In recent years, and especially, after the pandemic, policymakers in Latin America and the Caribbean have become increasingly interested in promoting the principles of the circular economy as a core component of the region’s sustainable development. Under the banner of sustainability, the national and regional markets for circular economy items have grown and consumer preference for them has been attracted. However, the debate on the impact of IPRs on the upcycling of goods, which could be protected by an IPRs system, is still very young. This chapter examines whether IP laws interfere with the production and distribution of goods by analyzing national and regional regulations in selected countries in the region, where there is growing interest in circular economy products. In addition, an analysis of the legal defences available within the IP system for the relevant stakeholders will also be undertaken. In particular, the IP systems concerning trademarks, industrial designs, and copyright will be discussed. Finally, the chapter examines whether creating distinctive signs specific to the goods produced under these practices exist and whether this seems desirable.

When people move to another culture, their emotions may not “fit” because these were socialized to align with values and goals central to their culture of origin. However, with increasing cultural engagement, immigrant minorities’ emotions may change and, eventually, come to fit the normative emotions in the new/other culture. This chapter reviews the emerging research on emotional acculturation and argues that emotional fit with culture may be an important (understudied) condition for the inclusion of immigrant minorities. Specifically, it presents evidence showing that (1) minorities’ emotions change over time given frequent intercultural contact and friendships; (2) these changes occur independently of acculturation attitudes; (3) emotional fit with the majority culture does not jeopardize fit with the heritage culture; and that (4) emotional acculturation may benefit minorities’ well-being and inclusion in the majority culture. In closing, the chapter outlines directions for future research to advance understanding of emotional acculturation.

In this reflective afterword, Shinobu Kitayama traces how our understanding of culture and emotion has shifted from viewing emotions as biologically hard-wired to understanding them as dynamically shaped by culture. It articulates four themes as emerging from the edited volume The Cultural Shaping of Emotion: emotion as situated cultural practice, the centrality of meaning-making, emotion development as cultural apprenticeship, and the dynamic interplay between biology and culture. In sketching pathways for the future, Kitayama calls for an integrative approach that studies emotions as rooted in cultural meanings and practices as well as in biological processes. He also calls to study emotions beyond East–West dichotomies such that we can move toward a globally informed and inclusive science of emotion.

Chapter 2 turns to the evidence of royal diplomas produced by the kings of Mercia and Wessex during the reigns of Æthelwulf, Berhtwulf and Burgred. With Æthelwulf’s diplomas, we find the earliest clear evidence for centralised production of diplomas for an Anglo-Saxon king. It is in this centralised West Saxon context, furthermore, that Old English boundary clauses are likely to have been established as a royal diplomatic feature. Contemporary Mercian diplomas lack evidence for comparable production processes. Novelty nevertheless is apparent: with a royal diploma in Old English, and in the literary flair of diplomas issued for the community at Breedon-on-the-Hill. Overall, the continued importance of the Latin charter tradition for both Mercian and West Saxon kings is clear, yet there was space for experimentation, innovation and reflection on the qualities and potencies that specific languages could carry. Moreover, people were increasingly interested in the performative potential of charter production, as an opportunity for ritual action that would generate and reaffirm authority for participants.

The aim of this chapter is twofold: we first give a full description of those weights β = (βn)n≥0 such that the composition operators Cϕ are bounded on the weighted Hardy space H2(β) for all symbols ϕ (analytic self-maps of D).

Culture and emotion are two of the fundamental mechanisms for human adaptation to the natural and social environment. Culture provides informational resources that help a human population adapt to environmental regularities, whereas emotion provides informational resources that help adaptation to environmental perturbations. In this chapter, we speculate on micro-to-macro cultural dynamics under societal threats, namely, when a population experiences recurrent large-scale perturbations. We first piece together individual-level micro-cultural dynamics under societal threat – encoding, storage, and transmission of cultural information when a large proportion of a population is threatened with potential adverse effects by natural challenges, such as extreme weather events and pandemics, or by social challenges, such as wars and conflicts. We then speculate how these processes may give rise to macro-level cultural dynamics under recurrent societal threats by transforming cultural scripts to cope with societal challenges.

At present, signed graphs with a small number of distinct eigenvalues of the adjacency matrix remain largely undetermined, even in the case of just two eigenvalues. This chapter presents the current state of knowledge, focusing on signed graphs that possess at most four eigenvalues. Detailed constructions are provided, along with an in-depth analysis of the interplay between spectral properties and graph structure. Complete characterizations are given for particular signed graphs with two eigenvalues, including various classes such as signed line graphs. In addition, it is shown that the signed line graph of a regular signed doubled graph possesses exactly two eigenvalues. The discussion is further extended to regular signed graphs with three or four eigenvalues, as well as signed graphs with a small number of net Laplacian eigenvalues, highlighting both theoretical results and illustrative examples.

Chapter 1 assesses the evidence beyond the charter corpus for literary activity in Kent, Mercia and Wessex in the mid-ninth century. This evidence comprises five categories: surviving manuscripts with contemporary English provenances, letters, inscribed objects, the events of the 850s, and Asser’s account of King Alfred’s childhood engagement with books. The importance of understanding survival patterns and the nature of the evidence is stressed, particularly because attempts were rarely made to preserve letters for posterity, and because different ways of engaging with books and inscribed objects generated varyingly large fingerprints for twenty-first-century eyes. Asser’s famous account, furthermore, needs to be approached with caution, though it does in several ways align with the impression of literary activity that one gets from mid-ninth-century sources. A good deal remains unknown about many of the contexts in which literary activity took place, but it is nonetheless clear that the written word was conspicuous in many mid-ninth-century social settings, despite the likelihood that in some contexts resources for new literary productions were limited. Much of this literary culture was fundamentally social, and it was often inspired by international exchange.

In this chapter, we adapt two concepts from the theory of ordinary graphs to the setting of signed graphs. A signed graph is called integral if its spectrum consists entirely of integers. Two signed graphs are said to be cospectral if they are switching non-isomorphic yet share the same spectrum. In both cases, the term ‘spectrum’ refers to the eigenvalues of a prescribed matrix associated with the signed graph. Integral signed graphs are studied within the class of graphs with vertex degree at most four, with a complete classification provided for those with degree at most three. Numerous sporadic constructions of cospectral signed graphs are considered, alongside two basic operations transferred from the domain of ordinary graphs: GM-switching and WQH-switching, both of which produce signed graphs with identical spectra. As a central result, a pivotal and distinguishing construction is presented that consistently generates cospectral signed graphs, representing a fundamental phenomenon unique to the domain of signed graphs. A survey of signed graphs that do not have a cospectral pair is given at the end of the chapter.