bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Glimmers of the World Soul in Kabbalah
Authors: Brown Jeremy P.
Published: September 2021

Brown interrogates the status of the world soul in medieval and early modern Kabbalah. He advances a critical distinction between stronger and weaker fields for determining this inquiry, namely, between (a) the kabbalists’ explicit uses of the Platonic term “world soul,” which are rare and begin primarily during the sixteenth century, and (b) Kabbalah’s hypostatic psychology. The latter dates back to the infancy of Kabbalah in the thirteenth century. While sharing affinities with Neoplatonic cosmo-psychology, it does adopt its technical terminology. Special attention focuses on attempts during the Renaissance to render the teachings of Isaac Luria into the philosophical idiom of the world soul, and in particular, a nexus of Lurianic speculation that related the distillation of the primordial ether from the abyssal depth, or ʾEn Sof. Conclusion explores the dynamics of Kabbalah’s uneasy relationship with this facet of the Platonic philosophical heritage.
Reflection II
Authors: Manning Gideon , Wilberding James
Published: September 2021

Explaining the generation of any living thing involves answering any number of difficult questions. Historically, two very prominent questions have been how to account for the life or vitality of the new living thing, and how to account for the specific features that make the new living thing into the ...
The World Soul in American Transcendentalism
Authors: Walls Laura Dassow
Published: September 2021

American Transcendentalism, a religious, literary, and social reform movement whose acknowledged leader was Ralph Waldo Emerson, characteristically deployed world soul thinking to harmonize Protestant individualism with Deist rationalism and modern science. Emerson’s “Over-Soul,” whose sources include Platonism, German Idealism, and the transcendental anatomy of Georges Cuvier, enabled the Transcendentalists to distance themselves from orthodox theism by turning God’s magisterial law from outer command into inner creative principle, based on the fundamental concept that all human beings (and, for some, all life) share an inner divine principle that radiates meaning into the world. This chapter draws on William James, who analyzed world soul thinking in terms of the varieties of transcendentalism: this lens suggests that for many Transcendentalists, Emerson’s idealist, absolute monism yielded to a range of pluralist and materialist variants, as seen in Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and the radical pluralism of William James himself.
Reflection V
Authors: Callicott J. Baird
Published: September 2021

The year was 1979. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, a book by James Lovelock (1919–), was published to much fanfare.1 To much less, “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest,” an essay by Aldo Leopold (1887–1948), was also published2—posthumously, exactly three decades after Leopold’s celebrated environmental classic ...
Bonnie and Clyde and the Aural Imagination of American Counterculture
Authors: Bishop Daniel
Published: September 2021

Bonnie and Clyde’s soundtrack dramatizes a conflict between historicity and the temporal immediacy of lived experience. The film’s sound design offers a self-reflexive meditation on the photo- and phonographic capturing of human presence through mechanical mediation. This capturing, the author argues, functions as a metaphor for historical narrativity, a confining discourse to which the film seeks alternatives through a stylistic language drawing upon both visceral realism and ephemeral abstraction. Bonnie and Clyde’s unique bluegrass pop score extends the soundtrack’s larger concern with sensory immersion and mechanized, alienating distance, allowing the film to acquire a countercultural cachet suggestive of the “Happening,” a concept from avant-garde art that was broadly appropriated as a way of understanding of the popular zeitgeist.
The Revisionist Western and the Mythic Past
Authors: Bishop Daniel
Published: September 2021

The role of myth in the Western has frequently been understood as that of cultural mystification, naturalizing the systemic violence that accompanied America’s westward expansion. Within this understanding, the sub-genre of the revisionist Western is understood to intervene with “counter-mythic” discourse. In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, however, myth emerges not merely as revisionist cultural narrative, but as a spatiotemporal aesthetic of experience, a sensibility conveying an imagined time-outside-of-time. In distinct ways, both films encourage us to imagine a mythic experience of the past through the soundtrack. Burt Bacharach’s pop score for Butch Cassidy and the use of Leonard Cohen’s songs in McCabe and Mrs. Miller distinctly position each film within a mythic space of timelessness in which the immediate present of a contemporary experience and the distancing effects of historicity might be imagined as blurring and freely flowing into one another.
Fundamental Game Scoring Techniques
Authors: Kellman Noah
Published: September 2021

Chapter 2 dives further into the technical side of game scoring fundamentals. The reader will learn how game composers structure their scores using techniques like horizontal resequencing and vertical layering, as well as looping and stingers. These fundamental methods of scoring games are essential to any game composer’s tool set, and this chapter leaves the reader with the necessary knowledge to jump right into game scoring.
Using Audio Middleware
Authors: Kellman Noah
Published: September 2021

