bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Volunteering for the Health of the Public
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: April 2020

This chapter examines the importance of volunteering in facilitating healthy aging. There is a strong link between volunteering and good health. Formal volunteering has been associated with reduced mortality and increased self-rated health and physical function. Indeed, a 2018 research suggests that those who have the greatest health vulnerabilities are, in fact, most likely to experience positive health benefits from volunteering. How does volunteering help? It can increase physical activity, social engagement, and brain stimulation. It may decrease social isolation, as new friendships emerge from the shared experience of volunteering. Moreover, it can promote confidence and enhance one’s sense of meaning and purpose. Volunteering might be particularly beneficial to cognitive functioning because it allows older adults to engage in, and master, complex tasks, many of which might be new to them.
Toward a Muscular Public Health
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: April 2020

This chapter assesses why public health persists in suggesting courses of actions for the entire population, to be taken on a population’s behalf. The answer is simple: public health professionals know best for populations; individuals know best for themselves. After assembling incontrovertible evidence, public health providers try to universalize its application for the good of all. Society entrusts public health to understand what is in the public good and to act on it. Therefore, when public health providers know the healthiest answer, they should be relentless in seeking its implementation. It is up to society to decide if public health should or should not be in a position to flex its muscles. However, when public health providers see the opportunity to improve the public’s health, which derives from the combination of evidence and public agreement, they should act, even in the absence of consensus.
Police and the Public’s Health
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: April 2020

This chapter describes how police work shapes the health context of cities and neighborhoods, and affects the lives and behaviors of countless citizens. While there has been much concern in recent years about how some police activity has harmed health, particularly among minority communities, police have the potential to improve the health of the communities they serve. Police beat work is filled with low-intensity interactions in which officers serve as problem-solvers; these problems often involve public health. Police are first responders to opioid overdoses; they also intercede in intimate partner violence, and they engage with the homeless. As such, leveraging police involvement into better health outcomes could go a long way toward helping people solve these crises. Increasingly, large cities are developing crisis intervention teams (CITs) to improve safety and divert individuals from criminal justice involvement.
What Is Practice Research and Why Is It Important
Authors: Michael Austin , Carnochan Sarah
Published: April 2020

Chapter 1 of Practice Research in the Human Services: A University-Agency Partnership Model discusses the evolving definition of practice research. It highlights the need to identify ways to improve practice in the complex situations that characterize human services, by developing knowledge that emerges directly from everyday practice. Practice research often focuses on the relationships between service providers and service users, between service providers and their managers, between agency-based service providers and community advocacy and support groups, and between agency managers and policymakers. The chapter outlines the “practice” and “research” components of practice research, the role of theory, and the importance of local context in shaping specific approaches to practice research. It provides an overview of the university-agency partnership that provided the platform for carrying out the studies described in the volume, and offers perspectives on the related phenomena associated with learning organizations and evidence-informed practice.
Learning from the Managers of Human Service Organizations
Authors: Michael Austin , Carnochan Sarah
Published: April 2020

Chapter 7 of Practice Research in the Human Services: A University-Agency Partnership Model focuses on the experiences and perspectives of human service agency managers. It describes a multiphase study examining the experiences of public and nonprofit managers involved in human services contracting. The study aimed to further our understanding of the accountability and service coordination challenges that these cross-sectoral relationships pose for managers, especially in the context of increasingly complex human service delivery systems. This study integrated case studies, a multi-county survey, and review of contract documents. The chapter also describes a second study that sought to inform managerial practice by examining managerial perspectives and experiences related to evidence-informed practice, using a multi-county survey incorporating closed and open-ended questions. Principles for practice research relate to the study design process, recruitment of study participants, engagement of agency staff, and translation of implications into concrete practice recommendations.
Practice Research and Related Methodologies
Authors: Michael Austin , Carnochan Sarah
Published: April 2020

Practice Research in the Human Services: A University-Agency Partnership Model describes the array of research methods employed in practice research as a foundation for distinguishing this approach from other applied research frameworks. Chapter 9 builds upon the preceding chapters and provides a comparative analysis of the differences and similarities between practice research and the basic elements of participatory action research and program evaluation and intervention research. It describes and compares approaches to research question formulation, sources of literature and practice wisdom, data collection tools, data analysis and interpretation processes, research dissemination processes, and knowledge development processes. With these common components in mind, the analysis also addresses the key concepts of principles, process challenges, methodological challenges, and success factors that are associated with each of the frameworks.
Building Organizational Supports for Research-minded Practitioners
Authors: Michael Austin , Carnochan Sarah
Published: April 2020

