bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Theater
Authors: Sawyer R. Keith , Henriksen Danah
Published: December 2023

This chapter reviews research on creativity in theater performance. Although much stage performance in Western countries is highly scripted, performances in non-Western cultures often incorporate substantial improvisation. The chapter reviews research by anthropologists on traditional non-written performance genres, and reviews the influence of commedia dell’arte—an improvisational genre—on European theater. The chapter reviews studies of the personality of the actor; the flow or peak state that actors experience; and the role of emotional expression in performance. The chapter ends with a review of ensemble creativity, particularly the form of improvisational theater associated with Chicago in the United States.
How Flexible Authoritarianism Looks and Feels
Authors: Schwenck Anna
Published: December 2023

This chapter establishes flexible authoritarianism as more than an abstract ideology; it operates at concrete sites, can be experienced, and is shaped by people co-creating these sites. Government-sponsored youth-leadership summer camps take place in all of Russia’s federal districts. They are political spectacles, intended to legitimate flexible authoritarianism by staging youthful support for the regime, influencing young people’s self-perception, and engaging them as co-creators of a government-sponsored civic life. These camps resemble business start-up meetings—enhancing campers’ project management and grant-writing skills—as much as Soviet summer camps. While seeking to engender creativity and ambition, the camps uphold an authoritarian Erziehungsstil that discourages independent thinking and cooperation among peers. Based on the author’s observations as a participant and young campers’ perceptions of their camp experience, the chapter provides a thick description of how flexible authoritarianism operates through narratives, images, symbols, music, and routines.
Loyal Youths’ Individualist Quests for Change
Authors: Schwenck Anna
Published: December 2023

Drawing on narrative interviews conducted with almost forty participants in provincial youth-leadership camps, this chapter investigates the texture of their loyalty to the regime, their quests for self-development, and the contribution of such quests to the common good. It shows that most campers are critical of the workings of the Russian government but largely tolerate or support the goals of the regime. It argues that campers seek social change through individualist projects but have a markedly apolitical understanding of this change. Motivated to enjoy the conveniences available to the middle class in economically advanced liberal democracies, they are keen to spur local development in their home regions. The chapter reveals that most campers self-identify as active, entrepreneurially minded, patriotic citizens, while condemning those who would passively live off state spending.
Professionalizing Patriots
Authors: Schwenck Anna
Published: December 2023

This chapter examines the activities of “Stop Rudeness” (StopKham) and “Lion Versus,” (Lev Protiv) two law-and-order youth initiatives that enforce and promote patriotic morals through the branding and staging of heroic masculinity. These initiatives popularize a neotraditional mindset among young people by challenging alleged offenders on camera and uploading suspenseful, humorous, and violent video clips of their raids on online platforms such as YouTube. The vigilante-entrepreneurs promote a new type of masculinity, fusing the heroic, combative figure of the rebel with that of the successful entrepreneur. This chapter examines the popularization and popification of authoritarian values in the digital era, and shows how these enterprises reflect the regime’s goals back at itself. The video clips translate governmental discourses of deservingness and undeservingness into a hip, youthful genre of social-media entertainment that reaches beyond Russia.
From Text to Numbers
Authors: Stoltz Dustin S. , Taylor Marshall A.
Published: December 2023

This chapter builds on information retrieval research and corpus linguistics to address three technical considerations: How do we represent texts efficiently? How do we summarize the contents of a text? How do we retrieve a text based on its contents? The first step in our journey involves turning words into a structured dataset with useful numeric quantities.
A hypothesised model and theoretical issues related to posttraumatic stress disorder in physical illnesses
Authors: Chung Man Cheung
Published: December 2023

Chapter 10 aims to identify knowledge gaps from existing research, to formulate overarching research questions, and to create a hypothesized model. The model is structured based on the research gaps of whether posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) subtypes should be considered in patients with chronic illness, whether the interaction between personality and coping strategies would moderate the association between cumulative trauma and distress outcomes, including PTSD subtypes, and whether a distorted self would influence the complex interaction between cumulative trauma and personality and coping risk factors in people who have experienced PTSD associated with a physical illness. To address posttraumatic growth, another research gap is how people with physical illnesses may experience growth when they experience a distorted self structure, and how illusory growth may contribute to triggering growth in patients with PTSD who suffer from their illnesses and a distorted self. The final research gap is how a family can cope with or reduce the demands of the cumulative effects of PTSD and the secondary traumatic effects of various family members, change their appraisal of the current situation, and restore homeostasis within a family.
Incarnation
Authors: Apetrei Sarah
Published: December 2023