While game engines are impressive in their power, they lack many important features for composers and sound designers. Often, a composer must spend several hours accomplishing a seemingly simple task in Unity that could be achieved quite easily with other methods. This chapter demonstrates the benefits of audio middleware, discussing its functionality and the practical reasons why it is ideal to implement middleware to create game audio whenever possible. The reader will learn how to use Wwise to create interactive music structures and seamless transitions.
Epilogue
Authors: Kellman Noah
Published: September 2021

When it comes down to it, writing game music is an incredibly fun and enriching experience, but a career in game music can be highly competitive and difficult to navigate. This chapter explores the business side of creating game music, focusing primarily on the indie game market. The reader learns about different negotiating factors that go into a game audio contract, and is presented with practical knowledge about where and how to network. The chapter also includes information about organizing one’s workflow to achieve maximum creativity. These concepts will be illuminated through interviews with prominent composers in the field, discussing how they manage their careers and maintain good workflows.
Welcome, Will Hays!
Authors: Gautreau Justin
Published: September 2021

This chapter argues that the Hollywood novel became an increasingly politicized endeavor following the industry scandals of the early 1920s. While some insiders wrote novels as propaganda to defend the industry, others looked to the novel as the only way to circumvent the stranglehold that the Hays Office began enacting over film culture. Such a split can be seen most clearly in Rupert Hughes’s Souls for Sale and Harry Leon Wilson’s Merton of the Movies. Where Souls for Sale doubled down on its defense of Hollywood despite the scandal that continued to make headlines through its serialization, Merton of the Movies set the standard for critiquing the industry between the lines without causing the commotion that other damning publications would. In its aim to cast a critical eye on the industry, then, the first generation of the Hollywood novel conceived of the Hays Office as its official antithesis, the line that begged to be crossed.
Technicolor Consciousness
Authors: Gautreau Justin
Published: September 2021

Reapproaching more canonical Hollywood novels in the context of three-color Technicolor and the Production Code, this chapter argues that Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (both 1939) countered Technicolor treatments of Southern California in film, which had reified not only the industry’s sanitized façade but also boosterism’s whitewashed history. In opposition to the Technicolor Corporation’s persistent claims to realism, The Day of the Locust laments mass culture’s colonization of the senses, while The Big Sleep critiques the unreality of everyday life in a place built on a commodified past. West and Chandler depict a Hollywood landscape collapsing in on itself, becoming visually indistinguishable from a Technicolor film yet morally unrecognizable by the standards of the screen.
Discipline Formation and Research Training
Authors: Turner James
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines the training of several Anglo-American scholars who published in a cluster of fields in the humanities —including classics, archaeology, anthropology, history, and modern languages—before their specialization into separate disciplines. Intriguingly, instruction in research in these disciplines began very close in time to each discipline’s formation. Starting from this coincidence, the chapter asks whether research training gives rise to a discipline or the formation of a discipline precedes its particular way of training? The chapter’s answer is that research training alone cannot explain the emergence of disciplinarity, as many factors play into the formation of a new discipline. But the invention of research training, especially in academe, may have been the catalyst that made it gel.
The Rise of Academic Laboratory Science
Authors: Rocke Alan
Published: September 2021

This chapter seeks to understand the context and sequelae of Justus Liebig’s model for university research and teaching. This model was arguably the most important single element in the international rise of graduate education and research, not just in chemistry, but more broadly, over the course of the 19th century, in all academic fields. This chapter avoids hagiography by employing an eclectic approach that places emphasis on contingencies of time, place, and discipline, and briefly examines the results of the story not just in Germany, but also in France, Britain, and the United States.
Training Research Mathematicians circa 1900
Authors: Parshall Karen Hunger
Published: September 2021

An American mathematical research community emerged over the course of the closing quarter of the nineteenth century. In its efforts to shape itself, it looked abroad and especially to Germany, France, and Great Britain, three countries long established as mathematical leaders. What it found there were three very different systems for training future mathematical researchers. This chapter compares and contrasts those systems—at the same time that it examines the American system ultimately influenced by them—as they had evolved by the turn of the twentieth century. In so doing, it casts a comparative eye on what have traditionally been treated as four largely separate and distinct national mathematical communities and identifies shared standards of and practices in research-level training as a critical component of the internationalization of the field in the twentieth century.
The Année Sociologique as Training Ground for Sociology: Durkheim, Mauss, and the Art of Book Reviewing in Fin de Siècle France
Authors: Barberis Daniela S.
Published: September 2021

