The archaeology of Byzantium is the archaeology of an empire whose chronological bounds, broadly speaking, spanned the fourth through fifteenth century AD. The authors whose works are collected in this handbook examine methods and practice of Byzantine archaeology as well as the materials typically encountered in artifacts produced within the imperial boundaries. Byzantine archaeology is still a relatively young discipline, and, while vast in its scope and ambition, work in the field tends to be challenging to access. This volume aims to remedy this situation by providing current views of the nature of Byzantine archaeology, exploring crucial studies which elucidate salient features of the empire’s people, as well as offering glimpses of how things may develop in the near future.

This concluding chapter reiterates the main contributions of the book. Growth in most African countries has been characterised by a transformation from low-value agriculture to low-value services. As a result, structural transformation has remained largely elusive within Africa. Services has been the fastest-growing sector on the continent. Rwanda is unique among rapidly growing African countries in explicitly focusing on becoming a services hub. Using the case of Rwanda, this book shows that contemporary late development, which is more dependent on services, results in more transnational forms of dependence and political contestation than experienced in prior experiences of late development. The book ends with thoughts about the future of Rwanda. It argues that in the immediate short term, any instability will depend on what happens in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In the long term, Rwanda’s political stability depends not on the government’s capacity to contain domestic popular mobilisation alone but on the capacity of transnational coalitions of dissident elites and external actors capitalising on existing horizontal inequalities to challenge the Rwandan Patriotic Front rule.

This chapter lays out the initial steps which led to me reframing my relationship with cancer.

We’re back at the 1974 World Cup Finals in West Germany. Just as the reigning champions Brazil, winning 3–0, are about to take a free kick at goal against debutants Zaire, Mwepu Ilunga rushes out from the defensive wall and boots the ball up field. BBC commentator John Motson calls Ilunga’s clearance ‘a bizarre moment of African ignorance’. The truth is Ilunga knew football’s rules perfectly well but was angry and afraid. Days earlier, Zaire had been trounced 9–0 by Communist Yugoslavia. Zaire’s dictator Mobutu Sese Seko was so humiliated by this scoreline he’d told his squad they’d never see their families again if they lost heavily to Brazil. This chapter tells the full story of Zaire’s disastrous first and only World Cup appearance. It reveals how Mobutu – a canny recipient of Chinese and American Cold War support – meddled in Zaire’s World Cup campaign. It explores how Mobutu’s menacing influence led to his country’s historic trouncing by Yugoslavia and explains what happened to its players after the tournament. The chapter demonstrates that dictators didn’t always have things their own way on the football field during the Cold War. But they still left victims in their wake.

This chapter concentrates on the ways that writers improvised with the discourse of what Amy Kaplan first described as “manifest domesticity”—a discourse pressing domestic life in the US into the service of empire-building. Their improvisations are a courageous attempt to do nothing less than insert queer lives into the national narrative. Beginning with Walt Whitman’s antebellum fiction, the chapter takes readers all the way into the twentieth century, collating a wide range of writers (some canonical, others now obscure) who shared an interest in queer lives avant la lettre—before, that is, same-sex desire was codified and transformed into an identity rather than a behavior. What emerges astonishes the twenty-first–century’s commonsense of nineteenth-century America: a culture surprisingly open-minded about non-normative desires that is, in many ways, less restrictive than our own; models of domesticity that challenge, rather than reinforce, the rapacious elements of empire; gay sex published and, in some cases, canonized.

Organizations can behave narcissistically and criminally. Fraternities support a culture that encourages members to cheat and engage in predatory sexual behavior. White supremacist groups engage in retaliatory acts against minorities, Jews, immigrants, and others. Law enforcement agencies, while not narcissistic by nature, attract individuals who hold minorities in contempt. The border crisis led to contracts with Southwest Key Programs, whose staff sexually abused immigrant children.

Children develop language skills in interaction with others and the ability to make references in culturally appropriate ways is strengthened through habitual conversations. The chapter focuses on social strategies of verbal referencing as a pointing device in everyday social interactions in a specific cultural context of multiple generation families living in Northern India. Using language socialisation theory, examples are provided from conversations in Indian homes to demonstrate culturally specific ways in which children are guided towards socially organised person-talk, quite distinct from the dominant model of family life in mainstream developmental psychology where face-to-face, direct and dyadic exchanges with young children is the norm, The issue of diversity in language use and the political overtones of cultural differences are also raised in defence of valuing difference and protecting people’s inalienable right to their native language/s, cultures and identities.

