bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
How to Do Things with Gendered Words
Authors: Hernandez E. M. , Crowley Archie
Published: May 2024

With increased visibility of trans people comes increased philosophical interest in gendered language. This chapter aims to look at the research on gendered language in analytic philosophy of language so far, which has focused on two concerns: (1) determining how to define gender terms like ‘man’ and ‘woman’ such that they are trans inclusive, and (2) if, or to what extent, we should use gendered language at all. We argue that the literature has focused too heavily on how gendered language can harm trans people and has not considered how trans people use gendered language to create meaning and joy for ourselves. Pulling from the literature in sociolinguistics, we look at examples of how trans people use language to make their lives better by gaining recognition, playing with gendered language, finding joy in gendered language, and taking control of definitional power, concluding that debates about gendered language need to consider not only how such language harms trans people but also how trans people use it for our own liberation.
Privacy, Critical Definition, and Racial Justice
Authors: Allen Anita L.
Published: May 2024

This chapter points the way to a philosophical approach to conveying the meaning of privacy called critical definitional facilitation. This approach contrasts to another “analytic definitional prescription,” which has been commonplace in the field of philosophy for decades and which critical definitional facilitation ought to supplement or supplant. The motivation for shifting emphasis from prescriptive analysis to critical facilitation—a shift from an emphasis on definitional meaning to definitional significance is the political and urgent nature of privacy discourse in contemporary life. Privacy discourse is a way of thinking, speaking, and acting with serious implications for moral, human, civil, and legal rights. This chapter addresses the relationship between definitional facilitation, politics and justice for African Americans.
Visual and Linguistic Dogwhistles
Authors: Drainville Ray , Saul Jennifer
Published: May 2024

The focus of the fast-growing philosophical literature on dogwhistles has been on linguistic dogwhistles. But there is a very important lacuna: the role of visual materials in dogwhistles, which is only glancingly touched on in the burgeoning dogwhistles literature. This chapter begins to rectify this oversight, with a detailed examination and taxonomy of the workings of visual dogwhistles, both on their own and as they interact with linguistic utterances. It shows that, like linguistic dogwhistles, visual dogwhistles may be categorized as Overt Code or Covert Effect and as intentional or unintentional. The discussion ranges from the history of art to modern political imagery and internet culture.
Semantic Change in the Language of Technology
Authors: Flórez Daian
Published: May 2024

problem of semantic change in science has been widely examined at the intersection between philosophy of language and philosophy of science. Philosophers have been concerned with the change of meaning of theoretical terms in scientific theories, but the interesting question is whether we can identify a similar phenomenon in technological knowledge, since admitting that there are semantic changes in technology might violate the common sense intuition that technology is the totality of artifacts and as such, lacks semantic properties. However, if technology is as complex a phenomenon as science and there are also technological theories, it becomes reasonable to expect semantic changes in its domain. This view can be supported by the thesis of the incommensurability of theories Kuhn used to argue that there is no common language to enable the translation of terms ordinarily used in scientific theories. Kuhn did not extend the scope of the incommensurability relation to the domain of technology, though he analyzed some technological cases to illustrate the nature of this semantic phenomenon. Controversial as it might look, this chapter shall show that the history of technology provides enough evidence for the thesis that there are profound semantic changes in technology or, in other words, that there is technological incommensurability. The chapter explains how this thesis works in technology domain by means of two historical cases: the substitution of the contact theory of the voltaic battery by the so-called chemical theory and the transit of the material theory of heat to thermodynamics.
Speech-Act Theory in Feminist Thought
Authors: Antony Louise
Published: May 2024

In this chapter, I criticize attempts by Rae Langton, Jennifer Hornsby, and others to apply J. L. Austin’s theory of speech acts to accounts of the wrongs of pornography and rape. There are two main ideas: (a) that pornography is a verdictive or exercitive illocutionary act, and (b) that an assailant can “silence” a victim in their attempt to refuse sex by not providing “uptake.” The chapter argues that the first idea is inconsistent with Austin’s theory of illocutionary acts. The second idea requires a reading of Austin that commits him to a host of counterintuitive consequences. The chapter concludes by pointing out that the normative claims these authors want to make about the wrongs of pornography and rape can be developed and defended without any appeal to Austin.
Shakespeare’s Proper Names
Authors: Chanter Tina , Cutrofello Andrew
Published: May 2024

