This chapter explores thematic repertoire as a hallmark of aesthetic variety in African American novels of the 1940s. Focusing on portrayals of dating and marriage, it charts how Chester Himes, Ann Petry, and William Demby use romantic relationships to express unique creative priorities as they engage Black life in a Jim Crow society. The chapter’s argument builds on recent research about heterosexual intimacy. At the same time, it endorses a patient exploration of mid-century African American novelic production, contending that precisely because the 1940s were moments of unprecedented growth in the publication of Black fiction, that era’s texts provide singular insights into artistic maturation. Today, scholars celebrate the variety of Black expressive styles. While such hoorays often wear theoretical guises, this chapter suggests that fully grasping such plurality requires scrupulous attention to the archive of African American literary and cultural production. It espouses a granular analysis tied to exhaustive inventorying.

This chapter discusses qualitative studies, which explore meanings, experiences, and processes underlying health and illness. It contrasts qualitative and quantitative paradigms, emphasising the depth and richness of qualitative insights. Common methods such as interviews, focus groups, participant observation, and document analysis are explained, alongside analytic approaches including thematic analysis, grounded theory, and phenomenology. Strengths of qualitative research include its ability to capture lived experience, uncover context-specific factors, and generate hypotheses for further study. Limitations include smaller sample sizes, issues of generalisability, and the need for reflexivity in interpretation. The chapter highlights criteria for rigour in qualitative research, including credibility, dependability, confirmability, and transferability. Examples illustrate applications in exploring patient experiences of chronic illness, barriers to healthcare access, and the implementation of interventions. Ethical considerations, including informed consent, confidentiality, and sensitivity to participant vulnerability, are also discussed. The chapter concludes by emphasising the complementary role of qualitative studies within health research. This chapter maps to syllabus section 3.4, which covers qualitative methodologies, strengths, limitations, and appraisal criteria.

This chapter examines the placing of COVID-19 grief through ethnographic vignettes from three distinct contexts: the prolonged search by one woman in Guayaquil, Ecuador, to find and bury her mother’s body; the ritualized micro-eulogies and use of public health data that characterized Kentucky’s state response to the pandemic; and the community efforts to create a national commemorative space in Washington, DC, for lives lost to COVID in the absence of state recognition. Drawing on philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the ethical imperative to care for the deceased, we show how individual acts of mourning – what we call “micro-eulogies” – confront the silences and erasures surrounding COVID-19 death. These quotidian practices of naming, honoring, and remembering the dead emerge alongside and against narratives of revisionism and calls to “move on.” In attending to the specificity of these three places – geographic, sociopolitical, symbolic – and the movement of individual and collective grief between the private and the public, the chapter explores what it means for the experience of COVID-19 loss to be located. It argues that localizing pandemic grief is an act of refusal, one that demands a collective reckoning and response.

Routines are part of everyday life. Essentially a routine is a sequence of actions that is followed regularly, although not always with the same frequency. For example, some routines are part of every day, while others may occur weekly or even less frequently. Some people are comfortable with a framework of their day and prefer a flexible approach to routines. Others prefer a more rigid schedule, and routines are part of that fixed plan. However, there are some people who find routines challenging, and require additional support for these to be a successful part of the day. This chapter will explore some of the daily routines that are part of a child’s life, both within and outside the ECEC service. It will include what routines are, why they are important, challenges some children (and adults) might experience, and strategies that may provide additional support for routines to become less difficult, and more seamlessly embedded in the day.

In this chapter, we examine key empirical implications of our theoretical argument by analyzing global patterns in the termination and recurrence of Islamist civil wars compared with other civil wars. Drawing on novel data that captures the religious dimensions of armed conflict, we assess whether civil wars involving Islamist claims are less likely to end and more likely to restart. The analysis reveals strong evidence that Islamist conflicts are indeed less likely to terminate compared with other civil wars, and when they do end, they are significantly more likely to recur – either through the resurgence of the same group or the emergence of new ones. Importantly, our findings further suggest that the degree of internationalization matters – specifically, the presence of foreign fighters on the rebel side and secondary support on the government side can make these conflicts more intractable. In our analysis, we rule out some competing explanations for the religious dimension more broadly, and we also nuance the claim that Islamists are merely the new revolutionaries.

Large corporations increasingly shape economic and political life, often beyond public oversight. This chapter examines how market concentration, lobbying, and financialization distort competition and policymaking. It traces the emergence of a global economic elite whose influence undermines democratic accountability and inclusive growth. The chapter proposes antitrust reforms, corporate transparency, and institutional checks to limit excess power. Ensuring capitalism serves the public interest requires rebalancing the relationship between business and the state.

This chapter begins by explaining why I came to think questions about the rule of law are crucially important questions in general and why it is particularly important to seek answers to them today. It goes on to outline how my approach to thinking about these issues has evolved away from conventional ways of asking and answering them, and why. In particular I have moved from being a ‘rule of law guy’ to being a ‘tempering power guy’. That is the place to start. What follows depends. I then summarise the themes of the subsequent chapters.

Between the eighth and sixth centuries BCE, the Indigenous Elymian settlement of Monte Polizzo underwent a period of notable socio-economic development in the wake of Greek and Phoenician colonization. Archaeological evidence from multiple excavated domestic structures, including a substantial assemblage of weaving implements, underscores the central role of weaving within the community. Textile production was deeply embedded in daily life, functioning not only as a key contributor to the economy but also as a conservative force in articulating and reinforcing local identity and local agency in response to an ever-changing world.

Life was conceived by the Romantics as the underlying force of nature, and they sought to identify its norms and rules of transformation. For them, life oscillates between contraction and relaxion, between potentiality and actuality. Life establishes and renews the norms they set. However, these sequences do not only lead to the form of living beings. Life is immanent and its creations flourish in every sphere. As we will see in this chapter, this idea of ‘life’ prompted the Romantics to focus on rhythm and habit, as the way in which life gives itself a dynamic order. Habit is the key for the Romantic reformulation of the political lexicon: it enhances sociability; individualities are not isolated beings but rather carry in themselves the inexhaustible transformative forces of life that deploy in and outside the individual. The individual is therefore always influenced by the context. For this reason, her freedom is not formulated as autonomy but rather as creativity or wisdom. This interpretation of ‘freedom’ bridges the gap between humans and nature and demonstrates that, in order to rethink our relationship with nature, we have to reformulate our political concepts.