We have already seen how nonparametric inference (e.g. about a density or regression function) is possible when our target of interest is smooth. The aim of this chapter is to explore nonparametric methods in a different context, namely where our target can be reasonably modelled using shape constraints, for example monotonicity, convexity or log-concavity. Such constraints are quite natural in many applications; moreover, in contrast to the smoothing methods we have encountered previously, it is often possible to propose methods that do not require the choice of any tuning parameters. Indeed, we show how simple approaches based on maximum likelihood or least squares can frequently be employed even in these infinite-dimensional settings.

This chapter contextualizes Gwendolyn Brooks’ first publications in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse: the sonnets “gay chaps at the bar” and “still do I keep my look, my identity…” The magazine’s editorial framework becomes more inclusive in the late 1930s, creating space for Margaret Walker, Langston Hughes, and Edward Bland to write poetry and criticism representative of Black experience that is previously absent from the magazine. Brooks riffs off their work to carve out an effective aesthetic from which she infuses classic poetic structure with a perspective unique to African American experience. As a native of Chicago and member of the South Side Writer’s Group, Brooks long desires to publish in Poetry, and reading her work in the magazine’s bibliographic code allows for new appreciations of Brooks’ work as both a continuation of African American modernism and a political commentary on marginalizing mid-century literary discourse.

The final chapter of this book considers external challenges – namely, discourses and regulatory moves driven by concerns about state sovereignty and, relatedly, security and development – to the dual-sided framework in the current digital era. It starts by discussing to what extent China provides a counter-model to the liberal conception of information freedom and the dual-sided framework and argues that there is not really a Chinese (counter-)model. It moves to consider other Global South countries, looking at firstly Brazil and India and then the peripheries of the periphery. It argues that placed in a chain of dependence, practices of Global South countries generally do not present fundamental challenges to the dual-sided framework despite their genuine normative contestations. The chapter finally moves to recent sovereignist policies and discourses from the Western liberal world and observes that the main challenge to the dual-sided framework comes from an increasingly fascist United States.

This section explores the dead body – its parts, its distillations, its residues, and traces – as synecdoche and catalyst, and as a medium of exchange and thus broker of reciprocity. By drawing together scholars working on different aspects and temporal registers of material-corporeal transformation, this selection of essays considers the different regimes of value (Appadurai 1986) through which the corpse (or organ, bone, or ash) is produced, altered, acted upon, or signified, the larger social context in which the dead exist as generative material, and the relationship between processes of subjectification and objectification (Dziuban 2017). The emphasis on materiality and the “work of the dead” (Laqueur 2015), in whatever fragmentary or residual form, also illustrates how a more expansive anthropology of death includes not only canonical death studies’ considerations of the corpse as locus of social action – a thing to be overcome—(Durkheim [1912] 1995; Hertz [1907] 2009), or an agent of social transformation (Bloch and Parry 1982), but challenges to and movements beyond this expected theorizing. In tracing how anthropology has analyzed death’s materiality, we find disciplinary fissures and silos

This chapter explores how the Twa’s space of nature is created in Rwanda by the encounter between global narratives of indigeneity and conservationism with global capitalism and national social norms. These are refracted through the state’s nationalisation agenda and through policies that condition the access of Twa to resources such as land and together form an important element of the space in which they can negotiate their place in Rwandan society. The response of Twa to questions about nature suggests that they have no special connection to nature or to the forests more particularly. Instead, their responses locate them as ordinary villagers focused on subsistence farming and on survival, but draw also upon national cultural norms of success and status. Whereas traditional land is a key part of articulating indigenous identity in global discourse, the Twa’s desire for land cultivation is non-traditional and instead symbolises the aspiration to inclusion and belonging in the mainstream.

Chapter 4 explores the negotiation of free speech within Tunisia’s public schools following the 2014 constitution’s guarantee of expression rights. It focuses on high school teachers who initiate classroom dialogues aimed at reforming civic education. These discussions address the limits of free speech and acceptable dissent, reflecting broader societal debates about who belongs to the demos and how democratic citizens should communicate and act publicly. The chapter introduces two key concepts: the democratic grotesque, a mode of communication that disrupts the ideal of rational deliberation through irony, excess, and emotion; and dissensus, from Jacques Rancière, describing enduring disagreement that unsettles social hierarchies and renews democratic engagement. Together, these ideas challenge traditional understandings of the demos and highlight democracy’s liminal nature – an an ongoing, contested process of political expression and identity formation.

