Upcycling, the creative reuse of pre-existing materials, offers clear environmental benefits by reducing waste and conserving resources, while also promoting sustainable consumption. However, despite its potential, consumer understanding of upcycling remains limited, with many either unfamiliar with the term or conflating it with other sustainable practices. This conceptual ambiguity can undermine confidence in upcycled products, hinder market adoption, and pose challenges for businesses. The inclusion of branded materials in upcycled goods further complicates the landscape, raising legal and reputational concerns for trademark holders and prompting questions about consumer confusion and fairness. To investigate these issues, this chapter presents empirical insights from three studies involving 2,393 participants. Study 1 examines consumers’ understanding of upcycling. Study 2 explores how branded materials in upcycled products influence evaluations and manufacturer identification. Study 3 assesses the effect of different information about manufacturers on consumer perceptions and recall. Findings provide a foundation for considering the legality of trademark use in upcycling and inform strategies for promoting consumer awareness, supporting sustainable business models, and safeguarding both brand and consumer interests in the transition from a linear to a circular economy.

This chapter focuses on the eigenvalues of a prescribed matrix associated with a signed graph. The exposition begins with the concept of main eigenvalues and examines their role in various structural analyses. It then proceeds to specific computations, including determinants, relationships with the spectrum of the underlying graph, and the effects of particular operations on signed graphs and their resulting spectra. Further developments consider signed graphs with specified spectral properties, such as those exhibiting a symmetric spectrum. The chapter also explores eigenvalue bounds, including limit points for the largest eigenvalue, spectral distances between signed graphs, and spectral deviations of a signed graph relative to related signed graphs, providing a detailed and comprehensive analysis of these spectral characteristics.

This chapter contrasts the growing acceptance of anger and grief in political theory with the persistent, one-sided pathologization of fear. While anger and grief are now frequently defended as politically valuable, fear is still dismissed as a primitive, irrational force threatening public life. Rather than defend fear, however, I criticise a pervasive argument against it, which relies on two dubious claims: (1) neuroscientific findings supposedly prove fear is inherently destructive in politics and (2) entire groups are driven by fear. I dispute the first claim by drawing on the work of LeDoux to show that ‘fear’ in neuroscientific research often differs fundamentally from the subjective experience of fear that critics often target. I dispute the second by arguing that attributions of fear to social groups and populations frequently hinge on weak evidence, such as conflating perceived threat with the emotional state of fear. Finally, I argue that the fear of fear in political theory is harmful. It fuels unwarranted attributions of fear that oversimplify the complexities of political behaviour and risk compounding the marginalisation of socio-economically disadvantaged people.

Early modern European imperialism in the Americas is distinctive in the broader history of empires in its fusion of economic interests and geopolitical rivalries with religious objectives and rationales, despite sectarian divides. Taking a comparative hemispheric perspective, this chapter provides an overview of the imperial contexts in which colonial literatures emerged in the Spanish, Portuguese, British, and French empires in the Americas and describes the development of the various colonial literary and generic landscapes in these realms in terms of their diverse modes of economic exploitation and political domination within an emergent global capitalist system.

Access to justice is a critical element of the rule of law, ensuring individuals can exercise their legal rights and resolve disputes through formal and alternative mechanisms. In the Netherlands, the judiciary plays a vital role in facilitating this access, but challenges remain, particularly for vulnerable groups. This paper introduces voorRecht-rechtspraak, an innovative online dispute resolution platform designed to address three key barriers to access: the presumption of citizen self-reliance, limited accessibility of legal aid, and the high costs of legal proceedings. Through a user-centred design and the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), voorRecht offers tools to support self-resolution of disputes while also providing structured human assistance for more complex cases. AI-driven features, such as simplified case-law summaries and semantic search functionality, improve the accessibility of legal information for non-experts, empowering citizens to engage with the law more effectively. While voorRecht is still in an iterative phase of development, early insights highlight its potential to reshape access to justice in the Dutch legal system.

This chapter traces the demobilisation process of the British National Party’s Red, White, and Blue festival campaign. The party had mobilised this campaign in attempts to reform its image and boost its electoral prospects, wanting to be known as family-friendly rather than fascist. The qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) locates it in the anti-far-right militancy pattern of demobilisation. By tracing the case, the chapter confirms the causation implied by the QCA pattern: militant counter-mobilisation drove a diminishing returns mechanism whereby increased costs of maintaining the campaign combined with decreased benefits, both directly resulting from private coercion, caused demobilisation.

