Each case in this chapter examines the experiences of a language learner from a different country, usually from the perspective of their teacher. Learners are the people who teachers interact with the most in their professional lives and are often the cause of dilemmas they encounter. The chapter covers topics such as gender identity in the classroom, teaching dedicated older learners, and teaching a learner with suspected ADHD.

This chapter discusses the idea that being ‘in transition’ towards a juridical condition impacts or shapes our duties and rights from a Kantian perspective. It analyses the implications of treating juridical duties as if they were duties of virtue, in the absence of or under imperfect juridical institutions. It argues that this introduces a problem for Kant’s account of ethical and legal obligations because respecting the dignity of those to whom a juridical duty is owed requires treating their claims as a matter of right instead of ethics. It also criticizes the way in which Kant’s theory of acquired rights in the state of nature has been reinterpreted as a theory of ‘provisionality’. Recent Kant scholarship has highlighted the ability of Kant’s legal-political theory to guide us through messy political developments in the manner of non-ideal theory. The chapter will object that the way Kant connects provisional rights and permissive laws has little to do with non-ideal theory, and follows instead from Kant’s apagogical argument for acquired rights in the state of nature.

This chapter is, for the most part, devoted to an appraisal of Greek art as a school of humanity. Herder applies the model of nature’s force to the work of art. The force that produces the human form in the work of art also conditions the possibilities for viewing and understanding art. Art grounds visible categories of humankind and it renders visible the ideas that make these categories intelligible. Greek statuary is seen as a formalization of timeless categories of human life, but these categories are subject to the contingencies of interpretation. He discusses the Greek idealization of childhood, heroism, the gods, fauns, satyrs, and centaurs. He then concludes that there is no such thing as formless goodness and truth. This is followed by an appraisal of allegory. A text by Johann Christoph Berens is cited as an example of practical moral enlightenment. In this connection, the question of public morals is raised with respect to Homer and Montesquieu. Kant’s pursuit of truth is praised. The chapter closes with thoughts on freedom of thought and the state.

There are multiple dimensions to the work that language teachers and teacher educators do in their institutions, and beyond, besides teaching in classrooms and doing research. They all perform some sort of professional service, be it administrative or committee work or taking on management and leadership roles. Professional service is the focus of this chapter, and cases include meeting with dissatisfied parents, serving on a Department of Education working group, and giving a talk to pre-service teachers.

This chapter focuses on the Schumann home and its inhabitants, drawing on documentary evidence to highlight Robert’s relationships with the family members who shaped his formative years. Diaries and letters paint the picture of a close-knit family that fostered Robert’s talents – encouraging his lifelong loves of literature and music – and in which he was a devoted son, brother, and brother-in-law. Yet while these sources depict a warm and loving home, they also reveal a succession of family deaths that took a serious toll on Robert’s mental health as a young man. Attending to the close relationships he shared with his parents, brothers, and sisters-in-law, as well as the emotional suffering he experienced at their deaths, offers illuminating context for understanding Robert’s artistic and intellectual principles as well as the mental health challenges with which he struggled as an adult.

Before being identified and given a name, the mafia had a shadowy pre-history. In a celebrated legal report sent to the Bourbon authorities in Naples in 1838, Pietro Cala Ulloa talks of conditions in Sicily and of the influence of certain 'brotherhoods'. The Inchiesta in Sicilia by Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino, published in 1876, was probably the most thorough and unbiased enquiry into Sicilian life and social conditions ever undertaken. Franchetti's remit included the inquiry into the forms of criminality specific to the island. The description of Sicilian life outraged the folklorist, Giuseppe Pitre, who answered Franchetti, and others, with a disquisition on the origins of the mafia, which became an extended paean of praise to its values and conduct.

Until the COVID-19 pandemic, a working style in Japan that emphasized teamwork was predominant, and telework was not widespread. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority of companies had no choice but to introduce telework. Telework, where individual workers operate independently rather than collectively, was an entirely new way of working for many Japanese individuals. To make telework function efficiently, a re-evaluation of Japan's traditional employment system, where job descriptions are not specified in employment contracts and individuals agree only to become members of a company, became necessary. While it was previously considered an obligation for workers to comply with employers’ transfer orders involving relocation, telework has introduced a new option of handling such orders without physically relocating. In this way, telework has the potential to be a game-changer in Japan's traditional employment system. However, there are diverse legal issues that need to be resolved when introducing telework.

The Atrocity Exhibition is Ballard's most demanding and most unsettling work. An experimental text that eschews the codes of realist narrative, it is a heteroglossic and open-ended artefact that works on multiple levels and refuses the closure of meaning. The exorbitation of consciousness all the way through the book is significant because it draws attention to the erosion of taboos, the deadening of affect, and the spectacularisation of social life at the heart of this deviant logic. In Crash it is self-evidently a psycho-social unconscious that is visible through the aperture of the wound. Dynamic in structure and manifesting multiple relays and links, it functions as an assemblage that attests the novel's moral ambivalence. The search for an ostensibly charitable psychopathology takes place within a libidinal economy that is well beyond the pleasure principle. Dissociation from affects and from the meaning of events is a predominant feature of Crash.