This chapter examines two distinctive christological teachings—the doctrine of spiritual or heavenly flesh, and the doctrine of spiritual senses—which were closely related, and central to the thought of radical theologians in the 1640s and 1650s. I argue that heavenly flesh, a heterodox tradition derived most immediately from radical Reformation sources, was prevalent in the apocalyptic mysticism of influential preachers in this period, and that women contributed centrally to its development and dissemination. The idea of a new incarnation in the flesh of saints involved radical implications, not least for gender identity, which were realized by the doctrine’s proponents. The doctrine of spiritual senses also provided an incarnational framework for understanding visionary experience, not least in women’s prophetic works.
The Nature of Patterns
Authors: Gallagher Shaun
Published: December 2023

This chapter addresses some philosophical issues concerning the very concept of pattern. What does it mean to say that some grouping of things constitutes a pattern, or that a pattern constitutes a self? How is it possible to take a scientific approach to a heterogeneous collection of processes that includes bodily, experiential, affective, cognitive, social, cultural, narratival, and normative factors. Can such factors form a coherent phenomenon? The chapter develops the idea that we should think of a pattern as an irreducible dynamical gestalt where parts or processes are organized in nonlinear dynamical relations across a number of time scales rather than in a set of hierarchical levels. This solution builds on the work of Daniel Dennett, John Haugeland, and Scott Kelso and differs from both mechanistic and network theories.
Autonomy in the Self-pattern
Authors: Gallagher Shaun
Published: December 2023

Questions about the nature of self and self-consciousness are closely aligned with questions about the nature of autonomy. These concepts have deep roots in traditional philosophical discussions that concern metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. They also have direct relevance to practical considerations about therapeutic treatments in medical contexts. This chapter references some specific side effects of deep brain stimulation (DBS), increasingly employed as a therapeutic approach in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, obsessive compulsive disorder, and major depressive disorder, and shows that the best way to think of autonomy with regard to the self-pattern is to think of it in terms of relational autonomy as it connects to affect, agency, and the notion of affordances. Affordances for action and interaction define part of the ecological dimension of the self-pattern, where specific environments are not only physical, but also social and cultural.
Mindfulness in the Self-pattern
Authors: Gallagher Shaun
Published: December 2023

Buddhist meditation practices have personal or existential significance and are relevant to treatment of psychiatric disorders. On the one hand, meditation-based interventions (MBIs) have been shown to have general health benefits, including stress reduction, the reduction of depression relapse, and improved wellbeing. This chapter explores the idea that rigidity or inflexibility in the self-pattern is a transdiagnostic symptom that can be addressed by MBI therapies. On the other hand, there is data showing that such practices are not always good for everyone, and may lead to adverse effects such as depersonalization. This chapter also considers that although the concept of the self-pattern correlates to some degree with the Buddhist psychology of the aggregates, philosophically, MBI practices that aim for the experience of no-self may seem to challenge the concept of the self-pattern.
Catholic Social Teaching and Labour Law
Authors: Bell Mark
Published: December 2023

Catholic Social Teaching (CST) and Labour Law explores the contribution that religious ethics can bring to debates on justice in working life. The substantive provisions of labour law reflect prior ethical choices about how workers should be treated. Many faiths include beliefs about the significance of work to human development and the need for work to be performed under conditions that uphold dignity, equality, and solidarity. This book provides a thorough account of the reflection found in CST on human work and labour rights. It tests the contemporary relevance of its principles by applying them to current debates, using EU labour law as a case study. Specifically, it examines CST on the right to a just wage, the right to rest, worker participation, and equality and discrimination. The book finds that CST offers fresh insights on long-standing injustices in the labour market, such as low wages or poor working conditions, as well as shedding light on emerging challenges, such as ensuring rest in an era of digital connectivity. The book also recognizes that tensions arise in areas where the Church’s beliefs diverge from those that prevail in a secular understanding of human rights. This is particularly evident in debates relating to equality. It concludes that faith-based perspectives should be included in pluralistic dialogue on the future of labour law.
Religion, Theology, and Labour Law
Authors: Bell Mark
Published: December 2023

This chapter explores the relationship between religion, theology, and labour law and it explains why this book focuses upon Catholic Social Teaching (CST). The chapter begins by examining ‘theology of work’, which concerns the perspective of religions on the value and meaning of work. It finds that many faiths hold that work has a spiritual significance that goes beyond its functional purpose of providing a means of subsistence. Performing work is often regarded as a duty and an essential part of human development. Given the importance attached by faiths to work, then the conditions under which work is performed are a matter of concern. This leads into theological scholarship on ‘ethics of work’, which addresses the normative criteria for constituting ‘good work’. Many faiths support the view that employment relationships need to respect values such as dignity, equality, and solidarity. Labour law is a key instrument through which such values can be advanced. Having identified the connection between theology and labour law, the chapter explains why this book concentrates upon CST. It offers extensive theological engagement with issues pertaining to justice in working life. Coupled with the history of social action by Catholic/Christian ethos organizations, it is a fruitful basis upon which to explore more deeply the relationship between faith and labour law.
Labour Rights and Catholic Social Teaching
Authors: Bell Mark
Published: December 2023

