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The religious tradition of male circumcision has come increasingly under attack across a number of European states. While critics of the practice argue that the problem is about children’s rights and the proper relationship between secular and religious traditions, Jews tend to see these attacks within the longer history of attempts to assimilate and remake them according to the norms of the majority. Using the 2012 German legal controversy concerning the issue as my vantage point, I explore how contemporary criticism of male circumcision remains entangled with ambivalence toward Judaism and the Jews as the “other.” Through a close reading of the arguments, I show how opponents use the seemingly neutral language of universal human rights to (re)make Jewish difference according to the norms of the majority. I conclude by arguing that such an approach to this issue runs the risk of turning Jews once again into strangers at a time when cultural anxieties are troubling European societies.

Drawing inspiration from C Wright Mills exhortation to sociologists to locate themselves and their experiences in the ‘trends of their epoch’, I consider how first-hand experience of imprisonment can help criminology account for the growing trend towards the use of imprisonment in many Western democracies. Using interviews with a small group of British criminologists who have experience of imprisonment, I explore the connections between personal stories and collective narratives. Drawing reflexively from my own imprisonment, my subsequent professional trajectory and experiences of prison research, I consider the difficulties and potential of crafting a collective criminological project from disparate and profoundly personal experiences of imprisonment. The chapter combines methodological reflections on the use of autoethnography, autobiography and vignettes as a means to an end: establishing collective narratives from personal stories. I argue that the task of connecting these narratives to the ‘trends of the epoch’ that manifest in expanding prison populations is difficult but developing some momentum in convict criminology.

To determine where, when, how, and wherefore European social theory hit upon the formula of “the True, the Good, and the Beautiful,” and how its structural position as a skeleton for the theory of action has changed.

Genealogy, library research, and unusually good fortune were used to trace back the origin of what was to become a ubiquitous phrase, and to reconstruct the debates that made deploying the term seem important to writers.

The triad, although sometimes used accidentally in the renaissance, assumed a key structural place with a rise of Neo-Platonism in the eighteenth century associated with a new interest in providing a serious analysis of taste. It was a focus on taste that allowed the Beautiful to assume a position that was structurally homologous to those of the True and the Good, long understood as potential parallels. Although the first efforts were ones that attempted to emphasize the unification of the human spirit, the triad, once formulated, was attractive to faculties theorists more interested in decomposing the soul. They seized upon the triad as corresponding to an emerging sense of a tripartition of the soul. Finally, the members of the triad became re-understood as values, now as orthogonal dimensions.

This seems to be the first time the story of the development of the triad – one of the most ubiquitous architectonics in social thought – has been told.

The Norwegian health care system is semi-decentralized. Primary care and long-term care (LTC) are the responsibilities of the municipalities. Specialist care is the responsibility of the central government and is organised through four Regional Health Authorities (RHA). Resource use, health outcomes and severity are the three main pillars for priority setting, regularly applied in reimbursement decisions for pharmaceuticals.

The sustainability of health care is challenged in Norway. The main factors are a growing elderly population with high need of complex, coordinated services, an increasing demand for newly approved drugs and advanced technology and a potential shortage of health care personnel.

We present recent trials and policy reforms in Norway aimed at improving care pathways combined with cost containment. Reforms in the pharmaceutical market, both with regard to market access and reimbursement (cost-effectiveness), and regulation of prices, have resulted in cost containment. The primary care sector awaits reform initiatives to recruit and retain physicians as general practitioners. No reform in the hospital sector has had cost containment as a main focus. The sector is characterized with low productivity growth, and expenditures that have increased more than the GDP growth. Waiting times are long, and coordination between sub-sectors of health care has been poor, although the Coordination reform of 2012 has alleviated some of the challenges related to intersectoral coordination. Still, the divided responsibility for health care between the central government and the municipalities creates tensions between national ambitions and local decisions in the financing and provision of health services.

Purpose: Risk is a multifaceted concept, and its identification requires complex approaches that are often misunderstood. The consequence is that decisions are based on limited perception rather than the full value and meaning of what risk is, as a result, the way it is being tackled is incorrect. The individuals are often limited in their perceptions and ideas and do not embrace the full multifaceted nature of risk. Regulators and individuals want to follow norms and checklists or overuse models, simulations, and templates, thereby reducing responsibility for decision-making. At the same time, the wider use of technology and rules reduces the critical thinking of individuals. We advance the automation process by building robots that follow protocols and forget about the part of risk assessment that cannot be programed. Therefore, with this study, the objective of this study was to discover how people define risk, the influencing factors of risk perception and how they behave toward this perception. The authors also determine how the perception differed with age, gender, marital status, education level and region. The novelty of the research is related to individual risk perception during COVID-19, as this is a new and unknown phenomenon. Methodology: The research is based on the analysis of the self-administered purposely designed questionnaires we distributed across different social media platforms between February and June 2020 in Europe and in some cases was carried out as a interview over communication platforms such as “Skype,” “Zoom” and “Microsoft Teams.” The questionnaire was divided into four parts: Section 1 was designed to collect demographic information from the participants; Section 2 included risk definition statements obtained from literature and a preliminary discussion with peers; Section 3 included risk behavior statements; and Section 4 included statements on risk perception experiences. A five-point Likert Scale was provided, and participants were required to answer along a scale of “1” for “Strongly Agree” to “5” for “Strongly Disagree.” Participants also had the option to elaborate further and provide additional comments in an open-ended box provided at the end of the section. 466 valid responses were received. Thematic analysis was carried out to analyze the interviews and the open-ended questions, while the questionnaire responses were analyzed using various quantitative methods on IBM SPSS (version 23). Findings: The results of the analysis indicate that individuals evaluate the risk before making a decision and view risk as both a loss and opportunity. The study identifies nine factors influencing risk perception. Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that we can continue to develop models and rules, but as long as the risk is not understood, we will never achieve anything.

