bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
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Authors: Burton Philip J.
Published: February 2025

The world’s natural forests have a long history of being destroyed, degraded, and simplified. Resilient forest management therefore must often start with forest restoration. Restorative actions can employ well-developed silvicultural methods, but with an emphasis on generating compositional diversity and structural complexity. Forest regeneration sets the stage for the next many decades of forest development, so requires the thoughtful selection of plant materials and attributes of the future desired forest, including its ability to thrive in both current and future climates. Many of the world’s homogenous, monotypic plantations and second-growth forests can be modified to include old-growth characteristics (such as standing and fallen deadwood, canopy gaps, and multilayered canopies), or can serve as nurse crops for the establishment of slow-growing native tree species. Other aspects of forest ecosystem restoration may need to focus on the reintroduction of keystone species (including animals), or the control of invasive species. Forest landscape restoration integrates these improvements to forest integrity with other land covers (such as agricultural and residential land uses) to assure socio-ecological resilience. Guidelines for forest restoration include recognition of the need first to protect existing forests and halt processes of degradation, and then to undertake broad stakeholder involvement in promoting biodiversity and adaptability in a framework of adaptive management. Forest restoration provides numerous opportunities to design or redesign forests for resilience.
The grammar of the verb in the languages of the Central Andes
Authors: Pache Matthias
Published: February 2025

The present chapter provides an overview of the grammar of the verb in the Central Andean languages covered in this book: Quechuan varieties, Jaqaru and Aymara (Aymaran) (Jaqaru, Aymara), Uru and Chipaya (Uru–Chipaya), Mochica, Puquina, Híbito and Cholon (Híbito–Cholón), some of the “minor” languages of northern Peru, Kallawaya, and Central Andean Spanish. Given that this chapter addresses data from several different languages, the chosen approach is onomasiological, and the characteristics of the grammar of the verb in Central Andean languages are discussed along semantic categories (for instance, the indication of participant-related categories, or of notions of time and space). Rather than providing a summary, this chapter has a comparative focus. Wherever appropriate, it discusses the grammar of the verb in terms of formal and structural similarities and of structural differences between Central Andean languages.
Contact between Indigenous languages of the Central Andes and Spanish
Authors: Escobar Anna María , Betty To
Published: February 2025

The Central Andes in the 20th and 21st centuries displays the social ecology of a language contact scenario that leads to grammatical influence between unrelated languages. Linguistic influence from Andean languages to Spanish, the focus of this chapter, represents a case of influence from minoritized languages to a hegemonic language. The Central Andes portrays a unique and vibrant case of contact-induced features in a variety of a global language, Spanish. Although contra-hierarchical diffusion (linguistic influence from a minoritized to a hegemonic language) is considered rare, contact-induced linguistic outcomes in Andean Spanish include phonetic–phonological, morphosyntactic, morphosemantic, and semantic–pragmatic features. The broader use of these linguistic features is dependent on the register they can appear in and speakers’ awareness of their perceived social meaning in the region. Andean linguistic studies are in an ideal position to make theoretical and methodological contributions to Hispamerindian (socio)linguistics and language contact studies.
Caliphs, the Economy, and Political Separatism in the Ḥijāz
Authors: Munt Harry
Published: February 2025

This chapter investigates the responses of local elites in the Ḥijāz (specifically in and around Mecca and Medina) to the increasing inability of the Abbasid caliphs in Iraq to provide security and the conditions necessary for economic prosperity over the ninth to eleventh centuries. The chapter starts by looking at some of the main means through which Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs had driven economic expansion in the region over the seventh and eighth centuries, before progressing to the symptoms of political and economic instability that followed alongside the caliphal administration’s gradual withdrawal from the region. It argues that, with the increasing lack of Abbasid caliphal interest in the Ḥijāz, the idea of political separatism became more viable to local elites in Mecca and Medina.
Introduction
Authors: Bessard Fanny
Published: February 2025

This chapter questions the role of the Ibāḍī communities of Islamic post-Conquest North Africa in the advent of a new economic system based on Trans-Saharan trade. My intention is to observe how sectarian and ethnic boundaries and rivalries could interplay with business relations and the building of new economic networks, but also how these communities were taking part in a broader social and economic order. The debate will be fuelled by a new approach of Ibāḍism during the Rustamid and Fatimid periods based on narrative and legal sources and by a collective investigation led on Sedrata, the archaeological site corresponding to Wārjlān, a major Saharan crossroads.
The Ibāḍī Trading Communities of the Maghreb (Eighth to Eleventh Centuries)
Authors: Aillet Cyrille
Published: February 2025