This chapter examines what Catholic Social Teaching (CST) says about labour rights and the role for labour law in their realization. The CST belief in the dignity of work implies certain rights that must be respected by employers for work to be performed under dignified conditions. The content of these rights has unfolded over time, but they include the right to a just wage, the right to rest, the right to safe working conditions, and freedom of association. Incrementally, the Church has endorsed the moral right to be free from discrimination in the workplace. The chapter finds that its teaching in this area remains divergent from mainstream secular thought, because it assumes that women have a distinct vocation for providing care in the home. Church teaching has increasingly recognized the legitimate role of the State and international organizations in securing labour rights, including the necessity of labour legislation. At the same time, it provides firm support for trade unions because they are viewed as an expression of the principle of solidarity. CST is also favourable to entrusting responsibility for securing labour rights to the social partners (representatives of management and labour) in keeping with the principle of subsidiarity.
The Right to Rest
Authors: Bell Mark
Published: December 2023

This chapter explores Catholic Social Teaching (CST) on the right to rest for workers. It uses this as a lens through which to evaluate EU law. In CST, the dignity of the human person demands sufficient rest for the body and time free from work for religious practice and for fostering relationships with others. Consequently, CST upholds a strong duty on employers to provide adequate rest for workers and it recognizes that this may require legal intervention by the state. In EU law, the Court of Justice attaches particular importance to the fundamental right of all workers to rest. Although this resonates with CST, the normative basis of the right to rest is less clear. Recent case law has begun to draw a connection between rest and dignity, but this remains tentative. CST and EU law diverge on the right to Sunday rest. This is central to CST, but the Court of Justice held that the EU did not enjoy the legislative power to designate Sunday as a rest day. Advocates for CST have supported the idea of a right to disconnect from digital devices during workers’ rest periods, which is under consideration at EU level. This chapter argues that CST provides a reminder of the value to workers of being able to share rest at a similar time to others in their family and community. This collective perspective on rest is absent from EU law and it warrants further reflection.
Worker Participation
Authors: Bell Mark
Published: December 2023

This chapter explores EU law on worker participation through the lens of Catholic Social Teaching (CST). It begins by explaining the ethical justification for worker participation found in CST. The dignity of the human person means that workers should not be treated as mere commodities by their employers. Businesses are regarded as communities of persons, and workers should have a say in their organizations. Reflecting the principle of subsidiarity, participation will often be via intermediate associations, namely trade unions. EU law also upholds the idea that workers have a right to participate in the life of the undertaking. The chapter identifies the main instruments through which EU law has sought to substantiate worker participation. This has often taken the form of rights to be consulted and, for certain transnational companies, the creation of European Works Councils. CST does not propose a specific model of worker participation. Its values can, though, be used to scrutinize the sufficiency of existing laws. To that end, the chapter takes a critical perspective on EU law’s approach to the purpose of participation, the meaning of participation, and which workers are participating. In various ways, it finds that EU law falls short of the aspiration for participation found in CST. The latter prompts consideration of whether there is a need for the Union to strengthen its existing instruments.
‘My heart hath store, write there’
Authors: Cioni Francesca
Published: December 2023

In ‘Mattens’ Herbert asks ‘what is a heart?’; the complexity of the answers he offers suggests the importance and the difficulty of the heart within his poetry. The early modern heart is a cognitive organ, involved in spiritual and physical sensing and thinking; it is also engaged in constant, frenetic self-scrutiny. Prayer is done by, and works on, the heart, making the organ the site of identification and judgement, and of dislocated subjectivity. Anxieties about stony and broken hearts recur throughout The Temple and broader seventeenth-century devotional literature. Yet this brokenness, in Herbert’s treatment, also offers the possibility of redemptive generation: the broken heart is an inventive and spiritually productive thing. In this sense it is crucial to the work of devotional poetry, which effects interaction between the human and the divine, and itself works through constant meaningful reproduction.
‘Down with thy knees, up with thy voice’
Authors: Cioni Francesca
Published: December 2023

Kneeling was for Herbert’s readers as for us today a ubiquitous and uncontroversial performance of prayer. The function of kneeling in prayer was complex: both an outward expression of inward devotion and a bodily exercise of spiritual discipline; and for all its value as external performance, it was therefore also both a guarantee of conformity, and a possible site of hypocrisy. As kneeling makes one’s prayer a communal act, the symbolism of the knee in devotional poetry carries aphoristic and emblematic meaning; Herbert’s verse therefore gives poetic form to the complex collective subjectivity of early modern prayer. In The Temple Herbert suggests and plays with parallels between the performance and affect of prayer and of devotional reading and writing, in their diverse, reflexive, controversial carrying of meaning both literal and figurative.
‘Betwixt this world and that of grace’
Authors: Cioni Francesca
Published: December 2023

