bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Domestication has reduced leaf water use efficiency associated with the anatomy of abaxial stomata in cotton
Authors: Lei Zhangying , He Yang , Li Xiafei , He Ziqi , Zhang Yujie , Zhang Wangfeng , Liu Fang , Zhang Yali
Published: November 2022

Crop domestication for increasing growth rates and yields appears to have altered the features of adaxial and abaxial stomata, but its effect on leaf water use efficiency (WUE) have not been experimentally verified. In this study, we characterized stomatal anatomy and carbon isotope discrimination (δ13C) in 32 wild and 36 domesticated genotypes of cotton grown under agricultural field conditions. The results showed that domesticated genotypes possessed lower WUE, as indicated by low or more negative δ13C compared with wild genotypes. Higher theoretical maximum stomatal conductance (gsmax) after domestication was accounted for by more stomata rather than significantly enlarged stomata. Specifically, abaxial stomatal density was higher whilst there was no change in the adaxial density. The size of both adaxial and abaxial stomata was greater due to larger guard cells but without there being any increase in pore size. However, there was a negative relationship between δ13C and stomatal size across wild and domesticated genotypes, especially on the abaxial leaf surface, because bigger stomata resulted in a lower maximum stomatal response rate to fluctuating canopy light, resulting in increased water loss. Overall, our results indicate that cotton domestication has resulted in substantial variation in stomatal anatomy, and that WUE and drought tolerance can potentially be improved in future breeding by decreasing the size of abaxial stomata to produce a faster stomatal response and hence a reduction in unnecessary water loss.
Cellobiose elicits immunity in lettuce conferring resistance toBotrytis cinerea
Authors: He Jiuxing , Kong Meng , Qian Yuanchao , Gong Min , Lv Guohua , Song Jiqing
Published: November 2022

Cellobiose is the primary product of cellulose hydrolysis and is expected to function as a type of pathogen/damage-associated molecular pattern in evoking plant innate immunity. In this study, cellobiose was demonstrated to be a positive regulator in the immune response of lettuce, but halted autoimmunity when lettuce was exposed to concentrations of cellobiose >60 mg l–1. When lettuce plants were infected by Botrytis cinerea, cellobiose endowed plants with enhanced pre-invasion resistance by activating high β-1,3-glucanase and antioxidative enzyme activities at the initial stage of pathogen infection. Cellobiose-activated core regulatory factors such as EDS1, PTI6, and WRKY70, as well as salicylic acid signaling, played an indispensable role in modulating plant growth–defense trade-offs. Transcriptomics data further suggested that the cellobiose-activated plant–pathogen pathways are involved in microbe/pathogen-associated molecular pattern-triggered immune responses. Genes encoding receptor-like kinases, transcription factors, and redox homeostasis, phytohormone signal transduction, and pathogenesis-related proteins were also up- or down-regulated by cellobiose. Taken together, the findings of this study demonstrated that cellobiose serves as an elicitor to directly activate disease-resistance-related cellular functions. In addition, multiple genes have been identified as potential modulators of the cellobiose-induced immune response, which could aid understanding of underlying molecular events.
Modelling the Lyman-α forest with Eulerian and SPH hydrodynamical methods
Authors: Chabanier Solène , Emberson J D , Lukić Zarija , Pulido Jesus , Habib Salman , Rangel Esteban , Sexton Jean , Frontiere Nicholas , Buehlmann Michael
Published: November 2022

We compare two state-of-the-art numerical codes to study the overall accuracy in modelling the intergalactic medium and reproducing Lyman-α forest observables for DESI and high-resolution data sets. The codes employ different approaches to solving both gravity and modelling the gas hydrodynamics. The first code, Nyx, solves the Poisson equation using the Particle-Mesh (PM) method and the Euler equations using a finite-volume method. The second code, CRK-HACC , uses a Tree-PM method to solve for gravity, and an improved Lagrangian smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) technique, where fluid elements are modelled with particles, to treat the intergalactic gas. We compare the convergence behaviour of the codes in flux statistics as well as the degree to which the codes agree in the converged limit. We find good agreement overall with differences being less than observational uncertainties, and a particularly notable ≲1 per cent agreement in the 1D flux power spectrum. This agreement was achieved by applying a tessellation methodology for reconstructing the density in CRK-HACC instead of using an SPH kernel as is standard practice. We show that use of the SPH kernel can lead to significant and unnecessary biases in flux statistics; this is especially prominent at high redshifts, z ∼ 5, as the Lyman-α forest mostly comes from lower-density regions that are intrinsically poorly sampled by SPH particles.
Propeller states in locally supercritical ULXs
Authors: Middleton M , Gúrpide A , Walton D J
Published: November 2022