This chapter focuses on a specific aspect of the efforts of Durkheim and his colleagues to institutionalize sociology as a scientific research discipline in France in the late nineteenth century: the graduate training of emerging sociologists. This training posed several challenges at its inception, such as the lack of a formal program of education and of dedicated faculty or facilities. One way that Durkheim and his associates worked around their relative lack of resources was through the foundation of the Année sociologique. This journal was a discipline building enterprise: it was a collective undertaking, it discussed a wide variety of material, and it organized the intellectual division of labor in a number of subfields, effectively defining the discipline of sociology by its choices of authors and books for review. Durkheim, as the hub of the enterprise, and Mauss, as his closest collaborator and ‘alter ego’, reviewed all submissions, suggested revisions and insisted on examining everything in the smallest detail. This extensive work of editing formed the style of professional reviews of their collaborators. Durkheim encouraged and directed the research work of his younger teammates, providing them with guidance in producing original articles in the field of sociology, offering models of scientific research in the field, and helping them obtain academic appointments. A large part of this work of training was conducted via correspondence, due to the geographical distance between the members of the group. This chapter examines the practices of training in writing, their transfer across generations, and their significance to the success of the group.
Shaping the Unruly Statistician
Authors: Porter Theodore M.
Published: September 2021

Statistics achieved something like disciplinary status in universities as a mathematical and methodological field during the first half of the twentieth century. Yet the experience of statistics stands as a warning against the supposition that scientific knowledge tends naturally to become a discrete discipline. Centuries prior to the consolidation of the mathematical field of statistics, there arose, gradually, a social and administrative field of statistics. Some of the most fundamental concepts and tools of statistical reasoning were first established in this context. Census offices and statistical bureaus devoted to economic, medical, trade, and labor statistics behave in some ways like scientific fields, and in recent times have been more or less closely allied to the mathematical field. From the late nineteenth century, the mathematical field of statistics also came to be seen as a set of concepts and tools for analyzing data in a variety of fields, from engineering, agriculture, education, medicine, and social surveys to astronomy, psychology, economics, sociology, ecology, and physical sciences. All of these gave some heed to the statistical discipline, but none were quite content to mathematicians and methodologists of quantification who dictate the appropriate tools to be used in diverse substantive disciplines. At the same time, input from the substantive disciplines and even from bureaucratic and professional uses has always been important for the shaping of the statistical discipline, which first took shape primarily as a field devoted to problems of evolution, genetics, and eugenics. That history shows a geographical trajectory, arising most prominently in Britain and spreading most readily to other English-language countries.
Training Medical Researchers in Korea during the Japanese Colonial Period (1910–1945)
Authors: Yeo In-sok
Published: September 2021

Western medicine integrated laboratory science with clinical experience in the nineteenth century. A similar process of integration took place in the non-Western world, though somewhat later, and with differences derived from specific historical and social contexts. This article describes this process in Korea, where Western medicine was first introduced in the 1880s, and medical education followed soon afterwards. During the Japanese colonial rule, which began in 1910, medical research was accommodated at the Severance Medical College, which was established and supported by Western missionaries, as well as the government medical college and the Faculty of Medicine at Keijo Imperial University in Seoul. This paper surveys the history of medical research from the introduction of Western medicine into Korea in the late nineteenth century to the appearance of first Korean medical researchers during the colonial period.
Training Historians and Ethnologists in Taiwan, 1928–1949
Authors: Chen Wei-Chi , Chou Wan-yao , Chang Ku-ming (Kevin)
Published: September 2021

This chapter studies the education for academic research that was institutionalized in colonial Taiwan and the informal training that was available to junior scholars. It first briefly contextualizes the founding of the only university in the colony in 1928, then examines the fields of Southeast Asian history and ethnology, in which the colonial government of Taiwan invested heavily, and draws a pattern from the careers of the faculty. This is followed by an analysis of the four modes of research training available at the time: undergraduate education, apprenticeship at the university, self-training outside the university, and advanced study abroad. At the end of the survey is a description of the foundational education that the remaining Japanese faculty provided to the first generation of Taiwanese academics in archaeology and anthropology after World War II.
Materials by design
Authors: Sutton Adrian P
Published: September 2021