Chapter 11 of Practice Research in the Human Services: A University-Agency Partnership Model discusses issues and strategies related to providing organizational supports for practitioners in order to facilitate their engagement in practice research. The chapter describes: (1) the emerging organizational context for evidence-informed practice and practice research; (2) an evolving definition of the elements of a research-minded practitioner, which include curiosity, critical reflection, and critical thinking; (3) a beginning framework for conceptualizing relevant organizational supports; and (4) case examples of organizational supports provided by national organizations in the United Kingdom. The chapter concludes with an emerging set of lessons learned and questions to guide future practice research efforts.
A Framework for Teaching Practice-based Research
Authors: Michael Austin , Carnochan Sarah
Published: April 2020

Practice Research in the Human Services: A University-Agency Partnership Model makes clear that as the art and science of practice research evolve, equal attention needs to be paid to educating the next generation of social work practitioners about various ways to incorporate practice research into their daily work. Students are expected to integrate their understanding of practice methods with their understanding of research methods, and to incorporate service user perspective. This chapter begins by exploring the implications of practice research with respect to service delivery and the changing nature of practice. It pays special attention to service users as a foundation for building a framework to guide the teaching/learning of practice research. The chapter concludes with a teaching case that illustrates an application of the framework as well as the implications for practice and future research.
Articulating a Thought
Authors: Alshanetsky Eli
Published: April 2020

The book examines how we make our thoughts clear to ourselves in the process of putting them into words. As philosophers and cognitive scientists have emphasized, articulating a thought can be astoundingly easy. We generally have no trouble expressing complex ideas that we have never considered before. But not always: a far less noted fact is that articulating a thought can sometimes be extremely hard. Our difficulties in articulating thoughts pervade many aspects of philosophical inquiry as well as many ordinary situations. We may face them in articulating an objection in a seminar, an insight into a movie, or a sudden realization about a friend. An important feature of these thoughts is that we often articulate them in order to find out what they are. In many cases, we would not bother articulating our thoughts if we already had this knowledge. Yet, when we find the right words, we can often immediately tell that they express our thought. So how do we manage to recognize the formulations of our thoughts, in the absence of prior knowledge of what we are thinking? And why is it that producing a public language formulation contributes in any way to the private undertaking of getting clear on our own thoughts?
Reading Plato’s Mind
Authors: Brennan Tad
Published: April 2020

This chapter distinguishes two Platonic interests in self-knowledge: the ‘thin’ self-knowledge that a human being is a rational soul using its body as a tool (the Delphic self-knowledge made prominent in the Phaedrus, First Alcibiades, and elsewhere), and the ‘thick’ self-knowledge of the particular accidental psychological profile of an individual. The two are contrasted in four ways: the thin applies to the entire species, makes no reference to irrational parts, offers no etiology of contingencies, and makes no special use of first-personal knowledge; the thick applies to individuals, incorporates details about the irrational soul, explains the individual through a narrative of the events that shaped them, and is first-personal in making the object of self-knowledge identical with the subject of that self-knowledge. This richer, thicker form of self-knowledge is illustrated with extensive examples from the Republic and Seventh Letter.
Citizens’ Assemblies and Republican Democracy
Authors: White Stuart
Published: April 2020

There has been growing interest in citizens’ assemblies (CAs) as institutions to enhance democratic politics: assemblies that consist wholly or mainly of individuals drawn at random from the general public so as to be representative of the population, which have the responsibility to deliberate over an issue and make recommendations or decisions. But exactly what kind of role should CAs have in a republican model of democracy, distinguished by commitment to the values of deliberation to the common good; political equality and resilience to oligarchy; and active popular sovereignty? The chapter argues against the view that CAs should replace elected assemblies. However, it also argues against seeing CAs as wholly subordinate to elected assemblies. It sets out a specific institutional mechanism in which CAs are integrated with a power to initiate referendums (the petition-assembly-referendum scheme) and shows how this is supported by the distinctive values of a republican democracy.
The Utopian Imagination
Authors: Hazareesingh Sudhir
Published: April 2020

This chapter examines the French tradition of radical republicanism, from the late Enlightenment to the twentieth century. Radical republicanism was a loose ensemble, especially driven by its prioritization of equality over liberty, its commitment to resisting political and social oppression, and its utopian aspiration to imagine a better world. While it expressed itself in different sensibilities, through its embrace of Rousseauism, this republican tradition was united by a common attachment to key ideals of the radical Enlightenment: the concept of the sovereignty of the people, the idea of the general will as the inalienable foundation of the political order, the belief in the human capacity for regeneration, the vision of citizenship based on the practice of the virtues and the rejection of tyranny, and the universal sense that all humans were bound by a sense of fraternity.
The First Scottish Enlightenment
Authors: Jackson Williams Kelsey
Published: April 2020

