bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
(Re)constructing a ‘Good’ School
Authors: Pradhan Uma
Published: February 2023

On 25 April 2015, a massive earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale hit Nepal. More than 16,000 schools, about half of the country’s total, were damaged or destroyed. Disaster of this magnitude disproportionately affected the state education system, with government schools accounted for 92 per cent of the total damage. This chapter analyses the reconstruction of government schools, after the 2015 earthquake, to understand how new school structures contribute to shape educational experiences and education governance. Drawing on the ethnographic fieldwork in a government school in Nepal, this chapter will explore how the rebuilding of the schools shapes discourses around the nature of education, especially given the prevailing narrative of failing government education system in Nepal. These shiny new ‘resort-like’ buildings play an important role in shaping the aspirations of the teachers, parents, and students; albeit in different ways. These aspirations are utilized to make a variety of changes: entrance exams for admission, selection of student, the introduction of new textbooks, the emphasis on English language, etc. Using post-crisis reconstruction as an analytical space, this chapter elaborates on how physical infrastructures can function as spaces for the governance of everyday life at school. Within this framework, infrastructure and its design reveal both visible and invisible ways in which physical objects are inextricably linked with the meanings that they bring to social lives.
Introduction
Authors: Richtarik Marilynn
Published: February 2023

The introduction opens with a brief discussion of Lucy Caldwell’s novel All the Beggars Riding, which explores metaphorically the experience of living in the aftermath of Northern Ireland’s late-twentieth-century Troubles and suggests that fiction can play an important role in truth-seeking and the cultivation of empathy. It then describes the genesis and development of Getting to Good Friday, which represents the author’s attempt to answer for herself the question of how peace was made in Northern Ireland. As a literary scholar, she conducted her investigation through texts that had long been significant to her but whose import shifted as she became more aware of the circumstances under which they had been written. The most distinctive feature of the book is the way the author employs literary analysis to illuminate historical events and processes. The introduction discusses personal connections between politicians such as John Hume and Martin McGuinness and writers whose work is discussed in the book and highlights the important role that non-literary creative writing played in the peace process. While acknowledging present-day criticisms of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, it emphasizes the Agreement’s most important accomplishment: ending thirty years of politically motivated violence in Northern Ireland. It then defines important terms used in the book (such as ‘unionist’, ‘nationalist’, ‘republican’, and ‘loyalist’) and introduces Northern Ireland’s largest political parties and their leaders during the peace process before summarizing the book’s chapters. The book itself cannot be so neatly summarized, but its form testifies to its author’s faith in narrative as a means of comprehending complexity.
Understanding
Authors: Richtarik Marilynn
Published: February 2023

Chapter Two (‘Understanding’) concerns attempts by constitutional nationalists, some republican leaders, and the British and Irish governments, from 1986 through 1994, to convince the IRA to end its military campaign. It examines key issues involved, with reference to works by Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley which approach the then contemporary politics of Northern Ireland through the classics. Heaney’s The Cure at Troy (1990), a Northern Irish vernacular version of a Sophocles play, centres on the feud between the Greek hero Philoctetes and former comrades who abandoned him on their way to the Trojan War. The chapter argues that their rapprochement can be interpreted as a metaphor for the uniting of republicans and constitutional nationalists at this time, although unionist allegorical readings are equally plausible. It also highlights the hope and anxiety that seized Northern Ireland’s people during the lead-up to the IRA’s ‘cessation of military operations’ in August 1994 through Longley’s Homeric poem ‘Ceasefire’, suggesting that the title of Longley’s poem (its only topical feature) perfectly encapsulates the uncertainty of the moment.
Repeating
Authors: Richtarik Marilynn
Published: February 2023

Chapter Four (‘Repeating’) examines Bernard MacLaverty’s novel Grace Notes (1997), about a female composer from Northern Ireland, to shed light on the political impasse over IRA decommissioning that persisted for several years after the 1994 ceasefires. The novel contains some overt political commentary—the composer, a Catholic like MacLaverty, writes music that incorporates traditional Protestant drums, thus weaving a symbol of unionist oppression of the Catholic minority into a harmonious representation of Northern Irish identity. However, most of the book seems more personal in nature, focusing on the protagonist’s difficult relationships with her mother, dead father, and the father of her child. Set at an unspecified time in the 1980s, Grace Notes refers only obliquely to the Troubles and not at all to the peace process. Nonetheless, it reflects through its form the tensions of the period in which it was written (1994–1996), with personal interactions serving as metaphors for the tense political situation and the kind of honest and respectful communication that would be required to improve it. The narrative sections of this chapter introduce another important historical figure: David Trimble, who would go on to lead the Ulster Unionist Party in the negotiations and head the first power-sharing government created by the Belfast Agreement. However, these actions could hardly have been predicted in the period covered by Chapter Four, when Trimble rose to prominence as a spokesman for hardline unionists during the contentious Drumcree standoffs of 1995 and 1996.
Placing the Frontier in British North-East India
Authors: Ray Reeju
Published: February 2023

