Education policies and frameworks are often structured by evolving political ideologies, public discourse, societal needs, and multifaceted types of media; requiring educators to remain informed about socio-political contexts aligned to education and to navigate the shifting education policy discourse landscape. It is within such a landscape that education policies and frameworks serve to provide information that supports and guides teachers in aligning their teaching and learning practices with national and/or international standards. By incorporating policy and frameworks into daily teaching, teachers make sure legal and ethical responsibilities are met, but also curriculum guidelines, assessment regulations, and inclusion requirements are adapted and applied, to meet all learners’ needs and professional obligations.

The 1930s saw both the rise of militantly racist regimes in Europe and a dramatic increase in Jewish immigration in Mandatory Palestine, which provoked a radicalisation of Arab opposition to the Zionist settlements. Meanwhile, Ireland experienced a further polarisation and a hardening of partition. The chapter looks first at the various manifestations of the sectarian mindset of the times. Then it examines the outbreak of sectarian violence of the summer 1935, which spread rapidly from Northern Ireland to the Twenty-Six Counties. The chapter then discusses the minorities’ responses to the 1937 Constitution and the election of the first President of Éire, the Protestant Douglas Hyde. By comparison with most of the rest of Europe, Ireland was a safe haven. In any case, the two minorities had very limited options, which, as usual, boiled down to a choice between emigration and submission. Many continued to emigrate, and for Jews Zionism represented the prospect of equality and liberty in the promised land. Mandatory Palestine also attracted the attention of Irish Protestants, some inspired by religious considerations, others by their imperial mindset.

This chapter explores the notion of “time-as-weather” (time as an active force rather than just an abstract parameter) in postwar efforts to address mass violence. It examines how Quechua-speaking survivors of the 1985 army massacre in Accomarca, Ayacucho, Peru, engage with official projects that seek to govern the legacies of state atrocities through the controlled circulation of dead bodies. The chapter discusses two temporal frameworks within which survivors position their efforts to remake their worlds. One is Peru’s necrogovernmental project, which seeks to create a linear temporality to bury state violence in the past and move on politically. The other is “regimes of animation,” long historical periods that encompass political administration of life and death in the Andes, presupposing the decomposition of dead bodies into life-giving elements like water. The chapter argues that survivors’ efforts transcend these frameworks, introducing their own political and cultural specifications that view time as an active, material force – like weather – rather than a mere chronological marker. By using material remnants and ruins to inscribe the history of state atrocity on the landscape, they highlight the dynamic interplay between memory, materiality, and time, asserting a novel form of historical inscription that forces history to confront “time-as-weather.”

In providing an overview of the state of the discipline, this chapter introduces the Handbook not as a comprehensive inventory of the anthropology of death but as a mesh of cross-cutting inquiries into the subject matter. We begin by sketching some of the field’s touchstones and how they’ve been reimagined and reengaged with in recent years. We set forth our vision as to how this compilation of scholarship adds to the discipline’s intellectual remit and how it wrestles with broader movements and preoccupations that extend beyond the object (death) itself. The diverse contexts of being with the dead explored throughout the chapters illustrate how living with the dead and dying among the living are processes nested within and in dynamic interplay with ethical, political, economic, ontological, and epistemological arenas. This analytical focus on being with the dead, we argue, foregrounds relationships and draws together scholarship often positioned outside the traditional ambit of the anthropology of death. Finally, we contextualize this editorial effort, reflecting on the exceptional conditions of death, namely a global pandemic, that shaped both the course of the collection and the subject of so many of its contributions.

This chapter offers a history of African American theater in the 1940s by way of case studies of three of that decade’s landmark productions: Richard Wright’s adaptation of his novel Native Son (1941), the American Negro Theatre’s production of Anna Lucasta (1944), and Alice Childress’ one-act play Florence (1949). Examining the formation of the American Negro Theatre in the immediate wake of the Negro People’s Theatre movement of the 1930s, the chapter notes how that era’s emphasis on ensemble-centered, collectivist agitprop and audience participation gives way to “standard forms” that emphasize individuality on stage. The process of the stage adaptation of Native Son further illuminates how Wright uncovered fruitful ambiguity in the tensions between liberal individual agency and Marxist class analysis, but struggled to translate that ambiguity to the dramatic form together with his collaborators. A coda demonstrates that Alice Childress’ turn to metatheatricality beginning with Florence serves as a rejoinder to the failure of form experienced by Wright.