In poems like ‘Affliction (IV)’ and ‘Businesse’ Herbert expresses a deep sense of displacement and restlessness, which is set in contrast to a longed-for settled state in Heaven. This is a feature of real life for English readers, who had seen increased enclosure, civil unrest, and redistribution of lands in decades surrounding The Temple’s publication. It also expresses the spiritual weight of the doctrine of predestination, under which believers anxiously looked for signs of their unalterable state of election or reprobation. If spiritual and material lives are characterized by continual displacement and the hope of final settlement, this also accords with the work of literary circulation: The Temple may seem a fixed edifice, but its poems invite fragmentation and recontextualization. This chapter explores the relationship between The Temple’s literary and material form, and the lives and spiritual experiences of its readers and Herbert’s parishioners.
Sublime Physics in Paradise Lost
Authors: Vozar Thomas Matthew
Published: December 2023

Chapter 3 contends that in Paradise Lost in particular Milton makes use of a physics of sublime magnitudes in his attempt to adequately render the unimaginable sizes and spaces of the poem, inspired both by classical authors and by the technologies and discoveries of the new science. I begin with a focus on Mount Etna as it appears in Milton’s early work In Quintum Novembis and especially in Paradise Lost. I then consider what I call Milton’s “hyperbolic similes” in Paradise Lost. In the last part of this chapter I examine Milton’s attempts to depict the impossibly huge sublimities of the universe—indeed the multiverse—in the poem, ranging from the seemingly incalculable span of the finite created universe to the infinite expanse of Chaos.
Human Rights Due Diligence and Labour Governance
Authors: Landau Ingrid
Published: December 2023

Human rights due diligence (HRDD) has emerged as a dominant frame through which to conceptualise and operationalise responsible business conduct with respect to workers’ rights in transnational supply chains. Legislation mandating HRDD is now found in a number of European countries and is on national regulatory agendas in other regions of the world. Many scholars, practitioners, and activists are welcoming—and, indeed, actively calling for—further legalisation of the concept, believing that this will broaden and deepen respect for human rights. This book critiques HRDD as an emerging instrument of transnational labour law. Proceeding from the observation that the concept as originally articulated in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights is open to multiple interpretations, the book examines contests that have taken place globally over the role and status of the concept. It also considers the implications of HRDD’s ascension for transnational labour law as a distinct field of law, scholarship, and activism. Combining insights from transnational governance and business regulation with empirical analysis, this book reveals that HRDD is not being institutionalised at either the global or national level in a way that renders it a transformative or even robust mechanism of transnational labour law. It also draws attention to the important ways in which the rise of the concept is leading to subtle shifts in the configuration of actors and institutions in transnational labour governance.
HRDD and Divergent Logics in Transnational Labour Governance
Authors: Landau Ingrid
Published: December 2023

This chapter explores how human rights due diligence (HRDD) was received and understood by actors within the field of transnational labour governance subsequent to adoption of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). Drawing on in-depth interviews and document analysis, it shows that HRDD has played an important function in enabling a shared frame and language between diverse stakeholders. However, this shared language did not equate to shared understandings of the concept. Actors interpreted HRDD in divergent ways. Drawing on insights from legal endogeneity theory, it is argued that these divergences in interpretation arise largely from the fact that actors were filtering the concept through divergent logics. Two basic stylised logics within transnational labour governance are identified: a transnational labour logic and a managerial one. This chapter shows that, when mediated through these competing logics, HRDD takes on different characteristics and implications. While the former logic leads to a robust interpretation of HRDD that challenges extant business models and approaches, the latter logic leads to an interpretation that demands significantly less from companies and presents much less of a challenge to existing practices.
Norm-instability as a Strategy in International Lawmaking
Authors: Esponda Pedro Martínez
Published: December 2023

This chapter focuses on an understudied, though pervasive, form of engagement with legal change: the deliberate perpetuation of instability in international legal rules. That is, the reluctance of actors to concretize arguments about the meaning, scope, bindingness, or existence of a rule, as a means for prolonging a situation of legal uncertainty. While examples of these meaning-destabilizing attitudes are not lacking in international law, this work centres its attention on a particularly prominent one: the rule on self-defence against non-state actors (SD-NSA). An analysis is conducted here on the equivocal courses of action followed by a number of states and other actors around this notion for over half a century now. This exercise, as shown in the chapter, provides ample insights into the workings of norm-destabilization strategies beyond the law on the use of force, and its effects on processes of legal change throughout the discipline.
Conclusion
Authors: Terrell Robert Shea
Published: December 2023

