This chapter historicizes the African American undertaker in Baltimore, Maryland, a city where the Black-owned and operated Mount Auburn Cemetery created a ripe death industry for African American undertakers to enter and thrive in. As a death industry site that goes back to 1807, Mount Auburn Cemetery suggests the importance of Baltimore to the death trade. Apprenticed as carpenters and labored as hired drivers and sextons, early Black undertakers claimed an occupation within an expansive cooperative of laborers who all mutually benefited within the death trade. Nineteenth-century gendered norms shaped early Black undertaking, often omitting Black women from this history. By discussing the cultural, social, local, and gendered forces that started the trade – illustrating how undertaking was much more than a solitary, male endeavor – the chapter inserts Black women back into the narrative of undertaking that they helped to create and sustain. This chapter shows how it was the wives who helped to start these entrepreneurial undertaking efforts, and it was the wives, daughters, and sisters who sustained and furthered their legacy after the patriarchs passed away.

This chapter explores the construction of Twa as global development subjects within the Rwandan context and asks how they position themselves within that landscape, formed by the intersection of the global development narrative and Rwanda’s unity and reconciliation agenda. This chapter interrogates the state’s development narrative in the context of the global development discourse and examines its ability to offer a believable and accessible vision of progress. The Twa in our study push back against the de-politicising effect of development and its processes, whereby the emphasis is placed on the individual and their mind-set. However, they do so not to emphasise their ethnic apartness but to assert their right to the attributes of Rwandanness, notably land. Their answer is thus not to refuse to participate in the modern Rwanda but actively to seek it by demanding equal care.

This chapter engages with a Colombian performance action by a group called Cuerpos Gramaticales, or Grammatical Bodies. Members of the collective symbolically sow themselves in public places, planted for six hours with their lower bodies under mounds of dirt and their upper bodies rising as trunks, stems, and leaves from the earth. The action is undertaken to denounce violence, achieve collective catharsis, and (re)align relationships among body, territory, and memory. That is, it is an exercise putting the body at the center of a project to restructure – and to synthesize – ethical, spiritual, ecological, and political grammars that guide sensemaking about violence, life, and death in Colombia. The action was first initiated to denounce a joint state-paramilitary urban massacre two years before Colombia ratified peace accords ending a fifty-three-year armed conflict with its oldest guerrilla army. The chapter discusses actions taken in the early stages of the accords’ implementation, as surviving kin of victims of state-perpetrated crimes against humanity struggled to make state and society acknowledge the significance of their loved ones’ lives and the cruelty of their deaths.

How should we view the relationship between ethics and economics? One of the most salient differences between the two—at least as they are traditionally conceived—involves the different intentions or motivations of agents. They are often regarded as mutually exclusive: ethical motives are other-regarding, while economic ones are self-regarding (and perhaps selfish). If markets give rise to material benefits and, furthermore, those benefits are a consequence of market agents pursuing their self-interest, does that mean we must accept the legitimacy of selfishness or greed? In this chapter we suggest that this picture is too simplistic. We accept that self-interest in the marketplace gives rise to material benefits, and hence we accept forms of behaviour that might elsewhere (in other areas of social life) be condemned, but our analysis shows that morality still has a role to play. This is the moral leeway approach at work, and it involves distinguishing between different varieties of the profit motive.

Chapter 9 concludes the book by further probing the theory’s generalizability, mechanisms, and implications. It starts with the theory’s applicability to the illustrative case studies of India and Mexico. It next hones in on the ideational mechanisms – learning and experimentation – that account for how a developmentalist legacy is updated and discusses other potential mechanisms, including emulation and competition. It lastly assesses three implications of the book’s theory. The first is whether state support for nationally controlled MNCs can continue to be an effective strategy under the current wave of backlash to globalization in advanced economies. The second is whether states that lack a developmentalist legacy can support the internationalization of national firms at a more limited scale. The third is whether the internationalization of national firms is compatible with more expansive definitions of development that go beyond structural transformation.

‘If Rohith Vemula had not poetized his death in the English language, would he have resonated with the “collective conscience” of the secular university-subject in as immediate a way?’ This was a question I posed to a friend working on contemporary Indian university movements. We then re-read Rohith's suicide letter together, almost as a cold ritual of remembrance – in the same way that it has been published and re-published and excerpted and textualized in innumerable articles, posters and slogans, ever since the handwritten note was recovered from a hostel room.

Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD scholar and Ambedkarite activist, was driven to suicide by the University of Hyderabad (UoH) administration under pressure from Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ministers and the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). A member of the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA) at UoH, Rohith was at the forefront of campus movements against caste discrimination and communal violence. The ASA's principled resistance against Hindu fundamentalists irked the student front of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which demanded intervention from a union minister and locally elected member of Parliament. The BJP leader immediately swung into action, and orders were passed directly from the central government to the university's vice-chancellor urging a censuring of ‘casteist’ and ‘anti-national activities’ indulged in by the ASA. In a day's time, on 5 August 2015, Rohith and four other ASA activists were evicted from their hostel rooms; an ongoing Proctorial inquiry compounded the penalty in September by suspending these students and barring them from all social spaces on campus.