This paper questions the role of the Ibāḍī communities of Islamic Post-conquest North Africa in the advent of a new economic system based on Trans-Saharan trade. My intention is to observe how sectarian and ethnic boundaries and rivalries could interplay with business relations and the building of new economic networks, but also how these communities were taking part into a broader social and economic order. The debate will be fueled by a new approach of Ibāḍism during the Rustamid and Fatimid periods based on narrative and legal sources and by a collective investigation lead on Sedrata, the archaeological site corresponding to Wārjlān, a major Saharan crossroad.
Ivory and Rock Crystal Trade in East Africa, Eighth to Twelfth Centuries
Authors: Pradines Stéphane
Published: February 2025

The Swahili in East Africa exported precious commodities like gold, ivory, and rock crystal. Nowadays, these ‘commercial items’ are mostly invisible to the archaeologists because they are ‘by nature’ gross materials for export. Fortunately, the use of historical and ethnographic sources, combined with recent archaeological researches, allow us to trace the history of this trade, from the ʿAbbāsid to the late Fatimid period. Far from the well-known gold trade, the study of ivory and rock crystal allows us to present local and regional commercial networks and the trade in the Indian Ocean during the early medieval period.
Introduction
Authors: Spencer Nick , Waite Hannah
Published: February 2025

This introductory chapter sets out the basis for comparing science and religion, and understanding where the perceived disagreements lie. Many of the debates around science and religion remain mired in essentialist concepts of the two entities—the conviction that there is such a thing as science and such a thing as religion and that the two can be meaningfully compared. This is not justifiable. Both are sprawling, socially mediated categories, and for all that they may have settled down after centuries of fluctuation and dispute, they remain socially constructed and so disputable. This chapter builds on Peter Harrison’s metaphor of ‘territories’ to understand the historical dynamic between science and religion, and applies this to the contemporary debate. It then draws on Wittgenstein’s later work, specifically the ideas of meaning as usage and of family resemblances, to provide a foundation by means of which we can disaggregate the terms ‘science’ and ‘religion’ and start to map out the various meanings of the terms today. In effect, it moves from the bird’s eye view of the historical territories of science and religion offered by Harrison to an on-the-ground, sociological view of the contemporary landscapes of science and religion.
Freelancing ‘for the Sake of Reputation’
Authors: Pulignano Valeria , Domecka Markieta
Published: February 2025

The chapter empirically illustrates the politics of unpaid labour in the online platform sector in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Italy, and Poland. Online platforms for freelancers vary, with different business models creating different conditions for freelancers. Dependent on a well-developed online reputation to secure a living income, many online freelancers sacrifice themselves and their family life for the sake of reputation. However, how an online reputation—and thus financial security—is built is greatly dependent on structures within and strategies of digital platforms, some of which foster precarity through their low rates, thus potentially exacerbating existing class differences characterized by the availability of resources to cope with the uncertainty of the work. This situation highlights how class-based circumstances intersect with platform structures, strategies, and dynamics, influencing the economic realities experienced by freelancers.
Unpaid Labour, Labour Markets, and Capabilities
Authors: Pulignano Valeria , Domecka Markieta , Gazier Bernard
Published: February 2025

The chapter draws on the book’s notion of the politics of unpaid labour to examine the implications for the theory of capability in labour economics. Drawing from the novel theory presented in the book and supported by empirical findings in creative dance, residential care, and online freelancing, our argument asserts that the freedoms people enjoy—and which theories of ‘capability egalitarianism’ consider important for explaining equality in society—cannot be built ‘in silos’ as they are contingent upon a set of capability-providing collective arrangements of which labour market institutions and policies are key factors. In essence, labour market institutions and policies are just as important as civil, social, and political rights to guarantee equality in opportunities as they account for how far these rights are equally exercised.
(Not) Bombing Civilians
Authors: Gregory Thomas
Published: February 2025

This chapter examines the specific measures the coalition introduced to reduce collateral damage from coalition airstrikes and mitigate its consequences, including new rules about who/what could be targeted, what weapons could be released, and what should be done when civilians were killed. Although these restrictions effectuated a sharp decline in civilian casualties from coalition airstrikes, it will argue that these restrictions are not a sign that the coalition now cared about the civilians they were killing. Instead, it will argue that coalition officials were concerned with recalibrating their attacks to ensure that commanders could achieve their objectives without causing unnecessary harm to civilians, which would be counterproductive from a military perspective.
(Not) Counting Civilians
Authors: Gregory Thomas
Published: February 2025

This chapter examines what prompted coalition officials to start counting civilian casualties, what data the coalition collected and how officials tried to use this data, and what these measures reveal about their attitudes towards civilian harm. Whereas some commentators have celebrated these changes, reading them as an attempt to document the harms inflicted upon civilians, hold coalition forces more accountable for their errors, and ensure that the victims are recognized as victims, this chapter argues that coalition officials tried to weaponize this statistical information to ensure that civilian casualties did not allow tactical victories to become strategic setbacks. In doing so, the chapter makes an important contribution to debates about counting civilian harm because it challenges the idea that these figures merely document the harm inflicted upon the civilian population, showing instead that these figures are complicit in the violence they claim to enumerate.
The Victorian Mind's Eye
Authors: 9780198914617  , Thomas Julia
Published: February 2025

