This chapter explores the rise of US imperial militarism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on the settler colonial American West and overseas colonies in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific. Beyond sketching a general account of this period, the chapter argues that US military colonization was both a set of distinct encounters and a larger project connected by shared repertoires of violence; transfers of expert knowledge; and ideologies of racialized dominance. It also understands US imperial militarism in infrastructural terms. Military actors and organizations served not only as the sharp edge of colonization, but also initial – and sometimes primary – agents of colonial state-building. Longer term, American imperialism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era created the conditions of possibility, both ideologically and materially, for global elaborations of US empire that persist today.

Americans have struggled to reconcile capitalism and war. Over three centuries of history, they have grappled with fundamental tensions between capitalism and security. The combination of war and capitalism often created disruptions and deep inequities that ordinary Americans and their leaders decided must be moderated for the sake of a more successful and politically sustainable war effort. For much of the nation’s history, capitalism was understood to be an insufficient provider of security; the U.S. military economy was semi-socialized, in both peacetime and wartime. But as the record of recent decades has highlighted, Americans have not experienced an ever-higher ratcheting of regulation and socialism, with each new war, over the long run. Rather, the historical record suggests that many postwar demobilizations served to reinforce capitalism. For the nation’s entire history, struggles over the economics of war and national security have been important parts of U.S. political development. This will continue to be the case in the current century, as Americans battle over economic policy and fight new wars, domestically and abroad.

The inspiration for this volume is Simon Deakin’s proposal to think of the corporation as a shared resource which is collectively held and managed for the benefit of multiple interests. A small but fascinating recent literature extended this insight to mutuals, cooperatives, and benefit corporations, while an independent literature applied a similar line of Ostromian thinking to inter alia cities, land trusts, civil society organization, and certain kinds of platforms. All these studies noted the importance of shared knowledge, but none deployed the governing knowledge commons (GKC) framework. What this volume attempts to do is to steer the discussion toward this unifying framework. This chapter introduces the contributions, which despite their diversity engage with the idea that corporations and ecosystems comprising corporate actors cohere around shared knowledge, values, and other kinds of intellectual or cognitive resources, the sustainable production and reproduction of which depends on specific practices and rule configurations.

The book concludes with a short chapter that invites readers to re-consider the relationship between Truth Commissions and international law. It emphasizes the consequences of this relationship for the quality of state-society relations in the aftermath of violent conflict. It also highlights the importance of paying attention to who is authorizing the inclusion of local cultural expressions of violent conflict in the accounts produced by Truth Commission; who benefits from such inclusions; and what ends are being served.

Spoken discourse is a less commonly explored domain of corpus-based research. This chapter explores these challenges, as well as providing an overview of current corpus research on spoken discourse and emerging research areas. It concludes with a case study illustrating methods for these emerging research areas. The chapter highlights newer areas of corpus-based research such as fluency, prosody, and multimodal studies, language variation and change, and discourse-level units and includes an empirical study that illustrates two of these research areas through the use of fluency, prosody, and multimodal features across nurse–patient interactions. Rather than reporting on the interactions as a whole, the analysis also shows frequency of occurrence across discourse-level units: opening the visit, establishing the patient’s chief complaint, examination of the patient (both physical and patient history), counseling the patient (providing care options), and closing the interaction. The data comes from the US Nurse–Standardized Patient Corpus (Staples, 2015), and includes fifty interactions between nurses and standardized patients, who are actors trained to present the same case to multiple providers. The study demonstrates some of the more challenging elements of spoken discourse analysis and offers insights for the analysis of spoken discourse, particularly in these emerging research areas.

We introduce the simplest photonic spin glass by leveraging the so-called random energy model (REM), which allows one to derive a phase diagram with reasonable mathematical complexity. We introduce some concepts of nonequilibrium thermodynamic phases in a multimode photonic system.

This chapter focuses on the multiple identities performed by William Burroughs through the sign system of his distinctive fashion choices. It explores the paradox that Burroughs’ sartorial appearance made him both immediately recognizable and yet permanently elusive. In particular, it reads the many significations of his trademark choice of hat, arguing that it aligned Burroughs with identities ranging from gangsters to bankers as well as a specific past era at odds with his futuristic writing. The hat also had a psychological function as a mask for Burroughs’ emotional vulnerability and ambivalence about being an outsider. Miles makes a comparative analysis with such figures as David Bowie, to argue that in his fashion choices, “El Hombre Invisible” was at his most visible as a performance artist.

Anna Sampaio provides an intersectional analysis of Latina candidates for national office and Latiné/x voting behavior in the 2024 election. She pays particular attention to how disparities in polling inform our understanding of Latiné/x voters’ impact on the presidential election outcome while acknowledging that a widening gender gap among this community of voters was evident across multiple polls. Sampaio describes how gender and racialized messaging were weaponized in campaign communications to aggravate gender differences among Latiné/x voters. In her analysis of Latina candidates and officeholders, Sampaio places recent gains in historical context while pointing out the stalled progress for Latinas in election 2024. The chapter concludes with a discussion of obstacles and opportunities in the future of Latina politics in the United States.

Rosalyn Cooperman examines the role that political parties, women’s organizations, and political action committees (PACs) play in the recruitment of women to run for federal office and support of women’s candidacies. With a focus on 2024, she describes the structures of the national Democratic and Republican parties and looks at how party organizations assist candidates to run for office. She assesses attitudes about women’s political participation from Democratic and Republican party activists who influence who runs for office, and the issue positions they embrace. She looks at the strategies pursued by women’s PACs, candidate training groups, and campaign finance networks to train and fund women candidates. Cooperman finds that the resources available to Democratic women candidates far exceed those available to their Republican counterparts, which holds implications for women as parties compete to capture or expand majority party status in Congress.

Cultural safety in midwifery is fundamentally about the practitioner. The consumer, or the recipient of care, must be empowered to determine whether they feel safe, shifting power dynamics in their favour. This chapter explores traditional Māori birthing practices, and it begins with a discussion about the legacy of Hine te iwaiwa, the female Māori deity of childbirth. It examines key concepts, legislation and events introduced from 1769 that highlight the cultural reality for Māori before, during and after the resettlement of Aotearoa. Turanga Kaupapa is explored as a cultural framework to guide best practice for midwives. Additionally, the chapter examines the critical role of midwives in ensuring culturally safe maternity care. Midwives must challenge institutional bias, advocate for Indigenous autonomy and uphold the Treaty of Waitangi / Te Tiriti o Waitangi in their practice. Reflection points encourage midwives to critically evaluate their knowledge and practice through a culturally safe lens, ensuring future maternity care remains responsive to the needs of hapū māma (pregnant women) Māori.

Understanding Plato means having to assimilate concepts. But it also means having to familiarize oneself, in the first place, with dozens of proper names, the names of all those who figure in the Socratic dialogues. The Japanese tried to do this in a remarkably short period of time, between roughly 1900 and 1950. To be sure, most readers remembered only the most outstanding name, Socrates, but, as in Europe, his interlocutors were known to the more cultivated among them. At all events, there was no feeling of revulsion whatever. In Europe, by contrast, Japanese, Chinese, and Indian patronymics tend to arouse so great a sense of foreignness that even comprehension appears to be impossible: The mind becomes fogged, names pile up one after another, who is who is hopelessly unclear; one becomes lost in concatenations of syllables, to the point that trying to separate and remember them seems futile.