According to Beauvoir’s existentialist philosophy, human beings have no essence; they must create themselves through their actions and choices. Projects are central to our very humanity. But does it matter what these projects are intended to achieve? Is it up to each individual to choose their own projects and goals? Can the commitment to a project, and its goal, become unethical? Chapter 2 explores these questions and examines Beauvoir’s answers in The Ethics of Ambiguity and Pyrrhus and Cineas. These works mark the beginning of Beauvoir’s journey away from her youthful individualism. While exploring human freedom and asserting the moral imperative to exercise one’s freedom, they also start to investigate the limits of freedom, a theme that looms large in her subsequent works.

In this chapter, we use the classification of the root systems with all roots of the same length to determine the graphs G whose adjacency matrix A(G) has least eigenvalue −2 or larger. This classification includes the Shrikhande graph and gives us another, quite different, proof of Shrikhande’s Theorem.

Note that if G is a graph with at least one edge, then the sum of the eigenvalues of A(G) is zero (the trace of A(G)), and hence G has both positive and negative eigenvalues. So, for non-null graphs, the smallest eigenvalue is negative.

This chapter details the self-inquiry of a language teacher educator (LTE) examining emotional exchanges during mentoring sessions over a semester. It focuses on the LTE’s emotion work of providing empathy and discomfort to guide a teacher learner (TL)’s critical inquiry into her emotions for professional development. Data included the TL’s weekly reflective journals and feedback, Zoom meetings, and the LTE’s field notes. Results indicate that critical inquiry into emotions fosters the TL’s emotional reflexivity and agency. However, the process demanded the LTE carefully balance creating discomfort and providing support to ensure the TL’s emotional well-being, causing significant emotional challenges. Discomforting the TL made the LTE feel vulnerable and face ethical tensions about the appropriateness and responsibility of creating discomfort for educational purposes and its justification. The LTE’s emotional experiences are further discussed in relation to her beliefs and identity. The chapter suggests that incorporating emotion as critical inquiry in teacher education foregrounds LTEs’ emotional experiences, highlighting emotion as pedagogy.

This chapter examines actual but in particular imagined deserts of the Anthropocene as they have been portrayed in literature, while also making occasional forays into other cultural media like film, television, comics, and computer games. The chapter is divided into three sections titled Apocalyptic Desert, Toxic Desert, and Biospheric Desert, each section examining how Eurocentric ideologies, religious perspectives, financial models, as well as literary and cultural traditions have tended to paint the desert in the light of an existential struggle of “the human.” The chapter argues that when reading deserts from the perspective of the Anthropocene, it is important to undo any totalizing vision of the desert. The chapter points towards a wide range of desert texts like Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, J.G. Ballard’s The Drought, David Brin’s The Postman, and Edan Lepucki’s California, computer games like Spec Ops: The Line, and Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, films like The Mad Max franchise, as well as comics like Judge Dredd and Tank Girl. The chapter concludes with an extended reading of Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Water Knife and Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Violence against religious objects is the chief subject of this chapter. It considers Irish Catholic violence against the Protestant Bible, arguing that its status as a heretical object was central in explaining hostility and destruction; however, its anglicising power was also targeted, with implications touching language, the law, imperialism and more. Protestant iconoclasm also receives some attention, though the chapter notes its relative paucity in the sources; when it occurred however, it was a powerful statement against perceived idolatry, superstition and the believed inherent violence of Catholicism, especially the clergy. The chapter concludes with a reconsideration of massacre in light of iconoclasm and material violence, arguing that the body could be understood as a form of ‘sacred image’, and thus, interpersonal attacks must be viewed and understood as part of a continuum of violence against symbols of faith, giving a new perspective to long-running debates concerning massacre in the rebellion.

The First World War has recently been reinvented in the West as the grand stage to play the anthem of “multiculturalism”: A colonial and violent past often gets sanitized and instrumentalized for a political agenda of social cohesion. This chapter uncovers this story through a focus on South Asia, which contributed 1.5 million soldiers to the war. In the process, it examines the color of war memory and practices of remembrance, the archive and the digital revolution, and diversity and recolonization, as well as the work of literary and artistic imagination in interrogating the colonial past.