This book conceptualizes the material and mental mechanics of reading that emerged with the Victorian age of illustration. This period witnessed the growth of illustrated material on an unprecedented scale, with words and pictures printed alongside each other in works of fiction and non-fiction. Victorian illustrated literature was extraordinarily diverse in terms of its style, subject matter, and audience, but its common feature was its bi-mediality, a conjunction of text and image that instigated and demanded new processes and experiences of reading. This book identifies and analyses these modes of reading as they are articulated across an array of Victorian sources, from the first-hand accounts of Victorian readers, reviewers, authors, and artists to the corpus of work by Victorian psychologists that explores multiple aspects of reading, including mental visualization or the ‘mind’s eye’. The book also turns to the content and form of illustrated texts, which indicate how readers handled and interacted with them and how the activity of reading was facilitated or frustrated by their materiality. By uncovering the cognitive and cultural mechanisms of the Victorian engagement with illustrated literature, the book reveals a mode of reading in which illustrations were conceived as both material and mental entities, where they were experienced as part of iconographic networks and clusters, where they elicited their own specific pleasures and displeasures, and where they were seen before the words and remembered long after the words were forgotten. These ways of reading redefine the relation between texts, images, and historical meanings, situating illustration as central to how the Victorians read, and to how we read the Victorians.
Introduction
Authors: Thomas Julia
Published: February 2025

The Introduction describes the Victorian period as an age of illustration, which was characterized by the development of printing methods and the exponential growth of illustrated material. The revolution in illustration necessitated and generated a mode of reading that moved between pictures and the words. This reading process is outlined in an analysis of a Victorian illustrated edition of Washington Irving’s story ‘Rip Van Winkle’. The analysis suggests that the mechanics of reading an illustrated text, the mental processes and experiences that it involved, were inherently different from the mechanics of reading an unillustrated text. The Introduction locates this difference in the concept of the ‘mind’s eye’. Reading Victorian illustrated texts was said to appeal to the physical eye, but this sensuous attraction existed alongside a psychological aspect of reading that involved the mind’s eye and its generation of mental ‘pictures’. The Introduction concludes by suggesting the ways in which illustrations were themselves conceived as material embodiments of mental images that were produced when the illustrators read the text.
Reading for (dis)pleasure
Authors: Thomas Julia
Published: February 2025

Framed by Grant Allen’s treatise on aesthetic experiences, Physiological Aesthetics (1877), and an illustrated short story that Allen wrote for the first issue of the Strand Magazine in 1891, this chapter points to the ways in which illustrations created a pleasurable experience for Victorian readers by adding to the plot-interest of literary texts, appealing directly to the eye, and producing an immersive effect that we have come to associate with more recent forms of media. But illustrations could also be distinctly unpleasurable, especially for readers who were strong mental visualizers. The chapter argues that the reading of illustrated texts elicited specific pleasures and displeasures that were bound up in the juxtaposition of word and image and in the relation between material and mental images. Pleasure was said to ensue from an apparent congruence or ‘match’ between the illustration and the reader’s mental image of the text, while displeasure was rooted in a ‘mismatch’ between the image on the page and the image in the reader’s mind’s eye.
Reading and memory
Authors: Thomas Julia
Published: February 2025

The final chapter picks up on the ways in which illustrations were retained and recalled in the memories of Victorian readers. Memory was intrinsic to the process of reading illustrated texts, illustrations existing not only as material entities but also as mental images that were remembered, or, indeed, misremembered. The experience of Victorian readers indicates how illustrations were retained in the memory even when the words they illustrated were long forgotten. This experience was intensified for the first generation of readers brought up on illustrated texts, who looked back nostalgically on the images that formed part of their childhood reading. Illustrations were etched in the memory of Victorian readers, and they also came to play a key role in the memorialization of texts and authors. The chapter re-views Robert William Buss’s famous memorial painting of Charles Dickens, Dickens’s Dream, as an image that engages with the issue of how illustrations are remembered. The chapter suggests that the prominent place of illustrations in the memory of readers has implications for how we understand Victorian literary culture, raising the possibility that this culture was defined and characterized by remembrances of illustrative images.
Administration of Estates in Spain
Authors: Cámara Lapuente Sergio
Published: February 2025

The Spanish Civil Code of 1889 does not provide a complete and structured regime for the administration of estates. Rather, its peculiarities are scattered in many controversial institutions. In the absence of an executor, the heirs are typically responsible for administering the estate and paying the deceased’s debts. Although heirs may accept with benefit of inventory, by default they are liable for the estate debts with their own assets, and this is the usual practice, which has proved effective for over a century. However, the rise in the disclaiming of estates, the risk of hidden debts, the need to clarify the order of preference among creditors, and the uncertainties surrounding hereditas iacens, among other issues, have led the General Codification Commission to present a proposal for reform on the topic that is more in line with social reality and doctrinal coherence.
Administration of Estates in Historical and Comparative Perspective
Authors: Zimmermann Reinhard , Schmidt Jan Peter
Published: February 2025