An expected signature of the presence of neutron stars in the population of ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are large scale changes in X-ray luminosity, as systems reach spin equilibrium and a propeller state ensues. We explore the predicted luminosity changes when the disc is locally supercritical, finding that a significant parameter space in dipole field strength, and accretion rate (at large radius) can be accompanied by changes of less than an order of magnitude in luminosity. We discuss the spectral signature and locate three ULXs (IC 342 X-1, Cir ULX-5, and NGC 1313 X-1), which appear to show changes consistent with the super-Eddington systems entering a propeller state, and place rough constraints on the dipole field strength of NGC 1313 X-1 of < 1010 G. This work implies that the most reliable means by which to search for putative propeller states will be to search for changes in hardness ratio and at high energies.
Introduction
Authors: Nolan Cathal J.
Published: November 2022

This chapter concerns the virtue of mercy in war, emphasizing the pity of war that Welsh poet Wilfred Owen dwelled on before he was killed in November 1918 in the last week of the Great War. It shows how mercy limits cruelty in ways laws and honor codes seldom do, because mercy is the highest personal and moral quality any person can achieve. Mercy is above all other virtues and is superior to bravery, especially in a soldier. The chapter explores how, inside the essential barbarism of war, some still act with astonishing grace toward their enemy. It depicts ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary swirl of savagery, who did not see themselves as saints or heroes at the time yet showed rare courage and moral restraint.
AI in Law or AI in the Place of Law?
Authors: Postema Gerald J.
Published: November 2022

The exponential growth in the power and reach of artificial intelligence poses a further challenge: artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have colonized the law itself. This chapter argues that artificial intelligence, suitably regulated, may have a role to play in ordinary operations of the law, but that it must not take the place of law. It contrasts AI’s distinctive modus operandi, its characteristic mode of reasoning and its design for social control, with law’s distinctive mode of reasoning and mode of control. It argues that governance by algorithm leaves no room for legal reasoning, and hence no room for judgment, reflection, interpersonal engagement, or personal decision-maker responsibility. The chapter then asks what of value would be lost to us as individuals and to our political community if AI were to replace law in a large swath of our political and personal lives? It argues, first, that AI has no room for judgment-enhancing human elements like compassion. Second, AI-dominated adjudication of civil disputes and AI-dominated enforcement of the criminal law provide no opportunity for meaningful participation by immediately affected parties or by the public at large. Third, AI-dominated reasoning leaves no room for contesting specific exercises of power; and it leaves no room for contesting the alleged warrant for that exercise. Fourth, AI technologies replace accountability with accounting, the process of offering reasons and arguments with counting and calculation. Finally, AI technologies remove regulation from the deliberative domain of those subject to it.
InsideEnvironments’s Psychedelic “Psychological Sound”
Authors: Szabo Victor
Published: November 2022

The first chapter focuses on Tintinnabulation (Contemplative Sound), a 1970 recording of bells from Syntonic Research, Inc.’s Environments series of nature sound LPs. The Environments series, created by Irv Teibel, between 1969 and 1979 popularly packaged spare audio recordings, mostly of nature sounds, under the pretense of their “psychological” efficacy. This chapter historicizes Environments and avant-garde minimalism together as concurrent and overlapping explorations of the psychological—and psychedelic—affordances of recorded cyclical and droning sounds. It investigates 1960s psychedelic art, as well as the early marketing of recorded minimal music in the late ’60s, as formative contexts for Teibel’s promotion of ambient audio as a hip commodity. Using Tintinnabulation as its chief example, it demonstrates how Environments embodied the ideals of the psychedelic counterculture as it popularized the hypnotic sonic minimalism of its avant-garde participants for a mass middle-class market.
Pacifica Radio’sMusic from the Hearts of Spaceand the Spacious Sound of California’s New Age
Authors: Szabo Victor
Published: November 2022

The second chapter investigates the first decade of Music from the Hearts of Space, a Bay Area–based radio program that from 1973 to 1982 crystallized the ideals of the local grassroots spirituality network through the DJs’ ethereal “space music.” It describes how the aesthetic and concept of Hearts, which in the 1980s found national popularity through NPR syndication, grew out of the metaphysical ideals and material culture of the ’70s Bay Area New Age network. A style analysis illustrates, by way of the program’s most frequently played tracks during its first decade, common properties of “space music.” This chapter links these properties to the program’s universalist social vision, to which it applies a sociological critique and historical perspective. A concluding section details how Hearts’s “space music” appellation fell to the wayside of media discourses as the consumer market for ambient audio became more popularly fragmented by the new age and ambient genre labels.
Helena Augusta
Authors: Hillner Julia
Published: November 2022

Helena, the mother of the first Christian emperor Constantine, is best known for the last two years of her life, when she traveled around the Eastern Mediterranean, and for something that, in all likelihood, she did not do: the discovery of the True Cross relic. Using a vast range of sources, from textual and epigraphical to visual, and an array of archaeological insights from the places Helena lived at or visited, this book instead investigates Helena in the round, taking seriously the ruptures in her life course and her changing positions within the imperial and female networks of her time. The book follows Helena’s life, the majority of which was spent in the third century and during the period of the tetrarchy, and explores the different ways in which she was commemorated after her death, up to the late sixth century. It wrestles Helena’s historical significance back from medieval legends, to demonstrate the development and purpose of her role within Constantinian politics and to chart her meandering impact on the image and behavior of the Christian empress in the late Roman world.
The Necklace Affair
Authors: Hillner Julia
Published: November 2022

