"Science, Africa and Europe. Processing Information and Creating Knowledge". Historically, scientists and experts have played a prominent role in shaping the relationship between Europe and Africa. Starting with travel writers and missionary intellectuals in the 17th century, European savants have engaged in the study of nature and society in Africa. Knowledge about realms of the world like Africa provided a foil against which Europeans came to view themselves as members of enlightened and modern civilisations. Science and technology also offered crucial tools with which to administer, represent and legitimate power relations in a new global world but the knowledge drawn from contacts with people in far-off places provided Europeans with information and ideas that contributed in everyday ways to the scientific revolution and that provided explorers with the intellectual and social capital needed to develop science into modern disciplines at home in the metropole. This book poses questions about the changing role of European science and expert knowledge from early colonial times to post-colonial times. How did science shape understanding of Africa in Europe and how was scientific knowledge shaped, adapted and redefined in African contexts? More

"Between Memory and Reappraisal. Fürsorgerische Zwangsmassnahmen an Minderjährigen in der Schweiz im 20. Jahrhundert". / "Forced measures of care on minors in the 20th century".
For some years now, the history of preventive measures against minors has been reappraised. The fact that this can happen is not self-evident. Those affected have broken their silence after decades, cultural workers have addressed the injustice and brought it to the public, and state institutions have shown the will to politically and historically reappraise that what happened.
The book provides an insight into the forced measures against minors in the 20th century and the consequences of the injustice experienced. It discusses principles and guiding principles associated with social recognition and coming to terms with the injustice, and identifies the means and media thanks to which society has been sensitized to this issue.
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"Firsthand. Deaf people, sign language and deaf education in Switzerland in the 19th and 20th centuries."
Deaf people were long considered a group of disabled people in the 19th and 20th centuries. Among their peculiarities was sign language, a form of expression that separated them from the rest of society. Today, the deaf see themselves as a cultural minority. Their identity is based to a significant extent on sign language. They reject the idea of deafness as a disability.
This book illuminates the eventful history of the deaf in Switzerland in the 19th and 20th centuries. The focus is on the places where the hearing society and the deaf community met, especially the institutions for the deaf and dumb and later speech therapy schools, which taught according to the spoken language method until the 1980s. What pedagogical approach did the schools and institutions for the deaf take toward the deaf? How did the pedagogical models change, especially towards sign language? And what impact did the schools have on the social marginalization of sign language and on the lives of the deaf? The study draws on broad archival resources and numerous interviews. For the first time, those affected themselves have their say in this study: deaf people of different generations, but also a number of school officials. They tell a hitherto largely unknown story of a social minority - at first hand.
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