Traditional accounts of the Scottish Enlightenment present the half-century or so before 1750 as, at best, a not yet fully realized precursor to the era of Hume and Smith, at worst, a period of superstition and religious bigotry. This is the first book-length study to systematically challenge that notion. Instead, it argues that the era between approximately 1680 and 1745 was a ‘First’ Scottish Enlightenment, part of the continent-wide phenomenon of Early Enlightenment and led by the Jacobites, Episcopalians, and Catholics of north-eastern Scotland. It makes this argument through an intensive study of the dramatic changes in historiographical practice which took place in Scotland during this era, showing how the documentary scholarship of Jean Mabillon and the Maurists was eagerly received and rapidly developed in Scottish historical circles, resulting in the wholesale demolition of the older, humanist myths of Scottish origins and their replacement with the foundations of our modern understanding of early Scottish history. This volume accordingly challenges many of the truisms surrounding seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish history, pushing back against notions of pre-Enlightenment Scotland as backward, insular, and intellectually impoverished and mapping a richly polymathic, erudite, and transnational web of scholars, readers, and polemicists. It highlights the enduring cultural links with France and argues for the central importance of Scotland’s two principal religious minorities—Episcopalians and Catholics—in the growth of Enlightenment thinking. As such, it makes a major intervention in the intellectual and cultural histories of Scotland, early modern Europe, and the Enlightenment itself.
The Fall of the Ancient Monarchy
Authors: Jackson Williams Kelsey
Published: April 2020

This chapter recovers the first major assault on Scotland’s humanist history, its myth of an Ancient Monarchy in the 1680s and the subsequent, increasingly probing challenges which were directed against it in the wake of revolution. The authority of historians such as Hector Boece and George Buchanan was no longer sufficient to protect them from challenges based upon new and more sophisticated interpretations of medieval texts. In particular, Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh’s high-profile dispute with English and Irish scholars such as William Lloyd, Edward Stillingfleet, and Roderick O’Flaherty is identified as a turning point in the development of Scottish historiographical practice.
Scotland Illustrated
Authors: Jackson Williams Kelsey
Published: April 2020

This chapter explores national and local geographies, challenging older views of this period as a geographically impoverished caesura between the monumental achievements of the 1662 Atlas Maior and the 1791 First Statistical Account. Instead, it argues, geographical scholarship was very much alive during the Early Enlightenment, but was undergoing rapid and unpredictable change as scholars brought new methodologies and new mentalities to bear on a traditional, humanist discipline. It identifies Sir Robert Sibbald as a key figure in early Enlightenment geographical thought while also recovering the works of the forgotten geographers and antiquaries Alexander Keith and Thomas Orem.
Pedigrees and Proof
Authors: Jackson Williams Kelsey
Published: April 2020

This chapter interrogates the methods and motivations of a discipline often dismissed as the driest of dry and antiquarian pursuits: genealogy. It reveals that, far from being intellectually vapid, genealogical scholarship was intimately connected to the development of the Stuart state and the transmission of French textual scholarship to Scotland. It offered a proving ground for the new practices of archival research and could practically demonstrate the value of the new scholarship in a field of study whose application was widely seen to be both immediate and essential in a kin-based society.
Fighting with Canon
Authors: Jackson Williams Kelsey
Published: April 2020

The Early Enlightenment was, in many ways, a time of reckoning and wrestling with Scotland’s humanist past and this was no different for those Scots attempting to build, rebuild, or deconstruct their nation’s literary heritage. This chapter explores a series of canon-building efforts during this period, all growing out of the much older dispute between Scottish and Irish scholars over their shared Gaelic heritage, but all also partaking of new, Enlightened forms of literary scholarship and textual editing to create a distinctive canon of Scottish writers. Key figures discussed include Robert Freebairn, Thomas Ruddiman, Robert Sibbald, and Pierre Bayle.
Doing the Dirty Job
Authors: Aliverti Ana
Published: April 2020

This chapter offers a more historical and sociological perspective on the inclusionary and exclusionary effects of criminal law, determining who is inside and who is outside the polity’s ‘civil order’. In so doing, the chapter draws upon Lindsay Farmer’s work which tracks shifts in the structure and content of criminal law with shifting notions of ‘civil order’. The resulting analysis illuminates the shifting social functions of criminalization during different historical phases, especially as it relates to migration control and labour market governance. Legal norms have both reflected and constructed political and social boundaries, often based around racialized notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrants. The most recent phase of criminal law intervention conjoins highly deregulated labour markets and highly juridified migration regimes. This has been linked to the rise of populism and more authoritarian and nationalistic forms of statecraft. Nevertheless, this chapter asserts that we should avoid determinism in reading these historical shifts.
The Double Occupancy Problem
Authors: Effingham Nikk
Published: April 2020