This article is about the construction of masculinity in the German rap scene. After giving a short overview over the history, structure, main narratives and economic relevance of German rap, the construction of rap masculinity will be mainly discussed in the context of a transformation of the (global) gender order. For example, what impact does the rise and success of female rappers have on the gendered power relations within the German rap scene? Does the inclusion of feminine-coded moves and sounds, aesthetics or topics indicate a shift towards more alternative forms of masculinity? And what does it mean, when male rap artists currently rap about the meaning of masculinity, as if it was something that has to be (re-?) defined all at once?

The field study works with different data material from the rap scene, lyrics, interviews, but also multimodal signs as album covers, photos, video material, etc. Through discourse analysis, major discursive lines and threads are pointed out to draw a picture of gender order in this distinctive social and artistic setting.

Academics in the field of higher education have been studying various factors that might contribute to students’ progress and impact their grading. One such factor could be practicing academic freedom among students. The concept of academic freedom in most case is restricted to faculty alone and is often interpreted as the freedom to teach and conduct research. The neglected field in academic freedom is student. As faculty are engaged in the pedagogical approach of teaching and learning, it is obvious that students will encounter ideas and beliefs through books and wider reading as it is expected of them to do so. There comes the point when students start questioning the popular beliefs and the policies that have been imposed without making them a key stakeholder in those issues. The chapter takes one case study of an international university in Iraq where a strict attendance policy undermines the key concept of academic freedom among students. The author used a qualitative method to interview a cohort of 39 students, 10% of the entire student population that are currently engaged in undergraduate study. The sample comprised both male and female students, and no significant difference was noticed in the response of either of these sample groups.

In 1969, the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote On Death and Dying. In this influential essay, she presented her now-famous 5-stage model of approaching death, which can be modelled into a downward trajectory (1. shock and denial, 2. anger, 3. bargaining, 4. depression) followed by a symmetrical psychological rise (5. acceptance).

In 1888–1894, in response to Hans von Bülow's death, Gustav Mahler composed his Symphony No. 2 (subtitled ‘Resurrection’), in which the idea of death is omnipresent: it opens with a funeral march based on a symphonic poem called Totenfeier (‘Remembrance Ceremony’) containing a Dies Irae motive and closes with a very long finale inspired by Klopstock's Die Auferstehung (The Resurrection). The structure of the finale itself is quite similar to the symmetrical mechanism described by Kübler-Ross, which can be summarised in the symphony by this verse sung by the choir: ‘Sterben werd’ ich, um zu leben!’ (‘I shall die, to live!’). With this ‘death and transfiguration’ movement, the orchestra and the choir embodying the psychological process of a dying subject covers every single step of the model: from a ‘cry of despair’ in the first bar (1. shock) to a horn call without response (2. denial), to the depiction of a rivalry between the Dies Irae motive (‘death’) and what will be the Resurrection theme (3. bargaining), to a grieving section (4. depression) and to a long rising towards an optimistic climax at the end (5. acceptance).

Even though the death acceptance process was far from being formalised in Mahler's days, this symphony shows that more than 75 years before Kübler-Ross, the composer, who had many opportunities to grieve since his youth (facing his brothers' and sisters' deaths), intuitively converted these experiences into an in-depth knowledge of the psychological processes of dying. In other words, after having dealt with the loss of loved ones, Mahler turns out to know how to deal with his own.

The chapter examines the attendance, cost, structure and nature of demand for supplementary education in Germany.

This chapter reviews a variety of secondary sources.

Between 20 and 30 percent of German students use “Nachhilfe” (supplementary education). This chapter argues that a complex combination of perceptions of poor school quality and parents’ fears push German students and their parents into the supplementary education sector. It also finds that Nachhilfe providers have very effectively altered the nature of their services in light of these demands.

This chapter articulates the underlying “push” and “pull” factors that shape the nature and popularity of supplementary education in Germany.