Materials design brings together the engineering requirements of a material for an application with the science of the relationships between the structure, properties and method of fabrication of the material. It also takes into account the conditions into which the material will be put in service. It is different from materials selection and materials discovery. The concepts of microstructure and materials as complex systems are introduced. An example is given of materials design using a systems approach. Some materials are produced by self-assembly, as illustrated by the bubble raft, photonic crystals and quantum dots. Self-healing materials and self-cleaning glass are two examples of smart materials.
Biological matter as a material
Authors: Sutton Adrian P
Published: September 2021

Although it is usually obvious whether matter is animate or inanimate, it is far from easy to define life. Here we adopt as a definition the three principles identified by Paul Nurse in his recent book ‘What is life?’ There is a resurgence in the physics of life, in particular the materials science of animate matter and the emergence of complexity. This is a departure from molecular biology to a more holistic approach to understanding living matter as a self-organised complex system comprising energy-consuming, purposeful molecular machines, or agents, working collectively. An ultimate goal of synthetic biology is to create animate matter from inanimate matter. First steps have been taken, but there is still a long way to go.
Introduction to Critical Modesty
Authors: Dancer Thom
Published: September 2021

The Introduction examines Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go to explore how the modest and minor mode of thinking practiced in it might be broadened to an emerging set of contemporary fiction, criticism, and theory. Drawing on the work of philosophical pragmatism, the Introduction argues that modesty as a temperament in novels entails the principle that fiction holds no special position outside the world from which to speak about it, and therefore, it frames novelistic expression as a process of thinking. Crucially, recognizing the novel as a process of thinking with the world requires a reciprocal critical modesty in which we understand critical work as something that happens in collaboration with the novel rather than to it. Critical modesty is not a theory or method to be applied but a temperament sourced from the ways texts model their own relations. Thus, the Introduction offers an account of the book’s key terms that follow from the ways that novelists and critics practice critical modesty.
Ian McEwan’s Redescriptions
Authors: Dancer Thom
Published: September 2021

This chapter focuses on theories of modesty as redescription at work in literary texts. Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Saturday, and Solar demonstrate critical modesty in two interrelated ways. His novels offer a modest vision of literary efficacy as severely circumscribed by literature’s entanglements with the larger world. At the same time, to the extent that McEwan grants some relevance to the literary, it is through a style of epistemologically modest narration that seeks to redescribe a situation without judgment. The chapter illustrates the effects of a critically modest approach to reading McEwan’s fiction by contrasting it with different approaches by critics such as John Banville and Elaine Hadley. In contrast to these critics who find McEwan’s novels to be self-satisfied and politically quietist, I argue that McEwan narrates and formalizes the process of thinking in such a way as to intensify the mismatch between the reader’s experience of the world and the redescription of that experience in the novel. Novels such as Atonement, Saturday, and Solar demonstrate the value of epistemological modesty precisely at those moments when their main characters fail most spectacularly to achieve it.
Zadie Smith’s Partnerships
Authors: Dancer Thom
Published: September 2021

Taking up questions of reading and the agency of the critic, the second chapter offers the most direct treatment of post-critical discourse. In it, I argue that Zadie Smith’s claim that all critics are artists, contrary to expectations, recommends a disposition of critical modesty. Though Smith works to reimagine criticism as a “difficult partnership” between writer and critic, what makes it difficult, according to Smith, is the need for the critic to subordinate their view of the world to the one on offer in the work of literature. Reading Smith as a reader and critic, especially her work on E. M. Forster, I find that the comparison of the work of the artist to that of the critic is less an aggrandizement of the importance of writing (in terms of style) for the critic than an effort to recognize that novels and works of criticism are engaged in the same kind of activity: making a certain experience of the world sufficiently shared to create common ground for further conversation. The chapter ends with a reading of Smith’s novel On Beauty that models the kind of difficult partnership that Smith cultivates in her essays.
J. M. Coetzee’s Weakness
Authors: Dancer Thom
Published: September 2021

This chapter’s investigation of the value of “soft opinions” from Diary of a Bad Year seeks to take political objections to critical modesty head on by thinking with J. M. Coetzee about the dispositions necessary to speak well in public. Both McEwan and Smith are interested in reading as an event that intimates one to an experience of failure, specifically the failure to know the world as another person does. From this intimation of failure, both draw lessons about the need for a modest disposition towards our own self-knowledge and our ability to make private experience public. Coetzee’s late novels—Elizabeth Costello and Diary of a Bad Year—take this failure to mean that there is no uncompromised position outside of politics or literature from which to speak about them. Coetzee’s well-known critique of rationalism is a reflection of his insistence that we are already compromised when we speak, that neither pure reason nor pure fiction provides any neutral site of judgment. Against the strong opinions of rationality, Coetzee embraces the weak but still critical claims of fiction, rhetoric, and imagination. Thus, for Coetzee modesty emerges as a condition of speaking in public because such speech is already politically, ethically, and spiritually implicated. In Diary, Coetzee uses multiple overlapping narrative lines to model what he calls “soft opinions” and “sympathetic imagination.” These formal techniques exemplify a disposition of critical modesty that he finds necessary for cultivating a better life from a position already entangled with the world.
Structural Change in South Africa
Authors: Zalk Nimrod
Published: September 2021