The chapter presents three models of what courts how courts operate in hybrid regimes. The first two are what this book calls the Pessimistic Model and the Optimistic Model. They represent two different bodies of literature and two contrasting views of constitutional courts in hybrid regimes. Under the Pessimistic Model, a court can do very little to resist an authoritarian, let alone promote democratic norms. On the other hand, the Optimistic Model views a constitutional court as the guardian of liberal democratic norms, possessing the capacity to bring democratic change to a hybrid regime. This chapter argues that while each model captures distinct elements and raises important issues regarding constitutional courts in hybrid regimes, each has gone too far. Drawing on the lessons learnt from the analyses of these two models, the chapter presents a third – and what it argues to be a more attractive – model, namely, the Realistic Model, under which the constitutional court can play a meaningful, if limited, role within the hybrid regime.

This chapter is designed to provide some common background. We introduce linear models and ordinary least squares, which are starting points for more recent developments presented in later chapters. Although we do present standard distributional theory and inferential methods under homoscedastic Gaussian errors, we also focus on model misspecification, as well as techniques for assessing goodness-of-fit by looking for signal in the residuals. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some key approaches to multiple testing, a problem that occurs for example when testing for the individual significance of several predictors in regression settings.

This chapter explores the processes and form of the imagined national community in Rwanda in light of global discourses of difference, focusing on the space of identity that the state narrative of unity allows for Twa to navigate their subjectivisation as Rwandans. Our data shows that many Twa buy into the government’s narratives of national unity and ‘Rwandan-ness’. They choose to identify themselves as Rwandan and appear willing to forgo Twa identity for the promise of belonging and progress that they understand national narratives of unity to offer. To understand this as forced assimilation – whether through the violence of law or economic circumstances – is too simple a reading: Twa individuals are actively using the ‘Ndi Umunyarwanda’ programme messaging to create spaces of inclusion for themselves within Rwandan society.

In the previous chapter, we explored ways in which a constitutional court can and should contribute to democratic values in a hybrid regime. Toward the end of the chapter, I also highlighted the extent to which questions of competency might limit the democracy-enhancing roles of a constitutional court. While democratic theory may justify the roles suggested, we must also engage with another question: whether it is feasible for a constitutional court to play those roles under the political climate of a hybrid regime. Empirical evidence, as laid out in Chapter 3, generally shows that constitutional courts in hybrid regimes enjoy some degree of judicial autonomy. Those findings give us prima facie reasons to believe that the democratic roles are possible. This chapter takes a closer look at how the hybridity of a hybrid regime impacts the conditions under which a constitutional court exercises its powers and applies the roles. This issue is explored through the lens of perceived legitimacy.

This chapter deals with the English religious lexicon at the end of the fourteenth/beginning of the fifteenth century. This period saw the appearance of religious reformers – condemned by many as heretics – who are known as Lollards, a ‘movement’ associated with the fourteenth-century academic theologian John Wyclif that has been called a ‘premature reformation’. A special ‘Lollard language’ was identified – albeit somewhat vaguely – at the time, and an attempt is made here to establish the details of this distinctive lexicon, comparing the usage of selected Lollard sermons with other more orthodox works in the same genre by the Augustinian canon John Mirk. The ‘reformist’ usages thus distinguished are then compared with those found in other works from the period, notably Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Parson’s Tale and the C-text of William Langland’s Piers Plowman.

The final chapter brings together the themes of the book, exemplified through two case studies located diachronically: the development of the lexeme spirit , and the theological writings of the seventeenth-century poet and thinker Lucy Hutchinson. The chapter concludes with some observations on how the insights presented in this book can be aligned with a wider reimagining of the philological enterprise along pragmatic lines, taking on board interdisciplinary perspectives.

This chapter examines the human rights framing for the governance of information from the 1990s to the early 2010s and argues that, overall, it did not fundamentally unsettle two basic logics of neoliberalism, namely, securitization and marketization. In commonplace positive narratives about technology, human rights were presented by policymakers and international technocrats as one benefit of new information and telecommunication technologies (ICTs), to justify the market-driven technological change. By contrast, negative narratives about technology focused on the social harms of new ICTs and invoked human rights to normatively ground technological development. However, human rights struggles in this period suffered from two processes of dilution – firstly, the proceduralization of human rights obligations of the state during the War on Terror years and, secondly, the narrowing down of a broad social programme into focusing only on classic civil and political rights in civil society campaigns – and were therefore unable to fundamentally reshape the governance of information towards more equitable distribution of power and wealth.