The article reflects on the contingency of proper names, and their fraught character in a range of Shakespeare’s plays. Differentiating between Shakespeare the “man” and Shakespeare the “author,” the article asks what it means to be the bearer of a proper name, and analyses how names function as part of one’s social anatomy. It discusses Juliet’s efforts to disentangle Romeo from his name, and the difficulty of undoing names, except in privileged, prescribed performances such as marriage ceremonies. Certain names, however, can and do migrate from one person to another, as when Richard can no longer name himself “King” in a play in which the accusation of traitor functions by way of unnaming. Confusion ensues when the name Dromio is shared by identical twins. Female characters often adopt other names, while disguising themselves in male clothing, as does Imogen in Cymbeline, a play which complicates the referentiality of the title king. Like many of Shakespeare’s plays, the drama has historical roots, so that names cut across the fiction–nonfiction divide. Caliban’s name is an approximate anagram of cannibal, thus serving to mark Caliban as a native of the new world. The racially fraught attribution—or lack thereof—of names and titles is evidenced when Iago prefers to refer to Othello not as “General,” but as “the Moor.” The contentious and fractious manner is which names can function in ways that honor and dishonor those named or not named is at the heart of Shakespeare’s language.
Bodily Aesthetics
Authors: Lennon Kathleen
Published: May 2024

Most women and an increasing number of men, people of all cultures, many people with disabilities, and many old people, dislike aspects of their bodies and are damaged by dominant aesthetic bodily norms from which they are excluded. This fuels demands for cosmetic surgery and other body modifications. It is often the spark for eating disorders but is also a component of many other mental health issues. Most of us at some time in our lives, and many of us for all of our lives, feel bad about our bodies. This chapter unpacks the role of damaging bodily imaginaries in generating this dislike and explores the role which artistic re-imaginings can play in countering such damage.
Sin, Justification, and Sanctification
Authors: Brunt John
Published: May 2024

Seventh-day Adventists believe that sin is a destructive power that enslaves human beings and separates them from God and from the quality of life God intended them to enjoy. In Jesus Christ, God has taken the initiative to offer salvation from sin as a free gift to all people. This salvation is based on God’s grace and not on human effort. It is received through faith, a commitment to place one’s trust in the work of Jesus Christ. Both justification, the sinner’s initial acceptance and welcome into God’s family, and sanctification, continued fellowship and growth within God’s family, are totally of faith. This fellowship produces growth toward unselfish love, a desire to bring peace and justice to this present world, and the promise of eternal life.
Epilogue
Authors: Ryrie Alec
Published: May 2024

This epilogue examines three key themes of wider Protestant history that illuminate and are illuminated by the Seventh-day Adventist experience. Adventist apocalypticism not only provides a telling example of how the apparent failure of apocalyptic expectations can be absorbed, but also reveals wider Protestant difficulties regarding imagined futures. Adventist anticlericalism picks up on deeper Protestant resistance to hierarchy and exemplifies a persistent egalitarian, republican, and autodidactic suspicion about priesthoods of learning. Finally, the Adventist tradition of apoliticism, and especially the two different expressions of it in the face of German Nazism, represents one strand of a wider Protestant apolitical tendency, a tendency that can at times be merely a form of submission but can in different circumstances have a distinctive theological and ethical integrity.
Buddhist Monasticism in North America
Authors: Clossey Luke , Ferguson Karen
Published: May 2024

Immigration reforms in the 1960s spurred Asian migration to North America, and the establishment of Buddhist institutions across the continent, serving mostly Buddhist migrants, but also a minority of converts. Laypeople meeting in private homes raised funds and invited monastics to found temples and monasteries so that they could serve as opportunities for lay generosity, perform religious functions, and meet migrants communities’ cultural and social needs. Given this focus on serving laypeople, only a small number of monastic institutions specialize in the training of monastics. The new geographical and cultural context has prompted some monastic traditions to adapt the strict rules that traditionally govern monks’ and nuns’ lives. Exceptionally, monasteries in the Chinese “humanistic” Buddhism tradition orient themselves more toward global networks than to American society. Missionary monks negotiated an alien cultural landscape to offer not only meditation lessons for well-being, but also a structured tradition for ultimate liberation.
American Buddhism and Psychotherapy
Authors: Helderman Ira
Published: May 2024

For over two centuries, so-called convert US Buddhist communities have taken a keen interest in the disciplines of psychology and psychotherapy. This chapter surveys the history of how these highly specific communities and their scholarly observers have explained their approaches to psychology. Buddhism has been described as having a “dialogue” with psychology or a “relationship” with psychotherapy that others believe is “developing” or even “maturing.” Ultimately, the way that Buddhist communities talk about their approaches to the psychological, and in particular the metaphors they use, often conveys differing opinions on whether it is positive or negative to mix the Buddhist with the psychotherapeutic, and how diligently boundary lines between the Buddhist and the psychological should be maintained in defining what it means to be Buddhist.
Identities I
Authors: Gleig Ann
Published: May 2024