This chapter examines the evidence on Eastern tetrarchic women, especially those around the emperor Galerius and his nephew Maximinus Daza. It shows how these men’s attempts to build up their dynasties via commemorative tombs for their mothers and public profiles for their wives through titles and stylistic make-overs foreshadowed Constantine’s display of his own wife Fausta and of Helena. The chapter also details the brutal consequences of such public exposure for some of these women once their male relations had died and describes their executions in Antioch and Thessalonica.
Keeping Up Appearances
Authors: Hillner Julia
Published: November 2022

This chapter explores the circumstances around Helena’s appearance at Constantine’s court, evidenced by coinage minted in Thessalonica c. 318. It shows how Constantine’s military expansion eastward coincided with an ever more public profile of his female relatives, mirroring that of earlier tetrarchic women, until his final victory over his brother-in-law Licinius in 324, which became the context of Helena’s elevation to Augusta. The chapter investigates Helena’s role in Constantine’s dynasty at this point and her relationship with Constantine’s wife Fausta, also promoted to Augusta in 324, through a detailed examination and comparison of their portraits on coins, cameos, intaglios, and other artwork.
Silence of the Empress
Authors: Hillner Julia
Published: November 2022

This chapter covers the decades of the fourth century, between the late 330s and 80s, during which little mention was made of Helena. It discusses the reasons for such silence, including the need of Helena’s grandsons to repair relations with their “Theodoran” relatives in the face of continuing violent divisions. To assess the extent of Helena’s immediate influence and legacy, the chapter follows the trail of two female descendants of the Constantinian dynasty: Helena’s granddaughter Constantina and Theodora’s (probable) great-granddaughter Justina. Their respective activities replicated aspects of Helena’s role at the court of Constantine, but changed historical circumstances allowed them to considerably expand on Helena’s spheres of action. The chapter also discusses the greater visibility and negative publicity that especially Justina attracted, which became the framework for Helena’s rediscovery as a significant figure from the Constantinian past.
Midnight Sun: Johnny Mercer
Authors: Furia Philip , Patterson Laurie J.
Published: November 2022

Because of Johnny Mercer, the rules for the Oscars now require that songs must be specifically written for the screen to be eligible for an Academy Award for Best Song. Mercer wrote a song, “Blues in the Night,” for a movie of the same title. He lost to Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern, who had written the winning song, “The Last Night I Saw Paris,” for Lady Be Good. Mercer was unique as a songwriter: a southerner (in a world of mostly New Yorkers), he wrote both music and words, and he sang. His business acumen culminated in the co-creation of Capitol Records with Buddy DeSylva and Glenn Wallichs. But perhaps he is best known for his songs that reflect his heartbreak over his love of Judy Garland: “That Old Black Magic” and “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).”
Call Me Irresponsible: Sammy Cahn
Authors: Furia Philip , Patterson Laurie J.
Published: November 2022

This new chapter of The Poets of Tin Pan Alley celebrates the works of lyricist Sammy Cahn. Perhaps one of the songs Cahn is best known for is “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” (frequently thought to be “My Beer, Mister Shane”). Cahn wrote the better-known English lyrics for this song, which was originally written in Yiddish, with Saul Chaplin. Working with Jule Styne, Cahn had such hits as “I’ve Heard That Song Before,” “I’ll Walk Alone,” and “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” Cahn and Styne because Sinatra’s “house” songwriters, writing many of the songs for his movies.
Pluralism and Priority
Authors: Kelly Thomas
Published: November 2022

This chapter argues for a robust pluralism about bias, a pluralism that has two aspects. First, many different kinds of things are genuinely biased: the fact that in the normal course of everyday life we unhesitatingly attribute bias to a radically diverse collection of things is not a matter of overly casual speech or sloppy thought on our part, but rather reflects reality. Second, this pluralism is robust, in the sense that no one of type of biased thing is fundamental in the order of explanation across contexts. In addition to arguing that robust pluralism is true, the chapter offers a speculative hypothesis about why such pluralism holds. It explores the relationships between biased processes, biased outcomes, and biased people, and argues that biased processes sometimes produce unbiased outcomes, that unbiased processes sometimes produce biased outcomes, and that biases of people are typically not fundamental in the order of explanation.
The Norm-Theoretic Account of Bias
Authors: Kelly Thomas
Published: November 2022

This chapter introduces the norm-theoretic account of bias, according to which biases typically involve systematic departures from norms. It explores the perspectival character of bias attributions, or the ways in which our first order views about a topic rationally influence and constrain our higher-order judgments about who is and who isn’t biased about that topic. It shows how this general framework explains a familiar phenomenon: the fact that accusations of bias often inspire not only denials but also countercharges of bias. It explores the circumstances in which we are rationally required to believe that those who disagree with us are not only mistaken but also biased simply because they disagree with us in the way that they do. In addition, it argues that theoretical rationality, practical rationality, and morality can all require us to be biased, in the pejorative sense of “bias.”
Biased People
Authors: Kelly Thomas
Published: November 2022