This chapter explores the foundations from which cultural variability in emotion emerges by providing a theoretical framework to query degrees of universality for different emotion components. We first review two dominant approaches in affective science that diverge on the extent to which culture is deemed central for emotion: the basic emotions approach and the psychological constructionist approach. Then we apply Norenzayan and Heine’s hierarchical system of cultural universals to the empirical literature on cultural variation in two components of emotion: felt experience and nonverbal expression. In reviewing representative sets of findings, we suggest that while some aspects of emotional experience may be existential universals, nonverbal expressions may reflect functional universals. Our chapter emphasizes the interplay between biological preparedness and cultural learning in shaping emotions. To enable fruitful discussions between scholars of varied research traditions, we advocate for a common set of criteria to evaluate cultural similarities and differences in emotion.

This chapter examines the development of Spanish music in the seventeenth century, a period often described as one of decline following the Golden Age of Renaissance polyphony. Challenging this view, it highlights the cultural transformations that reshaped secular music, particularly its ties to poetry, theatre, and dance. The expansion of public theatres and the rise of new poetic forms, such as the romance nuevo, influenced musical composition, fostering the development of tonos humanos. Stylistic shifts included the growing prominence of the strummed guitar, the popularity of dance-songs like the zarabanda and chacona, and the widespread adoption of triple metre with hemiolas. The chapter also explores the role of music in Spanish theatre, distinguishing between public and courtly productions, and examines the emergence of mythological zarzuelas and comedias with extensive musical content. Additionally, it offers a fresh perspective on sacred music, stressing the interplay between traditional elements and new concertato conventions, as well as the enduring significance of the villancico in churches throughout the period and beyond. By drawing on both written sources and oral traditions, this study reframes seventeenth-century Spanish music as a dynamic and evolving landscape, marked by distinct and innovative characteristics, rather than a mere decline from earlier heights.

The press publishers’ right (granted under Art. 15 of the EU’s 2019 Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market) equips publishers with a legal basis for negotiations with digital intermediaries. However, the process of bargaining has not been specified by the EU legislator, which left it to the discretion of EU Member States and the market. This chapter examines the four main approaches to the operationalisation of the press publishers’ right in the EU, in contrast with the bargaining framework that has evolved in Australia without the underpinning of a new intellectual property right. It analyses these frameworks from the perspective of ‘bargaining in the shadow of the law’ to understand the relationship between statutory law and private bargaining as mediated by institutional frameworks. By defining and coding key parameters concerning the bargaining parties, their endowments (bargaining chips), measures to mitigate dependencies and the role played by the authority (such as a regulator), the chapter shows that bargaining frameworks sit as complex institutional constraints between pure private ordering and the law. It is the shape of the bargaining framework that matters for the range and frequency of agreements between press publishers and digital platforms.

Upcycling describes the process of altering an existing product by modifying it, which in many instances involves improving it and consequently giving a new lease of life to a pre-existing product. It has been increasingly recognized as a promising way to reduce material and energy use, and to promote sustainable production and consumption. Alongside this, there is an increasing customer preference towards environmentally friendly products and minimal waste. Unsurprisingly, upcycling has received considerable attention, particularly in discussion about the circular economy. However, upcycling also poses a challenge to businesses looking to control their IP rights, particularly those seeking to protect their brand and control their reputation through IP protections. This chapter explores these issues, with particular reference to trademark and copyright law in the Pacific region.

In 2019, the EU legislature introduced a right in favour of press publishers over their press publications. The rationale supporting EU intervention in relation to Article 15 of Directive 2019/790 on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSMD) is multi-fold, ranging from support for press publishers when licensing the use of press publications to ensuring a fair marketplace and the protection of a free and pluralist press in performing its societal functions. Article 15 CDSMD has now been transposed at the national level. Despite the harmonizing objective of EU legislature, the resulting legal landscape across the EU appears fragmented. Focusing on the exclusion of ‘very short extracts’ of press publications and considering selected divergent national transpositions, this chapter investigates whether such divergences will thwart the harmonization objective of 15 CDSMD, whether they are incompatible with EU law, and, if so, what the solutions could be. The chapter’s title question is answered: harmonization is necessary, but where the instrument chosen is a directive, national legislatures must correctly interpret and act within the freedom afforded to them under EU law. In many national transpositions of Article 15 CDSMD, this has not occurred.