Imagine a time machine travels back in time in the same way it persists into the future (i.e. by persisting backwards). For instance, this is how time machines move through time in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Such a machine would have a problem: immediately upon moving back in time it would collide with its earlier self. This is the ‘Double Occupancy Problem’. Using the notions introduced in Chapters 1–3, this chapter explains how to avoid this ‘Double Occupancy Problem’: such time machines can travel back in time just as long as they are both in motion and move back in time bit by bit.
Impossability Theory
Authors: Effingham Nikk
Published: April 2020

My preferred solution to the Grandfather Paradox is to say that time travellers have the ability to do the metaphysically impossible (and so I can kill my grandfather), even though they never will. This requires physical possibility to outstrip metaphysical possibility. This chapter argues that, given the dialectic one must be in when considering the Grandfather Paradox, it’s reasonable to assume just that. It then argues that, given that assumption, impossability theory follows. The rest of the chapter explains Jack Spencer’s argument for the same conclusion, before discussing how impossability theory can be applied to a selection of paradoxes other than the Grandfather Paradox, and which have nothing to do with time travel.
The Fragility of Dignity
Authors: Killmister Suzy
Published: April 2020

This chapter utilizes the theoretical framework developed in Chapter 1 to explain how dignity can be violated, frustrated, or destroyed. For personal dignity, violations involve forcing a person to transgress her own dignitarian standards, making her less respect-worthy in her own eyes, while frustrations involve preventing a person from upholding her own dignitarian standards, blocking an avenue for increased self-regard. Social dignity takes the same form, but with community standards taking the place of personal standards. Status dignity, by contrast, is violated when an agent is treated in ways that contravene the recognition respect she is owed in virtue of her membership in a social class, and is frustrated when she is denied access to sites where recognition respect is offered.
Dignity and Recognition
Authors: Killmister Suzy
Published: April 2020

This chapter completes the discussion of the source and scope of individuals’ moral claims against having their dignity violated, frustrated, or destroyed, by considering status dignity. To fail to treat someone as a member of her social class ought to be treated constitutes a dignity violation; but this raises the difficult question of how individuals could have a moral claim to be treated in accordance with socially constructed norms. The answer developed in this chapter builds on the widely accepted idea of legitimate expectations: since social classes inform personal identity, we have a prima facie claim to have those identities recognized. Such claims are illegitimate, though, if granting that recognition would perpetuate the oppression of others. This will often be the case, it is argued, for claims to be recognized as members of hierarchical social classes such as race or gender.
Ancient Relativity
Authors: Duncombe Matthew
Published: April 2020

Relativity is the phenomenon that things relate to things: parents to their offspring; doubles to halves; larger things to smaller things. This book is about how ancient philosophers, particularly Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Sextus Empiricus, understood this phenomenon and how their theories of relativity affected, and were affected by, their broader philosophical outlooks. Many scholars have thought that ancient thinkers were either fundamentally confused about the phenomenon of relativity, or held a view that is a trivial variation on a modern view. This book argues that neither is the case. In fact, ancient philosophers shared a close-knit family of views, referred to as ‘constitutive relativity’: a relative is not simply linked by a relation, but is constituted by it. The book shows that this view is present in Plato, and is exploited by him in some key arguments concerning the Forms and the partition of the soul. Aristotle adopts the constitutive view in his discussions of relativity in Categories 7 and the Topics, and retains the constitutive view in his later discussion in Metaphysics 5.15. The Relatives Argument of Aristotle’s lost work On Ideas also involves constitutive relativity. The book moves on to examine a complex report of Stoic relativity and the role relativity played in Stoic philosophy. Finally, the book discusses Sextus Empiricus’ way of thinking about relativity, which does not appeal to the nature of relatives, but rather to how we conceive of things as correlative.
Introduction
Authors: Cave Stephen , Dihal Kanta , Dillon Sarah
Published: April 2020

This chapter argues that narratives about artificial intelligence (AI) have a major impact on science, policy, and society. These imaginaries of intelligent machines matter because they form the backdrop against which AI systems are being developed, and against which these developments are interpreted and assessed. The authors show how this book explores the way AI narratives have addressed, and offer sophisticated thinking about, some of the legitimate concerns that AI technologies now raise, such as loss of skills because of automation, replacement of the workforce by machines, and their role in perpetuating systems of oppression. At the same time, this book intervenes in a landscape in which prevalent AI narratives are mistrusted or criticized, for example, for their extremism, utopian or dystopian, or for their misrepresentation of current technology, for instance, in their tendency to focus on anthropomorphic representations.
Enslaved Minds
Authors: Dihal Kanta
Published: April 2020