Biases of people are best understood as multiply realizable dispositions that admit of degrees. “Bias” and its cognates often function like thick evaluative terms, and attributions of bias are frequently used to make or implicate normative claims. A person might count as biased against something because of what she thinks, how she acts, or what she feels; and different people might count as biased against the same thing despite a lack of overlap in their mental states, their actions, and their dispositions. One common way in which a person can end up biased is by trying not to be, as in cases of overcompensation. The contrasts between biased believers and biased agents, and between biased agents and unreliable agents, are further explored.
Introduction
Authors: Mayer Benoit
Published: November 2022

This chapter introduces the book’s project, which is to develop a doctrinal analysis of the international law on climate change mitigation. First of all, it shows that the need for such doctrinal analysis remains largely unmet. It goes on to outlines the tenets of the standard doctrinal methodology on which the following chapters rely, recognizing certain difficulties, for instance relating to the tension between ascending and descending reasoning in the identification of international legal norms. Finally, the chapter introduces the conceptual and terminological framework used throughout the book, presents the outline of the following chapters, and responds to some possible objections.
The Nature of Mitigation Obligations
Authors: Mayer Benoit
Published: November 2022

The first part of the monograph has identified, among other things, certain general obligations on climate change mitigation arising from customary international law and from general provisions of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The second part seeks to determine the implications of these general mitigation obligations. Chapter V provides an introductory reflection on the nature of general mitigation obligations. Chapter VI shows the perils of a judicial interpretation of states’ requisite level of mitigation action in the absence of any reliable benchmark. Chapter VII suggests an alternative approach to the judicial interpretation of general mitigation obligation, relying on the identification of corollary duties, that is, the appropriate measures implied by general mitigation obligations.
General Conclusion
Authors: Mayer Benoit
Published: November 2022

Yet to come
The EU’s Diplomatic Framework
Authors: Duquet Sanderijn
Published: November 2022

This chapter focuses on the legal architecture of the EU’s diplomatic framework. It addresses the patchwork of legal and political arrangements that the EU constructed to execute its diplomatic and consular roles. First, the chapter looks at how the Union ensures that privileges and immunities of its delegations to third states and international organizations are up to diplomatic standard, including as regards their staff, communication, and property (active ius legationis). Second, it determines how the EU can accredit permanent missions of member states, third states and international organizations, thereby asserting a protection that equals the protection granted to its own delegations abroad (passive ius legationis).
The Interplay between the EU and Its Member States
Authors: Duquet Sanderijn
Published: November 2022

This chapter concerns the triangular relationship of the Union, its member states, and diplomatic and consular law and the three sets of rules governing their regulatory and executive actions: EU law, public international law (PIL), and the national law of member states. It starts with a study on coexisting norms that examines how the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) has addressed diplomatic and consular law in the EU legal order. A following section tests how rights of legation can coexist in the international legal order and proposes a model of EU diplomacy, with both parallel and interactive features.
Concluding Thoughts
Authors: Duquet Sanderijn
Published: November 2022

This chapter offers conclusions to the handbook on EU diplomatic law, which has found that EU diplomacy, despite its practices and wide recognition, gives rise to a considerable number of vexed legal problems and questions. It makes the case for the Union functioning as a diplomatic actor in its own right as an entity separate from its member states. Concretely, it looks at the EU in the general international diplomatic legal system, how the Union’s propensity for conformism in the diplomatic arena works in practice, and the contributions made by the EU to diplomatic and consular law.
Setting the Scene
Authors: Macdonald David W. , Newman Chris
Published: November 2022

Observing that Wytham’s badgers live in groups, we begin by querying the adaptive significance of badger behaviour, in the context of their ecological circumstances, framed by the constraints of their mustelid phylogeny and, in turn, their mammalian ancestry. We start this quest, which is woven through all 19 chapters, at the beginning, with birth. Setting the scene we ask: What are the conditions, social and physical, deep inside setts into which badgers are born? What proportion of cubs dies along their journey from birth to emergence from the sett, and from what? What challenges do badgers face from birth to weaning? How do they first start to engage with their other social group compatriots? The chapter ends, in badger chronology, with the scene now set, and young cubs preparing to venture above ground. From the birth of a badger, we then turn to the birth of badgers, and review the evidence for the evolutionary origin of the species. By the end of the chapter readers have been introduced to Wytham Woods, the early life of the badgers that live there, and the broader perspective of the origins of badgers amongst the Carnivora.
Sex
Authors: Macdonald David W. , Newman Chris
Published: November 2022