Racism and whiteness have played a fundamental role in both the construction of the category of “American Buddhism” and the experiences of multiple North American Buddhist communities. Taking both a historical and ethnographic thick descriptive approach, this chapter demonstrates how racism and whiteness have functioned and been resisted within and across American Buddhist communities. Beginning with the experiences of Asian American heritage Buddhists before moving to Buddhists of Color in convert lineages, it identifies the themes of community, engaged Buddhist hermeneutics, intersectionality, and solidarity across marginalized Buddhists as core components of this resistance. Finally, it will reflect on emerging directions in Buddhist racial justice work across practice and academic communities and the role and responsibilities of scholars of Buddhism.
Identities II
Authors: Langenberg Amy Paris
Published: May 2024

This overview of gender and sexuality in contemporary American Buddhism starts from the premise that gender identities and sexual subjectivities are inextricable from other strong vectors of identity, especially race and ethnicity, but also ordained celibacy and survivorhood. Stepping around the narrative that white converts and their liberal feminisms have created a gender egalitarian Buddhism in America, it offers a different story by exploring the Buddhisms of Asian American and Asian immigrant lay women, Asian American ordained women, celibate women, Black women, trans and queer Buddhists, and sexual abuse survivors—often overlapping categories—at the seams of sex and gender. It argues that their innovative interpretations of Buddhist teachings and lifeways are shaped by their complex identities and experiences of violence and disruption. It concludes that the Buddhism of the multiply sexed and gendered individuals and communities profiled cannot be said to exist at the margins; rather, the rich multidimensionality of contemporary American Buddhism is now in large part their creation.
Social Rights and Social Relations
Authors: Brownlee Kimberley
Published: May 2024

Human rights identify a baseline of what we owe to each other as human beings and, in guaranteeing that baseline, human rights can both protect our agency and guard against oppression. The nature and significance of our social-connection rights, grounded in our needs for adequate social inclusion, have been largely sidelined in human rights debates, but they are in fact foundational to the human rights framework: they not only constitute essential priorities, but underpin almost all other rights. The defense of social rights thus understood rests on two grounds: (1) the growing body of evidence from social neuroscience and psychology showing that we are deeply social creatures whose agency, well-being, and survival depend on adequate protection of our sociality; and (2) a proper appreciation of the mechanisms of oppression, which are most effective when they use our social needs against us.
Ancient Andean Tattooing
Authors: Deter-Wolf Aaron , Auten Madison , Robitaille Benoît , Riday Daniel
Published: May 2024

Since the late nineteenth century, numerous tattoos have been identified on mummified human remains from archaeological sites in the coastal deserts of Peru and Chile. This chapter examines ancient Andean tattooing practices via an analysis of mummified human remains that are housed in the collections of four museums in the United States: the Arizona State Museum, the Field Museum of Natural History, the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the Milwaukee Public Museum. Through documentation of those examples, comparison with published studies, and a reassessment of ethnographic, historical, and archaeological data, it addresses the evidence for techniques, pigments, and shared iconographic themes from pre-Columbian tattooing traditions of the region. In addition to sharing previously unpublished examples of tattooed Andean mummies, this effort provides a foundation for future scholarly documentation and study of ancient tattooing practices in western South America.
The Global African Novel
Authors: Hallemeier Katherine
Published: May 2024

The global African novel, as a genre, describes realist fictions that map contemporary migrations of the African diaspora in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It has been understood as uniquely attuned to localized effects and regional experiences of global migration, particularly across the Black Atlantic. Focusing on the novelistic pairing of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, this chapter investigates how the global African novel participates not only in structural critique but also in the theorization of realism as a genre. Both Dangarembga’s and Bulawayo’s fictions, narrated from the perspective of the dispossessed, Black, maddened, “nervous” child, exemplify how African realism is constitutively critical of (neo)colonial modes of representation, including those realist modes that privilege the implicitly objective critique of global systems. Literary predecessors are invoked to clarify how the global African novel offers a disorienting account of the violence of the contemporary global capitalist system.
Indigi-realism and “Aye!”sthetics
Authors: Watchman Renae
Published: May 2024

In this chapter, the author turns to Diné concepts and overall Indigenous community features (language, accessories, and epistemologies) to demonstrate that Indigenous televisual stories are restorative and evocative of Indigi-realism through Indigenous “‘Aye!’sthetics” as storytelling autonomy. “Aye!”sthetics fuses the Turtle Island Indigenous utterance “Aye!” that expresses joking and joy with the beauty and autonomy of on-screen presence and Indigenous existence. Two Indigenous-centered television shows, Reservation Dogs and Rutherford Falls, showcase Indigenous aesthetics, or what I explore as “Aye!”sthetics that offer a glimpse of Indigi-realism in visual storytelling. The author introduces Diné (Navajo) epistemologies as a framework to interrogate Indigenous realities on screen. By focusing on select scenes from the combined thirty-six episodes of each series, the author highlights the beauty, laughter, and resilience of Indigenous peoples, eclipsing heartbreak and adversity.
Journalism and Realist Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France
Authors: Birch Edmund
Published: May 2024