This chapter traces how policies and institutions flowing from the post-apartheid political settlement in South Africa gave rise to a range of rents and rent-like transfers, which have not, however, been adequately invested to advance structural transformation. Rather, corporate and industrial restructuring has been associated with a ‘high-profit and low-investment’ economy and deindustrialization. Low investment, job losses, and limited black participation in the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy from the mid-1990s spurred the political impetus for a stronger role for the state during the 2000s. The formal introduction of industrial policy in 2007 has had some successes and helped to avert even deeper deindustrialization. However, it has been undermined by unsupportive macroeconomic policies and a weak articulation between policies to advance black ownership and structural transformation. Rising corruption and maladministration have further undermined structural transformation. Implications are drawn from South Africa’s experience for middle-income countries more generally.
Structural Transformation, Economic Power, and Inequality in South Africa
Authors: Goga Sumayya , Mondliwa Pamela
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines how economic power, understood as control over accumulation, has influenced the poor progress of structural transformation in South Africa, which, in turn, has impacted on inequality through income and wealth effects. The chapter argues that the failure to diversify and develop downstream capabilities in manufacturing in South Africa reflects, among other things, the entrenched advantages of incumbent upstream firms, as well as the lack of a policy agenda for transformation that incorporates a recognition of the economic power of these upstream firms. The inability to change the patterns of accumulation underlies the persistent inequality in income and wealth. The chapter involves an analysis of interests in the South African economy within key industry groupings (specifically the metals and plastics value chains) and how these interests have set agendas and shaped policy and regulation to set the rules of the game for the benefit of upstream firms. The analysis shows that economic structure is a source of economic power, and that the relative strength of the upstream industries means that their interests are better served than those of diversified downstream industries.
Black Economic Empowerment, Barriers to Entry, and Economic Transformation in South Africa
Authors: Vilakazi Thando , Bosiu Teboho
Published: September 2021

One of the key challenges of South Africa’s democratic project has been supporting the effective participation of the previously excluded black majority in the economy. The broad-based black economic empowerment (BBBEE) policy, as the primary tool employed to drive racial transformation, is assessed and found to have had a limited impact, although there has been some progress. The chapter considers the link between structural transformation and black economic empowerment in three key parts. First, relevant literature is drawn on to build the argument that inclusion matters for structural transformation. Second, is an examination of the factors that have underpinned the challenges with the implementation of BBBEE to open up the economy for broader participation, including its limited focus on key barriers to entry, and the implications for structural transformation in South Africa. Third, the chapter presents a case study based on a survey of applicants under the government’s ‘black industrialists scheme’ as a critical evolution from, and alternative to, the approach followed with BBBEE, as it is able to contribute to both racial and structural transformation of the economy. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the roles of black economic empowerment and the black industrialists scheme, barriers to entry, and structural transformation of the economy.
Population Dynamics and the Functional Response
Authors: DeLong John P.
Published: September 2021

In this chapter, I show how the functional response can drive predator–prey cycles (and dynamics more generally). I introduce predator–prey differential equation models and fit them to real dynamic data on classic predator–prey systems (lynx–hare and Daphnia–algae). This coupling achieves two things. First, it allows me to demonstrate that the models are capable of describing real predator–prey dynamics and that the functional response really does have a role in driving predator–prey cycles (even if it is not the driver of all cycles). Second, it allows me, from an empirically grounded starting point, to vary the parameters of the functional response to show how changes in the functional response parameters change the dynamics.
Optimal Foraging
Authors: DeLong John P.
Published: September 2021

This chapter is a refresher on the prey model of classic optimal foraging theory through the lens of this book. I build on the multi-species functional response, the selection ideas, and the parameter breakdown presented in the preceding chapters to argue for how optimal foraging might arise. I rederive the models and suggest that optimal foraging theory may still be relevant to understanding predator–prey interactions, in particular in the context of multi-species functional responses. I also address the possibility that predators mostly have broad diets because they experience low prey abundances most of the time in nature.
Introduction
Authors: Kizenko Nadieszda
Published: September 2021