Philosophers, philologists, and poets of the Romantic period showed a distinct attentiveness to language as a nontransparent medium of thought and expression. Working in the wake of Locke’s 1689 Essay concerning Human Understanding, with its third book entitled “Of Words,” Horne Tooke, Rousseau, and Herder developed theories about the origins and histories of languages. Friedrich August Wolf inaugurated modern philological study by approaching classical antiquity through historicist methods of textual editing and verification, and Orientalist scholars such as William Jones and Friedrich Schlegel expanded the study of languages and textual traditions to include those of Persia and India, with such an enterprise entangled, in varying ways, with the apparatus of European colonialism. Breakthroughs in hermeneutics (the branch of knowledge dealing with interpretation) and translation theory by Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher, among others, took place in the context of the historicist and relativist turn in the approach to language and languages. William Wordsworth’s aim to write poetry “in the real language of men” and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s caution that language may die for “the nobler purposes of human intercourse,” should no new poets create associations afresh, likewise evince a critical relationship to language.

Chapter 1 explores young women’s experiences growing up in their fathers’ households to situate this group in a broader understanding of social reproduction in urban Nigeria. At the heart of the chapter lies young women’s recognition that they must live up to their parents’ expectations of becoming eligible ‘wife material’ but that this process is complicated by their desires to conform to particular cosmopolitan identities as well as by interferences coming from ‘the village’. The chapter details young women’s childhood memories and the domestic challenges faced by the ‘girl child’ in urban Nigeria, before moving on to describe the various strategies young women have for managing their reputations as they seek to have fun in the city and look towards a future shaped by marital responsibility. Illuminating how social reproduction in Calabar is governed by the tensions of visibility and invisibility, the chapter highlights how it is not only the boundaries of feminine respectability that start at home but also the ways in which feminine identities can be shaped by uncertainty.

This chapter explores the history of “total war” in the Republic of China, from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. Despite not taking part directly in the First World War, Chinese officers, strategists, and political leaders exhibited considerable interest in the notion of “total war” that became popular in its wake. With the full-blown Japanese invasion of 1937, the transnational circulation of strategic ideas gave way to practical concerns about general mobilization for a conflict of unprecedented dimensions and stakes. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime survived the Second World War only to be destroyed by its Chinese Communist opponent, but it continued tapping pre-war ideas and wartime experiences of total war/mobilization to make sense of civil war – and defeat.

This chapter summarizes the debate on literary climate realism before arguing that existing ecocritical research on scalar mismatches should be complemented by a sustained reflection on political realism and climate activism. That such a shift can be productive is illustrated via a two-part analysis of Rachel Kushner’s novel Creation Lake, an example of Polemocene or planetary protest fiction. As the chapter details, Kushner’s text exhibits typical features of climate fiction yet it also mixes features of multiple realist subgenres to stress the impact of extractivist practices on rural and underground settings. It is a peculiar activist novel too, seeing that it does not celebrate communal protest but foregrounds an apparently cynical narrator tasked with undermining an insurgent group. Yet the story of this anti-environmental spy performs valuable cultural work, as it hints at unexpected alliances, trains readers to mistrust seductive storytellers, and to resist interpreting individual characters as generalizable models of behavior. Climate scholars should not dismiss realist fiction too quickly, this chapter shows, nor should we overlook the urgent question of political realism.

This chapter explores the intersections of media theory and the Anthropocene, arguing that ecological crisis and planetary transformation demand a reconceptualization of mediation itself. While the Anthropocene initially emerged as a broad umbrella term for overlapping ecological crises, its enduring relevance lies in collapsing the distinction between nature and culture, positioning media as both representational and performative agents within planetary history. Three theoretical positions are examined: intermedial ecocriticism, which analyzes diverse media products as vehicles for communicating ecological crisis; ecomedia studies, which foregrounds the material and ecological footprints of media infrastructures within political and decolonial frameworks; and environing media, which reconceives media as active agents that shape environments through governance, perception, and technological intervention. Together, these approaches provide complementary analytical, material, and philosophical perspectives on media’s role in the Anthropocene. The chapter’s case study is Amalie Smith’s Thread Ripper (2020/2022), a hybrid literary-artistic work that exemplifies how media hybridity, algorithmic voices, and historical narratives of weaving and computing illuminate Anthropocene conditions. By situating Thread Ripper within these three frameworks, the chapter demonstrates how Anthropocene media theories can enrich our understanding of representation, ecological imprint, and the entangled agency of media in shaping human-environment relations.