The conclusion recaps some of the main ways that Bavarian traditions, convictions, and interests shaped the discourses and structures of the German nation. From the near total homogenization of German beer as lager to contemporary tax structures, and from dominant brewing practices to ongoing consumer sentiments, the impact of Bavarian capital and regulatory power remain prevalent. The conclusion then draws on scholarship from several other geographical areas to propose the concept of the “provincial nation” as a useful analytic tool beyond the present case. The term captures the ways that nations defined by relatively decentralized politics, industry, and culture can feature centers of gravity—Bavaria, in this history of beer—that shape national politics and culture even, and perhaps especially, in the context of 20th century globalization.
Social Dimensions of Latinization
Authors: Mullen Alex
Published: December 2023

This introduction to the volume on social factors in Latinization weaves together key themes and offers further fuel for the debates tackled in the chapters. It argues that the story of Latinization has suffered from too much focus on the elite-level dimension—namely, linguistic imperialism and the vain search for wide-ranging language policies. While attitudes of the elites and language management, broadly conceived, did play a role in the promotion and spread of Latin, the exploration of the uptake of Latin in the provinces must also consider a series of social factors in local contexts and try to make sense of complex local identities and their relationships to language. But, since life is full of intertwined sociocultural elements, and language is part of everything and linked to everything, it is not easy to isolate and assess the impact of specific factors that may have promoted the spread of Latin, encouraged the retention of local languages or fostered bilingualism. Our evidence is also patchy and fragile: there are voices that we struggle to hear—for example, those of women—and limitations on our ability to interpret often poorly contextualized data or extrapolate from isolated caches of texts. Despite the difficulties, we argue that through a multidisciplinary approach, which draws on recent advances in sociolinguistics, we can explore differential Latinization, regionality, local languages, and literacies and advance our understanding of provincial linguistic experience.
Mobility, Roads, and Milestones
Authors: Kolb Anne
Published: December 2023

In the expansion of the Roman Empire, mobility and its infrastructural basis of roads and waterways played a crucial role in securing stability of this state over the ten centuries of its existence. In this multi-ethnic confederation, Latin contributed to this in serving as a vehicular language in the literal and figurative sense in the West. This is reflected by epigraphic monuments alongside roads, especially milestones. Although these distance markers display Latin as the language of power, divergent sources declare that the implementation was not all-encompassing, with exceptions such as the Celtic leuga reflecting the pragmatic approach of the Roman state.
The Role of Education in the Latinization of the Roman West
Authors: Wolff Catherine
Published: December 2023

In the western regions conquered by Rome, members of the elite ensured that their children learned Latin through careful education given either at home, or by a grammarian and then a rhetorician. The question of the role of education in the Latinization of the West is much more uncertain when it comes to the rest of the population. It seems that education played a less important role for lower-status groups than for the elite. Epigraphic sources indicate that a certain number of them could read and/or write more or less well in Latin, though this does not necessarily mean that their everyday language was Latin. They could acquire this Latin literacy at school, or at home, or, more or less formally, ‘on the job’, as needed. Education at school could have promoted the Latinization of provincial students, but its effect may have been limited, since these children mostly learned only the rudiments. Our evidence is patchy, but it seems likely that access to, and levels of, education among provincials differed across the provinces.
Law and Latinization in Rome’s Western Provinces
Authors: Meyer Elizabeth A.
Published: December 2023

Under what legal circumstances did inhabitants of Rome’s western provinces find themselves encouraged or subjected to incentives to learn Latin? This chapter argues that, because Latin and Roman status were prestigious and Roman citizenship could provide access to forms of the ius civile that protected property and inheritance, provincial elites were strongly pulled towards acquiring both. The possibility of appearing in a Roman court where Latin was spoken was also an incentive that probably worked more forcefully on the rich, although people from all ranks of society could in theory be summoned to appear before a Roman judge. This possibility of court therefore appears as a kind of push towards learning Latin as a form of legal self-defence. Finally, redress for wrongs suffered that could not be prosecuted in a court both pushed and pulled provincials towards Latin, since Latin had rapidly become the (written) language of cursing in the western provinces (particularly well attested in Britannia). Curse tablets embody an extra-legal form of self-help and were particularly employed, with urgency and emotion, to punish theft, which was a civil-law delict under Roman law for which an action was not available to non-citizens. For them, Latin was not about the law but was certainly about justice.
Responding to Populist Parties in Europe
Authors: Bourne Angela K.
Published: December 2023

