As stated in the National Foreign Language Project 2020, English language teaching in Vietnam must be reformed in all aspects. Part of this project has been the training scheme for in-service teachers of English for language proficiency and pedagogical innovation in the school system. This chapter explores the emotions of the teacher educators (TEs) who have been engaged in training English language teachers in Vietnam. Six TEs were interviewed to find out their emotions arising from their participation in the teacher-training scheme. The findings show that the TEs were not emotionally prepared for training in-service teachers, and their emotional complexity arose during teacher training. More importantly, the emotional experiences assisted them in adapting their training practice. The findings offer implications for policy and practice of English language teachers in Vietnam regarding the introduction of emotionally supportive programs.

Although criminal trials are primarily designed to repress individual acts, a new role has emerged with the third generation of jihadist trials. They have become a ‘forum’, giving voice to different actors in order to reconstruct a socio-historical phenomenon in all its complexity, as we have seen with truth commissions in post-conflict countries. These trials have become a space where the defendants recount their path to radicalization, the victims relate their trauma and expectations, the experts situate the phenomenon in a political, social and medical context, and the police and security services expose their work and their difficulties. The rich narratives exposed by the different stakeholders, and most notably by hundreds of victims, are at the center of this organic process, which is being constantly developed by the actors themselves. Obviously, the trial was strictly framed by criminal law procedure, but this framework was partly circumvented, enriched, and even subverted during the trial. This chapter discusses the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan trials and the emergence of a hybrid procedure, which introduced important elements of restorative justice.

Based on a case study on an English language education programme in private higher education in Bangladesh, the chapter explores the factors that impact teacher educators’ emotional well-being and emotion regulation strategies. The in-depth interviews of two participants are explored for critical moments, and the participants are asked to narrate their lived experiences of well-being and emotion regulation strategies. A thematic analysis of their narrative indicates that social, institutional, and emotional factors are vital to English language teacher educators’ well-being. Private higher education, with a strong focus on student-teachers’ well-being, somewhat neglects the well-being of English language teacher educators. Amidst emotionally conflicted situations and in the absence of appropriate counselling services, language teacher-educators use varied regulation strategies, amongst which avoidance strategies seem significant. In the end, the chapter suggests how English language education programmes in private higher education may become humane in their approach regarding language teacher educators’ emotional well-being and emotion regulation strategies.

Chapter 5 examines the popularity of sewing shops and apprenticeships amongst fashion-conscious young women on tight budgets. Focusing on materiality, the chapter develops the book’s discussion of how uncertainty is employed in future-making strategies by considering how young women engage with counterfeit commodities and use skilful artistry to reveal – or bring forth in material form – the individuals they believe God intends them to be. Focusing on young women’s desire for bespoke clothes, which they often create for themselves after learning how to sew, the chapter highlights how young women avoid clothes sold in the market not because they are fakes or imitations of global brands but because, as mass-produced commodities, they deny young women their uniqueness and risk making them a counterfeit of someone else. As the chapter explores, making bespoke clothes that are fashionable does not depend only on individual inspiration but, ironically, requires young women to carefully imitate others’ designs. Detailing how young women make clothes by skilfully copying current trends and mirroring the contours of their own bodies, the chapter discusses the art and ethics of imitation.

Developing the previous chapter’s focus on the artistry involved in imitation, Chapter 6 focuses on how young women’s skilful use of make-up palettes and other beauty practices can simultaneously transform their physical appearance and social status. The chapter follows young women’s efforts to evoke a particular urban feminine beauty ideal, which is summed up not in one particular ‘look’ but rather in the ability to constantly transform the self. While appearing effortless, this cosmopolitan aesthetic requires young women to navigate confusing make-up markets and the undesirable effects of fake cosmetics, as well as the infrastructural and social stresses that shape the beauty salon experience. It also requires them to avoid being instantly ‘made down’ by the gazes of other young women. Showing how young women’s beauty practices not only sit within an ever-shifting social and material terrain but also actively contribute to the inconsistencies and ambiguities of urban life, the chapter argues that beauty and uncertainty, far from being incongruous concepts, play a significant role in shaping each other in Calabar.

The British Army’s pluralistic religious culture was tenacious, proving responsive and adaptable to change. The RAChD, despite its mixed performance in previous decades, emerged from the War on Terror having demonstrated its abiding value. In the wider Army (and despite more soldiers professing ‘no religion’), recruitment patterns, the perils of active service and the religious character of mourning and Remembrance all conspired to maintain an unusual level of religiosity – or, at least, of religious susceptibility. The religious world into which it was sent also affected the Army, producing in the RAChD a strategy of professional mentorship and religious engagement and, from soldiers themselves, a sometimes hostile reaction against ‘religion’ – albeit one that was tempered by a generally favourable view of chaplains and their ministrations. In ethical terms, religion did not serve as a moving force in addressing the pernicious aspects of Army culture around the turn of the twenty-first century, but, through the abiding purchase of the just war tradition, it coloured its responses to the dilemma of killing, and to the ethical challenges of war.