Are certain texts held to be realist simply because they adopt the patterns and structures typically associated with the account of everyday life offered in the pages of newspapers? Or, conversely, did newspapers themselves appropriate the familiar moves and motifs of realist fiction? This chapter will explore the relationship between realist fiction and the press in the context of nineteenth-century France. This was an era of radical growth for the newspaper industry, and many of the novelists we have come to know as realists published widely in newspapers and periodicals. With reference to some of the ways in which the idea of realism has occupied major critics writing on nineteenth-century culture, the chapter evokes a set of beginnings, contrasting introductory or prefatory texts by Balzac and Maupassant with the kinds of “prefaces” frequently published as part of the very first edition of nineteenth-century newspapers.
Computational Realism in the Digital Humanities
Authors: Mauro Aaron
Published: May 2024

Digital humanities (DH) is an interdisciplinary field of study that often blends data collection, processing, and analysis with cultural criticism to augment empirical studies in history, literature, and philosophy with computation. A realist approach to DH must be ready to describe the sociocultural consequences of computation by avoiding the layers of abstraction often used to describe technical processes like large language models and other nonhuman agents. DH researchers often occupy an important role as both users and developers of software. They must be ready to validate and even reverse-engineer technical systems to verify the results and impact of research methods and output data. This chapter suggests that the critical intuition of humanists must guide a practical and desirable intervention in particularly salient and culturally relevant layers of the ever-evolving technology stack.
Blend and Balance in Trans* Choral Musicking
Authors: Patch Holly
Published: May 2024

This chapter investigates what it means to blend in a trans* chorus. In a first step, the chapter deconstructs “blend” as the hegemonic choral sound quality, illustrating the social gendering enforced in choral singing at large. Utilizing ethnographic data, including in-depth interviews with members of the Trans Chorus of Los Angeles and participant observations of the chorus, the chapter analyzes what happens to the gendering of blend and balance when trans* singers fill the choral form. The chapter neither seeks to evaluate the chorus’s tone quality nor tries to quantify or qualify what achieves a blended sound. Instead, it aims to understand the sound of the chorus with respect to gender and analyzes the practice and discourse of “blend” to do so. Furthermore, the chapter exposes other kinds of contingency in blend and its meaning for singers’ (gendered) experience.
Sacred Sounds and Social Justice
Authors: Whitmore Aleysia K. , Scott Marquisha L.
Published: May 2024

The Spirituals Project (TSP) is a multicultural and multigenerational community choir centered on the spirituals and based in Denver, Colorado (USA). Originally created by enslaved Africans in the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries, spirituals responded to pain, violence, and injustice while advocating for justice and fostering hope. TSP seeks to preserve spirituals, educate the community about these songs, and continue their social justice work—both within and outside of the organization. Members examine how the spirituals speak to contemporary inequities as well as their own life experiences and place in TSP. They ask, “how can we understand each other’s often painful experiences? Can we heal from this violence?” Conversations strengthen relationships and lay bare the false façade of harmony that singing together often projects. “We are farther apart than we realized,” one member noted after a community conversation. Illuminated by formal and informal interviews, this chapter shows how TSP members negotiate race, social justice, and personal histories as they seek to create humanizing and healing community musical experiences. TSP provides a unique model for how community music organizations might foster productive engagement with social justice work while embracing participants who have vastly different understandings of what work is needed and what that work entails.
A “Badge of Americanism”
Authors: Lohman Laura
Published: May 2024

National identity is frequently asserted through the collective singing of meaningful songs. While national anthems are the most prominent, many other types of repertoire—folk songs, “fakesongs” (imitation folks songs), popular songs, patriotic songs, and choral compositions—can also serve to construct and broadcast national identity. The act of collective singing impacts both the participant and the observer. The participant embodies text and sound that signify national identity, although they might do so either willingly or under coercion. The observer perceives a unified expression of national identity, voiced by a collective, that might inspire reactions ranging from pride to terror. As chapters in this section demonstrate, collective singing is employed to assert national identity in a wide variety of formal and informal settings.
By the Rivers of Babylon
Authors: Khalil Alexander K.
Published: May 2024