Responding to Populist Parties in Europe: The ‘Other People’ vs the ‘Populist People’ provides a new theoretical toolkit exploring how those who disagree with populist parties oppose them and what kinds of opposition initiatives work, why, and to what ends. It argues that analogies with the interwar rise of fascism and postwar communist takeover to the East do not easily fit the reality of today’s Europe. Those opposing populist parties often swim in muddier waters than the past, navigating more complex questions about whether populist opponents deepen or threaten democracy. Even would-be autocrats legitimize rule with appeals to popular sovereignty in regular electoral contests. Populists also operate in a globalized, interdependent Europe, with overlapping spheres of territorial governance. This novel context, the book claims, not only helps us understand the rise of populist parties, but also opposition they face. The book presents a new typology of tolerant and intolerant initiatives opposing populist parties by public authorities, political parties and civil society actors operating at state and international levels. This forms the foundations of a ‘bottom up’ approach for evaluating the effectiveness of opposition to populist parties, acknowledging substantial variation in opposition forms. The book then outlines a goal-attainment theory of effective opposition, focusing on whether opponents manage to curb illiberal and anti-democratic policies, reduce support for populist parties, diminish their resources, or induce moderation, without producing perverse effects. Opponents achieve these goals through manipulation of strategic choice, enforcement of the law, exploitation of interdependence through leverage, and persuasion.
Professor Jones vs. The Time Philosophy
Authors: Baines Robert
Published: December 2023

Finnegans Wake persistently returns to the notion of time. This is because, as Joyce was writing that novel, his frenemy Wyndham Lewis accused him of adhering to Bergson’s radical time philosophy. Joyce responds to this accusation in book one of the Wake by casting the character of Shaun as a caricature of Lewis named Professor Jones, an angry academic who is vehemently anti-Bergsonian. This chapter shows that Joyce uses Jones to highlight the similarities and the differences between himself and Lewis. In doing so, Joyce not only refuses Lewis’ attempt at defining their relationship as oppositional; he also reveals the essential ambivalence of his attitude towards Bergson’s time philosophy. Joyce supports Bergson’s notion of a discord between internal time and external time, but he also calls into question the idea that those two temporal modes can be viewed as separate. Joyce’s understanding of Bergson matters because Bergson is the central time theorist of literary modernism.
The Unity and Duality of Burrus and Caseous
Authors: Baines Robert
Published: December 2023

Are there individual substances or is all being really one? The third chapter assesses the Wake’s answer to that question by examining a tale told by Professor Jones, the tale of Burrus and Caseous. Joyce there uses Roman representations of Shaun and Shem to engage with the philosophies of being of Aristotle, Nicholas of Cusa, and Giordano Bruno. The chapter shows that, while Jones favors the divisible world of Aristotle, the Wake privileges the monisms of Nicholas of Cusa and Bruno and so endorses their beliefs in the principle of the coincidence of contraries. At the same time, the chapter also demonstrates that the Wake frequently offers a version of that principle that belongs neither to Nicholas of Cusa nor to Bruno, but rather to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This is important because the principle of the coincidence of contraries is central to the Wake.
A Portrait of the Ondt as a Young Man
Authors: Baines Robert
Published: December 2023

In the tale of the Ondt and the Gracehoper in book three, Shaun and Shem appear as characters inspired by Aesop’s “The Grasshopper and the Ants.” Joyce’s reworking of that fable offers a unique insight into his view of philosophy because it contains more philosophical allusions than any other section of the Wake. Those allusions point to a wide range of philosophers, including Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Confucius, and Plato. This chapter demonstrates that Joyce aligns the philosophers of his youth with the Shaunish Ondt and those of his maturity with the Shemish Gracehoper. Since Shaun and Shem primarily function as opposites, these alignments show that, as Joyce’s conception of philosophy developed, he came to embrace thinkers who challenged his original positions. This idea is significant because it allows a means of understanding the larger trajectory of Joyce’s relationship to philosophy.
Conclusion
Authors: Baines Robert
Published: December 2023

Vico and Bruno are the central philosophers of Finnegans Wake. The conclusion explains why Joyce embraced Vico’s cyclical conception of history and Bruno’s principle of the coincidence of contraries. At the same time, it also shows that, in considering how those ideas operate within the Wake, one must look carefully at how Joyce adapted and contextualized them. The conclusion then proceeds to demonstrate that Joyce used the characters of Shem and Shaun to align the Wake’s other major philosophers for or against Vico and Bruno. Those associated with Shem are connected to Vico and Bruno and, thereby, Joyce. Those related to Shaun are defined as standing against the key philosophical ideas of the Wake. In expanding and refining this basic opposition, Joyce created a network through which he defined his relationships to all the philosophers who feature prominently in Finnegans Wake.
Coins
Authors: Taylor Colleen
Published: December 2023

