This chapter discusses an ethically challenging case involving a seventeen-year-old patient, Joseph, diagnosed with advanced osteosarcoma. His care was complicated by his mother Sheila’s refusal to adhere to recommended medical treatments, including chemotherapy and pain management. Despite Joseph’s severe pain and deteriorating condition, Sheila’s resistance to medical interventions caused significant ethical and medical dilemmas. The medical team, ethics consultants, and Child Protective Services (CPS) were repeatedly involved, but Sheila’s influence over Joseph, compounded by his love and loyalty to her, continued to hinder pain and symptom management.

As Joseph neared the end of his life, ethical consultations suggested involving him in decision-making due to his cognitive maturity and understanding of his medical needs. However, Sheila’s refusals persisted, leading to intense moral distress among the care team. Efforts to engage CPS and legal avenues to override parental authority were insufficient, and the care team struggled between their responsibility to ease Joseph’s suffering and respecting Sheila’s decisions.

This case highlights significant deficiencies in end-of-life protections for adolescents and raises crucial ethical questions about parental authority, adolescent patient autonomy, and the role of healthcare providers in safeguarding patient welfare. The chapter concludes by advocating for stronger legal and institutional guidelines to address these complex ethical issues, especially in pediatric care.

This chapter examines the interplay between the HIV/AIDS pandemic and political dynamics, affecting both ruling and opposition parties. The chapter argues that governments can exploit public health crises to their advantage, mainly through their control over healthcare access and the movement of citizens. The HIV pandemic disproportionately impacted urban areas, which are also opposition strongholds. Thus, the majority of those who became ill and or died from the disease were urbanites who would have been opposition voters. The prolonged nature of HIV/AIDS also had a debilitating effect on entire families, where caregivers faced significant exhaustion and burnout, reducing their capacity for political engagement, protests, or voting. The HIV/AIDS pandemic also changed the political and cultural landscape. The death of politicians resulted in multiple elections that favored the ruling party, which had better resources. The loss of cultural leaders, musicians, and others in the arts also diminished the voices of those willing and able to speak up against the regime. The chapter provides a calculation of the exit premium of 4 to 12 percent due to HIV/AIDS-related voter exit.

The context in which Robert and Clara carried out their respective musical experiences as performers, listeners, and organizers of chamber music was richly varied. This chapter illustrates how, at the time, playing together with other musicians was considered of primary importance. Sometimes the Schumanns directly initiated such events, such as the Quartettmorgen (quartet mornings) that Robert had organized starting in 1838 in his own home. From the early nineteenth century onwards, concert series dedicated to chamber music flourished throughout Europe, often founded and run by musicians with whom Robert and Clara were in close contact. Above all, the number of student-populated instrumental ensembles increased, even in schools not specifically dedicated to music (such as military and art academies). The number of orchestras in which amateurs often played alongside professionals grew as well. Sometimes Robert himself conducted such groups.

This chapter grapples with the question of what has historically been admitted to the literary canon, via a consideration of comic poetry. Traditionally omitted from literary and language debates, comic poetry flourished especially in Florence, but was also produced in other centres. The chapter begins with Domenico di Giovanni, Burchiello, whose poetry satirised intellectuals and scholarly pursuits while demonstrating a virtuoso command of language, including Latinised poetic forms. It then discusses comic literature in Medici Florence, where poets including Lorenzo de’ Medici, Poliziano and Pulci refined this style, generating cultured parodies, and creating new genres such as Pulci’s mock-heroic epic, the Morgante, and allegorical and double-entendre Carnival songs. The final section considers comic poetry beyond Florence, including bilingual macaronic Latin-vernacular verse in Padua, post-Burchiello verse in Rome and Aretino’s pasquinades. The comic-burlesque mode is shown to be coterminous with more prized genres and produced by authors across the class spectrum.