This chapter undertakes a comparative mapping exercise on estate administration. While the common law jurisdictions are characterized by a remarkable uniformity of approaches, the civilian legal systems of the European Continent, and beyond, display an equally remarkable diversity. This is due mainly to differences in the respective legal histories. It was the law of the Church that predominated in England and Scotland, leading to a system where the estate is always administered as a separate patrimony by a ‘personal representative’. The general structure of the rules on estate administration in the civilian systems, in turn, was largely shaped by Roman law: the ‘heir’ is the universal successor of the deceased, and the deceased’s estate is fused with estate of the heir. That entails a system of ‘integrated’ administration. All civilian systems, however, also recognize the ‘separation’ mode of administration; but they do so in very different ways.
The Concept of Respect
Authors: Wolf Reinhard
Published: February 2025

Social respect is a considerate attitude expressed through the appropriate acknowledgement of someone’s status. It derives its distinct meaning from the fact that the demand for respect brings together status concerns, ethical expectations, and moral emotions. Everyone feels entitled to enjoy respect. Everybody owes it. Accordingly, it should be distinguished from related terms, such as deference, honour, or dignity. While respect bears some resemblance to the recognition of an actor’s identity, it does not fully overlap with it. As an attitude towards somebody’s (current) rank, respect is fundamentally a relational concept. Therefore, it is to be distinguished from the (positional) concept of status that refers to a given party’s place in a social hierarchy.
Status Dimensions and the Experience of Respect
Authors: Wolf Reinhard
Published: February 2025

This chapter investigates how actors and observers discern whether a party has been respected or not. Based on findings in social psychology and related disciplines, the chapter explains why an actor’s rank has two fundamental elements: socially esteemed qualities or achievements (status markers) and the hierarchical roles the actor occupies. Accordingly, proper respect for an actor also involves both dimensions: visibly appreciating their position in the hierarchy of public esteem (i.e. their relative prestige) and—even more importantly—deferring to them to the extent that both parties’ role-scripts mandate such behaviour (e.g. following one’s leader, consulting one’s partner). On this basis, the chapter develops a typology of dis/respect experiences, discusses their expected importance, and describes their empirical manifestations.
Defying Disrespectful Rescuers: Debt-Ridden Greece and Its Creditors
Authors: Wolf Reinhard
Published: February 2025

Focusing on the climax of the Greek debt crisis in 2015, the chapter investigates how the government in Athens responded to the indignity of highly intrusive bailout ‘diktats’. Its analytical value derives mostly from the fact that an intense experience of disrespect was pitted against an extremely weak bargaining position and quite substantial material risks. Considering these adverse odds, the case study proves that respect concerns can prevail even against strong economic incentives. Although the Greek government ultimately came to prioritize fresh bailout money when it finally capitulated to creditors’ demands, its defiant stance first brought the country to the brink of default. For a while, therefore, leaders and citizens displayed a remarkable inclination to put respect for national dignity above standard imperatives of expected utility—with substantial consequences for the country’s economic trajectory.
Gettysburg
Authors: 9780191651014  , Smith Adam I. P.
Published: February 2025

Why is Gettysburg the Civil War battle that everyone knows? How did it come to be regarded as the “turning point” of the war, and—more than that—one of the most potent symbols of what America stands for. The author describes how, almost as soon as it was over, Gettysburg was hailed as the decisive clash of arms, and how Abraham Lincoln’s address helped imbue the battle with transcendental political significance. The book explores how different groups of people over the generations have sought in Gettysburg an explanation for the outcome of the Civil War and thus the key to the meaning of America.
High Tide and Retreat, July 3 and Afterward
Authors: Smith Adam I. P.
Published: February 2025

The chapter describes the climactic assault by Confederate forces on July 3 known as Pickett’s Charge, its failure, and immediate aftermath, including the Army of Northern Virginia’s largely successful retreat back into Virginia. It argues that the Gettysburg campaign demonstrated both Lee’s weaknesses and his strengths. His fixation on the need for a decisive victory over the Army of the Potomac led to the sacrifice of the lives of thousands of men in assaults on July 2 and 3 that were unlikely to succeed.
The Islamic State as Social Movement Organization and the Concept of Protest in Its Anashid
Authors: Pieslak Jonathan
Published: February 2025

