This chapter analyses the Federal Reserve’s mandate and statutory objectives and how they have evolved since the Fed was established in 1913, and considers the mandate in the context of environmental and social sustainability challenges. The chapter argues that the Fed’s mandate and statutory objectives historically were interpreted broadly to allow discretion for the Fed and its Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to manage monetary policy in support of Government policy. The chapter further argues that the legislative history behind the adoption of the dual mandate to achieve price stability and full employment allows the FOMC and the Board of Governors discretion to use their powers to mitigate the risks emanating from the broader economy and society that might impact the price stability and full employment objectives. Despite the conventional interpretation by Fed officials that the Fed ‘should stick to its knitting’ by focusing on short-to-medium term risks to price stability, the chapter concludes that the economic evidence is compelling that climate finance risks and other sustainability challenges can undermine price stability and full employment and therefore should be factored into the Fed’s monetary policy and financial stability strategy.

The work of the controversial and formidable Mother Francis Bridgeman and her fourteen Sisters of Mercy is discussed in the context of anti-Catholicism and the Irish Question. Nightingale met stolid resistance from Bridgeman from the very first time she encountered her. She tried desperately to win Bridgeman’s confidence because of the important political consequences which would ensue if Bridgeman and her nuns were to abandon the Eastern hospitals, but she never succeeded. Bridgeman felt strongly that her system of nursing differed radically from that of Nightingale. The chapter explores her view of the two systems of nursing in detail, and demonstrates that to a large extent she misrepresented Nightingale’s nursing services while Nightingale exaggerated the untidy state in which she found the Balaclava General Hospital when Bridgeman left. This chapter also demonstrates that Bridgeman did not take a transnational approach to nursing; rather she felt her Sisters were only able to do their best when they had recreated Irish conventual practice in Balaclava.

Chapter 8, by Katja Biedenkopf and Alexander Mattelaer, covers policy diffusion. It argues that the analytical lens of interdependent policy decisions and mutual influence among foreign policy-makers can add a useful angle to FPA. More specifically, the focus of this chapter is on policy diffusion and transfer as independent variables in the analysis of foreign policy choices. The chapter starts with outlining policy diffusion and transfer as public policy approaches and then has a section that proposes how these two concepts could enrich FPA. The fourth section illustrates the application of a policy diffusion lens to foreign policy decisions, namely the case of planning doctrine for military crisis response operations. It explores the historical origins of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) operational planning doctrine and how it has diffused to other international organizations such as the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN). The concluding section provides some reflections on the contribution and limitations of integrating policy diffusion and transfer into FPA.

The municipal elite of Victorian and Edwardian Belfast, like their counterparts in other growing cities, sought to cope with the rapidly expanding industrial city for which they were responsible by promoting a sense of civic pride, and by developing a new policy of open but conditional access to public space. Both strategies were partly undermined, in the case of Belfast, by a pervasive religious and political sectionalism. Today policy makers pursue parallel goals, in the context of new ideas of human rights and the acceptance of diversity. Attempts to promote a shared civic identity have had some success, but the long-term future remains unclear. The alternative would be partition, continuing to close off the realisation in Belfast of the full potential of modern urban living.

Chapter 4 looks at the late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century Acallam na Senórach, medieval Ireland’s longest piece of literature at 8,000 lines. Set in the fifth-century past, the Acallam resurrects both Saint Patrick and the pagan hero Caílte to lead a pilgrimage through a reimagined Irish topography, merging sacred and secular to posit a revalorized, sanctified Ireland for a post-conquest audience. The Acallam advocates walking and physical movement through a green Ireland as knowledge-creating, while also promoting the benefits of imaginative engagement with a storied environment. The Acallam furthermore deploys a geospatial poetics to ‘naturalize’ Patrick: as in the Irish legends of kingship and sovereignty, Patrick is endorsed by the land. His actions show an increasingly harmonious relationship with the environment and culminate in his composition and delivery of Irish-language topographical poems. Patrick becomes a saintly practitioner of the Irish poetics of place, and the British-born foreigner is by the end of the text embraced as Ireland’s patron saint. By modeling Irish spatial practices through a range of characters transformed over the course of the narrative, the Acallam shows the diverse members of Irish (and English) society how to engage with Ireland as a richly storied, sanctified nation.

This chapter addresses central aspects of Kant’s late engagement with the internal obstacle to the realisation of the highest good, the inadequacy of the human will. It argues that his idea of a moral ‘revolution’, whereby the good disposition of a human fallen into evil is restored to its original power, involves an account of moral progress that produces an irresolvable tension: in necessitating an appeal to a doctrine of grace, it in fact reintroduces the paradox of Kantian theodicy. However, Kant’s account also points the way beyond the paradox, opening up a second path towards implicating the will in its concrete phenomenal environment. The possibility Kant brings into view is that neither whether an agent has adopted an end nor what that adoption commits them to is ascertainable independently of the pursuit of the end itself. What prevents Kant from taking this path is his enduring understanding of the very nature of moral constraint. That understanding, however, which also underlies his introduction of radical evil, arguably reflects a misguided conflation, between his core thesis about the logic of autonomy and a strictly independent metaphysics of the human person.