In Psalm 136, a people in diaspora asks, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” This question has resonated with many American communities throughout the nation’s history. For more than a century, Greek Orthodox parishes across the United States would appear to have been unable to answer this question, many of them featuring both traditional cantors and SATB choirs without integrating the two into a cohesive liturgical idiom. This long-standing discord, which comprises an effective acculturation strategy that incorporates forces of both assimilation and segregation, has not only muted congregational song but contributed to a sense of division within congregations. Over the past three decades, as community demographics shifted, new cataclysms unfolded, and new diasporas ensued, a new generation of church musicians is transforming the liturgical life of the parishes they serve in many parts of the country. In this chapter, which investigates the lives and work of these musicians, the author argues that this ongoing transformation, involving both a revival of the received tradition of Byzantine chant and the development of an English-based branch of this tradition, is enacted by affordances of and within congregational singing. These affordances, manifest in many ways, from ornamentation to repertoire choice are central to the process through which a community redraws affiliations, boundaries, and, ultimately, identity. Through the affordance of congregational singing, realized in a variety of ways, a community does not remember but re-members itself.
Coding and Expertise
Authors: Preda Alex
Published: May 2024

This chapter distinguishes two views on expertise: realist and relativist. It argues that coding expertise should be understood through a realist lens and from a relational perspective, defining it as bundles of operations anchored in group-supported discursive and nondiscursive skills. The chapter examines the relationship between coding and varied domains of social and natural science expertise, such as economics, financial economics, and biology, both from the viewpoint of ethnographic investigations on the ground and from that of historical, discursive rationalizations of coding expertise. The chapter argues that neither coding expertise nor the domains of scientific expertise should be treated monolithically, but rather as bundles of expert operations. Coding expertise entails rule-based systems of communication among human actors and machines. Additionally, the chapter makes the case that the expansion of machine-learning-based infrastructures raises conceptual challenges with regard to interaction as a key sociological notion. The chapter suggests the notion of interactions with incomplete intersubjectivity as a starting point for analyzing communication across machines and human actors.
Theoretical Challenges of Human-Machine Interaction
Authors: Lipp Benjamin , Mayer Henning
Published: May 2024

Machine learning systems and their interactions with humans challenge core assumptions of social theory. They are not completely defined by designers’ or users’ scripts. They hold an element of surprise and unpredictability. As a result, machines, similarly to humans, are increasingly able to produce contingency in their behavior. However, they achieve this through advanced techniques of information processing and pattern recognition, which are different from how humans relate to the world. Most notably, machines lack hermeneutic understanding. Despite this difference, they are becoming intelligible to humans as participants in communication—and vice versa. Sociology thus has to account for how humans and machines are able to interact with one another and recognize each other as intelligible agents despite operating in radically different ways. In practice, this is possible because of a specific kind of relation: the interface, which interconnects human and machine by keeping them apart. This chapter argues that a sociology of human-machine interaction requires a theory of interfaces. In response to these challenges and by drawing on an emerging interdisciplinary body of literature on interfaces, the chapter concludes by outlining three directions in which to study human-machine interaction at, through, and across the interface.
Prayers for Academic Success in South Korea
Authors: Galmiche Florence
Published: May 2024

Prayers for practical benefits—academic success, health, prosperity—are a major part of Buddhism as it is lived in Asia, but their status is controversial, both locally and academically. Widely practiced, they are also generally criticized in Buddhist intellectual circles. Moreover, the people who practice them—mostly women—also refuse to “pray like their grandmothers” and express the will to practice an enlightened Buddhism. Based on the case of prayers for academic success in South Korea, this chapter presents how the so-called prayers for good fortune (kibok 祈福) are framed within contemporary Buddhism. It also describes how clerics and laypeople share the concern to develop an “educated Buddhism” where it is possible to pray for this-worldly happiness in a “correct”—here “properly Buddhist”—way. Through the description of a case study, this chapter provides a reflection on the notion of popular religion in the context of contemporary Buddhism.
The International Legal Profession in the Americas
Authors: Soares Pereira Luíza Leão , Pereira Santos Pedro Henrique
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines the historical development of the Latin American international legal profession from 1890 to 2000 across three generations of professionals. The Generation of Statesmen (1890–1920) saw international law used as a tool for connecting with the international community and advancing Latin American nation-building efforts. These professionals were deeply involved in domestic politics, propelling them onto the global stage. The Generation of Bureaucrats (1930–50) concentrated on strengthening their national and international institutional frameworks while specializing in international law techniques. Lastly, the Generation of Democratic Transition (1960–2000) faced disruptions due to military dictatorships in the Southern Cone during the Cold War. These regimes limited academic freedom, influenced engagement with national foreign affairs institutions, and limited opportunities within NGOs and the private market. The end of these dictatorships, however, opened up career prospects in human rights and international arbitration for international lawyers.
Public Opinion and Geoeconomics
Authors: Chubb Andrew
Published: May 2024

