This chapter examines the question of when expanded channels of community consultation and redress are made available in infrastructure project-affected communities, are grievances aggregated or reduced? To provide context for the nature and functioning of redress mechanisms and requirements for community consultation alongside other safeguard policies including information disclosure, this chapter examines the increasingly stringent application of such principles in the practices of a select number of global multilateral development banks (MDBs) supported by the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment and Belt and Road Initiative. This includes the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and Asian infrastructure Investment Bank to explore how their Environmental and Social Frameworks are designed to mitigate negative social and environmental impacts of project investments beginning in the early 2000s. This is followed by a statistical comparison of the proportion of grievances per project raised prior to and after bank policy amendments between 2010 and 2020 expanding access to pre-project consultation, informed consent and formalised grievance mechanisms amongst 10 of the world’s MDBs in order to determine whether increasing channels of consultation and accountability lead to an increase or reduction in the number of project disputes. The findings indicate that the percentage of grievances per project peaks at 15.4% in 2019 then drops significantly in 2021 to 7.1%.

This chapter introduces key assessment principles and practical strategies. You will explore ways to foster evaluative judgement and reflective thinking, design rubrics, and use diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments to gather insights. The chapter also covers inclusive practices, authentic tasks, and the role of data in driving improvement. These strategies are examples to adapt to your own students and teaching context, helping you create a responsive, engaging learning environment that promotes growth for all learners.

This chapter introduces the notion of theodicy, addresses objections against the legitimacy of theodicy, and summarizes the main argument of the book. The relationship between human and divine love is also thematized, and it is argued that the former but not the latter has an essential relation to suffering.

This chapter examines the evolution of African-American short fiction in the 1940s, focusing on Ralph Ellison’s contributions. It traces the genre’s development from early twentieth-century foundations through the Harlem Renaissance to a flourishing in the 1940s. Ellison’s stories, including “Flying Home” and “King of the Bingo Game,” exemplify the decade’s shift toward more experimental, psychologically complex narratives that blend African-American folklore with modernist techniques. The chapter argues that this period was pivotal in African-American literature, as writers like Ellison combined vernacular traditions with high modernist styles to address themes of identity, alienation, and the American experience. This synthesis laid the groundwork for major novels of the 1950s and beyond, marking the 1940s as a transformative decade that propelled African-American literature into a new era of artistic achievement.

In these pages, the problematic at the centre of the book is introduced. It explores how the concepts of sovereignty and freedom and the human/nature relationship are linked and how they influence the idea of self. This Introduction also displays past and current interpretations of the Romantic conception of subjectivity and of Romantic political philosophy, highlighting the shortcomings of these readings. Indeed, they neglect the political essence of the Romantic Self. This chapter closes with an overview of the structure of the book and a list of the Romantic authors considered.

Consumed by thoughts of a blue flower, Heinrich leaves his cold homeland and travels south until he meets Mathilde, who opens his eyes to the world’s mysteries. Then a tragic event reveals the secret power of poetry …

Heinrich von Ofterdingen, left unfinished at the time of the author’s death, is a masterpiece of philosophical fiction and a classic of German literature. This highly detailed and original interpretation is the most comprehensive and systematic study of the novel ever written. Developing fresh insights into the philosophical ideas of the novel while also attending to its symbolic, literary, and creative qualities, Owen Ware explores how Novalis probes the core problem of modern life – fragmentation, and our sense of alienation from the world. Ultimately, he shows us, this novel is a timeless expression of the Romantics’ idea that only the imagination, guided by love, can bring us back to our spiritual home.

In the late 1960s, Protestants seemed in terminal demographic decline, while the Jewish population stagnated. At the same time, the old Catholic/Protestant divide retained much of its old political significance in Northern Ireland. As the Province descended into violence, the southern minorities were shocked to see how fragile were the achievements of half a century of democratic elections and self-government. The ‘minority question’ had not been answered, or perhaps the traditional response – submission or emigration – was no longer the one Northern nationalists were prepared to offer. This prompts us to consider one final point. As both Jews and Protestants claimed repeatedly throughout the period discussed in this book, what made their history noteworthy was not Ireland’s presumed exceptionalism, but the general significance of their experience as minorities in a democratic nation state. In this, they were basically right. Indeed, while a free society depends on the dignity of dissent, the challenge of how to make diverse democracies work is still with us, has become increasingly global, and has been renewing itself at every generation.

Consumed by thoughts of a blue flower, Heinrich leaves his cold homeland and travels south until he meets Mathilde, who opens his eyes to the world’s mysteries. Then a tragic event reveals the secret power of poetry …

Heinrich von Ofterdingen, left unfinished at the time of the author’s death, is a masterpiece of philosophical fiction and a classic of German literature. This highly detailed and original interpretation is the most comprehensive and systematic study of the novel ever written. Developing fresh insights into the philosophical ideas of the novel while also attending to its symbolic, literary, and creative qualities, Owen Ware explores how Novalis probes the core problem of modern life – fragmentation, and our sense of alienation from the world. Ultimately, he shows us, this novel is a timeless expression of the Romantics’ idea that only the imagination, guided by love, can bring us back to our spiritual home.

The long eighteenth century saw two opposed tendencies in Christian expression in the English-speaking world. On the one hand was the religion of the Enlightenment, which emphasised reason and tolerance, while on the other hand were those sometimes called ‘enthusiasts’, who valued emotion in their relation to the deity. In this chapter texts by major religious writers of the period – Joseph Butler, John Wesley, and George Whitefield – are examined, with a view to determining how their distinctive lexical choices aligned with their theology. All three were at one time members of the Church of England, but their thinking diverged markedly as the century progressed; Wesley and Whitefield are now recognised as leaders in the emergence of Methodism, although they too came to differ about basic matters of belief. The chapter ends with an examination of the ‘language of feeling’ in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, showing how ‘exemplary fiction’ was impacted by the contemporary religious lexicon.

This chapter examines shifts in funeral rituals during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on Zoom-mediated funerals as sites of negotiation between traditionalization and mediatization. Drawing on anthropological theories of ritual and discourse, the authors use a semiotic lens to analyze how mourners navigated the intersection of cultural expectations, technological affordances, and new media ecologies in the context of death. Drawing on the experiences of participants in US-based funerals conducted on Zoom in 2020, the chapter explores how participants used language and metacommunication to contextualize and reframe rituals in response to the absence of tactile, in-person mourning. Examples presented here illustrate how officiants and family members juxtaposed traditional religious and cultural expectations with the mediated nature of online ceremonies, transforming Zoom into a “sacred space,” even as they debated the technical difficulties of online rituals. Transcripts of recordings of Zoom-mediated funerals and interviews with participants show the process by which mourners forged a relationship between expectations for traditional funerals and an imagined imperative for mediatized responses to contemporary crises. The authors argue that rituals, far from being static or solely symbolic, are dynamic processes that respond to changing social and technological conditions and combine mediatization and traditionalization to co-construct meanings.