Do all individuals mate and, if not, what factors determine winners and losers? Using infrared video cameras we describe Rabelaisian badger mating encounters in a polygynandrous system of promiscuity. This led to discoveries about the mating oestrous period in Wytham, and how this varies between badger populations, according to density and likelihood of mating assurance. But there is also mating outside of these fertile periods, so what is the function of this non-conceptive intercourse? Why would female badgers mate with many males without appearing to be choosy on her suitor’s qualities, and what opportunities does she have for selecting between candidate mates, including post-copulatory selection of whose embryos to implant?
The Ecological Foundations to Badger Group Living
Authors: Macdonald David W. , Newman Chris
Published: November 2022

Why do badgers live in groups? If not for benefits linked to alloparenting or hunting success, what might favour Wytham’s 23 groups of c. 8 badgers, versus hundreds of individual burrows? The answer lies in the transition from behaviour to ecology, and so this transitional chapter begins by documenting badger diet in Wytham. An important element is the earthworm, and we use almost 40 years of data to reveal that young badgers, with least resilience to tolerate periods of food scarcity, present the greatest starvation risk. We revisit ideas, such as the Resource Dispersion Hypothesis, that interpret society as an emergent property of ecology combined with factors such as ability to tolerate food insecurity. Moving from ethological observations of badgers foraging for worms, and an exploration of optimal foraging theory, we document how badger social group geometry has changed over the decades. We ask what aspect of sociology imposes a glass ceiling on group size, and show the time scale of the fissioning of the original 12 progenitor groups in the 1970s into the 23 contemporary millennial groups. How does this affect interpretation of latrine-marked boundaries? This chapter leads to the question of whether the badgers’ evolutionary past has prepared them for twenty-first-century Wytham Woods. Do the ecological circumstances of Wytham in 2020 fit within the envelope of adaptive intra-specific variation (the sociological phenotype) that defines a badger, or might sociality be an as-yet not fully exploited compromise for high-density living?
In Sickness and in Health
Authors: Macdonald David W. , Newman Chris
Published: November 2022

Amongst the factors buffeting animal populations, badgers included, is contagious disease. In Chapter 2 we learnt that surviving intestinal coccidiosis was a crucial first hurdle to badger cubs being recruited to Wytham’s population. In this chapter we turn to the badgers’ natural pathogens, their immune defences against them, and the sickly influence of stress. A particularly remarkable case is Mustelid herpesvirus, which, intriguingly, is revealed to be a venereal disease amongst Wytham’s badgers, raising evolutionary questions as to whether the scent of infection influences mate selection. We also ask whether psychological stress, for example perhaps provoked by living in a particularly dense population, compounds the risks to good health amongst Wytham’s badgers. The answers lead us deeply into oxidative stress and imbalances caused by cellular stress responses and a consequential build-up of reactive oxygen species (ROS). These molecular phenomena tie up with ecology when we analyse how antioxidant capacity of badgers is inhibited when the going gets tough, for example when food is limited, and then, in evolutionary theory, is there a developmental trade-off, where cubs investing in antioxidant defences cope better with ROS arising from catabolic stress? And to draw back to a wider perspective, how might the increasingly unseasonable, variable and extreme, conditions predicted under UK climate change scenarios interact with oxidative stress and investment in antioxidants? We explore this through the development of the leucocyte coping capacity test. This leads us to the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) and how it might link badger pathogen resistance and mate choice.
The Story of Badgers and TB
Authors: Macdonald David W. , Newman Chris
Published: November 2022

Although for much of the 40 years that we have studied Wytham’s badgers, there was no sign of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) amongst them, they were at the heart of the controversy over management of this disease. The reason is that Wytham was used as the paradigm of an uninfected, unperturbed population. This chapter provides a crisp summary of the impact of Wytham’s badgers on thinking and policy, and especially the perturbation hypothesis. However, we do not dwell on well-rehearsed material: instead we take a fresh look at how the revelations in this book offer new thinking about bTB and its control. That insight is deepened because in recent years bTB has entered Wytham’s badgers, and we have studied its progress and initiated a vaccination programme.
Senescence, Telomeres, and Life history Trade-offs
Authors: Macdonald David W. , Newman Chris
Published: November 2022

We began with birth, and we arrive at old age. How well do Shakespeare’s ‘Seven Ages of Man’ match the badger’s reality? We explore the sex steroid profile of badgers throughout their lives, documenting how these steroids ebb with age, but that a subset of elderly individuals remain fertile. Meanwhile, curiously for a wild animal, a remaining proportion lives on in post-reproductive condition. This leads us to senescence and questions about what goes wrong, or impedes repair, at the cellular level, and the puzzle of why badgers, like most other larger mammals, don’t make telomerase continuously, regenerate their telomeres, and avoid cellular senescence. Interestingly, we find that badger telomeres get longer in meline middle age. Why? And in this chapter, as in others, we find that it’s the start each individual gets in life that counts. Why should cubs experiencing tough times early in life, linked again to inclement weather, have longer telomeres? The answer leads to a comparison of different preparations for life.
The Cult of Stephen in Jerusalem
Authors: Méndez Hugo
Published: November 2022