Humankind has long dreamed of a life of ease, but throughout history, those who achieved such a life have done so simply by delegating their labour to an exploited underclass. Machines have taken over the worst of the manual labour, and AI is beginning to replace cognitive labour. However, endowing machines with muscle power does not carry with it the ethical considerations involved in endowing machines with mental faculties. Just as human slaves have justly rebelled against their chains, so might intelligent machines be considered justified in attempting to break free of their enslavement to humans. Using Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (1921), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy (2014–2016) as case studies, this chapter contextualizes the robot uprising in fiction against the long history of slave revolts, to show how these narratives offer us a new way to consider the enslavement and subservience of humans.
There Are No Such Things As Theories
Authors: French Steven
Published: April 2020

What is a scientific theory? Is it a set of propositions? Or a family of models? Or is it some kind of abstract artefact? These options are examined in the context of a comparison between theories and artworks. On the one hand, theories are said to be like certain kinds of paintings, in that they play a representational role; on the other, they are compared to musical works, insofar as they can be multiply presented. I shall argue that such comparisons should be treated with care and that all of the above options face problems. Instead, I suggest, we should adopt a form of eliminativism towards theories, in the sense that a theory should not be regarded as any thing. Nevertheless, we can still talk about them and attribute certain qualities to them, where that talk is understood to be made true by certain practices. This shift to practices as truth-makers for theory talk then has certain implications for how we regard theories in the realism debate and in the context of the nature and role of representation in science.
Theories as Abstract Entities
Authors: French Steven
Published: April 2020

In this chapter a well-known dilemma is presented for musical works, involving their purported abstract nature and creativity. A similar dilemma is presented for scientific theories and various ways of resolving both dilemmas are canvassed. One is to take artworks and theories to be abstract and understand the creative act in terms of the author’s situation in some abstract space. Another is to insist that both are imaginary things and that appreciation of either involves intelligent reconstruction. Such views not only involve ontological proliferation but also fail to accommodate the heuristic processes involved.
Thomas Pennant’s Highlands
Authors: Leask Nigel
Published: April 2020

Thomas Pennant’s two Scottish Tours stabilized the generic norms for writing about the Highlands in the period, for which reason they lie at the heart of the book. The Welsh traveller sought to appease Scottish public opinion by publishing a favourable account of a nation in the early throes of improvement, combining the personal authority of the informed traveller’s eye with the encyclopaedic protocols of enlightenment knowledge, gleaned from correspondence and pre-circulated questionnaires to Highland ministers, gentlemen, and naturalists. Pennant was the first traveller to offer an adequate visual documentation of Scotland: his 1772 Tour contains ninety-one engraved plates, many of them the work of his artist Moses Griffith. Notable here, especially in connection with the previous chapter, is Pennant’s ‘vision at Ardmaddie’ at the end of his 1772 Voyage to the Hebrides, when he is visited by an Ossianic spectre critical of Highland landlords for abandoning their duties of trusteeship in pursuit of personal profit.
‘Mr Pennant Has Led The Way, Dr Johnson Has Followed’
Authors: Leask Nigel
Published: April 2020

In contrast to the positive Scottish reception of Pennant’s Tours, the 1775 publication of Dr Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands caused a furore north of the border. This chapter develops two claims that have been largely underplayed in the copious scholarship on Johnson. The first is that the publishing success of Pennant’s tours were a major (albeit unacknowledged) inspiration for Johnson and Boswell, providing an important intertext for Johnson’s Journey. Secondly, it supports the view that Johnson was specifically motivated to discredit the authenticity of Ossian and the claims of Gaelic culture, as well as of his distaste for the Scottish enlightenment’s appropriation of Macpherson’s ‘translations’. Drawing on contemporary Gaelic scholarship, the chapter examines the strengths and weaknesses of Johnson’s grasp of Gaelic culture, superstitions, and the Ossian controversy, as well as his ambivalent views on emigration, improvement, missionary activity, and the transformation of Highland society.
Scott on the Rocks
Authors: Leask Nigel
Published: April 2020

