methods in the mechanics of solids and fluids.

Der Sammelband beleuchtet die verschiedenen Folgen zunehmender digitaler Wahlkämpfe anhand der Bundestagswahl 2021 für Politik, Journalismus und Gesellschaft. Darüber hinaus ermöglichen die Erkenntnisse einen Blick in die Zukunft des digitalen Campaignings. Der digitale Wandel und die damit verbundenen Möglichkeiten für die politische Kommunikation werden die Wahlkämpfe der Zukunft immer stärker beeinflussen.Politische Challenges auf TikTok, Begleitung der TV-Trielle auf Twitter oder Haustürgespräche in der Dating-App – ein Wahlkampf ohne digitale Plattformen und Formate ist heute undenkbar. Entsprechend erhöhen Parteien, Spitzenkandidat*innen und andere politische Akteure ihre Budgets für den Online-Wahlkampf und professionalisieren Personal und Strukturen, um die Wähler*innen noch effizienter zu erreichen und zu mobilisieren. Im Bundestagswahlkampf 2021 beschleunigte die Corona-Pandemie diesen Trend, da traditionelle Wahlkampfveranstaltungen auf Marktplätzen oder in Hallen aufgrund der Maßnahmen zur Bekämpfung des Virus kaum möglich waren. Die Parteien und Kandidat*innen waren noch stärker auf digitale Plattformen angewiesen und die Strategien entsprechend detailreicher als in den Jahren zuvor.