This book is about the entanglements between colonial law and spatiality, and indigenous place-making in the frontiers in British India. The book shows that colonial law was central to the spatial transformation of the Himalayan borderland region into a frontier space. It demonstrates material conditions and discursive processes through which the frontier was produced as a particular type of political-legal space. The book will follow law’s movement—its ebb and flow—into such spaces through practices of border-making, jurisdiction, and colonial knowledge. The book unravels the mechanisms of colonial law in geographical ordering of the frontier and the concomitant identification of inhabitants as ‘tribal’. Colonial governance through law was enabled by a plural legal order of colonial regulatory formulations and local customs and customary authority. Arguing against the established notion that a legal plural order allowed autonomy and coexistence between local rulers and colonial administrators, this book shows how plurality in fact entrenched colonial power and enabled severe forms of legally sanctioned violence. The book is also concerned with changes in lived experiences of inhabitants of the frontier space. Place-making by inhabitants of the colonial frontier demonstrates the heterogeneous narratives of self, and belonging found in sites of orality, and kinship, that shape the hills in the present day.
Frontiers of Law
Authors: Ray Reeju
Published: February 2023

This chapter examines colonial encounters in the frontier hills through signing of contracts and agreements, the contingent and strategic use of British laws and regulations, and corresponding ambiguities in colonial legal policy. The use of special regulations and severe violence was justified by the categorization of the hills as exceptional legal zones and their inhabitants as hill tribals. The chapter shows categories such as ‘hill tribal’ and ‘frontier’ as concomitantly legal, spatial, and temporal. The chapter describes the entwined colonial discourses on primitive societies and frontier spaces that allowed for ambiguous legal policies and legally sanctioned violence. This chapter also discusses the production of the British geographical and cartographic knowledge. Military advances, colonial law, and cartographic surveys were overlapping and simultaneous processes in the frontier hills. Legal and geographical discourses worked hand in glove to administrate frontier spaces and expand colonial jurisdiction into non-British territories. In these ways, the chapter explores the relationship between law-making and frontier-making.
Colonial Governance and Customary Authority
Authors: Ray Reeju
Published: February 2023

By the second half of the nineteenth century, changes in imperial attitudes throughout the colony were reflected in changing policies vis-à-vis frontier hill polities. The 1858 mandate of Queen Victoria declared a new policy of non-interference in the affairs of princely states and pledged to uphold customary laws and practices. Along the frontier, the importance placed on custom and customary authority resulted in further entrenchment of colonial power in the so-called non-British territories. This chapter demonstrates colonial expansion by examining the changing form of agreements signed with local authorities or chiefs in the Khasi hills. The renewed Sanads signed between the colonial government and local chiefs allowed the former to interfere in the successions of the latter. Through an examination of succession disputes and a massive archive of petitions, reports, and correspondence, this chapter shows the different and changing meanings of custom and customary authority, and the corresponding masculinization of land and proprietary rights. Unlike in Punjab, codification of custom was not the only way patriarchal power was entrenched in negotiations between colonial administrators and local authorities.
‘Tribes of Trees’ and ‘Economical Geology’
Authors: Ray Reeju
Published: February 2023

The entanglements between conquest through law and through colonial knowledge production on the frontier are examined in this chapter. Colonial knowledge on the frontier hills represented the landscapes, plants, rocks, and people as quantifiable data. The hills provided rich ‘fields’ for scientists, botanists, geologists, anthropologists, and linguists. Scientifically mapped primitivism connected local knowledge with global circuits of knowledge, rendering space and its people as marginal and abstract. This chapter describes the links between different disciplinary studies including botany, geology, linguistics, and anthropology to show their commensurability in producing a frontier imagination. It also illustrates efforts to domesticate the frontier hills by analysing the shifting foci of imperial knowledge over the course of the nineteenth century from geography, geology, and botany in the first half of the nineteenth century to anthropology and ethnography in the second half. By centring the questions of knowledge production this chapter provides an important link between the politico-legal aspect of spatialization that forms the core of the book so far and the intricacies of place-making by inhabitants of these hills discussed in the following chapters.
Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health
Authors: Houston Lloyd (Meadhbh)
Published: February 2023

Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health explores the politicized role of sexual health as a concept, discourse, and subject of debate within Irish literary culture from 1880 to 1960. Combining perspectives from Irish Studies, Modernist Studies, and the Social History of Medicine, it traces the ways in which authors, politicians, and activists in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland harnessed debates over sexual hygiene, venereal disease, birth control, fertility, and eugenics to envisage competing models of Irish identity, culture, and political community. Analysing the work of canonical authors (Yeats, Synge, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien) and less often discussed figures (George Moore, Oliver Gogarty, Signe Toksvig, Kate O’Brien) in conversation with medical, scientific, and legal writing on sexual health, it charts how the medicalization and politicization of sex informed the emergence and development of modernism in Ireland. At the same time, by reading this literary material alongside the polemical and journalistic writing of figures such as Arthur Griffith, Maud Gonne, and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, it also reveals the ways in which key events in Irish cultural and political history—the Parnell Split, the Limerick Pogrom, the Playboy riots, the passage of the Censorship of Publications Act—were shaped by ongoing debates and dilemmas in the field of sexual health. This book will benefit students, researchers, and readers interested in the history of sex and its regulation in modern Ireland, the impact of sex and medicine on Irish political history, and the nature of modernism’s engagement with sex, health, and the body.
Disappearing and Resurfacing
Authors: Bateman Benjamin
Published: February 2023

Famous for its flamboyant portrayal of disco culture in 1970s New York City, Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance has become a fictional touchstone for prelapsarian gay life unspoiled by HIV and AIDS. This chapter turns the novel’s reputation on its head, arguing that the novel’s sexual excesses are counterbalanced by episodes of withdrawal necessitated by acute anxieties about illness and overexposure. As these anxieties build in and around the central character of Malone, the novel’s layered narrative creates varying degrees of separation between Malone and his many admirers, previewing a vision of gay community nurtured by deferral and distance. Thinking with Giorgio Agamben’s work on the imaginative possibilities of melancholia, the chapter contends that Holleran’s novel offers vital support to queer people spaced apart and dispirited by viral pandemics and epidemics.
Domestic Laws and Emergency Measures
Authors: Bennett Belinda , Freckelton Ian , Wolf Gabrielle
Published: February 2023

Chapter 5, ‘Domestic Laws and Emergency Measures’, focuses on national responses to the COVID-19 pandemic within domestic law. It reviews the measures that have been implemented domestically in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and their legal and ethical implications. The chapter begins with an analysis of emergency laws, including the relevance of international law to restrictions on rights during emergencies, and the challenges for parliaments of law-making during the pandemic. The remaining sections of the chapter analyse the various measures that have been introduced in response to the pandemic. The measures reviewed are: travel restrictions; quarantine and isolation; lockdowns and stay-at-home orders; curfews; physical distancing requirements; wearing of face masks; mandatory vaccination; and vaccination passports. The chapter finishes with a review of COVID-19 testing, contact tracing, and wastewater surveillance.
Criminal Justice Issues and the COVID-19 Pandemic
Authors: Bennett Belinda , Freckelton Ian , Wolf Gabrielle
Published: February 2023

Chapter 8, ‘Criminal Justice Issues and the COVID-19 Pandemic’, examines some important examples of significant changes in criminal justice systems that the COVID-19 pandemic and efforts to reduce its detrimental impact have prompted. It also explores their ramifications for human rights and the rule of law. The chapter reviews changes to substantive aspects of criminal justice systems during the pandemic, including criminalization of conduct that has threatened to exacerbate the health crisis, and shifts in the incidence and type of crimes committed. In addition, this chapter considers alterations to procedural aspects of criminal justice systems in response to the pandemic. In particular, it examines some disruptions to means of obtaining legal assistance, investigations of allegations of criminal offending, and hearing of criminal law matters. It discusses, too, issues of bail and sentencing relevant to COVID-19 and some changes to decision-making about incarcerating those charged with, or convicted of, criminal offending in response to the substantial risk of transmission of COVID-19 within prisons.
COVID-19 and Workplace and Occupational Health and Safety
Authors: Bennett Belinda , Freckelton Ian , Wolf Gabrielle
Published: February 2023

Chapter 10, ‘COVID-19 and Workplace and Occupational Health and Safety’, engages with issues of workplace safety, including occupational health and safety. It examines changes that have taken place during the COVID-19 pandemic to the operation of workplaces, including the adoption of working from home arrangements for many workers and hybrid arrangements for others. The chapter discusses how this experience has prompted questioning of occupational health and safety obligations for employers and employees in the context of a pandemic, as well as during the period when risks remain in spite of high levels of vaccination in some countries. This chapter reflects upon the measures that have been taken to protect particular categories of workers, including healthcare workers, but also the obligations imposed on other categories of workers who have significant contact with the public for the protection of both the public and the workers. The chapter also explores issues raised in many countries about the mandatory vaccination of workers and the extent to which employers can require such preconditions to participation in the workplace.
Prologue
Authors: Soares Claudia
Published: February 2023