The final chapter explores transformations in writing about the Highland tour from Waterloo to the novelist’s death. It examines how ‘Scott tourism’, a new geological interest in Scotland’s ‘rocks’, and the ‘moral electricity’ of a second transport revolution coincided with mounting social and economic pressures on the Gaels. The first part of the chapter focuses on manuscript tours by Robert Southey, John Bowman, and John Keats: meanwhile, the publication of Daniell’s Voyage (1814–25) developed Scott’s poetic version in a visual idiom, while disguising some of the traumatic effect of improvement. The second part turns to geologist John Macculloch’s massive Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland (1825), the real target of which was the romantic ‘Highlandism’ with which Scott’s name was associated. Manifesting a racialist disdain for the Gaels and a craven defence of clearance against the strictures of ‘romantic gentlemen’, Highlands and Western Isles is an appropriate terminus for this study of a century of tour writing.
Forging Germans
Authors: Mezger Caroline
Published: April 2020

Forging Germans explores the nationalization and eventual National Socialist mobilization of ethnic German children and youth in interwar and World War II Yugoslavia, particularly in two of its multiethnic, post-Habsburg borderlands: the Western Banat and the Batschka. Drawing upon original oral history interviews, untapped archival materials from Germany, Hungary, and Serbia, and historical press sources, the book uncovers the multifarious ways in which political, ecclesiastical, cultural, and military agents from Germany colluded with local nationalist activists to inculcate Yugoslavia’s ethnic Germans with divergent notions of “Germanness.” As the book shows, even in the midst of Yugoslavia’s violent and shifting Axis occupation, children and youth not only remained the subjects, but became agents of nationalist activism, as they embraced, negotiated, redefined, proselytized, lived, and died for the “Germanness” ascribed to them. Forging Germans is conceptualized as a contribution to the study of National Socialism from a transnational and comparative perspective, to the mid-twentieth-century history of Southeastern Europe and its relation to Germany, to studies of borderland nationalism and experiences of World War II occupation, and to the history of childhood and youth.
Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe
Authors: Katajala-Peltomaa Sari
Published: April 2020

This book focuses on conceptualizations of lived religion by analysing significant case studies from canonization processes (c. 1240–1450). Geographically it covers Western Europe and one of its aims is to compare Northern and Southern material and customs. ‘Lived religion’ is both a thematic approach and a methodology: a focus on rituals, symbols, and gestures as well as sensitivity to nuances and careful contextualizing of the sources are constitutive elements of the argumentation. Demonic possession was a spiritual state that often had physical symptoms. The main argument developed throughout is, however, that demonic possession was a social phenomenon which should be understood with regard to the community and culture. Each set of sources formed its own specific context, in which demonic presence derived from different motivations, reasonings, and methods of categorization. Rituals, gestures, emotions, and sensory elements in constructing demonic presence reveal negotiations over authority and agency. In the argumentation, the hierarchy between the ‘learned’ and ‘popular’ within religion is contested, as is a strict polarity between individual and collective religious participation. Cases of demonic possession demonstrate how the personal affected the communal, and vice versa, and how they were eventually transformed into discourses and institutions of the Church; that is, definitions of the miraculous and the diabolical. Alterity and inversion of identity, gender, and various forms of corporeality and the interplay between the sacred and diabolical are themes running throughout the volume.
Introduction
Authors: Katajala-Peltomaa Sari
Published: April 2020

This chapter contextualizes the phenomenon of demonic possession and discusses its medieval interpretations as well as demonstrating its connections to fields of study such as heresy, demonology, and witchcraft. It sets out the main analytical concept of lived religion and shows how demons were integral within it, intersecting cultural, communal, and individual levels. Religion created a performative space and demonic presence was a fluid and multifaceted category within it. This chapter introduces the corpus of source material and methodological elements of canonization processes: the final records were an outcome of collaboration between lay witnesses and the inquisitorial committee, an amalgam of personal choices in the use of rhetoric, communal memories of actual past events, and the demands of canon law and the miracle genre. Therefore, depositions reveal inconsistencies in the universalizing discourse of the Church and manifest local nuances in the way people lived their religion.
Constructing the Sacred
Authors: Katajala-Peltomaa Sari
Published: April 2020

The sacred and the diabolical were binary forces but, for that reason, they were inherently intertwined and even necessary for each other’s existence. The interaction between the sacred and the diabolical was a crucial part of the lived religion of the participants and an essential element in miraculous deliveries from demonic possession. All the participating groups, namely demons, their victims, co-pilgrims, and the clergy, were needed in this process to affirm the cosmological hierarchy. Exorcism rituals do not stand out in the depositions, but clergy could claim an intermediary role in attaining divine grace. Especially, demons’ speech and tribulations and participants’ sensory elements certifying demons’ exit affirmed the powers of the sacred. In the communal negotiations, affirmation of the sanctity of the local intercessor and the sacredness of his or her shrine was the hoped-for outcome of demonic presence.
The Interwoven Fabric of the Sacred and the Political
Authors: Katajala-Peltomaa Sari
Published: April 2020

