The refusal and withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment and care by, and on behalf of, people with impairments are the focus of Chapter 4. The chapter argues that greater attention must be given to the socio-economic contexts in which these non-treatment decisions are made. It also argues that the selective non-treatment of disabled infants and the non-consensual withholding and withdrawal of life-sustaining care from people with disorders of consciousness are incompatible with disability rights. The chapter concludes that disabled people, and their health care proxies, should not simply have rights to refuse or withdraw life-sustaining interventions, they must also have rights to request life support.

The spirit of the age is defined as the friend, the harbinger, and the servant of Humanity, but also as the ruler of the age. Martin Luther’s writings on education as well as his exegesis of the Psalms are cited to elaborate on his thoughts on government, and the change of government, particularly his denunciation of the tyranny of monarchs and what he called the rabble. Luther’s praise of German honesty and forthrightness is cited in order to position faith and loyalty as the cornerstone of human society. Klopstock’s poem on the naval warfare between Britain and France is cited in order to argue for the necessity of fairness and reason in all aspects of government. The ability of enlightened monarchs to uphold the spirit of the age is called into question, and Frederick the Great’s correspondence with Voltaire is further cited as evidence of a monarch’s struggles with his own human shortcomings. This is answered with a call for reform of education and politics. The inherent nature of human beings is described in its relationship to society and government, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s dialogue on Freemasonry is cited to elaborate on the importance of reason in civil society and the state.

With advances in critical care technology, survival of acute critical illness has risen drastically, and many of these patients experience persistent deficits in physical and cognitive functioning, termed post-intensive care syndrome (PICS). This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the pathophysiologic underpinnings of PICS. Perturbations during acute critical illness and early in recovery can have downstream and long-lasting effects. The immune response response is dysregulated with perturbations in both proinflammatory and immunosuppressive pathways. This dysregulation is more pronounced in patients who go on to have worse functional outcomes. Immune dysregulation also contributes to neuroinflammation, blood-brain barrier dysfunction, and disruptions in brain white matter leading to cognitive impairment. Transcriptomic analyses reveal massive shifts in gene expression, with aberrant expression of many genes related to the inflammatory response and extracellular matrix deposition, which clincially correlate with ICU-related complications, such as ICU-acquired weakness. Furthermore, sepsis and inflammation act together to disrupt the microvasculature, which further contributes to organ failure and ICU-acquired weakness. Mitochondrial dysfunction and ubiquitin-proteasome overactivation accelerate skeletal muscle catabolism and can also contribute to weakness. Finally, disruptions in the gut microbiome can disturb blood-brain barrier permeability and alter gene transcription associated with skeletal muscle growth and function. These perturbations interact deleteriously, resulting in the phenotype of PICS.

This chapter explores the rapid expansion of long-form narrative verse in medieval Italy, from a literary horizon dominated by lyric in the 1200s to the presence of a substantial and innovative corpus of vernacular narrative poetry by the start of the 1400s. It reviews formal and metrical innovations that supported the development of medieval Italian narrative verse, as well as analysing the themes and the conceptions of authorship that the poets articulate. The forms reviewed begin with couplet and sonnet as vehicles for narrative poetry in the later Duecento, and move on through Dante’s invention of terza rima, to Trecento terza rima and ottava rima production by poets from Boccaccio and Petrarch to Fazio degli Uberti, Frezzi and Nadal. The chapter explores the adventures in and with narrative that established long-form poetry’s important place within the emerging Italian poetic tradition across the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