The multifaceted relationships between domestic public opinion and geoeconomics are an increasingly salient feature of world politics. This chapter first details four common roles of public opinion in geoeconomics: (1) supporting and incentivizing economic statecraft; (2) implementing economic statecraft; (3) initiating economic punishments against foreign targets; and (4) responding to foreign economic statecraft. The second section provides an overview of recent research on public attitudes toward economic statecraft in both sending states (seeking to utilize economic statecraft) and receiving countries (targeted by such measures). The third section explores the further research needed to understand the role of public in geoeconomic competition in an era of unprecedented cross-border interaction.
Republicanism and Social Prejudice
Authors: Coffee Alan M. S. J.
Published: May 2024

Republicans are, in principle, committed to securing freedom from domination for all members of the political community. Traditionally, this has been done through a set of institutional mechanisms and a culture of public deliberation that holds the government to account. The members of historically marginalized social groups, however, have long argued that institutions and dialogue are insufficient to guarantee freedom, and that there is a third core element represented by the background culture shared by the republic’s population. Women, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, showed that centuries of patriarchal society had evolved to support a culture in which women were systematically dominated by men as much through norms and values as by legal exclusion. African Americans, such as Frederick Douglass, showed how the internalized racist myths used to maintain slave society persisted long after formal abolition. One of Wollstonecraft’s key arguments was that social prejudices ‘cloud’ people’s ability to reason impartially and so undercut the operation of public reason through which republican institutions must operate. Douglass shows how large-scale, persistent social inequality leads to ideological struggles that polarize society, fatally diminishing the quality of public deliberation and civil society. Free, republican society is only possible, both Wollstonecraft and Douglass argue, where republican institutions operate within a background culture that is the representative outcome of the input of citizens from all constitutive social groups.
Republicanism, the Environment, and Future Generations
Authors: Pinto Jorge
Published: May 2024

The links between republicanism and what can be called broadly the ‘environment’ are substantial. This chapter looks into the commonalities of republican and green politics, such as freedom, the recognition of the existing interdependencies (both social and nature-oriented), and the vulnerability (of individuals in a community and of the ecosphere), briefly sketching what a green republicanism could look like. Furthermore, it looks at length to how republican conception of freedom as non-domination answers the need for limits, which greens claim are essential to bring the planet to a situation of ecological sustainability. The chapter also looks to the relation between green republicanism and the economy, focusing particularly on the need for an economic floor and an economic ceiling. Finally, the chapter ends with a discussion about the freedom of the futures and how green republicanism can answer the social and ecological challenges of the present. Examples include what can be considered as green republican political innovations such as citizens’ assemblies.
History
Authors: Simmons Clare A.
Published: May 2024

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, new interest in national heritage and Indigenous tradition that also influenced ballad-collecting and the emergence of Gothic and historical novels broadened the scope of British history. Historiography is distinct from much Romantic-era writing in drawing its sources not from the imagination or from the natural world but from material human productions such as documents and artefacts. This chapter focuses on emerging ideas about history, both practical and philosophical, prompted by the French Revolution’s challenge to tradition; the more sympathetic view of the Middle Ages; and history’s relationship with imperial expansion. It also considers the transmission of history through education and through periodical writing.
Newspapers
Authors: Latané David
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores the transformation of the eighteenth-century newspaper into a more professional, profitable, and influential medium by the time of the Reform Bill of 1832. The uncertainties of news reporting are illustrated by comparing accounts of the fall of the Bastille with the Battle of Waterloo. The enhanced status of the press is reflected through a focus on the daily Times, Morning Chronicle, and Morning Post, which featured essays by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt, and the ‘leaders’ of Thomas Barnes. New genres of Sunday papers arose, broadening the audience. The Romantic era was also a time in which government fears of an uncensored press meant that a variety of strategies were deployed to lessen the risk—primarily taxes to make news expensive, and secret subventions to support the government’s line. Resourceful writers such as William Cobbett circumvented the restrictions, and the agitation that pushed through the Reform Bill owed much to the untaxed penny papers.
Romantic Cruxes Reimagined
Authors: Morrison Robert
Published: May 2024

Our understanding of British Romanticism has long been weighted heavily in favour of the many achievements of its poets. The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose vigorously contests this perception by revealing the many ways in which scholars are reassessing delineations of Romanticism in order to include and comprehensively evaluate the accomplishments of its nonfiction prose writers. The Handbook contains fifty-four chapters divided into eight sections, and reveals the immense variety and exuberance of British Romantic nonfiction prose. It brings together texts from the celebrated through the marginalized to the almost entirely forgotten. It assesses the interactions—often vexed, sometimes deeply congruent—between Romantic poetry and nonfiction prose, and between Romantic fiction and nonfiction. It reimagines comparisons, confronts paradoxes, considers historical and contemporary methodologies, and suggests future lines of inquiry. Throughout the focus is on cogent expression rather than abstruse observation, and on chapters that contain, not dutiful surveys, but engagingly evaluative assessments.
Recognition of Foreign Decisions Concerning Civil Status of LGBTI Persons and Private International Law
Authors: Montini Michel
Published: May 2024

