"Doktorat neu" - Analyse der Ausbildungssituation des sozialwissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses an der Universität Wien und weiterführende Reformvorschläge

'Das Doktoratsstudium ist in den letzten Jahren zunehmend ins Blickfeld gelangt: Es steht im Schnittpunkt zweier aktueller politischer Debatten: die erste betrifft den steigenden Bedarf an qualifizierten NachwuchsforscherInnen, die zweite die grundlegende Umstrukturierung des europäischen Hochschulraums durch den so genannten 'Bologna-Prozess' (Vergleichbarkeit der europäischen Studienabschlüsse, Anpassung an die dreigliedrige Studienarchitektur). Für eine sinnvolle Neugestaltung des Doktorats an der Fakultät für Sozialwissenschaften an der Universität Wien wurden im Jahr 2007 empirische Daten in einer Online-Befragung unter aktuell studierenden DoktorandInnen erhoben. Ausgehend von den Befragungsergebnissen beschreibt der Artikel die Folgen für die (Neu-) Gestaltung des Studienzugangs, der Studieninhalte, der notwendigen Unterstützungs- und Informationsangebote und der Finanzierung eines 'Doktoratsstudiums neu'. Eckpunkte sind die Erhaltung der Vielfalt beim Zugang zum Doktoratsstudium, der Ausbau eines auf das Doktoratsstudium zugeschnittenen Lehrveranstaltungsangebots, die stärkere Integration der DoktorandInnen in das Forschungsgeschehen der Institute und die Ausweitung der Finanzierungsmöglichkeiten für das Doktoratsstudium.' (Autorenreferat)'In Austria, PhD programs increasingly receive attention. They are at the centre of two recent political debates that concern, on the one hand, a growing need for qualified junior scholars (early stage researchers) and, on the other hand, the fundamental restructuring of European universities in the course of the so-called Bologna Process. Reforms of the PhD program of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Vienna must be supported by empirical data. For this reason, an online survey among current graduate students was undertaken in 2007. This article discusses the implications of the results for the (re-) organization of admission requirements, course descriptions, necessary services concerning support and information, and the funding of the 'PhD New'. Key are the maintaining of a variety in terms of admission, developing courses specific to the PhD, improving the involvement of graduate students in research activities of their respective departments, and expanding the funding of the PhD program.' (author's abstract)

Books in Arabic Script

The chapter approaches the book in Arabic script as the indispensable means for the transmission of knowledge across Eurasia and Africa, within cultures and across cultural boundaries, since the seventh century ad. The state of research can be divided into manuscript and print studies, but there is not yet a history of the book in Arabic script that captures its plurilinear development for over fourteen hundred years. The chapter explores the conceptual and practical challenges that impede the integration of the book in Arabic script into book history at large and includes an extensive reference list that reflects its diversity. The final published version was slightly updated, and includes seven illustrations of six Qurans from the holdings of Columbia University Libraries, four manuscripts and two printed versions. Moreover, the illustrations are images of historical artifacts which are in the public domain - despite Wiley's copyright claim

Resources and the life course: Patterns through the demographic transition

In most mammals, and in the majority of traditional human societies for which data exist, status, power, or resource control correlates with lifetime reproductive success; male and female patterns differ. Because such correlations are often argued to have disappeared in human societies during the demographic transition of the nineteenth century, we analyzed wealth and lifetime reproductive success in a nineteenth-century Swedish population in four economically diverse parishes, subsuming geographic and temporal variation. Children of both sexes born to poorer parents were more likely than richer children to die or emigrate before reaching maturity. Poorer men, and women whose fathers were poorer, were less likely to marry in the parish than others, largely as a result of differential mortality and migration. Of all adults of both sexes who remained in their home parish and thus generated complete lifetime records, richer individuals had greater lifetime fertility and more children alive at age ten, than others. The age-specific fertility of richer women rises slightly sooner, and reaches a higher peak, than that of poorer women. These patterns persisted throughout the period of the sample (1824-1896). Thus, wealth appears, even during the demographic transition in an egalitarian society, to have influenced lifetime reproductive success positively.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/29881/1/0000234.pd