This chapter examines the coin’s pivotal role in the articulation of eighteenth-century Irish national identity and introduces a little-known text: The Adventures of a Bad Shilling of the Kingdom of Ireland (1805), a hybridized genre that is half it-narrative and half aisling. The Hibernian iconography on Irish coins from 1691 up through the early nineteenth century reflects Ireland’s fraught national status; coins rebranded with Hibernia encoded a Williamite, Protestant, and Anglicized Ireland associated with Jacobite defeat. Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal (1760) and Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) demonstrate that any text bearing Irish authorship and invoking a coin inevitably questions the actions of the British Empire. Most importantly, The Adventures of a Bad Shilling and The Wild Irish Girl (1806) suggest that Irish nationalist consciousness in the wake of the Union quietly endures inside Irish mind and matter, despite the forced impression of Hibernia as the weakened kingdom.
The Taliban Courts in Afghanistan
Authors: Baczko Adam
Published: December 2023

What if the Taliban, with military and technological capabilities far inferior to those of Western armies, had won the war through law? While the international coalition set up an inadequate and corrupt legal system, the Taliban set up hundreds of courts in the countryside: by insisting on due process, impartiality from the judges, and the enforcement of verdicts, this system of justice has established itself as one of the few sources of predictability in the daily lives of Afghans. ‘The Taliban court is for all people of Afghanistan but the government’s court is only for rich people’, said one resident of Wardak province. How did the Taliban gain the trust of the population? How did they manage to put themselves in a position to regulate social relations? And with what consequences for Afghan society? Based on long-term fieldwork in various provinces in Afghanistan, this investigation offers new perspectives on a country that was at war for over four decades and proposes an innovative reflection on the place of law in civil wars.
Cities of Islamic States in Deccan
Authors: Shankar Pratyush
Published: December 2023

The cities of Deccan between the 14th and 18th centuries represented a very interesting phase in Indian Urban History. The examples such as Bidar, Bijapur, Golconda, etc. are early urbanization in India wherein concerns of defence, symbolism of Islam, and formation of suburban public places. The position and role of Islam pose interesting questions in the formation of the city. The location of Jami Mosque as being away from the palace and in the heart of the city was a conscious effort in balancing the power relation between state and religion. The surprising development of suburbs in form of the royal necropolis and the widely popular spots of Sufi saints created a pull outside the limits of the city.
Colonial Cities
Authors: Shankar Pratyush
Published: December 2023

The three main colonizers in the Indian sub-continent—the British, French, and Portuguese—were also prolific city builders. This chapter teases out the key difference between the colonial intents of the three European empires and how this difference manifested in the formation of their cities. British for example never had any great plan for city building during the major period of their presence in India. For them city building was a pragmatic and opportunist based on immediate problems. The lack of city building tradition back home did not allow them to form a comprehensive or centralized strategy to city building leading to cities that were more like patchwork. The French on the other hand had a tradition for centralized planning and city building while trying to use cities as a way of integrating the colonies with France. The Portuguese colonies all across the world and also in India were marked by a distinct tradition of urban municipalities that led to professional development and management of cities. The church became an important force that unified the diverse ethnic communities of the locals and foreigners into a single moral community. These attitudes reflected in the formation of the city as the church formed an important central open space in the city.
Introduction
Authors: Medhi Hemjyoti
Published: December 2023

The Introduction offers an overview of the milieu that shaped early women’s mobilization in the Brahmaputra valley with the backdrop of the anti-colonial mass movement. It explores the contested contours of the shifting borders of Assam with colonial intervention, plotting some of the key moments as a complex understanding of the public evolves in a nascent vernacular print culture. The Introduction locates the Assam Mahila Samiti (AMS, 1926 cont.) story amidst the proliferation of women’s associations across British India and a range of contemporary sabhas, samitis, and associations in the Brahmaputra valley. The extraordinary life of the firebrand feminist Chandraprava Saikiani (1901–72), the founding secretary of the AMS, is briefly discussed indicating how she attained celebrity status as a young woman activist mobilizing people in various movements as well as a writer and a controversial columnist, despite being a mother outside matrimony and belonging to a lower caste.
Early Women’s Writing, the Mahila Samitis, and the Naam Kirtan Space
Authors: Medhi Hemjyoti
Published: December 2023

