Using the evidence of normative texts, such as capitularies, as well as charters and estate records, this chapter studies the aims of interventions by political authorities and the dynamics of outside intervention within local society and their influence on social cohesion locally. With a focus on the three fields of war, justice and landownership, it demonstrates (where possible) the effects on the local of intervention from outside and demonstrates that such intervention was part of the regular experience of local people – whether from invaders, in court cases or as tenants. Moreover, individual members of local residential groups could often find supporters and mediators outside their small worlds, and factions within a community could use external agencies against their neighbours: external intervention into the local in the early Middle Ages could be an opportunity as well as a threat.

This chapter reviews the reach of public trust principles across the globe and compares them to a competing model of environmental rights, the rights of nature movement. The former affirms public rights to the environment, while the latter confers rights on the environment itself. Both reflect dissatisfaction with the failure of existing laws to ensure environmental stewardship. The rise of such advocacy responds to the missing foundations for environmental law identified in the Introduction, including weak constitutional foundations in the United States. Exploration begins with a review of public trust principles around the world, followed by a whirlwind tour of global rights of nature initiatives. The rights of nature movement provides an unapologetically biocentric alternative to the inherent anthropocentrism of the public trust and more typical environmental laws, which also premise the value of natural resources on their human beneficiaries – yet they are evolving along similar legal pathways. The chapter concludes with comparative analysis of the two approaches, contrasting the underlying ethics that divide them while recognizing the practical characteristics that unite them.

This chapter examines significant gay American travel writers from the nineteenth century to the present who mine the political, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of travel writing to interrogate the experience of non-heteronormative life. From Herman Melville’s Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) to Robert McAlmon’s time in Paris in the 1920s and Edmund White’s landmark account of travel in the US (published in 1980), the chapter traces how experiences of exoticism, exile, and home have conditioned the representation of gay masculinity.

In the Republic of Ireland, children have long been ancillary to immigration policy and decisions, with their specific needs and rights frequently overlooked. In 2016, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child expressed concern at the current inadequacy of Ireland’s migration law framework to address the needs of migrant children. This chapter explores the impact of the absence of clear law and policy on children's lives. It considers the barriers to children obtaining immigration status and applying for citizenship. It focuses on the problems created by uncertainty around children's immigration status that extend into adulthood and place ceilings on opportunities, including restricting access to third-level education. Migrant children are not a homogeneous group and their individual lived experiences may be very different. The chapter draws on research carried out by the Immigrant Council in 2016 including consultation with 19 young people and 180 social workers, guardians ad litem, and other advocates and support workers, exploring the impact of immigration law, entitlement to naturalisation, access to education and employment, and migrant children’s disproportionate contact with the statutory care system.

This chapter explores how different forms of reproductive labour create different precarities within LGBTQ parenting and kin-making in contemporary Sweden. It especially considers the precarization of biological labour in a setting where intimate labour is the foundation for kin-making and where the necessary making, gestating and breastfeeding of a child is downplayed in relation to parenthood status. Drawing on ethnographic research, the chapter also illuminates how ‘biology’ produces strong feelings, even in a kinship structure that departs from the notion of intent and intimate labour as equally shared matters. Framing queer reproduction as both a biopolitical question and a question of gender labour, the chapter then discusses how gendered and racialized ideas of parenthood and kinship are reproduced and reworked in imaginaries of LGBTQ parenthood. Contributing to critical whiteness studies, it argues that the (queer) nation is repeatedly recreated as white, while whiteness remains invisible to those who inhabit it.

This chapter explores how chronicles written in Spanish and Dutch portrayed loyalist commander Francisco de Valdés in his role of military leader during the Siege of Leiden (1573–74). Spanish and Dutch chronicles illustrate how the main characters of the story were fabricated in order to support the underlying perceptions of the chroniclers. Remarkably enough, differences are not so much between Spanish and Dutch narratives, but depend on the overall vision the chroniclers wish to offer. Valdés and his men are shown in a negative way by Dutch historians who want to emphasize the positive qualities of the Leiden defenders, while those that do not stress local unity do not show such a negative vision on the Spanish enemy either. The same holds true for Spanish authors. Those who wish to convey a very positive picture of the Spanish let their hero Valdés fight against a negatively described enemy, while a Spanish text more neutral on the enemy can even offer a negative image of the Spanish commander.