This chapter explores how citizens in the Frisian area of the Netherlands joined forces to combat disinformation through the project "De Pit" from September 2022 to September 2023. The project involved three independent regional learning communities with diverse participants investigating and exposing disinformation. The goal was to empower communities to fight disinformation as part of an active community at their local library, (vocational) school, or university. We conducted a multiple experimental case study to analyze how these communities establish rules, roles, and agreements to critically collect, analyze, understand, and report on the information surrounding them in online and offline spaces. Considering the different backgrounds, level of education, ages, and geographical locations enables us to learn if people create similar or different solutions to fight disinformation. Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development framework has supported us in understanding these learning communities and how the participants have developed a research approach enabling them to interpret the facts behind information circulating in the public sphere. Our research indicates that learning communities, backed by local institutions such as libraries, schools, and universities, can provide a secure space for acquiring and practicing skills. This can help in efforts to reduce polarization online and offline by engaging individuals from various backgrounds. Learning communities focus on creating a safe environment where individuals can self-govern with expert guidance. Our study suggests that defending democracy may begin within offline communities, fostering discussions on both local and global issues. Finally, as part of this chapter, we present a ‘roadmap’ with conditions and recommendations to implement a successful learning community to inspire and support others in setting up similar initiatives.

In this chapter, we explore the idea of the social world as a collection of patterned phenomena, and how the social sciences attempt to make sense of those patterns. We value the characteristics of parsimony, predictiveness, falsifiability, fertility, and replicability in research. Research questions are one of four types – normative, hypothetical, factual/procedural, or empirical – depending on the goal or purpose of the investigation. Empirical research questions deal with the world ‘as it is,’ seeking general explanations for patterns of outcomes or classes of phenomena. A good research question is one whose answer takes as much space as your paper has length.

This chapter focuses on the problems of authorship that hover around The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, an autobiographical text embedded in Tobias Smollett’s Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), and how these debates have served as a proxy for critics’ different accounts of the relation between gender and form. I demonstrate how the notorious aristocrat Lady Vane uses her scandalous memoir to voice her real marital complaints within Smollett’s novel, which despite a predominating misogyny, endorses her bid to rewrite her fallen public character as a literary one. As seen in chapter one, the idea that a woman’s speech could play a determinative role in conferring social legitimacy is treated as a conjectural privilege exercisable only in fiction. The resistant reading I offer here highlights the undeniable limitations of how Smollett and his text think about gender, while finding room for modern readers to re-engage meaningfully with both texts, novel and tale. Discovery of the first standalone publication of Memoirs, as a sumptuous art book with erotic illustrations by Véra Willoughby in 1925, demonstrates the radical feminist and queer potentiality of the text and its embedded form.

More than five million individuals in North America experience an episode of critical illness annually, and among those who survive, as many as a third experience substantial cognitive impairment, which often lasts long after discharge and can be permanent. While cognitive impairment after critical illness has been widely studied for two decades, much remains unknown, and the insights that have been generated by research often fail to inform clinical care. Key issues germane to understanding and optimally treating ICU survivors with cognitive deficits include: improving methods of early detection and screening, honing and implementing cognitive rehabilitation strategies, and better understanding the trajectories of impairments observed in patients. Prioritizing the brain health of individuals after critical care both through prevention and thoughtful interventional efforts remains a key public health goal and one that can only be accomplished through careful and deliberate interdisciplinary efforts.

All teachers are in some way involved in the assessment of their learners, whether it be informal classroom-based assessments or preparing them for external examinations. This chapter offers cases that raise dilemmas teachers face when their work relates to language learner assessment. It covers topics such as too much internal assessment, the pressure of external public examinations, post-entry university language assessment, and students copying off each other.

This chapter explores the relationship between voter migration and the political landscape in Zimbabwe. The chapter shows that the profiles of migrants often match the profiles of opposition voters: urban, educated, and younger. Upon exiting, these migrants forfeit their voting rights, as Zimbabwe does not permit voting from abroad, and the costs associated with returning home to vote can be prohibitive. Despite this disenfranchisement, migrants continue to engage with the politics of their homeland by raising awareness, writing for media outlets, and supporting local activists, thereby maintaining a form of political participation. ZANU-PF benefits from a migration exit premium of up to ten percent in elections between 2000 and 2010. This chapter also draws from examples of countries where diaspora votes directly impacted the election outcome to contrast the challenges in Zimbabwe.