This article conceptualizes the Islamic State (IS) as a social movement organization and explores the concept of protest in its anashid (“Islamic songs” or “Islamic chant/recitation,” sg: nashid; pl: anashid). It first presents an agenda of social-movement paradigms specific to the study of media within terrorist organizations, focusing on framing and emotion. Next, the article examines how distinct elements of Salafism, which forms the basis for IS ideology, intersect with dimensions of protest. Finally, a short case study is offered for how we might engage IS anashid through a social movement studies-informed agenda, presenting an analysis of framing and emotion in several IS anashid.
The Political Legacy of Woodstock: Rock Music Festivals and Protest
Authors: Bennett Andy
Published: February 2025

The original Woodstock Music and Arts Fair, held in August 1969, is typically represented as a watershed moment in the political significance of the rock festival. During a time when rock music had become increasingly political, Woodstock was regarded as a standard-bearer for countercultural ideology, including a back-to-the-land, neo-Greenist philosophy and the anti-Vietnam War movement. The mythology that has grown up around Woodstock’s political importance is bound up with the romanticized connections made during the late 1960s between rock music and notions of community. With reference to a series of post-Woodstock festivals, including the Goose Lake International Music Festival (USA, 1970), Festival Buenos Aires Rock (Argentina, 1971), Sunbury Pop Festival (Australia, 1972–1975), and the infamous Stonehenge Festival (UK, 1974–1984) this chapter considers how rock festivals from the late 1960s onward became centrally important as sites of youth cultural resistance and political subversiveness.
Varieties of Irish Song Collected by James Cody
Authors: Uí Bhaoill Máire
Published: February 2025

James Cody (Séamus Mhac Óda) was the only scribe working for Edward Bunting, the famous music collector, who could document both Irish lyrics and music notation, and his involvement in Bunting’s project of field-collecting was thus unrivaled at the time. A number of important manuscripts by Cody have survived in the collections of the Bunting archive (Queen’s University Library), in the Bryson and MacAdam Collection (Belfast Public library), and in the National Library of Ireland. This chapter focuses on the texts and airs taken from poets and singers, by James Cody, for Bunting, which date from the period 1803–1809. It offers authoritative texts in modern Irish and with English translations of a number of these, and considers the generic range of this important, relatively unknown, collection of songs.
Cultural Heritage Rights and Indigenous Peoples
Authors: Alves Ayla
Published: February 2025

Cultural heritage often plays many important roles for Indigenous peoples, reflecting holistic understandings that connect culture to identity, spirituality, ancestral lands, natural resources, self-determination, and survival. Despite this significance, international law has historically marginalized and often neglected the protection of Indigenous peoples’ cultural heritage rights, leading to a current inadequate or insufficient level of protection that often leaves threats to Indigenous heritage unaddressed and violations unpunished. This chapter examines three international regimes (international cultural heritage law, human rights law, and intellectual property law) offering some protection to Indigenous heritage, as well as ongoing international efforts to develop new instruments on the topic. These regimes and continuing debates are assessed against key themes of importance in Indigenous mobilization to identify how each regime responds to common claims and concerns advanced by Indigenous groups internationally. By identifying the regimes’ strengths and shortcomings in relation to those themes, this chapter considers avenues to make the international framework on Indigenous heritage safeguarding more culturally adequate and effective in responding to Indigenous peoples’ needs. In pursuing such goals, the usual state-centric and state sovereignty-based core of international law needs to be reappraised to make room for Indigenous voices and control to lead the way.
Methods of Soil Science and Microbiology in Studying Archaeological Sites in the Mountainous Zone
Authors: Borisov Alexander V. , Chernysheva Elena , Korobov Dmitry S.
Published: February 2025

The archaeological heritage of mountainous regions has peculiarities, which are fundamentally different from those of lowlands. This chapter discusses a series of microbiological methods and approaches to studying the biological memory of soils in mountainous regions, which is able to transmit information about organic substances accumulated in soils over thousands of years. It shows the results of soil microbiological and enzymatic analysis for three types of archaeological sites in mountains—settlements, animal enclosures, and ancient agricultural fields. The archaeological sites of the case study are located in the Kislovodsk Basin, Russia. We used a variety of methods from soil science, soil microbiology, and enzymology including measuring soil water content, soil pH, soil organic carbon, inorganic forms of nitrogen, and the content of phosphorus in soil samples. Microbial soil analyses included determination of microbial biomass carbon, abundance of thermophilic microorganisms, and activity of enzymes involved in the carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycles in the soil. It is possible to demonstrate that the soil microbiological community and the level of enzymatic activity can store information about various organic substrates in the soil of archaeological sites particular in the cold and moist conditions of mountain climates. Microbiological methods make it possible to identify places of livestock within the settlements, to determine the function of structures, and to recognize ancient manuring. The use of pedological and microbiological methods in the study of archaeological sites in mountains can significantly expand our understanding of the various activities of ancient populations.
If This Is a Man: Primo Levi and Holocaust Literature
Authors: Scaffai Niccolò
Published: February 2025