Beyond the demographic factors of socio-economic disadvantage, inequality and unemployment, some occupations have been historically linked with higher rates of suicide deaths. These include: the armed forces, farmers, healthcare workers (including doctors), and “blue light” emergency workers, or “first responders,” for example, police, ambulance, rescue and fire personnel. Where available, the chapter draws upon systematic reviews and meta-analyses to discuss the evidence in specific occupational groups; the risk indicators and protective factors for suicide at individual, organisational and systemic level; and potential interventions over the course of a worker’s career. Understanding occupational risk factors over the career span from recruitment, self-selection and selection, through work environments and cultures, occupational trauma and stresses, could yield strategies for more generalisable suicide prevention at a population level as well as reducing rates in specific occupations.

This chapter examines the introduction of new lay participation systems in Asian countries. Focusing on Russia, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, I explore the social and political contexts and goals of the policymakers that motivated the incorporation of citizen decision-making into the legal systems of these countries. In each of the four countries, the adoption of new systems of lay participation occurred during periods of political democratization. Those who argued in favor of citizen involvement hoped that it would promote democratic self-governance, create more robust connections between the citizenry and the government, and improve public confidence in the courts. Policymakers drew on the experiences of other countries, including other Asian nations, to develop a distinctive model that incorporated some features of lay participation systems elsewhere, and modified them to suit the specific circumstances of their own countries.

The arguments of this book are intended to tackle the social injustices faced by people living with dementia, yet reflecting on the author’s social position reveals a tension. As the author is not a member of the social group this book concerns, they are engaging in an act of speaking for others: a practice that has received significant criticism, given the risks of contributing to oppression and stigma through misrepresentation. With this concern in mind, this chapter engages in a reflective exercise about the content of the book, highlighting ways in which the author’s social position may have negatively influenced its content and setting out the steps the author has taken to try to address this.

The existence of democratic systems of government threatens the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes. Democracy presents unique opportunities and vulnerabilities, including public debate and free expression, which nefarious actors can exploit by spreading false information. Disinformation can propagate rapidly across social networks and further authoritarian efforts to weaken democracy. This research discusses how Russia and China leverage online disinformation across contexts and exploit democracies’ vulnerabilities to further their goals. We create an analytical framework to map authoritarian influence efforts against democracies: (i) through longer term, ambient disinformation, (ii) during transitions of political power, and (iii) during social and cultural divides. We apply this framework to case studies involving Western democracies and neighboring states of strategic importance. We argue that both China and Russia aim to undermine faith in democratic processes; however, they bring different histories, priorities, and strategies while also learning from each other and leveraging evolving technologies. A primary difference between the countries’ disinformation against democracies is their approach. Russia builds on its longstanding history of propaganda for a more direct, manipulation-driven approach, and China invested heavily in technological innovation more recently for a permeating censorship-driven approach. Acknowledging it is impossible to know disinformation’s full scope and impact given the current information landscape, the growing international ambition and disinformation efforts leveraged by authoritarian regimes are credible threats to democracy globally. For democracies to stay healthy and competitive, their policies and safeguards must champion the free flow of trustworthy information. Resilience against foreign online disinformation is vital to achieving fewer societal divides and a flourishing information environment for democracies during peaceful – and vulnerable – times.

How do the dual trends of increased misinformation in politics and increased socioeconomic inequality contribute to an erosion of trust and confidence in democratic institutions? In an era of massive misinformation, voters bear the burden of separating truth from lies as they determine how they stand on important issue areas and which candidates to support. When candidates engage in misinformation, it uncouples the already weak link among vote intentions, candidate choice, and policy outputs. At the same time, high levels of economic inequality and social stratification may contribute to lower levels of institutional trust, and the correspondingly more insular socioeconomic groups may experience misinformation differently. Social policy, as a policy area intentionally designed to alleviate risk and redistribute resources, thus becomes a special case where the effects of misinformation and socioeconomic inequality may be crosscutting and heightened.