This chapter delves into everyday administrative work at the Ministry of Culture, with a specific focus on the Mass Culture Institute, the ancestor of the current General Organisation for Cultural Palaces. Based on the personal papers of Saad Kamel, this chapter provides a brief institutional history of the Institute and the low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats who worked to accomplish its mission of cultivating the rural masses. This mission was influenced by diverging ideas about Arab socialism after the socialist turn of 1961. Thus, this chapter contributes to an intellectual history of Arab socialism, by showing how the Mass Culture Institute enacted a grounded version of ‘the socialism of culture’ (ishtirakiyyat al-thaqāfa). Moreover, the chapter explores the key relationship between responsibility and achievement at the Mass Culture Institute. Low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats are constantly concerned by what falls under their responsibility, which is managed by both avoiding to take responsibility for problems and seeking to take credit for achievements (however small). These everyday achievements embody, on a smaller scale, the postrevolutionary state project.

Despite increasing ethnic diversity and a rising proportion of births to migrant women, inequalities in health and care experiences for racial and ethnic minority groups have been a persistent challenge in the UK, with perinatal mental health being no exception. Whilst it is important to acknowledge that inequities in maternal health are a global phenomenon, there is a clear and alarming pattern of people from racialised groups (i.e. those who, based on their skin colour, are disadvantaged due to normalisation of an array of dynamics that favour white people) experience worse maternal outcomes in many high-income countries. Which specific groups experience worse outcomes is dependent on the sociocultural context rather than biological determinism. Childbirth has both a biological and a cultural definition. It is also a political and social phenomenon shaped by the society we live in. Humans’ actions such as the cultural creation of traditions, customs and rules affect childbirth practices directly. These actions take place through social interactions, communication and exchanges inside social institutions and can often be dismissed in the current culture of medicalisation of birth.

Scholars routinely make claims that presuppose the validity of the observations and measurements that operationalize their concepts. Yet, despite recent advances in political science methods, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to measurement validity. This chapter addresses this gap by exploring four themes. First, the chapter establishes a shared framework that allows quantitative and qualitative scholars to assess more effectively, and communicate about, issues of valid measurement. Second, the chapter underscores the need to draw a clear distinction between measurement issues and disputes about concepts. Third, the chapter discusses the contextual specificity of measurement claims, exploring a variety of measurement strategies that seek to combine generality and validity by devoting greater attention to context. Fourth, the chapter addresses the proliferation of terms for alternative measurement validation procedures and offer an account of the three main types of validation most relevant to political scientists.

We are a group of academic authors from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) who are in direct contact with students and professionals in the medical doctor’s career, as well as specialties and subspecialties. We have learned firsthand about cases of abuse of power, harassment, and gender violence by physicians towards physicians. Therefore, we are very interested in the deeper analysis of an issue in the search for strategies to curb these acts that have been legitimized and normalized with the excuse of the hierarchical tradition of medical education or the path to follow to achieve professional goals.

The case we present is a conglomerate case based on a series of questions presented to us as part of an investigation entitled “Gender violence during medical training in Mexico”. UNAM, as an institution of higher education, must contribute to generating a change in mentality and education to achieve a more egalitarian, fair, and equitable treatment so that women and men are treated with the same respect and dignity and have the same rights to work and have a life project. Without this implying being left without work or being relegated to less essential and even trivial functions that require little or no creativity, human talent is wasted, which, in the long term, causes losses for any health institution and society.

This chapter introduces sentiment analysis as a bridge between language and decision-making, reviewing emotion taxonomies (valence/arousal, Ekman, Plutchik) and core tools (LIWC, ANEW, SentiWordNet) for measuring the sentiment tenor of text. It proposes LiMoLES, a utility function combining monetary payoffs with language-elicited sentiment, and tests it on framing effects in the extreme Dictator Game, showing that human-rated sentiment predicts altruism better than lexicons. The chapter extends LiMoLES to basic emotions, clarifies limits of lexicon intensity and context, and motivates a shift toward normative components (LiMoLNoS) when emotions alone cannot explain choices, ultimately setting up a broader LENS model of emotional and normative influences.

Denmark’s approach to European law was distinct from most other member states in that it remained a largely administrative rather than judicial process. This chapter explores how Danish civil servants, rather than politicians or courts, managed Denmark’s interaction with European law, proactively shaping its application whilst also containing its implications. Denmark’s well-known reluctance toward European integration writ large is mirrored in its interactions with EU law, seeking to maximise economic benefits while limiting the in-roads on national sovereignty by supranational institutions. Danish courts were initially hesitant to engage with the ECJ, avoiding preliminary references. Despite this cautious approach, Danish governments pragmatically defended the ECJ’s authority in European institutions, recognising that a strong legal system could serve Danish interests as a small member state. The chapter concludes that while Denmark did not actively resist European law, it strategically managed its impact through administrative means rather than direct judicial or political engagement.

Lived experience narratives are often used to provide depth of understanding to an area of study in medicine, using ‘real world’ exemplars that explicate theory and models of practice. In our case, the narratives in this part help us understand how the social context of the authors and the people they discuss shape collective experience, and drive the way institutions and individuals respond to sexual harassment within their profession.

The Epilogue begins with a critical consideration of the post-war careers of individuals featured prominently in previous chapters, tracking their contributions to the re-emergent German environmental movement after 1945. That movement failed to confront its links to the Nazi past for decades on end, leaving a distorted and misunderstood legacy that awaits resolution even now. Extending both the chronological and geographical framework, the Epilogue outlines significant new material on non-German examples of far right appropriation of environmental ideals over the past century, including Italian and British examples. These comparative cases are essential to understanding that the themes at the heart of the book are not a German peculiarity, while placing the specifics of the Nazi era into broader historical context. Last, the Epilogue points to the persistent political ambivalence of ecology. Environmental activists today are justifiably concerned that tying their predecessors to Nazism could discredit the politics of nature as a whole and play into powerful anti-environmental currents in contemporary culture. Historical perspective allows for a more informed approach to such charged questions. If guarding against a resurgence of neo-Nazism means paying closer attention to its history, honoring the environmental movement’s future requires taking an honest look at its past.