This chapter analyzes the participation of public health experts in nineteenth-century medical societies. It examines societies’ relation to urban politics and professional medical organizations by scrutinizing how these experts mediated between the worlds of science and politics, making use of medical societies in the process. The general line that runs through the chapter is a shift in the way expertise in public health was framed in the course of the century. Early and mid-nineteenth-century experts conceived of their work as the voluntary, philanthropic work of engaged citizens. For them, medical societies formed a vehicle through which they could express such citizenship. State investments in public health gradually brought forth a new class of public health professionals in the second half of the century. These new experts stressed the scientific grounding of their studies to differentiate them from popular works or lobbying efforts. Participation in urban medical societies, which increasingly defined themselves as ‘scientific’ institutions as opposed to professional organizations, allowed them to realize their ambitions. The label of public health studies as a form of ‘applied science’ proved helpful to convince both medical colleagues and politicians.

This chapter argues that the poet of Genesis B imagines Satan’s crime as a failure to accept sovereign checks on his power and limits upon his territorial ambitions. Irish vernacular adaptations similarly depict how Satan views humankind as rival-inheritors of lands to which he feels entitled. These accounts, found in texts such as Saltair na Rann and Lebor Gabála, derive from the apocryphal ‘Life of Adam and Eve’. We see how both Anglo-Saxon and Irish authors adapt apocryphal traditions for a powerful socio-political effect, imagining features of their own ecclesiastical and secular administrations as mimetic representations of divine structures.

This chapter addresses the 'war on terror's' implications for democracy and human rights, arguing that it has legitimated political oppression and undermined democratization processes in some states in the region, particularly in Southeast Asia. It also addresses the associated 'Bush doctrine' for regional militarization and militarism. The chapter outlines the links between the 'war on terror', US foreign policy and the US hegemony, before outlining the ways in which these policies, interests and dynamics have played out in relations with the Asia-Pacific since 2001. It also outlines the threat posed by the US-led 'war on terror' for human rights, democracy and prospects for organized violence. The chapter reflects on the extent to which the United States might be viewed as a source of security and stability for the region. It concludes by highlighting possibilities for alternative security orders to emerge in the region which further individual emancipation.

This chapter explores lesbian Canadian language poet Erín Moure’s collection of poetry, O Cidadán. A challenging text, the collection offers a critique of established ideas of citizenship and formulates an alternative narrative of citizenship and community building, with Moure’s figure of the cidadán at its core. Embedded within Moure’s narrative are specific writing and reading practices that challenge the reader to act on the text, constituting the reader as a civic subject within this alternative narrative.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in this book. The book focuses on the potentially totalising narrative of radicalism that has long been applied to performance practices that seek to challenge the dramatic model of theatre. The poststructuralist imperative demands a radical practice that is not based on the reification of its own conclusions, but on a self-reflexivity that can serve to always and already destabilise its own manifestations of authority, wherever these might lie. The forms and methods of resistance need to be constantly in transition, in performance as in all other aspects of cultural and political life, to maintain their potential to counteract the influence of the spectacle of global capital. For those who have previously dismissed either the notion of radical poststructuralism or the notion of radical dramatic practice, the book suggests where the possibilities of both might lie.

The chapter discusses the role of the UK in supporting African Union (AU) peace and security structures, particularly the AU’s Peace and Security Architecture (APSA), since 2010. It argues that UK Governments – especially that led by Tony Blair (1997–2007) – gave Africa policy a high profile characterised inter alia by a desire to build the capacity of African states and institutions. Nevertheless, the chapter also notes that since the year 2010, when the Labour Party lost power, tensions, contradictions and ambiguities in the UK–AU/APSA relationship have emerged, partly exacerbated by the continued illegal immigration of Africans to Europe, and the UK intervention in Libya in 2011 in total disregard of African views on the matter.

This chapter compares the contemporaneous efforts by champions of distinct historical enterprises to demonstrate that they could create and sustain professional scholars worthy of the mantle of the Romantic man of letters. It compares the idealized personae created by Professor J. Franklin Jameson to those created by competing factions within the for-profit research company that produced what became the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. It demonstrates that Jameson and representatives from Bancroft’s History Company all claimed that their enterprises could synthesize and sustain genius, calling to mind the heroic man of letters who could believably promise to meet the onerous expectations of the archival turn. Just as importantly, this chapter examines what we stand to gain and to lose in different permutations of the ‘scholarly persona’ by experimenting with the results produced by aligning different traits with scholarly personae while reducing others to supporting structures like templates or repertoires.

Feminism is a peculiarly literary movement and many of the intellectual and political leaders of the women's struggle have been celebrated writers. Women's literature has been very useful to religious feminists. This chapter discusses canonical narrative theology with Hans Frei's important book, The Decline of Biblical Narrative. The project Frei initiated stands in contrast to the attempts of liberal and liberation theologians to discover, through conversation with secular culture, an appropriate register in which to reiterate Christian convictions. In the canonical narrative theologies of Frei and Stanley Hauerwas a distinction is being implicitly drawn between the realistic narrative and the values of contemporary culture which are illusory, seductive, immoral and dangerous. Through making this distinction literature becomes available as a resource that can be used to construct a theological position which then erases its vital contribution.