Witnessing and writing, memory and invention are parallel dimensions in Primo Levi’s work; his exceptionality does not reside exclusively in the effectiveness of his testimony and the importance of his theme, but also in its narrative power, in the quality of the form with which the writer expresses, organizes, and communicates his content, fixing it in the memory of his readers. This chapter walks through Levi’s oeuvre from this perspective, focusing in particular on his first, and most influential, book: If This Is a Man. Themes and forms of Levi’s writing will also be considered in light of his international reception and in the context of Holocaust literature. Connections between Levi’s books and themes and the closest contemporary issues will also be highlighted: intersections between science, society, and humanistic knowledge; morality and language; remembering and forgetting; responsibility and repression; and the control and domination of others.
Postface: Meetings with Remarkable Italians
Authors: Thomson Ian
Published: February 2025

During the time I lived in Rome in the early 1980s, I interviewed a number of Italian writers for the London Magazine, edited by the poet Alan Ross. The memories I have of meeting Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg, Alberto Moravia, and Leonardo Sciascia are still vivid in my mind; they add color (and, I hope, depth) to the thoughts and reflections I offer here on these four “Remarkable Italians.” Much of the verse Alan himself wrote in the 1950s and 1960s is set in Rome, and my essay on Pier Paolo Pasolini is indebted to Alan’s example. Without Alan’s encouragement to “keep going” with my Italian interests in Rome, I would not have been so bold as to seek out a generation of Italy’s greatest writers—a generation now long since gone. The interlinked essays do not pretend to be academic; rather, they are personal appreciations.
Sem Medo de Lobisomem
Authors: Villegas Lindvall Valeria
Published: February 2025

As Boas Maneiras focuses on Clara, a Black nurse hired as a caretaker by Ana, a white, single pregnant woman estranged from her wealthy family. It is revealed that Ana bears the child of a werewolf. When Ana dies during childbirth, Clara raises the baby, embracing his animality with care until the final moment of reckoning. This chapter explores the ways in which As Boas Maneiras facilitates a critique of the coloniality of gender and labor. The foundational, colonial dichotomy of animal/human has shaped racialization and related it to animalization. This chapter contends that As Boas Maneiras challenges these historically affixed notions. It contests staunch heterosexism, and the voracity of animality is projected onto Ana. Further, it updates a figure derived from Brazilian colonial history, the Black nanny, subverting the historical undermining of the figure by centering Clara as a significant, powerful bastion.
Dreaming of Blackness
Authors: Lowenstein Adam
Published: February 2025

This chapter argues that the conceptual frame of “Blackness” helps refigure the achievements of Peter Weir’s Australian horror film The Last Wave (1977). Aboriginal people, as “Blacks” of Australia, have often suffered from the othering lens of monstrousness associated with the horror film. However, The Last Wave resists such a designation. The film’s horror stems from its white Australian protagonist’s need for Aboriginal people to fill the void in himself. By daring to depict horrific dreaming as something that can potentially interweave white and Black experiences across painful histories, The Last Wave invites audiences to acknowledge how much white Australia has to learn about itself and its “others” by dreaming of the Blackness of Aboriginal Australia. Learning what this cinematic dreaming of Blackness might teach us is an urgent task; it invites us to forge a path toward future survival that winds through the horror of the past and present.
Risk, Resilience, and Resistance
Authors: Mälksoo Maria
Published: February 2025

The development of ‘resilience thinking’ in NATO’s post-Cold War discourse and practice raises questions about the compatibility between the logics of security and resilience. The increasing emphasis on resilience performatively enacts NATO’s self-identification as a comprehensive security organization, far beyond its standard military alliance repertoire. What deterrence and defence are to NATO’s original identity (now resurrected after Russia’s 2022 full-on aggression against Ukraine) resilience has been to the Alliance’s positive post-Cold War sense of self. The chapter offers a conceptualization and empirical documentation of NATO’s take on resilience, identifying four meanings of the term in NATO’s collective use: political unity, democratic essence, reputation/credibility, and institutional endurance.
The European Neutrals
Authors: Cottey Andrew
Published: February 2025

This chapter examines the unusual partnership which emerged between the main West European neutral states—Austria, Ireland, Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland—after the Cold War. Neutrality and alliances are inherently incompatible and during the Cold War ties between the European neutral states (ENS) and NATO were largely non-existent. In the 1990s and 2000s, however, these countries emerged as amongst NATO’s most committed and reliable partners, developing institutionalized cooperation with NATO and contributing forces to peacekeeping operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. This process reflected NATO’s shift away from collective defence towards cooperative and collective security. As NATO returned to its collective defence role after 2014, Finland and Sweden intensified their cooperation with NATO, culminating in accession to the Alliance in 2023 and 2024 respectively. With NATO reducing its role in peacekeeping, the cooperation of the remaining neutrals—Austria, Ireland, and Switzerland—with the Alliance is likely to become more limited.
The Istanbul Cooperation Initiative
Authors: Ardemagni Eleonora
Published: February 2025

