We present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in Germany, beginning with its origins: the formative people, places, and various intellectual schools of thought. Writing about the current state of the topic, we reflect on influential factors that are either facilitating or inhibiting the study of PoR, including publication options, topical emphases, practitioners, orientations, methodologies, and professional organizations.

We offer opinions concerning future development topics that are emerging as important in the immediate future and/or are perennially important in order to stimulate creative and useful research including Western theoretical relevance, the extent to which Western PoR theories may or may not contain reasonable expectations and concepts for this region, contextual nuances, Indigenous theoretical concerns, collaborative research opportunities, and common faux pas – reflections on what people unfamiliar with this region commonly and incorrectly assume about conducting PoR work in this context.

Seen as a path to Americanization, the sweatshop is a cultural trope. From Abraham Cahan’s fictional autobiography, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), to Amy Sherman-Palladino’s comedy-drama, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017-), stories set in the sweatshop comprise a subgenre of US immigrant narratives. Melissa Rivero’s The Affairs of the Falcóns (2019) adds to and disrupts that subgenre while challenging dominant conception of assimilation. As a story about undocumented labor and the informal economy, The Affairs of the Falcóns seems to say little about assimilation as it is widely perceived and celebrated. Yet Rivero’s novel offers a fresh take on this concept: Ana is incorporated in the US economy not only as a sweatshop seamstress, but also as a disposable worker. The Affairs of the Falcóns calls attention to the paradox of assimilation – inclusion via marginalization and subordination – and to the elusiveness of the American dream.

Szemerédi’s regularity lemma and its extensions and generalizations are one of the powerful and broadly applicable tools for extremal problems in graphs and hypergraphs. We study the removal lemma and some of its applications, as well as sparse regularity.

Scholars once divided British Romanticism into two generations (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake; Byron, Shelley, Keats), seeing the 1800s as a transitional period with little significant work. However, this view has changed with the rediscovery of women poets, working-class authors, and Black and Brown writers highlight Romanticism’s connection to global warfare, imperialism, slavery, and the expansion of communication technologies and print media. This chapter examines problems of communication in the works of William Wordsworth and Charlotte Smith, using their writing to reconsider Romantic temporality. It explores how both poets engage with time’s contradictions – its rapidity and slowness – driven by commercial and geological changes. By analyzing their differing approaches to temporal irregularity, the chapter argues that Romanticism reflects not only rapid changes (revolutions, industrialization, media) but also slower, more subtle transformations. This view of time, including geological slowness, offers Romantic poets a way to explore time and history, presenting Romanticism itself as a poetic expression of the tension between speed and slowness.

In the Indian, Arabian, and Malay seafaring worlds, the burden of ‘piraticality’ fell upon successive sets of maritime and littoral communities. As seen through the prism of the colonial archive, the sailors of these societies inhabited a dynamic frontier of imperial expansion, beginning in India in the eighteenth century, and pushing outwards from the shores of the subcontinent. Building from recent reinterpretations of the sea as a category of historical analysis, this introduction charts the emergence and transformation of piracy as a concept, spilling out from the early-modern Atlantic into the Indian Ocean. Moving beyond the more familiar pirates who positioned themselves within and between competing seaborne empires in the Caribbean and Atlantic, this study considers piracy instead as a projected category of imperial encounter. Across the Indian Ocean world, ‘pirates’ lost the individuality associated with their Atlantic counterparts, causing entire communities to be defined by their immutable characteristics—cast in terms of race and geography, as temporally inert and irredeemably backward, incapable of modernising except by the violence of purportedly enlightened empires.

Many scholars believe 1804 marks the beginning of Blake’s composition process for Milton: A Poem, a work whose plates were subsequently repurposed several times. This chapter reads Milton’s celebrated vortex passages as a response to the emergence of time-critical media in the early Romantic period. For Wolfgang Ernst, time-criticality refers to the temporalizing functions of media or the introduction of new temporal logics that transform how we interact with the signals such media produce. I highlight a gap between a cultural analysis of history in Milton: A Poem and a media archaeological analysis of the poem’s time-criticality by reading the poem in both senses. In addition to representing the history of Blake’s ideological relationship to history and time in 1804, I suggest that attention to the poem’s media materiality adds to our historical understanding of the first decade of the nineteenth century. Overall, my work emphasizes Blake’s history as a construction of temporal and archival techniques by delineating how time is produced by the infrastructures mediating Blake’s poem.

The independence number of a hypergraph H is the maximum size of an independent set of vertices of H – a set of vertices containing no edges of H. The problem of determining the maximum size of an independent set in an r-uniform hypergraph with a prescribed number of vertices and edges is equivalent to the notorious Turán problem for hypergraphs. In this chapter, we consider the fundamental problem of lower bounds on the independence number of H when H is an n-vertex r-uniform linear hypergraph of average degree d, with an illustration of applications to the Erdős–Heilbronn triangle problem and to lower bounds on extremal numbers for bipartite graphs. In particular, we give a novel proof of the Ajtai–Komlós–Pintz–Spencer– Szemerédi Theorem, giving large independent sets in uncrowded hypergraphs.

The proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has introduced a profound paradox: while AI promises efficiency, automation and insight, its growing energy consumption, computational demands and infrastructural dependencies increasingly strain ecological and technological limits. This chapter addresses the behavioural and systemic dynamics that shape the sustainability of AI itself – not only in terms of ethics or outcomes, but in terms of its continued viability in a resource-constrained world. Drawing from systems theory, behavioural modelling and computational sustainability, we examine how AI behaves as a system-of-systems, how those behaviours accumulate energy and material costs and what design principles might render AI more compatible with long-term environmental and economic thresholds. By analysing patterns such as runaway model scaling, overfitting to hardware architectures and unsustainable data pipelines, the chapter outlines a Behavioural Data Science approach to understanding and modifying AI’s systemic impact. Through case studies and modelling strategies, it argues that AI’s future must be governed not only by performance metrics, but by its capacity to sustain itself – ecologically, computationally and institutionally – within the planetary boundaries.

An r-sunflower is a collection of sets such that there is a set C (possibly the empty set) called the core, for which every two of the sets have intersection exactly C. Sunflowers are one of the most important structures in extremal set theory since they are the only configuration that one is guaranteed to contain in any sufficiently large collection of k-elements sets. The simple structure of a sunflower enables one to prove many theorems in combinatorics and beyond. This chapter considers the basic theory of sunflowers, culminating in recent breakthroughs.