An intensive care unit admission (ICU) can have a profound impact on patients and their families and loved ones. Most people experience heightened emotions, both negative and positive, during their time in the ICU. We know that the experiences that patients have in the ICU affect their psychological recovery and quality of life after hospital discharge. Risk factors for later psychological difficulties include acute stress and disturbing memories associated with the ICU; clinical factors, such as duration of sedation and delirium; and socio-demographic factors, such as age, gender, and socio-economic status. Patients have to deal with a range of challenges in the ICU, including illness-related, environment-related, and interpersonal stressors. ICU staff, including psychologists, should recognize common sources of distress and aim to alleviate patients’ stress through enhanced communication techniques and psychological interventions. Studying the coping strategies of patients who have a more positive experience during their time in the ICU is a promising way to help reduce stress and improve outcomes of intensive care.

In data-driven learning (DDL), learners discover how words or phrases are used by analysing corpus data with tools like concordancers. This makes it a direct application of corpus linguistics in language learning and teaching. This chapter examines the use of ColloCaid, a DDL writing assistant for academic writing, and explores how learners’ perceptions of this tool can inform future corpus applications. After discussing the challenges and opportunities of DDL adoption for learning and teaching, a diary study with twelve academic writers working or studying at a university in Catalonia evaluates how well ColloCaid addresses these challenges. Results suggest that while DDL tools help reduce data overload, they still pose technical challenges, even when user friendliness was a central consideration in their design. An analysis of participant diary entries and responses to follow-up interviews highlights closer integration with word processors and other everyday productivity software as a potential solution. More broadly, the results suggest that the evaluation of corpus-based tools should focus on their usability as well as their effectiveness for learning, take place beyond the classroom in ecologically valid contexts, and consider a variety of text types beyond typical academic genres such as abstracts, essays, and reports.

This chapter is devoted to fleshing out the empirical basis for the claims and counter-claims found within debates about ethnic minority electoral participation. It is divided into four principal themes. First, it looks at the nature and function of electorally-based routes to political participation and influence in relation to some of the main alternatives facing minority communities. Secondly, the chapter turns to examine evidence from 1997 on electoral registration and eligibility. Thirdly, it considers evidence on electoral turn out, noting not merely the evidence from the 1997 election but also the large volume of more locally-based empirical research carried out over many years on this theme. Finally, the chapter also contains an extended discussion of the alienation hypothesis that has featured so prominently in debates over minority participation.

The fifth chapter of Invisible Fatherland examines the relationship between the Weimar Republic’s symbolic legitimacy and far-right political violence. It focuses on the assassination of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau by nationalist fanatics in June 1922. The chapter explores how the republican government rallied public support and reinforced the republic’s authority. Rathenau’s state funeral and pro-democratic mass rallies united Germans across class and faith in mourning and defiance. The republic’s response framed the murder as part of a broader pattern of far-right violence, implicating even the more respectable factions of the far right in extremist crimes. This framing allowed Weimar democrats to discredit their political opponents and strengthen democratic alliances. The chapter argues that Rathenau’s funeral marked a pivotal moment when a democratic symbolism of sacrifice and solidarity emerged. This moment shows how symbolic acts can fortify democratic ideals during periods of political crisis.

This chapter re-examines slavery and abolition in the writing and reception of the Declaration of Independence. Far from being marginal parts of the nation’s founding document, as previous generations of scholars asserted, both slavery and abolition proved to be essential to the making and meaning of the Declaration. Indeed, during and after the American Revolution, the Declaration testified to the nation’s high abolitionist ideals and the enduring problem of slavery in American statecraft. By examining not only Jefferson’s ideas about black freedom in the Revolutionary era but a wide range of reformers who meditated on it as well – including African American writers and reformers like Benjamin Banneker – this essay argues that the Declaration itself remains a testament to the conflicted nature of emancipation in the American mind.