The Introduction proposes a new approach to studying the sacrament of penance in the Russian tradition from the seventeenth century to 1917. Overly political emphases have reduced penance to the Petrine requirement for priests to report anything treasonous they might hear at confession. Narrowly theological studies over-emphasize Orthodoxy’s ‘therapeutic’ approach versus such notions as ‘satisfaction’, ‘merits’, or ‘justification’. Here, confession is situated both in its broader social, liturgical, and legal context, and in the context of other traditions (Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish). Confession in imperial Russia was not an exclusively private act, but also a seasonal and communal one. As part of govienie, a week-long Lenten penitential process incorporating fasting and daily church attendance, it culminated with confession and communion. This liturgical context, described in the context of Lenten texts and services, allowed the sacrament to maintain its integrity even when rulers sought to use it for political, disciplinary, and educational purposes.
Enlightenment and Elite Enforcement
Authors: Kizenko Nadieszda
Published: September 2021

Chapter 3 examines how confession evolved from the reign of Elizabeth through the end of the eighteenth century. The earlier insistence on universal confession remained an egalitarian disciplinary measure. But the Synod and the Senate could still really only go after those groups easiest to watch and those deemed most important to state security and good order: the military, the high-ranking clergy, and the nobility. At the same time, the ‘soft power’ of such holy hierarchs as Dimitrii of Rostov and Tikhon of Zadonsk played a key role in the process of reframing Orthodox Christianity as a moral teaching that could speak to the concerns of the worldly, educated noble and eventually the peasant. Confession in the second half of the eighteenth century became a part of the new ‘civic’ piety for the ‘enlightened’ elites—and, in the form of preparing for death, remained a part of tradition for those who largely ignored it.
Going to the People
Authors: Kizenko Nadieszda
Published: September 2021

Chapter 6 examines the impact of liberalization on confession. From Alexander II on, Russian rulers started to show less interest in confession as a means of discipline. Confession discipline softened, bishops enjoined priests to show more latitude, and an ever-increasing stream of pamphlets on confession sought to reach an ever-broader literate public. Clerical outreach begun in the late 1850s anticipated the emancipation of the serfs. Both helped create a huge reading public for devotional literature. Texts by Russian writers including Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Goncharov, and more minor writers reflected the many aspects of the confession experience. After having been compelled to go to confession for nearly two centuries in every possible way, the Orthodox inhabitants of the Russian empire seemed finally to have internalized it.
Introduction
Authors: Kabay Sarah
Published: September 2021

The fact that millions of children around the world are unable to read, write, or perform basic mathematics has come to be called the “Global Learning Crisis.” Delayed but ever-increasing recognition of the crisis has made it a primary concern, if not the primary concern of the field of international education and the Education for All movement. Work to address the crisis in many ways depends upon how it is understood. This introductory chapter argues that a key theme of the discourse on the Global Learning Crisis is that it is the result of a disconnect or negative association between access to education and education quality. This chapter lays out how the book investigates this idea by conducting a case study of Ugandan primary education, with empirical analysis of three issues: grade repetition, private primary schools, and school fees, viewing each issue as an illustration of the connection between access and quality.
Defining Access and Quality in International Education
Authors: Kabay Sarah
Published: September 2021

Access and quality are key dimensions of any public service—health, infrastructure, and, of course, education. The terms are particularly ubiquitous in the field of international education, where over the past two decades they have been used to categorize both the challenges facing the Education for All movement and the work to address them. This chapter analyzes how these terms have been defined and used in the international education literature, and in particular focuses on understanding the connection between them. The discourse often presents access to education and education quality as either independent or competing concerns and uses them to explain the Global Learning Crisis. The chapter reviews evidence on the association between access and quality, laying the foundation for this theme to continue throughout the book.
Conclusion
Authors: Kabay Sarah
Published: September 2021

This book uses empirical analysis of grade repetition, private primary schools, and school fees in a single sample of Ugandan primary schools in order to examine the association between access to education and education quality. This concluding chapter reviews the results of this empirical research and advances the conclusion that there does not have to be a trade-off between efforts to improve access to education and efforts to improve education quality: there can be a positive association between the two. This finding can be used to inform how the Global Learning Crisis is defined and addressed. In addition, it can be seen as an example of research on complexity. This chapter emphasizes the importance of viewing primary education as a complex adaptive system, and offers some insights into education systems and complexity.
Institutional Structures
Authors: Daly Paul
Published: September 2021

