This chapter provides a brief introduction to the Chinese language, including its main properties, such as its writing system, the use of pinyin, tones, word order, classifiers, word-formation, temporal and aspectual marking, sentence-final particles, topicalisation, passives, and relative clauses. It explains the book’s focus on the mental representations of various aspects of learners’ L2 Chinese grammars and scrutinises these representations based on data from a range of empirical studies. It specifies the featural approach adopted and explains that all morphosyntactic variations, both within and across languages, are perceived to be encoded in the lexicon in terms of features. It is argued that this decompositional approach to lexical items is essential to any account of language acquisition and can help to advance our knowledge of the underlying mechanisms in interlanguage grammars. Influential theories on L2 acquisition are reviewed, and with examples from both L2 English and L2 Chinese, cues in the target language input are categorised into macro-, micro-, and nano-cues as well as absence of cues with regard to their salience, detectability, and availability in the input. These are assumed to form a scalar continuum with no clear boundaries between the categories.

Celeste Montoya examines the role that gendered mobilization has played in US electoral politics, both historically and in the recent elections. She provides a conceptualization of gendered mobilization that emphasizes the importance of looking at the role that gender (often at the intersection of race and class) plays in a wide array of US social movements. She provides a historical overview that demonstrates the various ways in which gendered mobilizations have influenced the development of US democracy and the evolution of its electoral politics. Montoya focuses specifically on the mobilizations surrounding the 2024 election, outlining the mobilization of the MAGA movement around restricting transgender rights and opposing critical race theory, gender studies, and DEI. She identifies race-gendered mobilization among progressives in 2024 as well, emphasizing the role of intersectional coalitions in advocating for racial justice and reproductive rights among other issues. Gendered mobilization has been a significant part of efforts to expand political participation and representation, as well as those to restrict it. It has shaped party platforms and electoral coalitions. The patterns of the past help explain the current political moment and what may be at stake.

We review an experiment on light focusing and transmission in random media via spatial light modulation. Various features such as scaling and iteration algorithms are described. The measurement of the transmission matrix and the four-phase method are considered. The use of the transfer matrix to realize target images through random media is illustrated.

By recovering the physiological and affective assumptions behind early modern artistic and dramatic spectatorship, this chapter lays out the Institutes’ perceptual ideal – a condition in which humans encounter God’s fatherly stance through their senses and imagination before conscious thought can even occur. This discussion reveals that the pre-conscious, evaluative dimension of perception as it was understood by early modern Europeans provides a plausible mechanism for how sensible accommodations such as creation, the sacraments, and scripture might be expected to directly elicit the immediate, pre-rational, affective orientation Calvin calls piety.

This article contextualizes the work of William Burroughs in terms of twentieth-century avant-garde movements, particularly Dada, Surrealism, Lettrism, and Situationism, arguing that he was deeply influenced by them and also made significant and hugely influential contributions to their aesthetic and political projects. It situates his early work with the beats as markedly Surrealist, and it argues that Naked Lunch is a Surrealist masterpiece. It traces Burroughs’ movement into 1960s multimedia cut-ups, image-text, film, and audio experiments in relation to Guy Debord and Situationism. The article concludes by noting that we should be cautious in how optimistically we read some of this work, particularly in light of the many ways the twentieth-century avant-gardes failed to realize their revolutionary hopes and how our current experience with a fully-networked world that uses many avant-garde techniques and ideas often leads not to a utopian revolution but instead a morass of reactionary post-truth politics.

Language use in online contexts has become an area of increasing academicinterest, especially for corpus linguistics (Crosthwaite et al., 2023). This chapter details the trends across previous corpus studies of online language, outlining some of the most important studies driving these trends and critically discussing the methodologies they use. Finally, we present a case study demonstrating some of these state-of-the-art techniques and trends. In this case study, we explore the discourses of stem-cell research across texts from websites known to promote pseudoscience and conspiracy.

The idea that Japan and Greece might be closely related is of European origin. Coinciding with the modern and demiurgical impulse that seized the Western imagination in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, it was part of a vast reconceptualization of the world in which analogy occupied a fundamental place. One of its first formulations is found in the History of Japan composed by the German physician Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716) and published eleven years after his death. Kaempfer stayed for two years in Nagasaki, working for the Dutch East India Company, and was one of the first Europeans to publish a detailed description of the archipelago following the expulsion of the Jesuits and most other Westerners in the first decades of the seventeenth century. His account is notable above all for unambiguously placing science before religion and personal analysis before collective evangelization.