Chapter 7 examines whether the American Dream – centered on freedom, equality of opportunity, and upward mobility – might be better realized in Nordic societies than in the US. Through Isaiah Berlin’s framework of negative freedom (freedom from something) and positive freedom (freedom to something), it analyzes how different varieties of capitalism translate shared aspirations into distinct realities. While American society prioritizes negative freedoms like freedom from taxation and regulation – often benefiting those with power – Nordic societies focus on expanding positive freedoms, such as universal access to healthcare and education. The chapter documents Nordic nations’ superior performance on measures of social mobility and equal opportunity, while exploring how their universal systems function as “efficient hand pumps” expanding positive freedoms. Using public universities as a case study, it demonstrates how American institutions that once enabled broad-based opportunity are being eroded by concentrated private interests. The chapter concludes that realizing the American Dream’s promise requires strong democratic institutions that expand positive freedom for all citizens.

This chapter tests those Indigenous directions and artistic visions of learning environments with close readings of local-level expressions of religious and cultural learning. Anchored in Huejotzingo and Calpan, but contextualized with valley-wide initiatives, the chapter exposees Indigenous contributions to learning environments in ethno-spatial analysis. Artwork and architecture developments from 1550s are exemplified as local interpretations of Christianity and local traditions beyond European prescriptions. The chapter argues for a multicultural reading of the lessons imparted in church courtyards, showing how place-based pedagogy and preexisting modes of learning could have informed convent-goers’ takeaways. Instead of wholly Christian convents were partial and un-wholistic pedagogical expressions, ripe for Burkhart’s slippages. Practice and place-based observances could cause a survivance of local history and Indigenous knowledge to persist, working effectively alongside the dogmatic reading of church art. Here, the overarching vision of learning emerges with critical visual and material culture studies of biblical figures, placements, enjambments, and reassessments of Indigenous sources that may have offered some friction in design choices of architects of the perfect classrooms of colonialism.

Sustainability transitions research explores how societies transform socio-technical systems towards evolving sustainability goals. This chapter introduces key concepts, development, and significance of this interdisciplinary field. We define sustainability transitions through three core components: socio-technical systems combining technology and social structures, transition processes as multi-dimensional shifts over long timespans, and the evolving, contested nature of sustainability goals. Since its 1990s origins, the field has expanded to include diverse theoretical frameworks and methods. While established frameworks offer valuable tools, emerging research on spatial dimensions, power dynamics, and methodological diversification is crucial for addressing contemporary challenges. This chapter lays the foundation for the handbook, previewing key debates and themes explored in subsequent chapters on theoretical frameworks, transition dynamics, methodologies, and future research directions.

After the installation of a liberal constitution, the socialist tilt in the aftermath of independence challenged some of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution, particularly the right to property, culminating in the removal of the right in the 1970s. Apart from noting the consequences of this, the chapter explores the effects of judicial hyperactivity manifest in public-interest litigation, as well as instances of overt judicial deference to the state. The other theme of the chapter follows the market orientation accompanying the 1991 economic liberalization, with the prominent challenge residing in the incapacity of the law and legal structures to govern long-term investment contracts. It is argued that the response – the creation of multiple regulatory bodies – resulted not only in fragmenting the law but also in raising generic social costs. The conclusion reinforces the narratives highlighted over the chapter by looking at arbitral awards imposed on India on account of international investment disputes.

‘The curse of Ratcliffe Highway’ examines how the Victorians ‘imagined’ the Highway by tracing how the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 left an indelible stain on the district’s reputation. By the mid-nineteenth century, the press and social observers had conflated the bloody murders of 1811 with the perceived vice and violence of sailortown. However, this chapter employs the Census material to uni a rather different picture of Ratcliffe Highway, one that is more socially heterogeneous than contemporaries imagined. By the 1860s, it was a cosmopolitan contact zone where sailors, the local working class, and tradespeople contributed to, and found support from, cultures and sailortown institutions of Ratcliffe Highway. Sailortown, however, was not only a contact zone for those who lodged, worked, and leisured in the district; it was also a site targeted by a legion of religious evangelists, social explorers, and journalists keen to make contact with and observe the urban poor.

This chapter considers American gay life writing with an emphasis on drag-performers and/as genderqueer subjects. It aims to lay out historical trends in the understanding of drag as a career and its connection to genderqueer subjectivity, arguing that much of drag and genderqueer life writing eschews rigid ontologies for more unfixed inhabitations of gendered and sexual subjectivities. Autobiographies published between the 1970s and the 1990s tend to treat drag performance as a vocational calling for gay and/or genderqueer individuals. By the 2000s, we see a trend toward memoirs that treat drag as an unserious diversion from normal life. Starting in the 2010s, there is increased emphasis on identity over vocation, reflecting new public interest in understanding genderqueer subjectivity but also increased pressure to define oneself through legible categories. Coeval with such accounts is the emergence of drag superstars propelled to prominence by RuPaul, yielding drag autobiographies for a mainstream market. As this new trend suggests, we may in the mid-2020s be situated at the cusp of a renaissance in drag and genderqueer autobiography.