This contribution focuses on the rights of LGBTI people and their family in relation to civil status issues and the international recognition of related changes in view of the divergences (applicable law, order public, etc.) between various legal systems. Topics covered include gender identity, marriage, civil unions, and various forms of registered partnership, as well as parent–child relationships established by law, recognition, or decision (adoption, surrogacy). The standards of various international institutions, both universal and regional (UN, Council of Europe, etc.) and specialized (International Commission on Civil Status, Hague Conference), and the case law of human rights courts (European Court of Human Rights, Inter-American Court of Human Rights) and national supreme courts are reviewed, as well as the Yogyakarta Principles.
A Legal History of SOGIESC
Authors: Ziegler Andreas R. , Bagi Raphaël
Published: May 2024

The handling of SOGIESC is increasingly being framed as a concern of how the law treats sexual minorities, including gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) people. From antiquity to modern times, this chapter considers how the issue encountered by the community was and still is addressed. Similarly, the principle of non-discrimination in this area has evolved and been consolidated in treaties ratified by many states. Violence against LGBTQ people continues to be an issue, with just a few states enacting explicit laws against so-called hate crimes. Homotransphobia is frequently at the root of so-called hate crimes, which cause intimidation and persistent dread among potential victims. Significant advances in the legal status of LGBTQ people have occurred after the Second World War, and even more recently, but they are far from universal and are frequently rescinded in many parts of the world.
Culture in Insects
Authors: Danchin Étienne , Isabel Guillaume , Nöbel Sabine
Published: May 2024

Does culture exist in insects? The answer is probably yes. No insect studies document patterns of behavioural variation among wild populations (i.e. traditions), but some lab studies offer major insight on the mechanisms that can potentially generate traditions. Hence studies on insect culture nicely complement vertebrate studies that often document persistent patterns of behavioural variation among natural populations without necessarily exploring the underlying mechanisms of social learning. This chapter reviews the evidence for insect social learning and suggests that this cognitive capacity is probably widespread in the taxon. The few convincing examples of insect culture, including the proposed case of cultural transmission of sexual preferences in the fruit fly allows testing of an integrative definition of animal culture that is applicable to any kind of animal from insects to vertebrates. The chapter concludes by briefly discussing the challenges for the future of the study of animal culture in insects and beyond.
Culture in Cetaceans
Authors: Garland Ellen C. , Rendell Luke
Published: May 2024

Our shared mammalian heritage makes cetaceans extremely important in any comparative analysis. There is a wide diversity of cetacean taxa, but, given their aquatic lifestyle, we know relatively little about most species. A handful of well-studied species provide convincing evidence that cultural transmission occurs in a number of behavioural contexts including foraging, communication, and migration. In this chapter, the authors highlight examples of social learning, cultural evolution, and the emergence of local cultures, using several case studies. These include vocal learning and multiple foraging traditions in bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops sp.), vocal clans and cultural hitchhiking in sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus), migratory culture in southern right whales (Eubalaena australis), song culture and foraging traditions in humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae), and the evolution of killer whale (Orcinus orca) ecotypes. Finally, the authors explore how some of these behaviours are linked to recent genomic findings suggesting that gene-culture coevolution is occurring in some populations, and how knowledge of cultural differences among groups and populations can inform conservation management.
Authoritarian Legacies
Authors: Loxton James
Published: May 2024

The transition to democracy rarely means a clean slate. Legacies of the old regime almost always survive. This chapter examines four common authoritarian legacies: holdover constitutions, subnational authoritarian enclaves, self-amnesties, and authoritarian successor parties. While the first three can be understood as “birth defects” resulting from authoritarian officials’ influence over the transition process, authoritarian successor parties depend on the active collaboration of voters and thus require a different explanation. The prevalence of these parties can be explained by “authoritarian inheritance”: they inherit valuable resources from the old regime, such as a party brand, territorial organization, and source of finance. This inheritance has allowed authoritarian successor parties to become prominent actors in nearly three-quarters of all new democracies since the third wave of democratization, and to be voted back into office in over one-half of third-wave democracies. The chapter concludes by outlining several potential directions for future research on authoritarian legacies.
Political Opposition in Authoritarian Institutions
Authors: Gandhi Jennifer
Published: May 2024