In Hamburg in June 1974, West Germany and East Germany – the two halves of a nation divided by the Cold War – met for the only time in a competitive football match. The West Germans, defending European champions, were favourites, though their communist rivals, better known for their exploits in Olympic sport, were improving. With fifteen minutes left of a tense encounter, East German striker Jürgen Sparwasser broke the deadlock to secure a historic underdog victory. The chapter explores the political and human complexities of Germany’s ultimate Cold War football match. It examines the pre-match build-up, as signs of détente mingled with paranoia, especially from East Germany, whose secret police were out in force in Hamburg. And it tells the story of some of the game’s key characters, including West Germany’s maverick left-back Paul Breitner and Sparwasser, who claimed political asylum in the West in 1988. In the end, East Germany won the battle, but West Germany won the war, going on to lift the 1974 World Cup and dominate German football after the country was reunited in 1990. The Sparwasser goal, meanwhile, remains a nostalgic touchstone in East Germany’s faded football history.

For poets Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, and Jayne Cortez, jazz indexes a series of paradoxes and contradictions beyond standard accounts of the music and, in turn, beyond standard accounts of jazz poetry. In Joans’s live collaboration with saxophonist Archie Shepp We Have Come Back, the multiple versions of Kaufman’s ‘War Memoir’, and Cortez’s ‘If the Drum Is a Woman’, jazz reveals contradictions of racial, gendered, and national belonging in the Black Arts Movement era. These poems do not simply imitate jazz rhythms, but conceive jazz as a social form, part of the raced, classed, and sexed negotiations of bohemian community. Jazz becomes a way of thinking about practices of listening, about the way that art and cultural practices encapsulate the values of overlapping communities, and about the way that such practices serve as contested terrain. Drawing both prosodic energy and symbolic strength from jazz, these are also poems about jazz, about the stakes of listening to, consuming, appropriating, and appreciating the music, and about its role in the complex politics of the eras of McCarthyism, decolonisation, and the renewed rise of Black art.

“Poetry can be a genre of history,” proclaimed Natasha Trethewey, underscoring the role of historical poetry as a repository of cultural memory commensurate with and even more reliable than traditional histories. This chapter traces this distinctive turn to history among African American poets that emerged in the twenty-first century and characterizes aspects of the cumulative impact this verse has had of revising the nation’s history. It exemplifies this impact by analyzing “A Postcard From Okemah” by Terrance Hayes, which addresses a 1911 lynching; Evie Shockley’s “dependences,” which questions the reputation of Thomas Jefferson by demonstrating the contradictions between his words and his actions; and how, in leadbelly, Tyehimba Jess frees Huddie Ledbetter from the shadow of folklorist John Lomax and prominently positions him in the annals of American music. He offers a portrait of a Huddie Ledbetter who had agency, who hired a lawyer and sued for proper compensation, and whose musical contributions stand alone. In these new public histories, Hayes, Shockley, and Jess offer hope for a more just future.

The European Union’s (EU) media policy balances harmonising regulations across Member States with national autonomy. Traditional audiovisual media is heavily regulated, but digital media formats and user-generated content add complexity to policy frameworks. Public service broadcasters (PSBs), guided by the Amsterdam Protocol, have aimed to promote pluralism and public interest while grappling with market distortions due to public funding. Many PSBs have evolved into public service media (PSM), with websites and presence on third-party platforms. Member States face challenges defining PSB mandates amid technological changes and commercial competition, exacerbated by advertising revenue shifting to global platforms. Additionally, ‘information disorders’ such as disinformation and hate speech have pressured the EU to find ways to safeguard a healthy media environment. Media capture, where governments control propaganda outlets, further threatens democratic communication. The European Media Freedom Act recognises PSM as crucial to democracy, mandating editorial independence and proper funding. Yet implementation and governance lie with Member States, leading to varied outcomes. This chapter offers case studies from Finland and Hungary to illustrate how the lack of specific guidance for PSM challenges the information resilience of national media landscapes. The chapter argues for EU-wide guidelines to foster national and EU-wide resilience.