The American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the smaller conflicts in between helped to define who Americans became. They pursued Indian lands and freedom from impressment and British trade restrictions. These wars altered political boundaries, brought social hierarchies into sharp relief, and disoriented people’s sense of identity. Their wartime experiences shaped fighting men as well as civilians. New scholarship on war and society during the Revolutionary Era takes the actions of marginalized groups seriously, attempting to understand the experiences and allegiances of women, Black people, and Indigenous people as well as internal conflicts among whites. Recent work also explores the harshness of wartime conduct, from destruction of homes to the treatment of prisoners and civilians. These wars transformed society by forcing questions of national inclusion, cultural interaction, and racial exclusion; gendered violence and gendered upheavals; the ennobling and degradation of rank-and-file soldiers, deserters, and prisoners of war. Unmistakably an era of brutality, dispossession, and enslavement, these wars etched enduring patterns for the future of the United States.

This chapter traces William Burroughs’ self-imposed exile across the Americas, North Africa, and Europe, arguing that the geographic settings where he lived were integral to the conceptual structure of his work. Rather than treating setting as backdrop or exotic inspiration, Burroughs reimagines place as a set – simultaneously stage, fiction, and experiential filter – through which he explores identity, language, and systems of control. From his ironic travel ethnographies in Junky and The Yage Letters, to the colonial parody of Queer, and the fractured landscapes of Naked Lunch and the cut-up novels, Burroughs engages in a layered literary expatriation that aligns him with, but ultimately distinguishes him from, figures like Bowles, Baldwin, Stein, and Beckett. Focusing on Tangier and Paris as creative epicenters, the chapter argues that Burroughs’ spatial displacements catalyze formal and thematic experimentation. His work reveals a persistent tension between immersive estrangement and mediated construction, exposing alterity not only in foreign cultures, but within language and self.

This chapter begins by describing ending service – the automated discontinuance of the employment of international officials, administrated in accordance with the authority of the principal executive officer to achieve an adaptable, effective and highly efficient international organization. (Differently, administrative action may terminate employment as a consequence of performance management – see Chapter 8, ‘Performance Management’ – and as consequence of the enforcement of standards of conduct – see Chapter 10, ‘Misconduct’ – at international organizations.) Second, the legal principles of ending service are identified, namely: (1) Absent abuse of discretion, deference is owed organizational restructuring; (2) Absent abuse of discretion, deference is owed appointment nonrenewal; and (3) Mutually agreed termination may obtain legal release. Third, the related governance of ending service is considered, namely the legal duties that: (1) Abolition of post must be credible; and (2) Recourse to redundancy must exhaust practicable alternatives. Fourth, the chapter addresses service ending in circumstances of an international official unable – as a result of illness or injury – or unwilling to perform their duties. Fifth, service ending upon attainment by a staff member of a mandatory retirement age is examined. Sixth, and in conclusion, this employment law of ending service at international organizations is restated.

This chapter outlines the opportunities offered by coinage as a source of evidence to the ancient historian. Different aspects of numismatic terminology and methodology are set out, and different approaches to the use of the characteristics of coinage are outlined. Coinage may be evidence for ‘official practice’ on the part of the wide variety of its issuers in the archaic period. It may be indicative of specific regional and cultural similarities or differences. It is in essence an economic object, and its mobility offers the possibility of mapping ancient economies. But at the same time its designs open up avenues of iconographic interpretation.

This chapter explores the central role of nostalgia, youth, and memory across the works of William Burroughs, challenging his reputation as an anti-sentimental icon of literary transgression. Thom Robinson traces Burroughs’ shifting relationship with nostalgia – from early satirical treatments in The Yage Letters and Naked Lunch, through the melancholic repetitions of the cut-up era, to the queer adolescent utopias of his later novels. These texts, including The Wild Boys, Cities of the Red Night, and The Place of Dead Roads, draw heavily on Burroughs’ own youth, subvert the moral codes of institutions like the Boy Scouts of America, and reimagine coming-of-age as a site of resistance and sexual awakening. Through his admiration for Denton Welch and incorporation of children’s literature tropes, Burroughs ultimately transforms nostalgia from a regressive impulse into a creative, disruptive force – an affective mechanism through which the past might be rescripted in defiance of normative adulthood.

This chapter examines decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) as emergent forms of software or knowledge commons, applying the governing knowledge commons (GKC) framework. It argues that DAOs, characterised by their reliance on blockchain-enabled smart contracts and elimination of hierarchical management, represent a novel form of collective decision-making and governance. The analysis distinguishes between on-chain and off-chain governance models, evaluating their effectiveness in ensuring decentralisation and addressing internal conflicts, with particular emphasis on the unique conflict resolution mechanisms available to DAOs (such as "forking" and "rage-quitting"). An important insight is that the rules-in-use in on-chain governance and off-chain governance are likely to be very different. The chapter also considers the robustness decentralised systems in managing common-pool resources.