Given that most dictatorships allow for contested national elections and legislatures, opposition often emerges in the form of organized parties and movements challenging the regime for control of political offices, policy, and spoils. This chapter reviews the literature on opposition in authoritarian legislatures and elections. It examines the types of decisions and dilemmas facing opposition leaders and followers, including whether to participate and how to participate in legislative and electoral institutions that are designed to perpetuate incumbent rule. While our understanding of the opposition in authoritarian institutions has advanced over the last several years, there remain several areas that require further investigation.
Legitimacy and Legitimation Strategies in Authoritarian Regimes
Authors: Grauvogel Julia , von Soest Christian
Published: May 2024

All authoritarian regimes seek to substantiate their right to rule. In this chapter, we differentiate legitimation—understood as the process of claiming popular support—from legitimacy itself, which refers to the extent to which a regime is perceived as legitimate by its citizens. Given autocracies’ opaque and repressive nature, their legitimacy is notoriously difficult to measure with public opinion surveys. In response, research has focused on nondemocratic regimes’ claims to legitimacy, which have fundamental repercussions for how authoritarian leaders relate to other elite members and to society. Regimes’ characteristics render certain legitimation strategies more likely and effective. Accordingly, electoral autocracies regularly focus on procedural claims, thereby emulating democracies, while closed autocracies tend to stress their (illiberal) ideology. As legitimation is crucial for autocratic stability, regimes adjust their claims to withstand domestic and international crises, for example by shifting from performance-based to personalistic claims amid economic crisis.
Pinpointing the causal influences of stomatal anatomy and behavior on minimum, operational, and maximum leaf surface conductance
Authors: Ochoa Marissa E , Henry Christian , John Grace P , Medeiros Camila D , Pan Ruihua , Scoffoni Christine , Buckley Thomas N , Sack Lawren
Published: May 2024

Leaf surface conductance to water vapor and CO2 across the epidermis (gleaf) strongly determines the rates of gas exchange. Thus, clarifying the drivers of gleaf has important implications for resolving the mechanisms of photosynthetic productivity and leaf and plant responses and tolerance to drought. It is well recognized that gleaf is a function of the conductances of the stomata (gs) and of the epidermis + cuticle (gec). Yet, controversies have arisen around the relative roles of stomatal density (d) and size (s), fractional stomatal opening (α; aperture relative to maximum), and gec in determining gleaf. Resolving the importance of these drivers is critical across the range of leaf surface conductances, from strong stomatal closure under drought (gleaf,min), to typical opening for photosynthesis (gleaf,op), to maximum achievable opening (gleaf,max). We derived equations and analyzed a compiled database of published and measured data for approximately 200 species and genotypes. On average, within and across species, higher gleaf,min was determined 10 times more strongly by α and gec than by d and negligibly by s; higher gleaf,op was determined approximately equally by α (47%) and by stomatal anatomy (45% by d and 8% by s), and negligibly by gec; and higher gleaf,max was determined entirely by d. These findings clarify how diversity in stomatal functioning arises from multiple structural and physiological causes with importance shifting with context. The rising importance of d relative to α, from gleaf,min to gleaf,op, enables even species with low gleaf,min, which can retain leaves through drought, to possess high d and thereby achieve rapid gas exchange in periods of high water availability.
Reporting delays: A widely neglected impact factor in COVID-19 forecasts
Authors: Ma Long , Qiu Zhihao , Van Mieghem Piet , Kitsak Maksim
Published: May 2024

Epidemic forecasts are only as good as the accuracy of epidemic measurements. Is epidemic data, particularly COVID-19 epidemic data, clean, and devoid of noise? The complexity and variability inherent in data collection and reporting suggest otherwise. While we cannot evaluate the integrity of the COVID-19 epidemic data in a holistic fashion, we can assess the data for the presence of reporting delays. In our work, through the analysis of the first COVID-19 wave, we find substantial reporting delays in the published epidemic data. Motivated by the desire to enhance epidemic forecasts, we develop a statistical framework to detect, uncover, and remove reporting delays in the infectious, recovered, and deceased epidemic time series. Using our framework, we expose and analyze reporting delays in eight regions significantly affected by the first COVID-19 wave. Further, we demonstrate that removing reporting delays from epidemic data by using our statistical framework may decrease the error in epidemic forecasts. While our statistical framework can be used in combination with any epidemic forecast method that intakes infectious, recovered, and deceased data, to make a basic assessment, we employed the classical SIRD epidemic model. Our results indicate that the removal of reporting delays from the epidemic data may decrease the forecast error by up to 50%. We anticipate that our framework will be indispensable in the analysis of novel COVID-19 strains and other existing or novel infectious diseases.