As the site of only a small and obscure Christian population, Jerusalem witnessed few instances of anti-Christian persecution between 135 and 313 ce. This fact became a source of embarrassment to the city in late antiquity—a period when martyr traditions, relics, and shrines were closely intertwined with local prestige. At that time, the city had every incentive to stretch the fame of its few apostolic martyrs as far as possible—especially the fame of the biblical St. Stephen, the figure traditionally regarded as the first Christian martyr (Acts 6–8). What Jerusalem lacked in the quantity of its martyrs, it believed it could compensate for in an exclusive, local claim to the figure widely hailed as the “Protomartyr,” “firstborn of the martyrs,” and “chief of confessors.” This book traces the rise of the cult of Stephen in Jerusalem, exploring such historical episodes as the fabrication of the saint’s relics, the construction of a grand basilica in his honor, and the multiplication of his feast days. It argues that local church authorities promoted devotion to Stephen in the fifth century in a conscious attempt to position him as a patron saint for Jerusalem—a symbol of the city’s Christian identity and power.
Introduction
Authors: Méndez Hugo
Published: November 2022

Through the numerous disruptions affecting Jerusalem in the first and second centuries, the burial sites of those apostolic-era figures killed in or around the city were lost. There is also no evidence that the city’s Christians experienced episodes of local persecution in later centuries. Thus, although Aelia/Jerusalem boasted numerous pilgrimage sites associated with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, it lacked even a single tomb or shrine for a Christian martyr up to the mid-fourth century. In a period in which cities articulated their prestige around local martyr cults, the absence of any such cult in Jerusalem was embarrassing. In this context, the city’s local church had every incentive to stretch the fame of its few early martyrs as far as possible. In time, the community opted to stress its unique connections to the biblical St. Stephen, the figure traditionally regarded as the first and chief Christian martyr (Acts 6–8).
The Prestige of Stephen
Authors: Méndez Hugo
Published: November 2022

This first chapter traces the long-term motivations for Jerusalem’s investments in the cult of the Protomartyr. In the explosion of martyr piety in the early fourth century, Stephen’s memory rose to new heights of prominence. Nowhere was that prominence more visibly inscribed than in Stephen’s 26 December feast, now rapidly spreading across the Mediterranean. By design, that feast occupied the first open date on many ancient Christian liturgical calendars, symbolizing Stephen’s priority and pre-eminence among all martyrs. In a period, then, when cities seized on the fame of local martyrs to claim importance themselves as spaces, the city of Jerusalem could not ignore its connections to a saint hailed as the “chief of confessors.”
A Very Great Sanctuary
Authors: Méndez Hugo
Published: November 2022

This chapter explores the enshrinement of Stephen’s relics in various churches throughout Jerusalem—a process culminating in the construction of a “Martyrion of St. Stephen” outside the city’s principal gate. In the 430s, Juvenal of Jerusalem secured funds for the construction of a dedicated martyr shrine to Stephen—a structure anchoring what became the single largest complex of ecclesiastical buildings in the city. This chapter argues that the size of the structure and its prominent place in local ritual life symbolized the unique profile of Stephen among all saints venerated in the city. Through it, the city articulated its unique attachment to Stephen as a patron martyr and civic symbol.
Obligations to Blow the Whistle
Authors: Lewis Jeremy , Bowers John , Fodder Martin , Mitchell Jack
Published: November 2022

This chapter explains the circumstances in which workers may be obliged by contractual or fiduciary obligations to make disclosures of information to their employer in relation to wrongdoing by others or their own wrongdoing. It also addresses whether there may be a duty on the worker to investigate wrongdoing. It then considers various statutory and regulatory obligations upon workers to make what will in effect be disclosures of information, for example by the imposition of a duty of candour on health service professionals and on employees under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations. The benefits of a whistleblowing policy in such circumstances are explained.
Macro-level Assessment of Deliberative Quality
Authors: Fleuß Dannica
Published: November 2022

This chapter outlines a strategy for assessing deliberative quality at a systemic level, that is, for measuring the ‘macro-deliberativeness’ of democratic political systems. To meet the challenges associated with this enterprise, it suggests combining two strands of research: the theoretical groundwork of systemic deliberative theory and the methodological guidelines of democracy measurements. The chapter outlines recommendations for conceptualization, operationalization, and aggregation procedures that reflect the conceptual requirements of deliberative theorists. It then compiles a ‘methodological toolkit’ and provides practical advice for how researchers can apply and combine existing methodological tools from deliberative democracy scholarship to arrive at a theoretically sound and empirically valid measurement of macro-deliberativeness.
Mixed Methods
Authors: Escobar Oliver
Published: November 2022

The areas of inquiry in deliberative democracy are multifaceted and often call for methodological approaches that can grapple with complexity. Deliberative studies cover diverse foci, from individuals, groups, collectives, and networks, to artefacts, practices, processes, systems, and cultures. This chapter argues that mixed methods research (MMR) is well suited to investigating deliberative democracy, while also noting the limitations of this approach to social and political science. Mixing methods entails the integration of findings gleaned from qualitative and quantitative strands within a coherent research design. The chapter reviews methodological foundations and outlines questions and puzzles where mixed methods can contribute to deliberative scholarship. It also covers research design, data generation, analysis and quality standards, while offering examples that illustrate different types of research design and how they can be applied. The chapter concludes with a call to strengthen the mixed methods community of practice within the deliberative community of inquiry.
Community of Inquiry
Authors: Nishiyama Kei
Published: November 2022