This chapter is concerned with the structure of administrative decision-making institutions. Two general aspects of this important topic are particularly relevant to the law of judicial review of administrative action. First, the no-bias principle ensures that decision-making is impartial, by preventing decision-makers from acting where their personal interests, conduct or history could conceivably raise a concern about their ability to make a dispassionate decision on the merits. Second, the principle that a decision-maker must retain their discretion prevents decision-makers from delegating their powers (subject to an exception in the case of government ministers) and limits the scope for the development of policies about how discretionary powers will be exercised in the future. These principles can be understood as being structured by the values of individual self-realisation, good administration, electoral legitimacy and decisional autonomy.
Procedural Fairness
Authors: Daly Paul
Published: September 2021

The object of discussion in this chapter is the contemporary form of the second of the two rules of natural justice mentioned in the introduction to Chapter 2: audi alteram partem. First, the general structure of procedural fairness is discussed, noting how individual interests, effective and efficient public administration, respect for the decisions of elected representatives and the maintenance of distinct roles for distinct bodies illuminate the general structure of the duty of fairness. Second, exclusions to the duty of fairness, again presented in terms of administrative law values are briefly discussed. Third, the chapter discusses individual procedural rights—such as the right to notice and the right to legal representation—with a view to highlighting how these too can be understood in terms of individual self-realisation, good administration, electoral legitimacy and decisional autonomy.
Substantive Review
Authors: Daly Paul
Published: September 2021

This chapter addresses three particular areas of substantive review: jurisdictional issues (including review for error of law); irrationality and the doctrines of relevant considerations and proper purposes. First, the chapter argues that administrative law values are useful in distinguishing jurisdictional from non-jurisdictional issues and in understanding debates about ‘deference’. Second, it argues that administrative law values are useful in understanding rationality review—in particular, in calibrating the range of reasonable responses, a key concept in the contemporary approach to irrationality. Third, the chapter argues that the structure of relevancy and propriety can be understood as being influenced by administrative law values. Given that in these areas there are significant divergences—certainly at the level of detail—between Commonwealth jurisdictions, the analysis in this chapter will be conducted at a higher level of abstraction than the analysis in the other chapters. Nonetheless, individual self-realisation, good administration, electoral legitimacy and decisional autonomy can be understood to influence the contemporary law of substantive review.
Scope of Judicial Review of Administrative Action
Authors: Daly Paul
Published: September 2021

The law relating to the scope of judicial review of administrative action is somewhat unclear and has a particular tendency to be decided on a case-by-case basis. Indeed, amenability to judicial review will often turn on the application of particular constitutional, statutory or regulatory provisions: in Australia and Canada, for instance, there are multiple judicial review jurisdictions, at federal and state/provincial/territorial level, each with their own idiosyncrasies. This chapter argues, nonetheless, that administrative law values are helpful in understanding the decided cases, with individual self-realisation, good administration, electoral legitimacy and decisional autonomy providing meaningful guidance in navigating the jurisprudence. This chapter also offers some suggestions as to how the law relating to scope of judicial review could be improved, further underscoring how useful it is to understand the law of judicial review of administrative action in terms of administrative law values.
Grounding the Open Future
Authors: Todd Patrick
Published: September 2021

In this chapter, Patrick Todd considers how presentists can argue that the future is open, holding fixed that they maintain that the past is not. He argues that any such presentist argument is doomed to failure, if it proceeds by appeal to a general thesis about truth (such as that “truth supervenes on being”). Thus, he contends, presentist open futurists should not argue for the open future from an intuition about truth in general, but from an intuition about the future in particular. The result, however, is that presentist open futurists cannot make their case by appeal to anything like a metaphysically neutral starting point. Nevertheless, due to certain asymmetries between facts about the past and facts about the future, a presentist open future view remains substantially theoretically motivated.
Three Models of the Undetermined Future
Authors: Todd Patrick
Published: September 2021

This chapter articulates three models of the undetermined future. Assuming that there are multiple future histories consistent with the past and the laws, we can maintain that (I) there is a unique actual future history, and it is determinate which history that is; (II) there is a unique actual future history, but it is indeterminate which history that is; (III) there is no such thing as the “unique actual future history”. Models (I) and (II) are united in terms of there being a unique actual course of history; models (II) and (III) are united in terms of there being no privileged history in the model. The author defends model (III). He further argues that will is a universal quantifier over all the causally possible histories consistent with the future directed facts. The author shows how this view combined with model (III) generates the view that future contingents are all false.
The Assertion Problem
Authors: Todd Patrick
Published: September 2021