Chapter 2, titled ‘Early Women’s Writing, the Mahila Samitis and the Naam Kirtan Space’, enters a different milieu in the mobilization of women. Despite the prevalence of caste and gender hierarchy, women have had a sustained presence in the vibrant practice of naam kirtan (community singing of prayer songs) in the Vaishnava tradition in Assam since the sixteenth century. Both early women writers in Assam and leaders in the mahila samitis sourced and reinvented the naam kirtan space as a mode to validate self-expression in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, albeit in somewhat different ways. While scholars have established women’s education and social reform movements as being intrinsic to women’s socio-political mobilization in India, this chapter extends these connections to include earlier forms of expressive traditions such as the naam kirtan. The centrality of naam kirtan in such diverse sites allows us to explore writing practices, colonial education, access to print culture, publication, and political mobilization as interconnected trajectories. New political equations and liberal agendas of women’s claims to the nascent public were being rehearsed and shaped in a complex and dynamic relationship with available traditional practices. Practices around the naam kirtan, therefore, offer us a vital thread to connect diverse disciplinary borders of women’s writing, political mobilization, and the public sphere. The chapter also raises methodological questions about what constitutes sources in feminist research and historiography.
‘Weaving Fairy Tales’: The Mahila Samitis and the Sipini Bhoral
Authors: Medhi Hemjyoti
Published: December 2023

Chapter 4, ‘Weaving Fairy Tales’: The Mahila Samitis and the Sipini Bhoral, concentrates on the mahila samitis’ institutionalization of women’s customary practice of weaving through several sipini bhorals (weaver’s stores/co-operatives) established in different parts of Assam from 1928 onwards. This initiative connects women’s everyday domestic labour to larger discourse of Swadeshi and Gandhian khadi. Weaving runs across tribe, caste, and class; hills and plains, in the northeastern region in India and is the single thread that symbolically connects women across this geographical landscape. This chapter argues that the mahila samitis’ privileging of this space acquires immense significance at a time when identity markers of tribe–caste formulations were beginning to acquire political colours in early twentieth-century Assam. While Gandhi’s call for khadi helped to institutionalize women’s domestic labour of weaving in a wider context of market economy and patriotic nationalism, the mahila samitis were eager to invoke the weaving tradition by women in Assam for a more meaningful participation within the nation. The chapter explores the weaving tradition as opposed to agricultural or plantation labour, because weaving was the site through which the mahila samitis articulated their politics and poetics of nation-building and emphasized women’s role therein. The chapter outlines some of the links between women, labour, production, and the imagining of a new nation.
Mukto Manuh: Chandraprava Saikiani’s Writings
Authors: Medhi Hemjyoti
Published: December 2023

The fifth and the last chapter explores Saikiani’s extensive range of writings through five decades, from the 1920s to the 1960s including her letters, reports, essays, speeches, poems, short stories published in contemporary periodicals; novels, books, translations; select issues of edited journals Abhijan (1941–, perhaps the first Asamiya-Hindi Bilingual) and Abhijatri (1947–, mouthpiece of the APMS); handwritten manuscripts of novellas and a memoir Jail Kahini among others. The chapter discusses that the appearance of Saikiani’s early writings in periodicals, such as Banhi, Chetana, Awahan in the 1920s and the 1930s, is symbolic of the selective democratisation process unleashed by print culture where a female headmistress of a girls’ school in Tezpur could jostle for print space with contemporary luminaries. Though Saikiani was celebrated among noted Asamiya women writers by her contemporaries, most histories of Asamiya literature written in the late twentieth century do not acknowledge her among significant litterateurs; some even fail to mention her altogether. The chapter explores how Saikiani’s writings examine, conceptualize, and critique institutions such as marriage, family, patriarchy, and social divisions of caste and class through perspectives of the social ‘other’, the ‘fallen’ woman. The chapter argues that Saikiani’s vision for ‘revolutionary social change’ is part of a larger imaginary of freedom and liberty, ‘mukto manuh’.
Curating Memories
Authors: Medhi Hemjyoti
Published: December 2023

This piece shares field notes from an oral history and archiving project conducted during 2009–12 around three mahila samitis: Assam Pradeshik Mahila Samity (Guwahati), Dibrugarh District Mahila Samity (Dibrugarh), and Tezpur District Mahila Samiti (Tezpur). This project (funded by the Sephis Programme, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam and supported by Tezpur University) has digitally scanned and preserved handwritten minutes and proceedings of select early mahila samiti meetings. Simultaneously, audio-visual recordings were made of conversations and interviews with samiti members and associates. The memories of an earlier generation of women both complement and challenge other sources available in print that have figured in this study. This raises questions related to agency, memory, and history and their entanglements in the process of writing about the mahila samiti in the early twenty-first century. Retrieving and recording the mahila samitis’ vision for a ‘revolutionary social change’ has been crucial to understand the richness and diversity of women’s conceptualization of the public sphere anew. This note alerts us to the contingencies that inform the process of creation of an archive—human and technological, academic and logistics without blurring crucial distinctions between voices and visuals, memory and history—where women’s memory transforms the very essence of how we attempt to understand women’s agency, then and now.