New Releases 2024
Queen of Sheba : East and Central African Women’s Theologies of Liberation (Circle Jubilee Volume 2) / edited by Loreen Maseno, Esther Mombo, Nagaju Muke and Veronica Kahindo
Bamberg: Univ. of Bamberg Press, 2024
(Bible in Africa Studies ; 40) (Exploring Religion in Africa ; 14)
978-3-86309-976-3
Price: 23,00 €
This volume, named after a legendary biblical woman, the Queen of Sheba, is celebrating the wisdom of pioneers of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians’ (CIRCLE). It rose within the context of producing biographies of the founding members of the CIRCLE. The three regional volumes are: Sankofa: Liberation Theologies of West African Women, ed. by S. Amenyedi, M. Yele & Y. Maton (BiAS 39); Queen of Sheba: East and Central African Theologies of Liberation, ed. by L. Maseno, E. Mombo, N. Muke & V. K. Kahindo (BiAS 40); Nehanda: Women’s Theologies of Liberation in Southern Africa, ed. by N. Mwale, R. Gabaitse, D. Tembo & F. Kobo (BiAS 41). Thus, this essays collection, being the second partof the CIRCLE jubilee trilogy, focuses on East and Central African women, their lives and struggles and their powerful Queen-of-Sheba-Wisdom in contributing to liberation in theory and practice.
The editors and authors:
Loreen MASENO (Lead Editor — Kenya) | Esther MOMBO (Ass. Editor — Kenya) | Nagaju MUKE (Ass. Editor — Rwanda) | Veronica K. KAHINDO (Ass. Editor — DR Congo) | Daniel ASSEFA (Ethiopia) | Tekletsadik BELACHEW (USA/ Ethiopia) | Musa W. DUBE (USA/ Botswana) | Witness ISSA (Tanzania) | Heleen JOZIASSE (Netherlands/ Kenya) | Dorcas JUMA (Kenya) | Joy Isabirye MUKISA (Uganda) | Hope Karangwa MUNEZERO (Rwanda) | Telesia MUSILI (Kenya) | Christine NAKYEYUNE (Uganda) | Françoise NIYONSABA (Rwanda) | Joyce Damian NGANDANGO (Tanzania) | Pauline NJIRU (Kenya) | Monica OSUKA (Kenya) |
Access to the full text:
https://doi.org/10.20378/irb-92896
Displacement, Emplacement, and Migration : an Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays / Touhid Ahmed Chowdhury (Ed.)
Bamberg: Univ. of Bamberg Press, 2024
(Schriften aus der Fakultät Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften der Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg ; 42)
978-3-86309-916-9
Price: 19,00 €
Migration is one of the most prominent cultural, socio-political, and economic questions of our time. Whether internal or cross-border, whether voluntary or forced, migration occurs for a variety of factors that are influenced by and rooted in regional and national, local and global interrelations, social and technological networks, organisations and institutions. In speaking about migration, one cannot ignore the possible intensification of migrants feeling displaced and their effort to re-embed their lives in host localities. The concept of displacement evokes images of being cut off from social and physical worlds that one calls home, which generates differentiated accounts of dispossession, disruption, and dislocation. The feeling of being cut off pushes migrants to open up and advance the notion of place-making or emplacement. Everyday place-making or emplacement is material and effective, resulting in migrants leaving traces in the places they cross. Emplacement, therefore, is a place-making practice where migrants repeatedly tell stories about their former homes, maintain connections to imaginary or real places of belonging, and reorganise the new homes into common categories.
"Displacement, Emplacement, and Migration: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays" examines the impact of the interlocking relationship between displacement, emplacement, and migration. Contributors bring the perspectives of history, art, politics, films, and literature to bear on discussions of belonging, home, dislocation, and identity politics for individuals and groups in the current migration studies landscape.
Access to the full text:
https://doi.org/10.20378/irb-58625
A Simulation Framework for Function as a Service / Johannes Manner
Bamberg: Univ. of Bamberg Press, 2024
(Schriften aus der Fakultät Wirtschaftsinformatik und Angewandte Informatik der Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg ; 43)
978-3-86309-978-7
Price: 24,00 €
Serverless Computing is seen as a game changer in operating large-scale applications. While practitioners and researches often use this term, the concept they actually want to refer to is Function as a Service (FaaS). In this new service model, a user deploys only single functions to cloud platforms where the cloud provider deals with all operational concerns – this creates the notion of server-less computing for the user.