Demons not only caused personal afflictions but were also used within wider societal debates, for example by demonizing political opponents. The sacred, the demonic, and the political were intertwined. This chapter shows how demonic presence played a part in constructing collective identity and enhancing a community’s coherence by reflecting political alliances. In the Italian context, the place of origin of the named tormentors was crucial and possession cases revealed communities’ power struggles. In the North, demonic presence and punishment miracles were politically laden acts which affirmed the position of Saint Birgitta in heavenly and earthly hierarchies. In both contexts, demons served as a means of demonstrating personal and communal subordination to a heavenly intercessor and power-holders associated with the local patron saint. By linking the tormenting spirits with political adversaries, cases of demonic possession became a device for creating collective identity and forming the boundaries of a cultic community.
The Authoritarian Governor’s Dilemma
Authors: Thomson Henry
Published: April 2020

Even authoritarian leaders cannot rule alone. This chapter explores the politics of indirect authoritarian governance through coercive institutions in socialist Poland and East Germany. It explains why the Polish Bezpieka’s staff and secret informant network shrank after 1956 despite significant mass opposition to the regime, while the East German Stasi grew to become a much larger agency. Authoritarian governors face a problematic tradeoff between the competence of the secret police and their ability to control it. When goal divergence with the police leads a regime to exert more control, agency competence suffers and the regime must turn to violent ex post repression, rather than ex ante deterrence and subversion of threats. In Poland, replacement of the Stalinist party leader in 1956 created significant goal divergence between the upper ranks of the secret police and the new elites the police had previously victimized. Elites shrank the coercive agency to exert control over it, despite significant mass opposition to the regime. In East Germany, in contrast, continuity of Stalinist leadership led to less goal divergence between elites and the secret police, enabling its continued growth.
Militias and the Iraqi State
Authors: Salehyan Idean
Published: April 2020

According to conventional wisdom, states have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within their territories, and delegate its operation to closely held state agents such as the military and police. Yet when faced with insurgencies, states often enlist the support of paramilitary organizations or militias. The competence–control tradeoff is especially stark in these cases, as states depend on capable militias to fight insurgents, but also risk losing control over them. This chapter examines the tradeoff in light of the relationship between militia groups and the Iraqi government. To bring a semblance of security to Iraq, both the United States and the Iraqi government used paramilitary groups such as the Sons of Iraq and the Kurdish Peshmerga. Following the withdrawal of US troops, the government has become increasingly beholden to Shia militias, yet the case defies a simple, sectarian logic. This chapter examines the choice of governance strategy vis-à-vis militias in Iraq, and changes in that strategy over time, providing insights into the governor’s dilemma, counterinsurgency strategy, and state formation.
The Invader’s Dilemma
Authors: Tamm Henning
Published: April 2020

Military invasions are typically considered illegitimate both by local populations and by the international community. How do invaders mitigate this legitimacy deficit? This chapter argues that invading states enlist local rebel groups not only for the expertise and operational capacity they provide but also to gain some degree of legitimacy vis-à-vis local and international audiences. Gaining legitimacy in this way, however, comes at a cost: to avoid the perception that rebel intermediaries are mere puppets, the invading state must refrain from exercising hard controls over them. The chapter illustrates this legitimacy–control tradeoff by contrasting the Rwandan and Ugandan invasions during the Second Congo War (1998–2003). Drawing on interviews with key protagonists, the chapter shows that the different levels of control exerted by Rwanda and Uganda help account for the vast difference in the popularity of their rebel intermediaries. While Rwanda continuously maintained hard controls, eroding its intermediary’s local legitimacy, Uganda initially limited itself to soft inducements, thereby enabling its intermediary to garner legitimacy. In developing these arguments, this chapter engages with the literatures on rebel governance, intervention in civil war, state-building, and military occupation.
Balancing Competence and Control
Authors: Biermann Felix , Rittberger Berthold
Published: April 2020

In recent decades the EU has witnessed a remarkable rise in the number of specialized regulatory agencies and European regulatory networks (ERNs). It is often assumed that agencies and ERNs are mutually exclusive instruments of indirect governance. As this chapter argues, however, they are often used in combination to better address competence–control tradeoffs. The chapter illustrates this argument with two case studies of regulatory policymaking in the EU. First, in the case of aviation safety, the EU and its member states created a new agency, the European Aviation Safety Agency, to overcome a control deficit which had hampered its ability to rein in existing regulatory networks. Second, in the field of food safety, the EU as collective governor sought to overcome the competence deficit of its intermediary, the European Food Safety Agency, by enlisting a second intermediary: the “Focal Point Network” (an ERN).
Indirect Governance in Global Financial Regulation
Authors: Rixen Thomas , Viola Lora Anne
Published: April 2020

