Probing Human Dignity from multiple disciplinary backgrounds by scholars from a variety of countries and different cultures is an intense intellectual and emotional venture. The intensity emerges from an encounter with Human dignity that challenges individuals, communities, and society at large to navigate different spheres of human action, including ethical, moral, religious, and legal realms. Difficulties arise in the attempt to bridge the conversation about Human Dignity across cultures and traditions. This volume addresses such difficulties, exploring new horizons of the discourse and offering a mosaic of the quest for Human Dignity.

Alas, the denial of a person’s dignity continues to manifest in contemporary life, through injustices often related to personal hardship, crisis, unrest, or upheaval. This collection confronts such injustices with sensitive, complex, nuanced, and academically rigorous engagement. 

Each chapter begins from the understanding that recognizing and investigating Human Dignity often occurs “at the threshold”, where in times of societal crisis or individual hardship questions of Human Dignity turn into ethical, moral, and legal dilemmas. The objective of this volume is to draw on theoretical and conceptual distinctions of Human Dignity in order to inform new perspectives that probe its ambiguity. The contributors offer greater clarity and push beyond existing thresholds to develop new paradigms that cross disciplinary lines while speaking to the goals and needs of post-modern societies and individuals. Each contributor crosses into new territory to examine a pressing legal or societal issue with a new lens.

The authors worked together as an international and interdisciplinary research group within the framework of the 2nd Intercontinental Academia of the UBIAS network (University-Based Institutes for Advanced Studies). This volume reflects their journey, their fruitful collaboration, and their scholarly endeavors. The result is a collection that serves as a fresh and exciting contribution to the contemporary Human Dignity discourse. 

There has been a dramatic increase in theoretical and practical studies on insect natural enemies over the last decades. The appeal of insect predators and, in particular, parasitoids, as research animals derives from the relative ease with which many species may be cultured and experimented on in the laboratory, the simple life-cycles of most parasitoid species, and the increasing demand for biological pest control as a key component of the integrated pest management approach.There is now a very substantial literature on insect natural enemies and thus a great need for a general text that enquiring students or research workers can use in deciding on approaches and techniques that are appropriate to the study and evaluation of such insects. This book fulfils that demand. It is a considerably updated and expanded version of a previous best-seller and provides an account of major aspects of the biology of predators and parasitoids, punctuated with information and advice onwhich experiments or observations to conduct and, importantly, how to carry them out. Guidance is provided, where necessary, on the most recent further literature that may need to be consulted on given topics.While researchers can now refer to several books on parasitoids and predators, Jervis’s Insects as Natural Enemies is unique in emphasising practicalities. It is aimed at students and professionals working in universities and both government and commercial institutes in the fields of integrated pest management, agriculture, horticulture and forestry, as well as those interested in fundamentals of behavioural, population, community and evolutionary ecology.

Entomologists have often used computational modeling to study the dynamics of insects in agricultural landscapes. Recently, important issues such as the movement of adults and immatures associated with insect resistance to GMO (genetically modified organism) crops have been addressed using computational models. We developed an individual-based model using the cellular automata approach (CA) to investigate how an intercropping system composed of maize engineered with Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) gene, refuge areas (non-Bt maize), and grasses combined with off-season periods might influence the evolution of resistance in Spodoptera frugiperda (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae), one of the leading agricultural pests targeted by GMOs.

We designed the Bt and non-Bt plants in two different arrangements: (a) a seed mixture and (b) strips rows, adding grasses in areas adjacent to the field. We added the seasonal planting dynamics (crop season and off-season), to evaluate a total of six agricultural scenarios. We followed a crop calendar from the United States to create simulations close to agricultural practice.

The results showed that the frequency of the resistance allele was strongly related to the landscape arrangements and their dynamics. Since the adult insects are mobile, the seed-mixture scenario increased the frequency of the resistance the most (95.86%), followed by strips (82.10%), without grass fields. The maize harvest made it possible to reduce the frequency of resistance allele below 1%. Based on our results, we can expect that the maintenance of pasture areas, for instance next to the corn crops, will act as a reservoir of susceptible insects during off-season periods.

A Lasting Vision is dedicated to the Mirror of Literature (Kāvyādarśa), a Sanskrit treatise on poetics composed by Dandin in south India (ca. 700 CE) and to its remarkable career throughout large parts of Asia. The Mirror was adapted and translated into several languages in the southern Indian peninsula (Kannada, Tamil) and the island of Sri Lanka (Sinhala, Pali), as well as in the Tibetan plateau far to the north (Tibetan, Mongolian). In all these receiving cultures, it became a classical text and a source of constant engagement and innovation, often well into the modern era. It also traveled to Burma and Thailand, where it held a place of honor in Buddhist monastic education and intellectual life, and likely to the islands of Java and Bali, where it contributed to the production of literature in Old Javanese. There is even reason to believe that it reached China and impacted Chinese literary culture, although far more peripherally than in other parts of Asia. It also maintained a prominent position in the Sanskrit learned discourses throughout the Indian subcontinent for at least a millennium. This multi-authored volume, organized by region and language, is the first attempt to chart and explain the Mirror’s amazing transregional and multilingual success: what was so unique about this work that might explain its near-continental conquest, how it was transmitted to and received in the many different environments, and what happened to it whenever it was being adopted and adapted.

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH VOLUME 26 ISSUE 5
On Interruptions

Suddenly, the topic of the research laboratory for theory and practice in performance that had been active daily for three months at the Israeli Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, became a global reality. In October 2019, a group of researchers and artists began investigating the notion of Interruptions expressed in artistic creativity and in works of art as well as through reflection and academic research in aesthetics, performance theory and poetics. And in January 2020, as we held the symposium summarizing the initial findings of this project, we did not yet know anything about the pandemic, which is still—now, a year and a half later—a central feature of our everyday realities. This issue of PR, with its thirty contributions by scholars and artists from the initial research laboratory (which focused on the work and thinking of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht) as well as the ‘newcomers’ from the local (Israeli) and international communities, considers the notion of Interruptions in/of performance in a broad range of historical, theoretical and political contexts.