This chapter introduces the ‘Community of Inquiry’, (CoI) as a form of deliberative group interview. Pioneered by pragmatist philosophers such as John Dewey, CoI enables reflective knowledge-construction in a group setting. When applied as a deliberative interview method, CoI requires participants to share their views and experiences about the issue at stake, exchange reasons, question taken-for-granted assumptions, and listen to different views. During this process, CoI participants act both as interviewers and interviewees. This enables them to examine their experience carefully and reflectively and serves to minimize potential power imbalances between them. This chapter draws on the example of CoI practised with teenagers in Japan and elaborates on the ways CoI can contribute to interpretive deliberative research. Research process involving CoI includes: (i) set up, (ii) topic and question selection, (iii) instruction, (iv) deliberation and facilitation, and (v) wrap-up and analysis.
Italy
Authors: Marrone Alessandro
Published: November 2022

The chapter analyses Italy’s policy within NATO, its characteristics, priorities, strengths, and weaknesses. It explains why NATO has always been central to Italy’s security and defence policy and this despite the frequent turnover in the country’s governments. On the one hand, Rome believes in the idea of an international liberal order which is cooperative, multilateral, and rules-based, and NATO comes as a pillar of such order. On the other hand, narrowly defined national interests are better pursued through this framework than through bilateral relations with stronger interlocutors like the United States. The chapter also argues that Italy has constantly sought a greater NATO commitment to the ‘wider Mediterranean’ region through crisis management operations and partnerships. Italy has obtained some results in this regard, including the establishment of the Strategic Direction South ‘Hub’ in Naples, yet the overall weak attention of the Alliance to its Southern flank has generated frustration among Italian elites. This notwithstanding, the chapter shows Italy’s record of constant presence in NATO operations, thus presenting itself as a security provider within the Alliance. The Italian presence in Afghanistan has been particularly significant, but Italy has also been much involved in Kosovo and in Iraq. Looking forward, Italy is likely to continue to engage with and within NATO, in accordance with the evolution of the threat environment and the US posture, while pursuing its traditional priorities, including NATO–EU cooperation.
Walking from Dandi
Authors: Siganporia Harmony
Published: November 2022

In February 2019, Harmony Siganporia walked from Dandi to Ahmedabad, retracing the route of Gandhi’s Salt March in reverse. She walked this route of just under 400 kilometres over 25 days, much as Gandhi and the original band of Marchers did in 1930. The ‘Dandi Path’ is the setting against which she explores the story of modern Gujarat, tracing the contours of the State’s seismic shift towards espousing the narrative of vikas, abandoning in the process the possibility of a quest for swaraj. Gujarat has been described as the laboratory of Hindutva, and this book is an effort to explore this theme, even as it attempts to unearth whether there remain any contesting epistemes to it; memories of the region’s prior avatar as the setting against which Gandhi put into practice his experiments with truth, non-violent civil disobedience, and satyagraha. This project investigates what—if anything—remains of the Salt March in Gujarat’s cultural memory, while also attempting to fill out the contours of the ‘single story’ of vikas with which the State has become so closely associated.
Aslali-Ahmedabad
Authors: Siganporia Harmony
Published: November 2022

This section pertains to the end of the journey, with the walkers arriving in Ahmedabad, at Gandhi’s Satyagraha Ashram along the banks of the Sabarmati River, after 25 days on the road. The walk may well be walked, but it keeps walking its walkers. The Conclusion which follows this description of the last day on the Dandi Path muses about the role of the ashram in Gandhi’s life and scheme of things, asserting that it was more space than place; more about the community that cohered around Gandhi than about the physical location it was grounded in; more about the experiments—individual and collective—that were the markers of aforesaid community than about them merely living a prescriptive existence premised on the famous Ashramic vows.
Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, and the ‘Apocalyptic View’
Authors: Lovibond Sabina
Published: November 2022

Some aspects of Wittgenstein’s thought, especially on modernity and on the condition of Europe after 1945, are considered in the light of a remark he makes about the ‘apocalyptic’ view of the world. The influence of Tolstoy on Wittgenstein—already apparent in the closing pages of the Tractatus, but not limited to that early work—is discussed and elaborated with reference to the idea of a ‘form of life’ as a locus of order, and also to that of ‘exceptionality’ in an unfolding course of events; the latter sets up a connection with the ‘apocalyptic’ theme. This imaginative backdrop remains visible in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, which draws upon it to perhaps unexpected effect in achieving a dialectical balance between the motifs of order and breakdown.
Between Tradition and Criticism
Authors: Lovibond Sabina
Published: November 2022