Nonetheless, a few configurations for the cloud function are necessary for most commercial FaaS platforms as they influence the resource assignments like CPU time and memory. Due to these options, there is still an abstracted perception of servers for the FaaS user. The resource assignment and the different strategies to scale resources for public cloud offerings and on-premise hosted open-source platforms determine the runtime characteristics of cloud functions and are in the focus of this work. Compared to cloud offerings like Platform as a Service, two out of the five cloud computing characteristics improved. These two are rapid elasticity and measured service. FaaS is the first computational cloud model to scale functions only on demand. Due to an independent scaling and a strong isolation via virtualized environments, functions can be considered independent of other cloud functions. Therefore, noisy neighbor problems do not occur. The second characteristic, measured service, targets billing. FaaS platforms measure execution time on a millisecond basis and bill users accordingly based on the function configuration. This leads to new performance and cost trade-offs.
Therefore, this thesis proposes a simulation approach to investigate this tradeoff in an early development phase. The alternative would be to deploy functions with varying configurations, analyze the execution data from several FaaS platforms and adjust the configuration. However, this alternative is time-consuming, tedious and costly. To provide a proper simulation, the development and production environment should be as similar as possible. This similarity is also known as dev-prod parity. Based on a new methodology to compare different virtualized environments, users of our simulation framework are able to execute functions on their machines and investigate the runtime characteristics for different function configurations at several cloud platforms without running their functions on the cloud platform at all. A visualization of the local simulations guide the user to choose an appropriate function configuration to resolve the mentioned trade-off dependent on their requirements.
Access to the full fext:
https://doi.org/10.20378/irb-92913
Crime Fiction, Femininities and Masculinities : Proceedings of the Eighth Captivating Criminality Conference / Edited by Kerstin-Anja Münderlein
Bamberg: Univ. of Bamberg Press, 2024
(Bamberger Studien zu Literatur, Kultur und Medien ; 38)
978-3-86309-973-2
Online edition only
The present volume is a collection of select papers presented at Captivating Criminality 8: Crime Fiction, Femininities and Masculinities (Bamberg, July 2022), the eighth annual conference of the International Crime Fiction Association. As gender and crime fiction is a popular topic with researchers from all areas of (world) crime fiction and the contributions ranging from the highly popularised Victorian Jack the Ripper case to contemporary domestic noir novels written by authors such as Gillian Flynn, this book covers crime fiction studies from a broad variety of angles. The chapters in this book cover texts from all over the world in a joint effort to show that crime fiction (studies) is omnipresent, diverse, and – above all – topical and that gender is one of the mainstays of the genre and a determinant of its topicality and diversity.
Access to the full text:
https://doi.org/10.20378/irb-92502
Kaiser Heinrich II. : Herrschaft, Handschriften und Heiligkeit im Mittelalter / herausgegeben von Christof Rolker
Bamberg: Univ. of Bamberg Press, 2024
(Bamberger interdisziplinäre Mittelalterstudien / Vorträge und Vorlesungen ; 10)
978-3-86309-971-8
Price: 24,00 €
Der Band versammelt Vorträge, die im Rahmen der Ringvor-lesung des Bamberger Zentrums für Mittelalterstudien (ZEMAS) mit dem Titel „Heinrich II.: Herrschaft, Handschriften und Heiligkeit im Mittelalter“ im Sommersemester 2023 gehalten wurden. Die publizierten Aufsätze stellen aktuelle Ergebnisse der kunsthistorischen, historischen, archäologischen, musik- und liturgiegeschichtlichen Forschung zu Heinrich II. vor. Unter den Objekten, die besondersgewürdigt werden, sind neben den kostbaren Handschriften der Kaiser-Heinrich-Bibliothek der Bamberger Dom sowie die Kaisergewänder.
Access to the full text:
https://doi.org/10.20378/irb-92716
Protestplätze, Partizipationsräume, Parallelwelten : wissenschaftliche Betrachtung und aktuelle Bewertung von Alternativmedien / Matthias Kast
Bamberg: Univ. of Bamberg Press, 2024
(Bamberger Beiträge zur Kommunikationswissenschaft ; 21)
978-3-86309-974-9
Price: 22,00 €
From left to right, from promoting participation to undermining democracy; they come in various forms and exist in every media system; they are as significant as professional journalism but are often dismissed as unqualified: alternative media. As they still receive various attributions to date, the scientific community struggles to explain contemporary alternative media. For society, their emergence, aspirations, and significance often remain nebulous. This is problematic, as only knowledge about alternative media can fully comprehend contemporary media systems.
Therefore, this work addresses the topic from a theoretical perspective. It draws on existing works on alternative media and utilizes them for a current definition and evaluation. The study shows that the heterogeneous field of alternative media today encompasses viewpoints from all ideologies, with the common element being criticism of mainstream media. Nevertheless, contemporary alternative media shares essential similarities with its "antagonists." As a result, the work contributes to a better understanding and theoretical advancement of the subject.
Access to the full text:
https://doi.org/10.20378/irb-92686