In this chapter, the author responds to a family of related objections to the doctrine of the open future—roughly, problems stemming from the observation that what are plausibly future contingents are often nevertheless properly assertible (despite being, on the author’s view, false). He responds to this family of problems by developing several related themes: (i) even if the author’s view is true, it is properly ignored in ordinary life; (ii) an assertion may assert what is false but nevertheless communicate what is true, and this can explain the appropriateness of that assertion; (iii) there is plausibly replacement talk that we could use that would enable us, if we wished, to avoid saying what is false, but would nevertheless allow us to communicate in satisfactory ways. In the end, then, there is no compelling “assertion problem” for the view defended in this book.
Contingencies in International Legal Histories
Authors: dos Reis Filipe
Published: September 2021

This chapter reconstructs how contingency is situated in international legal histories. In particular, it focuses on how contingency relates to narratives of international law’s origin and progress. It explores, first, how traditional and recent international legal histories locate the origin of international law. Different authors—advancing different projects—situate international law within a range of different origins. In the end, the origin of international law is contingent. Moreover, it is possible for some authors, particularly those problematising international law’s Eurocentric origin, to conceptualise the link of contingency and origin not only as the contingency of origin but also in the form of a contingency as origin of international law, as international law originates from the confrontations, translations, encounters, and struggles of various actors. The chapter analyses, second, arguments about progress in international legal histories and argues that these arguments are tied to different conceptualisations of the observer, i.e. the international legal historian. Here, more traditional international legal histories often rely on an understanding of a non-contingent observer, who seeks to create an international legal order that is able to tame the contingencies of the international sphere. However, such narratives of international law’s linear progress have come under scrutiny recently as several interventions started to direct our attention to the multiple perspectives and multilinear trajectories in the making of the current international legal order or invite us to conceptualise the history of international law as a sequence of contingent disruptive events. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of what it could mean to open international legal histories for different conceptualisations of origin and to give up the idea of a non-contingent observer inscribed in progressive narratives.
The Time of Contingency in International Law
Authors: Gordon Geoff
Published: September 2021

The normative affirmation that international law could have been otherwise upholds material commitments to an actually-existing distribution of goods, which international law supports. To make this clear, this chapter begins by sketching a larger context by which the contingency of international law can be made legible. The larger context here pertains to a Western humanist tradition, following which international law relies on contingency to sustain a humanist fantasy of a temporal economic actor. The humanist fantasy includes an emancipatory pretension to political pre-eminence that is inscribed in its temporality, but at odds with its material, economic underpinnings. The pretension to pre-eminence corresponds historically with an ascendant normative regime that has succeeded as an economic programme but continuously failed as an emancipatory one. The frustrated emancipatory project is a complementary counterpart to the successful economic one. The former persists not despite but on the basis of failure and contradiction: in the face of historical failure, international law always already contains within itself the normative solution; its past failures are proof of future successes, a source of assurance and self-affirmation. When political ideals fail, specific temporal logics entangled with international law enable an affirmation of the subject who maintains those failed ideals, for no other reason than persisting as the same idealistic subject in the same material system that produced the failure. As a result, international legal practice redirects energy for social objectives into subjective self-affirmation, leaving other forces at work for political purposes.
Rights for Daydreaming
Authors: McNeilly Kathryn
Published: September 2021

Contingency and the counterfactual are often apprehended as tools to explore how international human rights law might have evolved differently, or have been ‘done better’ as a hopeful and emancipatory discourse. In this chapter, I remain with the theme of hope which pervades this subset of international law and undertake a counterfactual exploration of it. To do so, I ask the question ‘what if international human rights law, in its mainstream form as a discourse shaped by the United Nations, had been developed as a discourse for daydreaming?’ As rights for daydreaming, human rights would offer a vehicle to help us dream individually, but also collectively, of a future of hope which is better than the present, and to do so in a politically-engaged way. Exploring the history of international human rights law in the twentieth century, I locate one period where the futural and the political did collide, albeit not for long: in the work of states from the Global South during the 1960s–1970s. I consider the difference that might have been made had human rights successfully developed as rights for daydreaming in this period. This includes consequences for this area of law’s connection to grassroots social movements; development of its institutional processes and structures; and its compatibility with neoliberalism. Stemming from these changes, thinking international human rights otherwise in this way may have also had positive consequences for the position and potential of this international discourse today.