This essay considers how the ‘authority of tradition’ can be viewed as an intellectually enabling (not just authoritarian) principle, invoking for this purpose a ‘naturalism of second nature’ in which rational capacities are understood as embedded in a quasi-Wittgensteinian ‘form of life’; and hence, as grounded ultimately in a certain contingent like-mindedness which exceeds what we can make explicit (or ‘codify’). However, we need to enquire further into what is meant by ‘codification’. It is argued that the kind of authority which does genuinely inhere in cultural tradition will prove not to be at variance with the demands of independent or critical thought, and that recognition of the real social possibility of such thought—where that possibility exists—is in fact required by Wittgenstein’s (metaphysical) quietism.
The Varieties of Attention
Authors: Lovibond Sabina
Published: November 2022

This essay interrogates Iris Murdoch’s call for a ‘new vocabulary of attention’ and her appeal, in that context, to the thought of Simone Weil. In Murdoch’s early literary essays, the novel—at its best—figures as an encounter with the unsurveyable (‘sublime’) plurality of human character and situation. Meanwhile, Weil’s own work offers the idea of attention as annihilation of the ego: ‘Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.’ But here a certain mismatch is noticeable between the novelist’s powers of attention (and the reader’s pleasure in imaginative engagement with fiction), and on the other hand the Weilian ideal of self-abnegation. The difficulty this poses for Murdoch’s Platonism is the central theme of The Fire and the Sun, which the present essay discusses in connection with some relevant evidence from her novels.
Vulnerable and Invulnerable
Authors: Lovibond Sabina
Published: November 2022

In her most recent work, Pamela Sue Anderson engages with the facts of ‘mutual vulnerability’ and ‘precarious life’, whether at a practical level or in philosophical argument. The essay considers this topic in relation to the tradition we inherit from Plato, and to ‘dialectics’ in the specialized, Platonic sense of truth-directed conversation. It suggests that there are these two sides to the classic dialectical encounter: aporia, as exemplified by the sceptical and quasi-sacrificial figure of Socrates; but also the (equally Socratic) ambition to escape from aporia, to be no longer at a loss. With the latter point in view, Anderson’s theme of intellectual precarity returns us to the institutional critique of philosophy, and to the lived experience of vulnerability about which some practitioners of the subject know so much more than others.
Philosophy, Literature, Politics
Authors: Lovibond Sabina
Published: November 2022

Richard Rorty wishes philosophy to turn away from traditional epistemological ideals of reason, truth, and objectivity and devote itself instead to ‘continuing the conversation of the West’. He celebrates the achievements of ‘abnormal’ philosophical discourse, represented for example by Heidegger and (the later) Wittgenstein. The Oxford philosopher R. G. Collingwood is an exact contemporary of the two thinkers just mentioned and shares Rorty’s contrarian and historicist attitude, as well as his interest in the status of philosophy as a branch of literature. On the other hand, Collingwood looks like a clear case of allegiance to the teleological and rationalist values which Rorty challenges. This essay explores some worrying implications—for political engagement as well as for pure theory—of replacing the rationalist conception of philosophy with a Rorty-style successor that would no longer conceive of itself as engaged in (truth-orientated) ‘enquiry’.
Reading Summer in Summer 2020
Authors: Davies Ben , Lupton Christina , Gormsen Schmidt Johanne
Published: November 2022

Chapter 6 zooms in on Ali Smith’s 2020 novel Summer, a fiction published in that very specific season it describes. This provides an opportunity to explore the way readers connected that first summer of the pandemic to the consumption of new novels, as well as to ask more theoretically whether a novel can anticipate its own reception. Not only were there synchronic differences between people’s pandemic experiences, but there were also differences diachronically across the period of the pandemic. It is with this latter complication in mind that this chapter turns to one season which does seem to have solicited a sense of agreement amongst readers, if only as an idea: that of Summer 2020. Many accounts of reading gathered converge on the sense that it was then that there was (or that there seems in hindsight to have been) more time for books. The first summer of the pandemic was marked in readers’ minds as providing spaces and times almost mythically hospitable to the novel. Turning to a second order problem that this sense of agreement about summer reading generates, however, the chapter argues that the experience of real readers shows that works cannot completely locate themselves in time, however much they wish to speak to a particular historical moment.
Questions
Authors: Dixon R. M. W.
Published: November 2022

The Jalnguy (‘mother-in-law’) avoidance style has different form for each lexical unit but grammatical affixes and words are the same. This principle shows that interrogative content words fall into two classes: (a) lexical interrogatives which are different in Jalnguy; these include ‘what’, ‘how many’, and ‘when’, interrogative verbs ‘do what’ and ‘do how’ and (b) grammatical interrogatives which are the same in Jalnguy: ‘who’ and ‘where’. There is detailed discussion and exemplification for each interrogative content word. Of especial note are the intransitive and transitive question verbs ‘do what’ and ‘do how’; these show similar structure and faction to the pair of demonstrative verbs ‘do like this’ and are discussed in conjunction with them. Polar questions may be marked by a second position enclitic =ma, or just by intonation. The chapter closes with speculation about past diachronic changes.