Disputes over access to public space are central to the continuing conflict in Northern Ireland. One key to resolving these disputes is to recognise that public space is not a timeless absolute, but the product of the municipal revolution that took place in the nineteenth-century United Kingdom. From the start, access to that newly created public space involved a balance between liberty and restraint characteristic of Victorian Liberalism. Analysis must also take account of a recent body of theory, the ‘spatial turn’, which emphasises the extent to which space and place are both social product and material actor.

One of Europe's most acclaimed and prolific contemporary directors, Chantal Akerman is one director notoriously difficult to classify. Akerman came to prominence with Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Her films of the 1970s most strongly epitomise minority position, although the themes of exile and alterity are present in virtually all of her output and resurface strongly in the 1990s, especially in her documentary work. This chapter pays close attention to her evolving film style, and pays tribute to the social, ideological and ethical ramifications of her prolific oeuvre. Her intransigent avant-garde style, manifest even in her more mainstream works, in its problematisation of questions of perception, representation and spectatorship, is a direct correlate of as well as an instrument for the profound questions raised by her work. Whilst greatest attention is given to works that are readily accessible, the chapter also discusses lesser-known films from archives.

A targeted European welfare state emerged between 1950 and 1992, one that was referred to in the late 1980s as the ‘social flank to the internal market’. This chapter will begin with a chronological overview, including a first section on the slow development of this European social policy between 1945 and 1985, and a second one its heights under Jacques Delors (1985–1995). It will then proceed with a topical exploration of European measures in this area (protecting the weak, environmental policy, regional solidarity), before concluding with an analysis of the two most important alternatives that were later abandoned: planning, and comprehensive social and fiscal harmonisation. This relative weakness of social Europe can be explained by its late development, by the sheer difficulty of organising a transnational social movement, as well as by divisions among its supporters. Besides, Thatcher was a formidable obstacle, one that Delors sought to circumvent through greater use of qualified majority voting. Other important actors were European trade unions, gender and environmental activists, as well as members of the European Parliament.

It has been a remarkable journey for India from the nation’s independence in 1947 to now. Economic performance has been mixed, with growth remaining sluggish during the first three decades, and picking up only after the mid-1990s. On the political front, with free media, secularism and a vibrant democracy, India was an outlier in the developing world; it resembled some of the most advanced economies in the world. This chapter is a study of this unusual growth path, over the last seventy years, with a focus on how the economy and politics impacted each other. It is argued that, while early political choices may have slowed growth during the early decades, they played a vital role in India rising to be among the world’s fastest-growing nations in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

This chapter provides an overview of the process of urbanization after 1947 and its impacts, highlighting its contested meanings, measurement and policy outcomes. Noting the contrasting ways in which urbanization is occurring, the chapter first reviews the debates over India’s slow urbanization and its possible causes. It then turns to the way the government has influenced the process through the dirigisme policies of the first forty years since independence, followed by economic liberalization in the last three decades. Some of these policies are best observed in the changing profile of the largest cities of the country, such as the three colonial port cities of Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai and, to a lesser extent, in small towns and emerging urban places. Improvements in urban services and quality of life have occurred, but unevenly, with small towns and poorer households in larger cities lagging behind.

This final chapter traces how anthropology transformed Wittgenstein’s qualified antiformalism into an absolute principle. Through an examination of Writing Culture, the ‘suffering slot’, and work on ordinary life, it shows how anthropological theory made formlessness itself into the only legitimate approach to context. The chapter argues this distinctive interpretation of Wittgenstein has had lasting effects on the discipline.

Claire Denis' first film, Chocolat, was a deceptively gentle family chronicle set in colonial Africa. Selected for the Cannes Festival, it was hailed by the critics and festival audiences as a remarkable first feature. This introduction presents the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book attempts to outline the multi-faceted, poetic vision of the contemporary world that emerges through Denis' filmmaking to date and to bring to light its main thematic, temporal, spatial and stylistic implications. The analysis focuses primarily on her fictional feature films, which form the main body of her work and have generally become easily accessible in video or DVD format. The book summarises the principal aspects of the director's biographical and professional background, with reference to the wider historical context and to French cinema production in general. It provides a detailed analysis of each of her feature films.

The introduction outlines the meaning and rise of bioprecarity and the bioprecariat, here understood as those who seek help with bodily interventions and those who provide such interventions. It discusses core concepts of importance for this volume, including shifting understandings and regulations of the body and bodily interventions, questions of bodily ownership and of agency in the age of the commodification of the body and the issue of power and unequal relations in the seeking and providing of help around bodily interventions. It also provides an overarching introduction to the chapters presented in this volume.

While most directors blessed by a successful début choose to follow the safe path and to attempt to meet their audiences' expectations, Claire Denis' work has remained in constant mutation. Her work offered, within a coherent thematic framework, a renewed exploration of film's less charted territories. The examination of the issues that are at the centre of her concerns, exile and alienation, desire and transgression, have become an intrinsic part of a specific stylistic approach, unrestricted by categorisations, genres and established conventions. As a result, Denis' work stands apart from a tradition of screenplay and dialogue-based cinema that defines much of France's auteur as well as of its popular production. Denis' work has an echo of a wide range of contemporary thought and the traces of influential aesthetic and genre models.

Chantal Akerman is not a director commonly associated with the depiction of love and romance. In the work of the 1970s, mutual, fulfilled love is largely presented as an absence or an impossible aspiration in the life of protagonists condemned to a life of solitude or errant desire by their nomadism or psychological difficulties. In the lighter output of the 1980s, love and romance emerge as the main driving forces of Akerman's burlesque dramas. Finally, in the narrative work of the 1990s and 2000s, love relationships are once again scrutinised and probed in a variety of combinations, from heterosexual love triangles to adolescent bisexual attraction and transatlantic romance across class and national boundaries. A tension between commercial and experimental forms of film-making informs Akerman's work from an early point in her career. Arguably Akerman's most Jewish film, Demain on déménage is also one of her most explicitly autofictional works.

Chapter 2 examines two specific religious events in remote cultural settings: the Jewish settlement in the Palestinian city of Hebron and the Hindu destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, India. The chapter argues that existing theories of religious violence or aggression do not account for both the specificity of each of these events nor form a basis for a proper comparison. Instead, the chapter shows that both the religious Zionists and the Hindu nationalists are responding to a sharp internal dissonance within their own religious systems, and the aggressive actions can be compared as an attempted mitigation of dissonance.