Children’s care and child abuse is a topical issue following recent welfare cuts, press reports, and public inquiries about children’s homes and child abuse historically. As the number of looked after children continues to grow and the number of residential care placements declines, the prologue to this book outlines shifting ideas about children’s homes and the roles that they should perform and locates anxieties about children’s nurture in wider historical context. In charting the continuity and change in debates about children’s care, the prologue highlights the rationale for examining 1870–1920 as a key moment in the development of children’s care, when legislation gave greater powers to agencies to intervene in family life, and the quality and nature of children’s care was being debated in Parliament. The prologue also sets out the foundations for examining the key narratives of home and family in children’s institutional care as central and organizing dimensions to this book, instead of the common themes of reform, discipline, and citizenship that other studies have focused on. The perception of the need to provide a ‘home’ and ‘family’ to pauper children arose primarily from a skewed vision about the interpersonal, material, and moral conditions of working-class families: middle-class welfare and social commentators were increasingly concerned with the unhealthy and immoral ‘slum’ life of the lower classes and the absence of affection, attachment, and sentimentality, particularly towards their children.
Feeling at Home?
Authors: Soares Claudia
Published: February 2023

The publication of advice manuals on how to tastefully decorate the middle-class home in the most fashionable and meaningful ways proliferated during the second half of the nineteenth century. Shifting attitudes towards the ‘house beautiful’ and a growing aesthetic movement that valued domestic virtue gave new meaning and status to the home and influenced patterns of middle-class homemaking. The increasing affluence of the middle classes, too, meant that new pride was taken in acquiring and displaying material items that communicated and symbolized the owners’ identity, character, and status. This aesthetic movement was not exclusive to the middle-class home, however. This chapter takes forward issues raised in recent scholarship on institutional material culture, to show how ‘homely’ ideals were also translated into the children’s institution, an issue which has not yet received scholarly attention. It examines how the spatial arrangement and material culture helped to create a sense of home for institutional inhabitants and highlights the relationship between institutional authority practices in relation to home life, which is an area that has not yet been explored. This chapter therefore redresses this gap in knowledge by bringing the children’s welfare institution into new scholarship on material culture and domesticity in institutional settings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In doing so, it offers new understandings of a different strand of welfare provision for children that held particular cultural and ideological meaning, beyond aspects of institutional discipline and reform.
Friends and Mentors in The Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web, and Bambi
Authors: Guroian Vigen
Published: February 2023

This chapter looks at friendship themes in The Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web, and Bambi. It notes how friendships tend to involve virtue and moral imagination among people, especially children. The Wind in the Willows depicts friendship as a situation where no one friend is superior and each friend still benefits from everyone’s own unique gift. Charlotte’s Web features a mentoral friendship that demonstrates a fundamental inequality in friendship but still l mutual affection. Bambi covers the theme of aloneness and the relationship of pure mentorship that is able to resolve the crisis of morality and culture.
The Triumph of Beauty in “The Nightingale” and “The Ugly Duckling”
Authors: Guroian Vigen
Published: February 2023

This chapter tackles the triumph of beauty in the narratives of “The Nightingale” and “The Ugly Duckling.” While Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Nightingale” considers the themes of love, death, immortality, and beauty, “The Ugly Duckling” showcases the transformative power of a love for beauty. The Gospel resonates across “The Nightingale,” especially in terms of Jesus repeatedly admonishing recipients of his kindness for boasting about his deeds to others. On the other hand, in “The Ugly Duckling” Andersen portrayed his romanticism through the theme of beauty in nature, which owed a lot to his Christian faith. Unlike in other fairy tales, the duckling’s beauty was simply part of biology instead of the product of fantastical magic.
The Goodness of Goodness
Authors: Guroian Vigen
Published: February 2023

This chapter looks into how “Cinderella” and The King of the Golden River embodied the concepts of goodness and happiness in line with the ideals of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. According to Bruno Bettelheim, virtue could be learned through narratives. While Disney used Charles Perrault’s version for their animated film, Perrault portrayed Cinderella as certainly good and inherently passive. This contrasts with the Grimms’ depiction of Cinderella forging her destiny, though not without help. The Grimms’ narrative draws from the biblical story of salvation. Similarly, The King of the Golden River’s Gluck rose from poverty to prosperity and happiness through resourcefulness.
For Liberty
Authors: Brennan Jason
Published: February 2023

