Ambat Vijayakumar, an author of this book, writes:

The International Conference on Recent Trends in Graph Theory and Combinatorics (ICRTGC) was held in Cochin, India. It was organized by the Cochin University of Science and Technology, India, during 7–10 June 2010, as a satellite conference of the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) 2010 held in Hyderabad, India. The conference logo (Fig. 1.1) was the renowned ‘Shrikhande Graph’. I had only a vague memory of having met S. S. Shrikhande in a conference held at the University of Mumbai and I had never heard about his contributions to combinatorial designs, association schemes, and the Shrikhande Graph itself before 2010. Although I do not wish to find excuses for my ignorance, it is surprising that the Shrikhande Graph came to my mind.

Do other people limit or even threaten our freedom and our projects, or are they necessary to their realisation? Do we only answer to ourselves for our actions, or are we accountable to other people as well, and if so, to whom? Do we have a responsibility for the welfare of other people? These questions, which Beauvoir addressed in the works she wrote from the Second World War onwards, have lost none of their relevance. Chapter 3 explores them by analysing many of her works, including The Ethics of Ambiguity, Pyrrhus and Cineas, America Day by Day, and her novels The Blood of Others and The Mandarins, which focus on social responsibility, communal action, and groups. Her anti-individualistic concept of freedom, focussed on projects and solidarity, is contrasted with the so-called negative concept of freedom and versions of the liberal concept of freedom. Beauvoir’s concepts of freedom, solidarity, and responsibility are proposed as tools to reflect on current issues, including some uses of social media, assisted suicide, the environment, and what should be done about historical wrongs such as slavery.

We saw earlier that the Shrikhande graph is a strongly regular graph, with parameters (16,6,2,2). In Chapter 3, we saw that this implies that the adjacency matrix A satisfies the two equations

AJ = 6J, A2 = 4I + 2J,

where I and J are the identity and all-1 matrices of order 16.

The first equation shows that the all-1 vector j is an eigenvector of A with eigenvalue 6. From the theory of real symmetric matrices we know that any other eigenvector v is orthogonal to j, and hence if the corresponding eigenvalue is θ.

This chapter considers sacred space and the battles surrounding its possession, uses and understandings of the sacred more generally, including the wider significance of the landscape itself as a sacred space. Irish Catholic approaches were nuanced, such as the distinctions drawn between newly-built Protestant churches and older buildings that could be ‘re-catholicised’. The numerous rites and practices that this entailed are explored, showing that while notions of the holy and control of space were important to Irish Catholics, there was, nonetheless, great variety in how that was expressed. Spaces such as churches and churchyards are also examined as locations where both sacrality and ethnic tensions overlapped, with disputes surrounding burial showcasing Irish Catholic hostility to Protestants and Protestantism as heresy but also as foreign bodies contaminating Irish soil. The politics of church possession is another theme, which is shown to have explosive potential for intra-confessional conflict, as Irish Catholics debated and fought over the control of churches as a central demand of their cause, leading to conflict among themselves.

Perhaps Mboya’s most famous initiative was the so-called ‘Airlift’, a programme that provided travel assistance to hundreds of Kenyans to enable them to take up scholarship opportunities in North America. Remembered now for its alumni, the airlift was a major part of Mboya’s efforts to get returns from his international networks, both in terms of the political capital he accrued as a result of the massive popularity of the programme and the opportunities it provided to Kenyans. