This chapter explores the transformative potential of collaboration and group work in higher education. It examines how students’ deep-rooted misconceptions about mathematics hinder their engagement with quantitative courses. Students’ reflections on group work reveal how collaborative learning can transform these mistaken negative beliefs about mathematics into positive ones. Beyond moderating mathematics anxiety, collaborative learning fosters a dynamic environment where students actively engage, share responsibility, and develop essential interpersonal and cognitive skills. Given the global shortage of core skills in the employment market, this chapter argues that group work is not merely a pedagogical tool but a strategic approach to future-proofing learners. By 2030, collaborative competencies are expected to be crucial across industries worldwide. The chapter offers insights into how working together in practice can empower students and prepare them for the evolving demands of the global workforce.

The chapter concerns the relationship between international law and domestic or municipal law. Theories of the relationship are referenced. The chapter then turns to the role of domestic or municipal law in international law, with the acceptance of the supremacy in the system of the latter. The chapter focuses, however, upon the role of international law within domestic legal systems with particular emphasis upon the UK. The various shifts in approach are noted with regard to customary international law and the current situation discussed, whereby custom constitutes a source of law and not a part of the common law upon which judges may draw. As far as treaties are concerned, these are not part of UK law unless incorporated. This avoids the situation whereby the executive may legislate merely by becoming a party to a treaty. The situation with regard to the US and other states in both the common law and civil law systems is then reviewed. The chapter ends with an examination of the doctrines of non-justiciability and act of state in various states.

Chapter 5 proposes that friendship is one of the founding principles of, and one of the main reasons for writing, familial letters. It focuses on the exchange of letters between Keats and his friend the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon, suggesting that the exchange itself sustained but also threatened the friendship because of its engagement with a paradoxical logic of reciprocity that governs both friendship and letter-writing. The chapter pays particular attention to the inherent contingency of epistolary friendship – friendship that is supplemented or sustained by epistolary contact – in the case of Keats’s mutually flattering but sometimes difficult relationship with a man who shared the poet’s sense of artistic ambition while lacking his talent and genius. As a form of gift exchange, the interchange of letters between two friends may be said to be governed by the economics of an implicit but difficult and ultimately paradoxical reciprocity.

This chapter considers the law of treaties in the light primarily of the key Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, 1969, much of which is considered as part of customary law. The chapter discusses the role and nature of international treaties in the light of their binding nature upon states parties (pacta sunt servanda). The making of treaties, from the formalities and methods of consent from signature to ratification, is covered before the chapter turns to reservations. The nature of reservations and their effect upon third parties is addressed is addressed as is the process of amendment of treaties. Consideration of treaty interpretation then follows with the various methodologies examined from the textual, intention and object, and purpose of the treaty points of view, with a careful look at case law. The particular position of human rights treaties in this process is noted. The chapter then turns to the invalidity, termination and suspension of treaties, including a discussion of the concepts of peremptory norms (jus cogens), material breach, supervening impossibility of performance and fundamental change of circumstances (rebus sic stantibus).

Complex fluids can be found all around us, from molten plastics to mayonnaise, and understanding their highly nonlinear dynamics is the subject of much research.

This text introduces a common theoretical framework for understanding and predicting the flow behavior of complex fluids. This framework allows for results including a qualitative understanding of the relationship between a fluid’s behavior at the microscale of particles or macromolecules, and its macroscopic, viscoelastic properties. The author uses a microstructural approach to derive constitutive theories that remain simple enough to allow computational predictions of complicated macroscale flows.

Readers develop their intuition to learn how to approach the description of materials not covered in the book, as well as limits such as higher concentrations that require computational methods for microstructural analysis.

This monograph’s unique breadth and depth make it a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students in fluid mechanics.

This chapter treats the aesthetics of human action. It begins by taking up athletic contest in particular, for insofar as the performance of athletic action serves to make conspicuous how an otherwise given, natural body becomes the vehicle for a striking realization of spirit’s freedom and autonomy, its eventful unfolding can serve as a kind of aesthetic standard for assessing the other forms of action as well. However, most of our actions prove to be rather lackluster in comparison, and when Hegel turns to the aesthetic prospects of practical life in the context of modern civil society and the state, he finds only what is prosaic, action here being defined on all sides by contingency, dependence, and exposure to external forces. Hegel would have us see that the aesthetic limitations of practical life are rooted in inherent, ontological limitations of practical life itself – what this chapter calls the tragedy of the practical – implying that there is no question of seeking a higher form of practical life that would be free of such limitation. This limitation is surpassed only by redefining ourselves, not exclusively in practical terms but in the terms of “absolute spirit,” whose first form is art.

This chapter synthesises current research on mathematics anxiety, tracing its precursors – such as negative emotions and attitudes – and examining its wide-ranging consequences. It explores the gendered nature of mathematics anxiety and its contribution to the persistent underrepresentation of women in STEM fields. The chapter reviews established instruments for measuring mathematics anxiety and considers key moderating factors, such as resilience and self-efficacy. Drawing on the author’s own analyses of recent empirical data, it offers new insights into the complexity and persistence of mathematics anxiety, particularly among non-specialist university students. The chapter concludes with a call to action, advocating for inclusive and emotionally intelligent pedagogical approaches that address both the cognitive and affective dimensions of mathematics learning.

The Introduction situates the book’s contribution in relation to the historiographies of madness, medicine, emotion, selfhood, and personhood. While mania and melancholy have enjoyed perennial scholarly interest, the same cannot be said of early modern frenzy. The Introduction offers some thoughts as to why frenzy has been neglected, and reflects on some of the conceptual and methodological difficulties which accompany its study. It explains the book’s scope (and limits), and offers short summaries of its six chapters. Sketching out the book’s central claim – that frenzy had devastating effects on personhood, and that these effects drove its early modern observers to unpick the tangle of mind, soul, and brain – it engages with recent claims about the emergence of a distinctively modern ‘cerebral self’. It sets out to test the claim that the possession of certain ‘psychological features, such as memory, consciousness, and self-awareness’ was not constitutive of ‘personhood’ until the end of the seventeenth century.

Scott’s struggles to maintain authorial control against the incursions of Merrilies’s witchlike powers compels him to consciously assume the more distanced role of an antiquarian collecting stories of female enthusiasm in subsequent novels, offering up prognoses of mental instability for the witches in The Antiquary, The Pirate and Ivanhoe. This chapter also introduces an entirely new and different witch figure: Rebecca, a lovely young Jewish healer whose potential marriage to Ivanhoe is challenged by racial prejudice and misogynistic suspicions that brand her as a witch. Although Rebecca is rescued from her trial as a witch, she does not receive the happy ending she deserves. Scott writes her out of the narrative in the end when she and her father decide to leave England. Yet Ivanhoe’s choice of a bride – the mild and dutiful Rowena – pales by comparison to Rebecca, inviting readers to envision an alternative ending: the union of Rebecca and Ivanhoe, and the socially transformative potential of this marriage between a Christian and a Jew, the story’s hero, and a purported witch.

Chapter 4 surveys the ways in which imperial officials were represented in various forms of late ancient Christian literature. In so doing, it acts as an introduction to Part II, which explores how contemporaries conceived of distinctly Christian forms of political service in this period. There is not a straightforward ‘archive’ of sources for this problem. Texts on government by current or former administrators do not tend to discuss the implications of their religious identities. As a result, it is rare that we can reconstruct an officeholder’s own perspective. At the same time—and in sharp contrast to other Christian authority figures (emperors, bishops, ascetics)—there is no single genre of Christian literature which focuses consistently on the careers of imperial or royal officials. This chapter thus considers how the purposes, audiences and generic expectations of letters, sermons, church histories, and saints’ lives shaped (and sometimes demanded) positive portrayals of officials, their religious identities, and their interactions with Christian communities and authority figures.

This chapter sets forth a framework based on a historical analysis of the role of efficiency in ICA. This chapter asserts that more so than party-autonomy, arbitrator discretion, the right to second instance review, or emphasis on privacy (and even confidentiality), the main historical principle upon which the legitimacy of ICA was premised, concerns a very narrow concept of efficiency. This legacy construct of efficiency is one that prioritizes the rendering of a binding and enforceable award over all other considerations. The primacy of “process efficiency” is such that even due process has been sacrificed at the altar of expediency. The text explores the interplay between efficiency and due process. It is suggested that only a voluntary settlement can yield “optimal efficiency,” and thereby redeem ICA’s promise to be efficient

This chapter takes up the question of whether the higher-order beauty of art is for Hegel best exemplified in the static, serene repose of classical sculpture or in the dramatic, developmental movement characteristic of the depiction of human action. Both paradigms are prevalent in Hegel’s lectures on art, and in the end the tension between them has not been fully addressed within Hegel’s lectures, nor has it been adequately addressed within existing scholarship. In addition to maintaining that the developmental paradigm fits better with the present book’s account of the ontology of the artwork as featuring the dramatic event of transformation into autonomy, the chapter also brings some textual sources to bear, and attempts to show as well that such a paradigm fits more naturally with Hegel’s claim that art is ultimately rooted in intuition and its direct, eventful encounters with the world.

This chapter explores practical strategies for sparking students’ interest and curiosity in statistics as lectures and classes commence, and for sustaining their engagement throughout the learning journey. It focuses on the benefits of capturing attention at the outset, encouraging open discussions, and creating a supportive environment where students feel confident to ask questions and seek help. By setting the scene for active participation and fostering a sense of curiosity, the chapter demonstrates how inclusive and student-centred teaching can transform statistics into a subject that feels relevant, accessible, and even enjoyable. Student perspectives highlight what truly makes a difference in their learning experience.