This chapter considers evidence and arguments that democracy has a special relationship to liberty, either because democracies tend to promote civil and economic freedom, or because democracy is itself an important kind of freedom. Constant argues that the ancients regarded freedom as the right of equal participation, but Raaflaub argues that this is a mistake and the ancients in fact defended individual civil and economic rights. Republican theories hold that constitutional democracy can protect citizens from domination. Rousseau argues that democracy can create a system in which each person is bound by the law and yet at the same time is only bound by rules they set for themselves. The chapter ends by considering the empirical evidence that as a matter of fact, democracies protect freedom better than other systems.
Against Equality
Authors: Brennan Jason
Published: February 2023

This chapter considers and reviews arguments skeptical of the claim that democracy instantiates equality, or skeptical that equality is good. Tocqueville argues that democratic egalitarianism leads to a pernicious culture of conformity, and that in democracies, citizens oppress each other by forcing politics into everything. Lenin argues that social change requires an intellectual vanguard and that the masses will not work toward their interests on their own. Contemporary public choice economics shows that representative democracy enables significant rent seeking and minority interest groups to exploit the majority. The demographic objection to democracy holds that democracies allow the majority to exploit or mistreat minorities even though these minority citizens have equal individual power. Finally, the chapter considers whether democratic nation-states contribute to worldwide inequality by preventing immigration and trapping the world’s worst-off people in badly governed countries. Perhaps democracies create equality inside their borders but then cause inequality overall.
Introduction
Authors: Jordan Daniel David
Published: February 2023

This introduction begins with a brief synopsis of the book while underscoring the Sección Femenina’s legacy within contemporary cultural memory in Spain. It then proceeds to outline how foundational myths, musical folklore, and ideas of peasantry have shaped diverse concepts of Hispanidad (Spanishness), raza española, and regionalism in the years leading to and during the Franco regime. Nonspecialists of twentieth-century Spanish history are provided with a basic understanding of the different ideological and territorial aspirations that motivated the nation’s politics of the 1940s and 1950s. After this historical background, the introduction discusses the Franco regime’s disparate approaches to religious and national identities.
Ethnicity, Race, Country of Origin, and the Challenges of Antidiscrimination Claims for Migrant Workers
Authors: Boucher Anna K.
Published: February 2023

In 2007, a fourteen-year-old domestic worker from Nigeria, Mary Hounga, was trafficked into the United Kingdom, racially vilified by her employers, and then rendered homeless. She was later rescued by a British charity. Chapter 3 works with the case of Hounga v. Allen to show how ethnic background can intersect with class and gender to heighten workplace vulnerability. It demonstrates that Anglo-Celtic and European migrants are generally underrepresented as claimants, while Spanish-speaking and Mexican migrants in California are overrepresented. Furthermore, the quantitative data from the MWRD challenge the notion that exploitation is commonly produced by employers of the same ethnic group; this is in fact rarely the case among human (as opposed to corporate) employers and employees. The relationship between immigration selection and ethnic background is another important consideration.
Decertification, Blacklisting, and Circular Migration
Authors: Boucher Anna K.
Published: February 2023

In the series of Floralia Plant Growers Ltd. v. United Food and Commercial Workers Union (2008, 2015, 2016) cases, a group of Mexican farm workers in British Columbia, Canada, were involved in almost a decade of litigation to enforce organizing rights in their workplace. Attempts to limit the organizing included the decertification of their union, blacklisting of union members by the Mexican Consulate in Vancouver, and recruitment of other workforces to replace unionized workers. Many of these claims were strongly contested by the employer. Migrant workers, who often move between work locations and countries, can also challenge traditional methods of trade union mobilizing, as was the case in Floralia Plant Growers. Comparative data from the MWRD across the six jurisdictions explore rates of trade union representation among migrants and compares this with sector-specific trade union data for each jurisdiction to see if union members are under- or overrepresented compared with national averages.
Neoliberalism
Authors: Billings Linda
Published: February 2023

“Neoliberalism: Problematic. Neoliberal Space Policy? Extremely Problematic” provides a critique of the neoliberal ideology of space exploration, which is dominant in US spaceflight culture. Neoliberal values (private property rights, “free enterprise,” and unlimited growth) are driving US spaceflight endeavors, whether they be public or private. This ideology sustains the US space policy goal of maintaining American space dominance. And it marginalizes the rights of other nations, as, according to the United Nations Treaty on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, “the exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all humankind; that outer space shall be free for exploration and use by all states; and that outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”
Protecting Labor Rights in Space
Authors: Nesvold Erika
Published: February 2023