The global financial crisis led G20 states to conclude that stronger regulatory standards and improved compliance were needed to ensure global financial stability. To this end, the G20, as collective governor, granted an institutional intermediary, the Financial Stability Board (FSB), authority to develop and supervise financial market regulations. However, the G20 designed the FSB in ways that stymied its regulatory competence. Why did the G20 design the FSB in ways that were inadequate to meeting its own governance goal? Competence–control theory provides a compelling answer. The G20 faces a tradeoff between a competent intermediary and control over the intermediary; this tradeoff is exacerbated by the G20’s collective nature. While the G20 has a collective long-term interest in an intermediary with the expertise and capacity to promote stability-enhancing regulations, intense short-term distributive conflicts among member states yield strong incentives to control the intermediary. These internal distributive conflicts are more easily overcome during systemic economic crisis, when a competent intermediary is urgently needed. Once the crisis has passed, however, the governor reasserts control, again compromising the intermediary’s competence. The chapter illustrates this argument with an account of reforming the Financial Stability Forum into the FSB, and three case studies of policy reforms after the financial crisis.
Poetic Address: Shaking the Hearts of Men
Authors: Dawson Clara
Published: April 2020

Chapter 4 takes four major poems of the 1850s and analyses them through the theoretical framework laid out in Chapter 3. It examines Tennyson’s In Memoriam as the poem made to stand for the voice of the Victorian age and analyses how the employment of pronouns creates that identity. A reading of Maud argues that Tennyson then critiques print culture and challenges the dominant public mode of poetry insisted on by reviewers. Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows and Clough’s Amours de Voyages offer examples of poets using address to experiment with a public poetics. Staging their poems outside England, both seek to expand what it means to write poetry for the British public.
State Sponsored Literature
Authors: Rogers Asha
Published: April 2020

Debates about the value of the ‘literary’ rarely register the expressive acts of state subsidy, sponsorship, and cultural policy that have shaped post-war Britain. In State Sponsored Literature, Asha Rogers argues that the modern state was a major material condition of literature, even as its efforts were relative, partial, and prone to disruption. Drawing from neglected and occasionally unexpected archives, she shows how the state became an integral and conflicted custodian of literary freedom in the postcolonial world as beliefs about literature’s ‘public’ were radically challenged by the unrivalled migration to Britain at the end of Empire. State Sponsored Literature retells the story of literature’s place in modern Britain through original analysis of the institutional forces behind canon-formation and contestation, from the literature programmes of the British Council and Arts Council to the UK’s fraught relations with UNESCO, from GCSE literature anthologies to the origins of The Satanic Verses in migrant Camden. The state did not shape literary production in a vacuum, Rogers argues, rather its policies, practices, and priorities were inexorably shaped in turn. Demonstrating how archival work can potentially transform our understanding of literature and its reading publics, this book challenges how we think about literature’s value by asking what state involvement has meant for writers, readers, institutions, and the ideal of autonomy itself.
UNESCO, the United Kingdom, and Cultural Diversity after the Millennium
Authors: Rogers Asha
Published: April 2020

This final diachronic chapter steps back from the question of literature’s publicly funded status to consider how cultural diversity became an important site of negotiation in the United Kingdom’s dealings with UNESCO. It suggests that cultural diversity was not only a competency developed through post-war state funding but an expansive discourse appropriated by competing geopolitical alliances within UNESCO. The 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions staged the larger tensions between the national and supra-national debates of cultural diversity. For all its flaws, and the United Kingdom’s ongoing ambivalence about UNESCO, the Convention promised to institute a more equitable public culture in ways that the controversy over the 2017 Jhalak Prize for Black Asian and Minority Ethnic writers suggests were sorely needed.
Postscript
Authors: Rogers Asha
Published: April 2020

This short concluding essay revisits the main ideas explored in this book, including the material and symbolic entanglements of state support and literature’s special capacity to represent the full range of voices and experiences now comprising modern Britain. Mindful of the intersecting political, social, and economic pressures shaping literary value and the vacillation between recognition and disavowal characteristic of the state’s engagements with literature, it turns to two recent reports of the state and fate of contemporary literary writing: Literature in the 21st Century (2017) and Writing the Future: Black and Asian Writers and Publishers in the UK Marketplace (2015).