Social networks have always influenced the day-to-day interactions of people, and our chapter highlights the latest research on the significance of these noteworthy social ties in people’s personal relationships. We attend to both romantic relationships and friendship connections, focusing on themes of network effects in relationship formation, maintenance, and dissolution. The findings we review underline the notable ways in which the social environment shapes our closest connections and often strengthens them. We also discuss the extension of network science to investigate marginalized relationships, such as those of sexual minorities, and note the potential for social networks to have a “dark side” in which social connections become problematic. We then address emerging scholarship regarding the positive and negative links between COVID-19 and social networks. Finally, we consider future avenues for research on this notable topic.

This chapter focuses on the production of official records of police–suspect interviews in England & Wales, and the flaws in their current use as criminal evidence. It reveals the importance of the administrative processes undergone by an interviewee’s words post-interview, revealing how they shape – indeed, create – the resulting evidential product, especially through the institutional practice of summarising parts of the interaction. The journey from ‘live’ interaction in an interview room to an official evidential record is largely taken for granted within the legal system, with little-to-no internal or external scrutiny; this chapter argues that it should instead be recognised as a substantial contribution to – and transformation of – the resulting evidence, with all the dangers that potentially entails. Using data from the ‘For The Record’ project, including interview recordings and official police records alongside focus groups with practitioners, it demonstrates the importance for practitioners and researchers alike to pay closer attention to the format of the data they are examining, and to actively reflect on and seek out the many voices and actors which have shaped it.

In the mid-nineteenth century, opéra de salon dominated residential entertainment in Parisian salons. As these short, comedic operas were adapted for household receptions, librettists and composers faced a choice: adhere to staging conventions or adapt their works to fit the idiosyncrasies of residential space. Focusing on the salon of Anne Gabrielle Orfila, who was a proponent of opéra de salon and who hosted at least ten unique productions, this study examines how opera was adapted to salon space. It shows how stage action was not always contained by a single room, with scenes often spanning adjacent rooms. This affected audience seating and shaped the dramatic experience. The study also considers the significance of salon décor as it harmonized with or competed with the opera scenery. At a time when spectacle and elaborate designs prevailed at the Paris Opéra, opéra de salon presented a contrasting model that challenged theatrical conventions.

This essay aims to expand the geographic and cultural understanding of jazz history by exploring how the after-hours jam sessions in the homes of Alma Scott, Mary Lou Williams, and Alice Coltrane were vital to the progression of jazz. During the height of the Harlem Renaissance, the home of Scott in Harlem became an important meeting space for a circle of Black musicians, who were significant in shaping the musical language of American musical theater, swing, and the vaudeville blues. In the mid-1940s and early 1950s, Williams’s Hamilton Terrace apartment attracted a collective of young musicians who would create the modern jazz aesthetic. More than two decades later, a basement recording studio in Coltrane’s Dix Hills home played a similar role, providing a space that fostered a new wave of avant-garde jazz in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Downtempo electronic dance music culture (EDMC) genres were popularised from 1989; much like more up-tempo forms they have roots stretching back to the late 1960s and 1970s, with the White Room at Heaven nightclub a particularly important moment. Several variant forms, such as ambient, ambient dub, ambient techno, chill out, downtempo, ambient house, chill hop, and trip hop connect with ecstatic forms of trance; listeners use such music to induce states of relaxation, stillness, meditation, blissful somatic consciousness, euphoria, or to lower tension or stress levels, in various contexts.

This chapter traces the development of EDMC ambient and chill out music, and explores techniques used by musicians composing in such styles, examining how they interact with, for example, deep listening, time, space, flow states, entrainment, and mystical or spiritual traditions. Framed by phenomenology and embodiment, it discusses how specific approaches aim to manipulate the listener’s experiential perception, as well as their mood and state of consciousness. As well as the listener’s experience, the processes of chill out composers are considered, examining the affordances of chill out music.