“Protecting Labor Rights in Space” interrogates three historical analogies that are commonly used in the context of the growing space industry, in order to anticipate potential labor rights abuses of future space workers. The environment of space—remote, deadly, and requiring extensive technological support for survival and transportation—poses unusually dangerous challenges to the labor rights of space workers. This chapter explores the experiences of workers in similar environments on Earth, from the Chinese laborers who built the transcontinental railroad in the United States to migrant fishermen in modern Thailand. It also describes the need to address labor abuses that occur in space-related and space-adjacent industries today, to set both a moral example and a legal precedent in this new and growing industry.
Procedural memory
Authors: Budson Andrew E. , Kensinger Elizabeth A.
Published: February 2023

Work on learning the right way the first time so that you don’t have bad habits that you need to correct. Once you know the right thing to do, practice, practice, practice. As long as you are practicing correctly, all skills improve with practice. Use feedback to improve your practice and your performance. Whatever skill you are doing, continue working with a teacher or coach for optimal performance. Space out your practice to optimize offline learning. Minimize interference by avoiding practicing another similar skill the same day that may interfere with what you wish to learn. When you practice, start with an easier task and build up to the more difficult ones. Vary your practice so that you will be able to perform at your best under a variety of conditions.
Working memory
Authors: Budson Andrew E. , Kensinger Elizabeth A.
Published: February 2023

Pay attention. Attention is the foundation of working memory, so there is nothing more important than paying attention if you are trying to improve your working memory. Don’t multitask! Turn off your cellphone, the television, and other distractions when you are trying to keep information in mind. Start by focusing on your sensations and keeping them in mind if you want to remember the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and touches that you are experiencing. Chunk information together when needed to keep it all in mind—particularly if there are more than three or four parts. You’re going to have difficulty keeping information in mind if you are anxious or stressed. Although you don’t want to be anxious, neither do you want to be too laid back. Practicing mindfulness meditation is one way to improve your ability to consciously, actively, pay attention to what you want to.
Get it into your memory—and keep it there
Authors: Budson Andrew E. , Kensinger Elizabeth A.
Published: February 2023

Use effort to help you learn and remember the FOUR principles of learning: Focus attention on the content you want to remember; organize the material in ways that it will be easier to remember; understand what you want to remember; and relate the information to things you already know, or topics you care about. Make information stand out: Imbue it with emotion, make it distinctive, involve the senses, and make it important to you. Build a strong memory. Memories tend to become less vivid over time, but you can build up a memory that will retain the important details. One way to retain those details is to study them multiple times, and in multiple ways.
Associate information
Authors: Budson Andrew E. , Kensinger Elizabeth A.
Published: February 2023

This chapter discusses the importance of associating bits of information to enhance memory. Attend to the details you want to remember. Link the details together. It’s hard to create a mental structure that consists of unrelated content, so put in the effort to connect the details. Try different retrieval cues. As you try to find your keys, imagine yourself coming home earlier or actually retrace your footsteps as you walked in the door. Stay calm. Stress is particularly harmful for constructing—and reconstructing—memory structures that contain all the relevant details. Of course, it can be difficult to stay calm as you’re rushing to find your misplaced keys or feeling uneasy when you can’t recall where you met someone. But take a deep breath, remember that memory lapses like these are common and often transient, and focus on what you can do in the moment—like trying those different retrieval cues.
Introduction
Authors: Knyt Erinn E.
Published: February 2023

The introduction discusses Busoni’s aesthetic views about material and spatial aspects of musical tones. In addition, it addresses Busoni’s historiographic significance as a composer. In particular, it positions Busoni’s ideas and compositions within recent scholarly discourse about modernism in music. It shows that even if Busoni remained closely connected to past musical traditions, he simultaneously contributed to contemporary ideals of fragmentation, a bringing together of the arts, an expansion of the tonal language, and an exploration of new timbres, textures, and formal structures. In so doing, it presents Busoni’s compositional approach as multifaceted and situates Busoni’s idiosyncratic musical voice among a plurality of musical modernisms.
The Circle of Sound
Authors: Knyt Erinn E.
Published: February 2023

Chapter 3 delineates how Busoni’s views about space and multi-dimensionality influenced his decisions about timbre, placement of instruments, and dramaturgy. Busoni’s compositions from the 1910s and 1920s feature sound radiating from different directions, textural layering, and evocations of depth and height through a play with register, timbre, acoustics, and time. Many of his aesthetic ideas were based on metaphysical notions of inaudible sound in the universe that he translated into audible sound using the model of physical space in architectural buildings. He also posited novel theories about how music could encircle a stage and envelop listeners as it emanated from different locations simultaneously. Architectural drawings for novel theatrical spaces, such as a triple stage opening inspired by Henry van de Velde, or a multilevel stage area, although never realized, informed his ideas about spatial instrument placement and inspired simultaneity of musical textures in Doktor Faust, BV 303.
Dark Energy
Authors: Lincoln Don
Published: February 2023