This concluding chapter invites educators to pause and reflect deeply on the interconnections between critical reflection, effective teaching, and personal wellbeing. It challenges teachers to view classroom leadership as a practice built on self-awareness, relational responsiveness, and thoughtful decision-making. Central to this interconnectedness is the ability to manage workload, set clear priorities, and self-regulate. These elements form a foundation for teaching that is effective and sustainable over time. Through this lens, wellbeing is not treated as separate from pedagogy or professionalism; rather, it directly shapes how teachers lead with empathy, uphold integrity, and make purposeful choices. By exploring how wellbeing, emotional regulation, and reflection shape the capacity to lead and connect, this chapter encourages teachers to consider how personal and professional growth are closely linked.

Classical methods such as ordinary least squares (OLS) were designed for datasets with just a handful of predictors. However, the trend over the last 30 years or so has been towards larger datasets, in particular where the number of predictors may be large even compared with the number of observations --- so-called high-dimensional data. In such settings, it may be advantageous to consider penalised estimators that reduce variance, at the expense of introducing some bias. We study both ridge regression and Lasso estimators, with the latter having the attractive property that it performs simultaneous variable selection and parameter estimation. The Lasso can be computed efficiently using coordinate descent, and we present finite-sample guarantees on its prediction, estimation and variable selection performance. We also consider extensions such as the square-root Lasso, the debiased Lasso and complementary pairs stability selection.

This chapter opens with an ethnographic account of Tunisian civic trainers preparing for the 2014 parliamentary elections, focusing on their efforts to teach the public the practices and sensibilities of democratic citizenship. Their diverse visions of democracy – shaped by the lived experience of the 2011 revolution – introduce the Tunisian public sphere as both a site of civic education and a space where revolution and democracy intersect. These perspectives ground the book’s two central arguments: first, that democracy can be redefined through a historically informed critique of liberalism’s limitations and affordances; and second, that such a redefinition requires attention to localized experiences, challenging the dominant view of revolution and democracy as a linear progression from disorder to order. The chapter also introduces the book’s main figures and theoretical interventions and outlines its structure: a movement from state-sanctioned and international pedagogies of public deliberation to more intimate and contested democratic expressions.

This chapter examines the lexicons of texts in Early Modern English from the 1520s through the 1560s: the turbulent decades spanning the English Reformation. On the one hand are works that look to the world of Catholic Christendom, such as books by the politician, philosopher, propagandist, and martyr Sir Thomas More and – later in the century – the polemical texts written by Jesuit exiles. On the other are outputs by reformers such as William Tyndale – also a martyr – and of later Protestant controversialists. Among the latter group is a royal figure whose writings have in recent years attracted increasing attention: Henry VIII’s last queen, Katherine Parr. The chapter begins with an examination of versions of a key work of the English Reformation: the Book of Common Prayer. Protestant and Catholic lexicons are identified, and shown to align with distinct confessional/theological orientations.

Dublin referred to the Second World War as the Emergency, but, when applied to the minorities, even this concise and elegant understatement deserves a question mark, partly because for many Éire citizens the war was a time of opportunities and partly because their response to the war was largely a matter of individual choice. The chapter first discusses aspects of the ‘pro-fascism’ allegedly shared by the Protestant middle classes at the beginning of the war and then moves to the way the war encouraged a rethinking of British values as universal liberal principles. It contrasts such lofty rhetoric with the response of the Loyal Orange Institute in the three Ulster counties of Éire, suggesting that the turn to democracy owed more to tactical choices than conviction politics. What turned out to be permanent, however, was a tendency to articulate minority issues as either Irish concerns or universal claims. A parallel development took place within the Dublin Jewish community from the end of 1944, as the ‘old acquaintance’ with Britain was rapidly forgotten, and Zionism emerged as – simultaneously – more Irish and more self-confidently aligned with the nascent Israeli state.

In addition to their usage in density estimation and nonparametric regression, 'kernel methods' also refer to a different concept, where the goal is to augment a feature space and thereby extend the scope of certain existing prediction techniques. The basic idea is to map our observations into a higher-dimensional space and then apply a simple (e.g. linear) method to the transformed data; in the context of regression, for instance, this can yield a nonlinear regression surface that may fit the responses better. For a certain rather large class of methods, namely those whose fitted values depend on inner products between observations, a key point is that this general procedure can often be carried out implicitly, and in ways that ensure the cost of the computations involved is independent of the dimension of the final feature space. The underlying theory relies on a particular type of Hilbert space structure known as a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. Some of the most well-known examples of kernel machines include support vector machines and kernel ridge regression, though the class of methods to which the ideas here may be applied is very broad.