At the core of nationalism, the nation has always been defined and celebrated as a fundamentally cultural community. This pioneering cultural history shows how artists and intellectuals since the days of Napoleon have celebrated and taken inspiration from an idealized nationality, and how this in turn has informed and influenced social and political nationalism. The book brings together telling examples from across the entire European continent, from Dublin and Barcelona to Istanbul and Helsinki, and from cultural fields that include literature, painting, music, sports, world fairs and cinema as well as intellectual history. Charismatic Nations offers unique insights into how the unobtrusive soft power of a culture inspired by the national interacts with nationalism as a hard-edged political agenda. It demonstrates how, thanks to its pervasive cultural and ‘unpolitical’ presence, nationalism can shape-shift between Romantic insurgency and nativist populism. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The project of constitutional democracy and the rule of law concept served as a powerful unifying platform for political compromise during the liberal democratic transformation after 1989. Today’s challenge to the liberal rule of law calls for re-evaluating our understanding of that period. To provide a deeper historical perspective, this chapter offers a tentative historical typology of the various rule of law understandings of the period of ‘liberal consensus’. First, it outlines the historical roots of the 1989 democratic and constitutional revolutions in ECE, pointing out their major sources, namely the import of Western constitutional theory, dissident human rights activism and the mostly neglected yet critical authoritarian socialist constitutionalism. Second, the chapter analyses the politics of liberal constitutionalism, in the 1990s, from the point of view of its internal diversity, depending on the different political ideas and ideologies behind it. The variety of constitutional imagination sets the stage for the final step, which is the exploration of different rule of law conceptions, namely neoliberal, substantive, positivist and non-liberal. Although transnational in its perspective, the last section, for the sake of concision and clarity, focuses primarily on the Czech context.

This concluding chapter draws together several strands and original dimensions of Leroi-Gourhan’s technology. Alongside his palaeontological and archaeological research, Leroi-Gourhan also addressed two seemingly contradictory dimensions of techniques: the machine and the artisan. Given his long-standing interest in machines and mechanical devices, including photography, film and also computers, Leroi-Gourhan’s quasi-cybernetic understanding of prehistoric flintknapping is less surprising. Moreover, such a broadly positive attitude towards modern techniques needs to be understood in relation to philosophical and intellectual debates emerging during the post-war years of economic and social reconstruction. While thinkers like Jacques Ellul emphasized the risks of disruption and loss of control associated with modern techniques, Leroi-Gourhan retained, on the whole, his technophile confidence in the cumulative and incremental continuity of techniques, as demonstrated (in his view) across prehistory. This approach also derived from his distinctive Catholic faith and his affinities with the thoughts of Jesuit-palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin. It embodied his belief in the long-term redemptive capacities of techniques, as evidenced by the plenitude achieved by the artisan of all times who ‘thinks with his fingers’, a crafting Homo faber present in each and every one of us.

In 1849–50, Étienne Duverger co-edited La Violette: Revue musicale et littéraire in New Orleans. He published this feuilleton with an aim to instill the idea of the Parisian salon among women in the French Quarter of New Orleans, and he encouraged them to adopt a new repertoire (Chopin) and a new stance (in the public gaze rather than out of it). In other words, he urged them to come out of the shadows (where violets hide) and into a broader light. His efforts, however, failed. This essay argues that while the rising domination of US-American culture (over that of the French) contributed to the breakdown of Duverger’s mission, the data that can be gleaned from this publication provides the most detailed account of salon activities in the South, and possibly the entire nation. Thus, La Violette proves invaluable as a resource for women’s musical culture in this period.

Interpreting for defendants who are not conversant with the language of the court is a standard service in jurisdictions that have ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This ensures defendants’ linguistic presence and meaningful participation in the judicial process, thereby protecting their right to a fair trial. Yet, interpreting for jurors is rare, despite their crucial role in determining defendants’ guilt or innocence in criminal jury trials. This qualitative study compares two Hong Kong appellate courts’ divergent decisions and arguments presented in the appeal case which contested jurors’ access to the chuchotage interpretation, which is usually audible only to the defendant. The chapter reflects on the practice of court interpreting in the bilingual legal system of Hong Kong and argues for extending interpreting services to jurors to better safeguard defendants’ right to a fair trial. Given that English is a dominant language in jury trials and the majority of the population is Cantonese-speaking, the discussion links interpreting for jurors to upholding the fundamental principle of trial by peers drawn from a cross-section of the community.