With the realization that the universe began in a colossal explosion called the Big Bang and that the cosmos is expanding, scientists asked what the ultimate fate of the universe would be. Would it expand forever, never stopping? Would it expand, ever slowing, and stopping in the infinite future? Or would the expansion reverse, and the universe collapse together in a “Big Crunch?” In 1998, scientists looked to the sky to answer the question and found, to their surprise, that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. The proposed explanation is that the universe is filled with an energy field that is a repulsive form of gravity. This field is called “dark energy.” This chapter discusses the discovery of dark matter and what it might be. Given that dark energy is about 70% of the matter and energy of the universe, understanding it is crucially important to understanding the cosmos.
Ultimate Building Blocks
Authors: Lincoln Don
Published: February 2023

Over 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Democritus postulated that the nature of matter consisted of ultimate building blocks that he called atomos. Over the ensuing millennia, we have realized that he was broadly correct. We know of molecules, atoms, protons, neutrons, and electrons, and now we even know of quarks, which are found inside protons and neutrons, and leptons, of which the electron is the most familiar example. However, there was a time when we didn’t know of the constituents of atoms; we simply knew of the patterns of the chemical periodic table of elements. We’re in a similar point today, where we see patterns in the quarks and leptons and ask if they could be built of even smaller particles. In this chapter, we explore that idea and get a sense of how tricky figuring that out will be.
Unfinished revolutions
Authors: Norton Anne
Published: February 2023

This set of theses makes the case that even the liberal revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are not yet completed. Though many call themselves democrats and praise democracy, we do not yet rule ourselves as free people. We are not democrats yet. These theses remind us that self-rule is a discipline. Anarchy is the training ground of that discipline. Democracy is not an idyllic state, still less a state that we have achieved. The struggle for democracy continues throughout the world. In the West, feudal hierarchies have transformed and persisted in hierarchies of race and gender. These theses draw on the writing and political practices of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Sheldon Wolin, the speeches of revolutionaries and the experiences of fugitives.
The direction of the democratic
Authors: Norton Anne
Published: February 2023

The theses in this section address the presence of conservatism, progressivism and radicalism among people who rule themselves. All can have a place where people govern themselves. Conservative currents and commitments show themselves when people look to their histories and their ancestors, taking the dead as well as the living as their own people. Progressivism and utopianism look to a future that may be seen either as inevitable or as requiring the work of the living people. These theses discuss the different ways in which people see the direction of their countries in time and the effects that these perspectives and directions have on political action.
Democratic spaces
Authors: Norton Anne
Published: February 2023

The theses in this section declare that people carry their rights with them. Where their bodies are their rights are as well. They preserve the anarchic and nurture the democratic when they assemble. Theses in this section argue that the democratic can prosper in both rural and urban spaces. They carry their rights into their workplaces, their schools, their churches, into both public and private space. Rights do not apply only in relation to the government. They cannot be fenced out of the aptly named economic realm or the social order. Where bodies go, rights are present and can be called upon. Rights live -and are endangered- in each person’s body.
Points of New Light Amid Darkness
Authors: Wicks Robert J.
Published: February 2023

Posttraumatic growth (PTG) occurs when a person deepens in ways that would not have been possible had trauma or stress not occurred in the first place. When it does occur, the person does not play down, minimize, deny, or romanticize the significant negative experience they have had; rather, the person remains open to what they might learn and where the undesirable events might take them psychologically and spiritually, which might not have been possible in the past. The literature on PTG is helpful even when trauma has not occurred because the themes it examines can turn out to be new points of light for anyone experiencing stress who wishes to respond in the most personally beneficial way possible.
The First Steps Toward Self-Knowledge
Authors: Wicks Robert J.
Published: February 2023

Understanding how resilience can be strengthened through enhanced self-knowledge, more enlightened behavior, and clearer awareness of our cognitions (ways of thinking, perceiving, and understanding) is presented. In addition, “self-regulation” (a term used in both behavioral and dynamic psychology referring to the conscious and less conscious management of our physical and emotional impulses, drives, and anxieties) is also discussed. Appreciation of how we understand and deal with anxiety and low periods in our life is also covered, as well as how to embark on a disciplined search of self; increase our awareness of our personal agendas; face failure in a productive way; improve critical thinking; and develop sensitivity to our own resistances to change and self-talk.
States: Analog and Digital
Authors: Johns Fleur
Published: February 2023