Seven billion bodies must be disposed of in the next century as the world enters a period of “peak-death.” Conventional techniques, burial and cremation, are economically and environmentally costly, and their future viability is questioned. In this chapter we examine emerging technologies such as human composting, water cremation, and natural burial that cater to individual and community desires and global environmental concerns. Developing new techniques requires shifting ideas about personhood, relationality, cosmos, and futures, and is challenging, as dead human bodies are more than waste. Anthropologists have long examined body disposal as a stage in a death ritual cycle that provides order and continuity. Surprisingly, however, little attention has been paid to techniques of disposal themselves. Here we consider ways of engaging with new disposal techniques through a celebration and critique of Mauss’s “Les techniques du corps.” His analysis of how bodies move through life from childbirth to adulthood stops short of death. However, by framing disposal in terms of bodily actions that are “effective and traditional,” where “education is superimposed on prestigious imitation,” we consider how new technologies are drawn forward by new effective and affective requirements, while they tend to gravitate to the traditional.

This chapter examines an alternative mode of public deliberation in post-revolutionary Tunisia by focusing on a group of left-wing militants who organize grassroots discussion initiatives, most notably the ciné-club – a gathering that blends film screenings with political debate. The ciné-club serves as a space for reclaiming Tunisia’s suppressed legacy of protest and its involvement in the global radical movements of the long 1960s. In contrast to official forums such as transitional justice hearings, which attempt to reconcile revolutionary ideals with the liberal democratic transition, ciné-club discussions assert the continued relevance of revolutionary leftist culture. They resist the depoliticizing pull of liberal norms and instead propose a different political temporality: one in which the revolutionary past informs an open-ended, insurgent present. By doing so, the ciné-club disrupts dominant narratives of linear democratic progress and reclaims space for alternative political imaginaries.

Questions about the social responsibilities of corporations or businesses are regarded by many as the most fundamental issues for business ethicists to solve. In the business ethics literature, debate has been starkly divided between stakeholder theory and stockholder theory, which at its most basic level means choosing either for or against the very idea of corporate social responsibility. This chapter gives a comprehensive and systematic overview of this extensive literature. In response to it, we develop a more nuanced view in line with our moral leeway approach. We argue that the justification of corporate social responsibility depends on a broad range of factors, including the urgency of the problem, the company’s ability to provide assistance, the cost of doing so, the importance of business as usual, and the availability of alternatives.

What role should morality or ethics play in economic interactions on markets? Much previous thinking on business ethics is unhelpful since it is polarised between two implausible extremes. Some neoclassical economists such as Milton Friedman believe ethics has no place in the market. We call this idea ‘economism’ and argue that it sits oddly with general intuitions about the importance of morality. On the other side are those philosophers who hold that traditional ethical theories, such as deontology or virtue ethics, can be applied just as readily in the business realm as they can in all other areas of social life. We call this idea ‘moralism’ and argue that it is unrealistic and unhelpful for typical interactions on competitive markets. We finally outline a more plausible alternative which is more balanced in this regard – the moral leeway approach to business ethics. Moral leeway accepts that the market is, in one sense, exceptional, in that actions which would be sanctioned in other spheres of life are accepted. But such leeway is only permissible in the context of a strong social network that ameliorates the sharp edges of the market.

This chapter summarizes the arguments of the book. It highlights that for judges who are democratically committed, the book has offered the theories and tools to help them build institutional resilience and contribute to democratic values. These tools cannot guarantee these democractic outcomes, as there is a limit as to what judges have control over in authoritarian environments. Nevertheless, constitutional courts are often heavily involved in the shaping of constitutional norms and structures. By pushing beyond the boundaries set by conventional conceptions of the judicial role, this book hopes to have instilled optimism in politically challenging environments and demonstrate how judges who are committed to the democratic cause can improve the chances of survival and success of constitutional courts.

In a blend of intellectual history and detailed explication, I intend to contextualize the historical moment of modernity, which gave rise to the literary properties recognized now as modernism (Miller, Ruins, 113–114). Then I shall assess in turn the delightful aesthetics and lasting impacts of three gifted African American poets: Langston Hughes, Melvin Tolson, and Robert Hayden. The modernism dates from 1940, the year of Hayden’s Heart-Shape in the Dust, to 1944, the date of Tolson’s Rendezvous with America, through Hughes’ Shakespeare in Harlem in 1942 and Freedom’s Plow in 1943 to a lyric masterpiece by Hayden in Night–Blooming Cereus (1972). In the process, I intend to examine a symbolic arc spiraling unpredictably between romantic epiphanies in time and shifting kinetics in African American modernist poetics.