NATO and a number of Gulf states have pursued security cooperation through the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI) launched in 2004. This chapter considers the achievements, the weak points, and the evolution of that partnership. The ICI is much less developed than comparable NATO initiatives in Europe such as Partnership for Peace. This is not unexpected. The states included in the ICI have no NATO membership trajectory. And the ICI is not a substitute for already well-developed bilateral security relations with NATO allies such as the United States and the United Kingdom. Further, they are not a cohesive group where common interests might converge in multilateral arrangements. Cooperation through the ICI is thus selective and narrowly defined, focusing most substantively on security sector reform.
China
Authors: Cottey Andrew , Webber Mark
Published: February 2025

This chapter considers China’s rise and its importance for the Alliance. By almost every ‘pivot to Asia’ metric that matters, China has become a global power. China has become a (if not the) determining factor in the foreign and security policies of the United States. It has also loomed ever larger in the policy calculations of the European allies and Canada. China has become an inescapable reality for all the allies, but this does not render NATO a necessary instrument of response. A number of policy options for how NATO might approach China are explored. Ultimately, NATO remains a Euro–Atlantic body with limited scope to act in the Asia–Pacific. NATO’s more important focus is likely to be in dealing with China’s encroachments in and around Europe.
Animal Domestication in the Mesolithic
Authors: Gron Kurt J.
Published: February 2025

The presence of managed, tame, or domestic animals in European Mesolithic contexts is contentious. This contribution reviews why this is the case, and presents a framework for evaluating claims for locally developed evolving mutualism in the Mesolithic record in Europe. Potentially managed species are discussed, including some unexpected taxa, and some of the requisite questions for identifying management are presented. The purpose of doing so is to increase the burden of proof required for identification of animal management in Mesolithic Europe. I conclude that more caution is needed when encountering potentially managed animals from a Mesolithic context, but that we should except more developed relationships with animals in delayed-return societies.
Orwell and William Shakespeare
Authors: Brennan Michael G.
Published: February 2025

This chapter examines the lifelong influence of Shakespeare on Orwell’s writings from the 1930s to Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which Shakespeare’s plays have become forbidden texts and Winston Smith wakes from a dream of a lost pastoral world with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips. Orwell remarked in 1944 that ‘Shakespeare has made life more worth living for ten generations of Englishmen’. He was a frequent reviewer of Shakespearean performances, included consideration of Shakespeare in his BBC talks, and as the 1940s progressed, his responses to Shakespeare became steadily darker and more politicized. The diversity and richness of his quotations and echoes from Antony and Cleopatra, I Henry IV, As You Like It, King Lear, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and his favourite play Macbeth illustrate how Shakespeare’s language became one of the most potent literary influences in the richness of Orwell’s own vocabulary and imagery.
Orwell and Jonathan Swift
Authors: Rounce Adam
Published: February 2025

This chapter looks at the influence upon Orwell of Jonathan Swift, especially his most famous work, Gulliver’s Travels, which Orwell read repeatedly and described as one of the most important of all works of literature. Orwell’s admiration for Swift, in spite of the latter’s misanthropy and apparent rejections of potential human happiness or amelioration, shows the importance for Orwell of engagement with texts with which you fundamentally disagree. Moreover, Orwell potentially simplifies Swift’s satire in order to accommodate a writer whom he finds in important ways rebarbative, in a manner akin to other difficult figures (such as Tolstoy). Some concluding reflections consider the reasons for Orwell’s fascination with Swiftian satire, for all its being apparently inimical to his own ideals and values.
Orwell, Anarchism, and Revolution
Authors: Gifford James
Published: February 2025

Ideas of anarchism and revolution occupied Orwell throughout his life, and he pursued close friendships with anarchists and publication in anarchist venues. This chapter understands Orwell’s works by employing an anarchist perspective and emphasizing studies of his works by anarchists. Despite Orwell’s repudiation of anarchist pacifism during the Second World War, anarchist concepts inform his writing and play a larger role than is typically recognized in the scholarly discourse. Recognizing anarchism implies an overhaul of how we read Orwell, including the critiques of America and Britain in Nineteen Eighty-Four that reflect anarchist activities and attitudes toward power. It also means exercising an anti-authoritarian reading practice when approaching Orwell and especially when reading critical and popular uses of him.
Orwell and Henry Miller
Authors: Cowe Jennifer
Published: February 2025

This chapter explores the conflicted relationship in print between Orwell and Henry Miller. It starts by examining the ways in which Miller is mostly remembered today, through Orwell’s reviews of his work and by his inclusion in Inside the Whale (1940). Orwell’s apparent support for Miller’s writing, especially Tropic of Cancer (1934), is contrasted with his overtly negative response to Miller’s later work and his personal attacks upon Miller’s apolitical stance during the Second World War. This chapter argues that Orwell’s reaction to Miller is more often a process through which he probes the limits of his own writing and politics rather than a meaningful engagement with Miller.
Mitochondrial DNA and the largest nuclear-mitochondrial DNA in Arabidopsis can be separated by their methylation levels
Authors: Zhong Yuyang , Okuno Miki , Tsutsumi Nobuhiro , Arimura Shin-ichi
Published: February 2025