States’ growing recourse to shifting streams of digital data for purposes of trying to understand the needs, wants, and circumstances of their constituents and affording them humanitarian assistance is giving rise to new ways of seeing and being a state: these are the focus of this chapter, which makes use of the analog-digital friction introduced earlier in the book. No longer are techniques of simplification, legibility, and planning necessary preconditions to state action. In many instances, an early warning signal assembled from real-time digital data will suffice to prompt states to canvass possibilities for humanitarian action and rule out other registers of political action. Nonstate actors and infrastructures condition and mediate these efforts in politically impactful ways. States of the Global South must especially contend with a litany of data doubles: digital representations of their polities, and social and economic conditions within their territories, assembled by commercial actors and/or other, surveillant states in parallel with, and sometimes in lieu of, national data. States are increasingly subject, in effect, to a standard of datafication whereby their capacity to maintain their statehood on the global plane is contingent on their ability to collect, marshal, and analyze digital data. With these changes in the logics of state governance, digital humanitarianism is tugging states away from the parameters of statehood presupposed by international law.
Law and Policy: Infrastructures of Interface
Authors: Johns Fleur
Published: February 2023

This chapter investigates how the digital interfaces depicted throughout this book tend to be produced and reproduced in the way that they do, even as they remain ever open to customization and improvement. It focuses on one dimension of the forces or factors that help to sustain this reproduction: international legal and policy infrastructures. As well as suggesting their heterogeneous provenance and supports, this analysis suggests digital interfaces’ openness to reassembly (more thoroughgoing than customization) and multiple possible sites of entry for that purpose. For this and other purposes, this chapter argues that there is value in investigating international law and policy surrounding humanitarian digital interfaces infrastructurally building on structuralist and post-structuralist practices of reading. The chapter’s revisitation of those practices helps to situate this book in relation to prior work in the international legal field.
Introduction
Authors: Braver Joshua
Published: February 2023

The people are the ultimate source of the authority for a constitution. But who are the people? This book examines how law may construct a plural people to stave off the establishment of semi-authoritarian constitutions. Both “radical” proponents and “legalist” critics of popular constitution-making share Carl Schmitt’s definition of the people as above, outside of, and superior to all law. Legalists invoke law to smother the people, while radicals destroy law in order to unleash them. This book considers the normative implications of the fact that, in real-world constitution-writing processes, existing constitutions are often neither fully respected nor suspended wholesale. Rather than adhering to an uncompromising legalism or slipping into a radical constitutional free-fall, constitution-makers draw on the existing constitution of their polity even as they abrogate certain of its provisions. This alternative approach to constitutional change –the “extraordinary adaptation” of existing constitutions -- has escaped the attention of scholars of democratic theory and constitutional law. This book theoretically develops the principles implicit in this approach, asking, how is the legitimacy of a project of constitutional renewal affected by partial adherence to existing constitutional rules and limitations? Can political actors justifiably violate the old constitution to create a new one if they grant a role for existing institutions and, in doing so, acknowledge the fundamental plurality of the people? In answering these questions, this book shows how hopes for large-scale constitutional change be fulfilled without sliding into a legal abyss.
How Effective Altruism Fails Community-Based Activism
Authors: Sanders Brenda
Published: February 2023

Judging the effectiveness of community organizing based on a “return on investment” model is, at its core, based on a white-centric view of activism. Gauging the effectiveness of community-based activism needs to be done through an entirely different lens, by someone who understands how activism works in marginalized communities. In the decade that Brenda Sanders has been doing vegan activism in low-income communities of color, she has seen why it’s vital that this information be conveyed by those who understand the specific needs of their communities and can build trust from a place of shared experience. On-the-ground activism is an integral part of influencing the culture in communities that are closed off to outsiders, and it is important and worthwhile work. Because of the vegan activism being done at the community level across the country, African Americans are one of the fastest-growing vegan demographics.
Animal Advocacy’s Stockholm Syndrome
Authors: deCoriolis Andrew , Gross Aaron S. , Tuminello Joseph , Gross Steve J. , Channin Jennifer
Published: February 2023

While Effective Altruism helps influencers do good by supporting farmed animal causes, it has been woefully inadequate in guiding strategies within the farmed animal advocacy space. Moreover, Effective Altruist funding has generated troubling consequences. Focusing on short-term incremental improvements, advocates are taking their eyes off the prize: the end of factory farming. The farmed animal movement has more investments than ever going into corporate campaigns, but meaningful returns have been diminishing. While advocacy groups receive significant funding for incremental improvements, other promising strategies tied to a bolder vision for systemic change remain underfunded. We don’t need to accept the factory farm as an inevitable evil and content ourselves with making it “more humane.” Funders can do enormous good within their lifetimes, but only through a willingness to confront complex social challenges. The movement needs funders with fearlessness, an entrepreneurial spirit of experimentation, and the moral imagination to end industrial farming.