In terms of references, themes, translations, Percy Shelley’s cosmopolitan poetics presents what is arguably the most sustained and adventurous British Romantic version of “world literature.” And yet at decisive moments, Shelley’s poetry offers a radical “unworlding” that takes leave of the world and, in its leave-taking, withdraws from contemporary notions of a “world literature.” The chapter explores a Shelleyan mode of abstraction that exhibits what in other contexts Edward Said described as “unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies.” Supported by contemporary correspondences with Said, Deleuze, and Radiohead, the essay features a sustained reading of “To a Sky-Lark,” in which the “exilic energies” of Shelley’s “intellectual mission” of are generated not by “loving” the world but by leaving it. The chapter concludes by placing Shelley’s “skylark-image” alongside Ocean Vuong’s “The Bull” (2022) to suggest how two poetic correspondents and their animal addressees propose a aesthetic apprehension of a poetics of unworlding.

The past three quarters of a century have witnessed humanity remake the planet on which it lives, but also begin to imagine better and worse ways in which this process might proceed. So, science fiction has acquired a peculiar centrality to Anthropocene culture. As Amitav Ghosh explains, climate change is a fundamentally collective process, whereas the dominant Western culture is one “in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike.” So, “serious prose fiction” has become overwhelmingly committed to versions of literary realism that depend for their efficacy on notions of everyday probability. By contrast, extreme climate change – and the Anthropocene more generally – necessarily involve everyday improbabilities. Radical improbabilities have therefore been banished from “literary fiction” into the “generic outhouses” of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. In short, the Anthropocene has itself generated the wave of recent anthropogenic eutopias and dystopias. The chapter concludes by endorsing Kim Stanley Robinson’s view that “utopia has gone from being a somewhat minor literary problem to a necessary survival strategy.”

The secularisation of British society was at odds with global developments. The resurgence of religion internationally affected the RAChD and the British Army in various ways. Despite its problems, such was the prestige of the RAChD that it helped mould Bundeswehr chaplaincy in the Cold War; chaplaincies in newly independent African nations; and chaplaincies in former Warsaw Pact countries. In the War on Terror, its mentorship was extended to the Afghan National Army. Meanwhile, the religious aspects of many contemporary conflicts involved chaplains in widespread ‘religious engagement’ with local populations. Significantly, religion proved to be a key dimension of the Cold War, of the ‘Emergencies’ in Kenya and Cyprus, of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, of the Falklands and Gulf Wars, of the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia and of the War on Terror. While British soldiers could and did recoil from their often-brutal ‘religious’ character, a strong anti-religious animus (which was widely stoked in ‘New Atheist’ circles) was probably forestalled by the support they received from their chaplains and by soldiers’ recourse to religion for personal protection and consolation.

Women have been historically relegated to supporting other people’s lives. Is it possible to find meaning in these roles? Beauvoir examined some common strategies that women employ to overcome the sense of their own insignificance. Motherhood is one of the most common. But can a child be their mother’s project? ‘The woman in love’ indicates those women who dedicate their existences to their partner’s life and projects. ‘The mystic’ aims to lose herself in a more powerful beloved, God, while ‘the narcissist’ loves her own body. Chapter 5 examines these figures as analysed in The Second Sex, and as presented both in Beauvoir’s and another writer’s novel, and shows their enduring relevance. For instance, Beauvoir’s depiction of the narcissist has become all the more significant with the advent of social media and online identities. Similarly, Beauvoir’s exploration of women’s complicity with the world of men that oppresses them is applied to the current situation, with a focus on women in power. The chapter concludes by addressing a crucial question: is it ethical, or even possible, to renounce one’s freedom and choose submission?

Through the window of the Shrikhande graph, we have introduced you to many important topics in discrete mathematics. We hope that you have been inspired to learn more about some of the topics, so we provide a list of books that go further than we have done. For a textbook on discrete mathematics, somewhat similar in spirit to this book, we recommend van Lint and Wilson [71].

For general graph theory, we suggest the books by Bollobás [18] and Diestel [42].

A series of books edited by Lowell Beineke and Robin Wilson [10, 11, 12] give a good overview of several aspects of graph theory: algebraic, topological, structural and chromatic [13].