Methylation of cytosines in plant mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has been a controversial issue. Results supporting mtDNA methylation may have been subject to contamination due to the presence of nuclear sequences originating from the mitochondrial genome called nuclear mitochondrial DNA insertions (NUMT). In Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) Columbia 0 (Col-0), the largest NUMT, located on chromosome 2, is nearly twice the size of the entire mitochondrial genome and exhibits a sequence almost identical to the mitochondrial genome, albeit with shuffling and repeats. In the presence of such high similarity, it is challenging to eliminate interference when determining mtDNA methylation levels. Here, we applied a methyl-CpG binding domain (MBD) protein-based affinity assay to separate total DNA, applied next-generation sequencing to the pre- and post-separation DNA samples, and examined the SNP sites between NUMT and mtDNA. The results revealed successful separation of methylated and non-methylated DNA within the total DNA, with simultaneous separation achieved between NUMT DNA and mtDNA. These results suggest that our method can achieve separation based on the differential methylation levels of the whole lengths of NUMT and mitochondrial DNAs. The bisulfite sequencing results for the post-separation DNA samples suggest that mtDNA exhibits not only a lack of CpG methylation but also an absence of CHH and CHG methylation. In contrast, the NUMT shows high levels of methylation across all three contexts, at least in the Columbia 0 accession.
CYTOKININ DEHYDROGENASE suppression increases intrinsic water use efficiency and photosynthesis in cotton under drought
Authors: Hu Wei , Loka Dimitra A , Luo Yuanyu , Yu Huilian , Wang Shanshan , Zhou Zhiguo
Published: February 2025

Drought reduces endogenous cytokinin (CK) content and disturbs plant water balance and photosynthesis. However, the effect of higher endogenous CK levels (achieved by suppressing cytokinin dehydrogenase (CKX) genes) on plant water status and photosynthesis under drought stress is unknown. Here, pot experiments were conducted with wild-type (WT) cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) and two GhCKX suppression lines (CR-3 and CR-13) to explore the effect of higher endogenous CK levels on leaf water utilization and photosynthesis under drought stress. The GhCKX suppression lines had higher leaf net photosynthetic rate (AN) and intrinsic water use efficiency (iWUE) than WT under drought. This increase was attributed to the decoupling of stomatal conductance (gs) and mesophyll conductance (gm) in the suppression lines in response to drought. GhCKX suppression increased gm but maintained gs relative to WT under drought, and the increased gm was associated with altered anatomical traits, including decreased cell wall thickness (Tcw) and increased surface area of chloroplast-facing intercellular airspaces per unit leaf area (Sc/S), as well as altered cell wall composition, especially decreased cellulose levels. This study provides evidence that increased endogenous CK levels can simultaneously enhance AN and iWUE in cotton under drought conditions and establishes a potential mechanism for this effect. These findings provide a potential strategy for breeding drought-tolerant crops or exploring alternative methods to promote crop drought tolerance.
The wheat stripe rust effector PstEXLX1 inhibits formate dehydrogenase activity to suppress immunity in wheat
Authors: Lu Jingwei , Sun Kexin , Yang Wenxin , Mou Ying , Zhang Ruijie , Voegele Ralf T , Kang Zhensheng , Guo Jia , Guo Jun
Published: February 2025

Effectors are the most critical weapons that Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici (Pst) employs to engage with wheat (Triticum aestivum L.). Discovering important effectors is essential for deciphering the pathogenic mechanisms of Pst. In this study, we identified the expansin-like protein 1from Pst (PstEXLX1), which suppresses cell death in Nicotiana benthamiana. In wheat, knockdown of PstEXLX1 diminished Pst development, whereas PstEXLX1 overexpression enhanced Pst virulence by inhibiting PAMP-triggered immunity (PTI), indicating its importance in pathogenesis. Further investigation revealed that PstEXLX1 stabilizes itself through self-association mediated by its expansin-like domain, which also determines its association with the wheat formate dehydrogenase TaFDH1. Wheat lines overexpressing TaFDH1 exhibited increased resistance to Pst, which was associated with elevated TaFDH1 catalytic activity and induced defense responses. In addition, TaFDH1 activity was strongly inhibited in the presence of PstEXLX1 but became more robust in PstEXLX1-silenced plants, suggesting that PstEXLX1 suppresses TaFDH1 activity. Collectively, our results uncover a strategy employed by Pst to facilitate infection, wherein PstEXLX1 suppresses TaFDH1 activity to repress host immune responses.