This chapter argues that John Webster’s The White Devil is grotesque by design, because it attempts to fuse two opposing philosophical polarities: the heightened emotions of the pleasure-seeking Epicurean with the undemonstrative façade of the Stoic. This fusion is acted out throughout the play’s dialogue, and embodied by the rival-murderers Lodovico and Flamineo. Webster’s ultra-violent finale becomes, in this reading, a dramatisation of Lucretian (Epicurean) physics – in which clashing bodies become swerving atoms, and Flamineo’s comically prolonged experience of death is informed by a hybrid acceptance of both ancient schools of thought.

This chapter begins with an interpretation of the final sections of the ‘Spirit’ chapter of the Phenomenology. Here, Hegel diagnoses the paradoxes of Kantian theodicy before going on to elaborate, in a highly allegorical idiom, how he envisages overcoming the dichotomy between divine and human standpoints that plagued his Leibnizian and Kantian predecessors. By developing the thesis that evil is a structural possibility of rational self-conscious, the culminating dialectic of ‘conscience’ posits an essential relation between human freedom and the historicity of the good; the ideal of conscience, of a unity between natural and ethical wills, is their continually coming apart. The chapter then moves away from the Phenomenology to elaborate the resulting picture of Hegelian theodicy in its own terms, drawing also on Hegel’s preface to his Philosophy of Right. Hegelian theodicy stands revealed as reconciling us to reality by fulfilling a primarily diagnostic function, resolving our theodical puzzlement by explaining its mistaken, but intelligible, origins. To bring out the specificity of this view of Hegel’s project, the chapter ends by contrasting it with two recent alternatives, Michael Rosen’s ‘right Hegelian’ and Robert Brandom’s ‘left Hegelian’ interpretations.

Chapter 6 elaborates on the psycho-affective complexes engendered in ‘men of culture’ – namely the advocates of negritude and Arabo-Islamism – who turned to a mythic past to counter colonialism. The chapter shows that, for Fanon, decolonization must be sought at the level of European thought; it goes on to explore the influence which he had on Abelkabir Khatibi, Abdallah Laroui and Edward Said. The aim of the chapter is to deconstruct Western epistemology by considering the notions of ‘tradition’, ‘translation’ and the ‘humanities’ and to provide a critique of neo-liberalism and cultural imperialism.

Urban sustainability transitions research has grown into a prominent field since the late 2000s. This chapter traces its historical evolution, offering a concise overview of key debates, defining terms, and examining methodological implications. It explores recent discussions on actors, agency, intermediation, governance, and urban transformative capacities. Drawing on the ‘City of the Future’ project in Dresden, Germany (2015-2022), it illustrates practical applications of research. The chapter concludes with an outlook on emerging priorities and methodological innovations, advocating a shift from short-term, project-based urban research towards long-term real-world laboratories. These would serve as enduring social research infrastructures, fostering sustained partnerships among academia, policymakers, businesses, civil society, and citizens to collectively experiment with and navigate transformative urban change.

This chapter explores the concept of bioprecarity in the context of intimate partner violence (IPV) in LBTQ relationships by focusing on help-seeking as crossing encounters. Judith Butler (2004: 44) discusses the body as a site of human vulnerability, emphasizing that ‘this vulnerability is always articulated differently, that it cannot be properly thought of outside a differentiated field of power and, specifically, the differential operation of norms of recognition’. Eve Sedgwick (1990: 71) describes the invisibility sustaining the figure of the closet as the defining structure of gay oppression. Following this line of thought, Beverly Skeggs and Leslie Moran (2014: 5) address the need to produce ‘new visibilities’ claims for protection against violence. Drawing on these theorizations and on original empirical data, in this chapter I analyse the concept of help-seeking as crossing encounters of intimacy, not only in the sense of the private–public realms, but also regarding community and cultural boundaries, as the embodied LBTQ victim-survivor transgresses the cultural perceptions of victimhood when meeting help providers in an institutional context.