This chapter outlines the history of conscription in the United States and argues that the draft can be used as a tool to decipher public understandings of religion, race, gender, obligation, and the role of government in each historical moment and over time. The answers to the questions of who was included, who was left out, and most importantly, why, reflect larger trends in American society and politics and constitute a clear field of inquiry for the war and society approach to history. The study of conscription is critical to understanding how war radiated out to all levels of American society and how the complex stew of American liberal individualism, republican notions of obligation, gendered and racial hierarchies, and personal psychology impacted American warfighting. In other words, the draft provides a roadmap to Americans’ relationship with and to war.

Kelly Dittmar examines the gender, race, and intersectional dynamics of presidential politics, focusing specifically on the dominance of masculinity and whiteness at the highest level of American politics. After providing an overview of concepts key to understanding the presidency as a raced and gendered institution, she presents a history of the pioneering women who have dared to step forward to seek the presidency or vice presidency. Dittmar then evaluates how Kamala Harris, Nikki Haley, and Donald Trump navigated gender and intersectional dynamics on the campaign trail. She analyzes the ways that gender and race influenced the strategies employed by these candidates, media coverage of their campaigns, and public responses to their candidacies. While Dittmar points to areas of progress, she illustrates how a presidential campaign that exploited white and male grievance and reinforced gendered, racialized, and intersectional stereotypes emerged victorious in 2024.

The chapter explores the legal and transactional governance of venture capital (VC) from the viewpoint of the theory of the firm as a knowledge commons. At first sight, VC seems far removed from any notion of commons, if that is taken to mean a shared resource constituted by emergent rules of conduct based on interactions between multiple stakeholders. Bright line rules favouring the interests of capital holders over those of producers and communities dominate the orthodox legal account of VC, which stresses the importance of US-style transactional flexibility in managing investment risks. On closer inspection, however, VC ecosystems have many commons-like aspects, involving risk-sharing, information pooling, and the braiding of formal and informal rules. The public benefits of VC depend on the positive externalities generated by knowledge spillovers, which cannot be fully captured by private ordering. Understanding these features through Masahiko Aoki’s theory of the firm as embedded cognition, and drawing on interviews with mostly Europe-based VC funds, entrepreneurs and legal advisers, the chapter argues that the governance of VC should be concerned with maximising the net social return from innovation, taking into account the multiple interests involved in knowledge creation and preservation.

As young people progress from primary school, through secondary, and, for many, on to university, they gain knowledge, develop skills, and learn to relate to others in ways that remain influential throughout their lives. Language is central to this process. At each educational stage, students need to understand and express new types of content to new audiences in new contexts. For some, this offers a rich opportunity for language growth. For many, however, academic language is a barrier that can seriously hamper their educational and life chances. Understanding language development at school and university is therefore central both to understanding linguistic, and sociocognitive development and to achieving a socially just education. This chapter reviews the contribution that corpus research has made and can make to understanding educational writing. It reviews the main foci of research, critically evaluates its methods, summarizes our current state of knowledge, and suggests directions for future work. It then looks in detail at one project, led by the author, that researched the grammar and vocabulary of children in schools in England. It highlights central findings and reflects on methodological strengths and weaknesses and on what lessons might be learned for future research.

This article reflects on the state of war and society scholarship in the context of current global conflicts. It argues for bridging the gap between traditional military history and the war and society school to gain a deeper understanding of war's complexities. It uses examples from contemporary conflicts and historical analyses to explore themes such as comradeship, gender, memory, and culture, demonstrating their relevance in interpreting modern warfare. In emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in examining war's multifaceted impact on societies and individuals, it calls for war and society scholars to engage more directly with contemporary issues, applying their insights to foster a more nuanced comprehension of the roots and implications of war.

This chapter introduces a set of real frictions that affect how the capital accumulation process works. Taking the canonical real business cycle model as a starting point, investment adjustment costs make it costly for the representative household to vary the scale of investment relative to its steady-state value. Variable capacity utilization reflects the fact that the capital stock can be used to various degrees of intensity and, consequently, more intensive usage results in a higher depreciation rate.

This chapter explores William Burroughs’s literary and theoretical engagement with the virus as a figure of both destruction and transformation. Drawing on works such as The Cities of Red Night, Naked Lunch, and Ghost of Chance, this chapter examines how Burroughs reimagines parasitical entities – not solely as biological threats but as units of language, ideology, and cultural transmission. Situating Burroughs’ writing alongside scientific thought and postmodern theory, the essay conducts a close reading of Burroughs’ lectures on the virus at the City College of New York in 1974, exploring the virus as a liminal force capable of mutating identity, dissolving fixed moral binaries, and challenging notions of agency and autonomy. Burroughs’s fascination with symbiosis and parasitism, both literal and metaphorical, reveals a vision of the self as shaped by infectious systems: genetic, linguistic, and media-based. Ultimately, the essay argues that Burroughs seeks not just to expose viral control but to become a viral force himself, rewriting perception through a radical reprogramming of language and consciousness.

This chapter focuses on learner corpora of L2 English and the analysis of learner language varieties. The first part of the chapter describes the main characteristics of learner corpus data and presents a survey of the aspects that have most often been dealt with in the literature within the frame of learner corpus research (LCR) and its three main research orientations (descriptive, predictive, and pedagogical). A number of representative studies are selected to illustrate various facets of LCR. The chapter then describes the methods that are typically used in LCR, including multimethod approaches. It identifies the recent advances in LCR as well as the challenges that it still needs to address in terms of data collection, methodology, linguistic analysis, and applications. In the second part of the chapter, the main aspects of LCR are illustrated in an empirical study that the authors conducted on the use of discourse markers (DMs) in learner spoken English. The study compares six frequent two-word DMs (and so, and then, I mean, in fact, sort of, you know) in native and learner speech, both from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The study considers individual texts in addition to entire corpora, showing that corpora may display a high degree of internal variability.

This essay explores the intersection of race and the field of war and society in U.S. history. Centering race as a critical fault line, it examines how racial identities, hierarchies, and constructions have shaped—and been shaped by—U.S. experiences of war, both during and beyond moments of active conflict. While race is the central focus, the essay also considers how gender, ethnicity, and class intersect with it. These interconnected forces help define not only who is recognized within "society" but also how war is waged, experienced, and remembered. By analyzing key historiographic debates, the essay considers how scholarship on race has contributed to a deeper, more complex understanding of the war and society field. It also argues that race-based inquiry challenges conventional definitions of war and society, expanding them beyond state-sanctioned actors and discrete wartime events to include long-term, systemic forms of violence and resistance. In doing so, the essay highlights the co-productive relationship between war and society and how race reshapes our understanding of both.

We consider the simplest model for a random laser by using the diffusion equation, including gain. We discuss the laser threshold, its scaling properties, and the rate equations with stable fluorescing and lasing solutions.

This essay argues that understanding religion and the history of religion in the United States can help scholars, students, and the American public be more aware of the dynamics around war and wiser in the conclusions they reach about experiences of war and their relationship to American society. Put differently, when those who study war and society in America keep religion out of their stories, they remove from consideration not only some of the nation’s most influential institutions and voices, but also many of the ideas, stories, and symbols that help women and men find meaning and purpose in the uncertainty, the suffering, and the loss that go along with war.

The final chapter explores the politicised and contested memories of Russia’s transition period, culminating in the gradual exit of liberals from government amid the resurgence of imperial-style rule under Vladimir Putin. Initially, many systemic liberals viewed Putin as a potential saviour who might resolve the country’s post-transition challenges; however, his ascent introduced new dilemmas that undermined their influence. This chapter uses the professional biographies of key systemic liberals – Irina Khakamada, Alexei Kudrin, and Elvira Nabiullina – to illuminate the varied political paths liberal economists navigated as Russia’s experiment with democracy faltered and autocratic governance was reasserted. The chapter thereby captures the dynamics of liberalism’s decline in the Putin era.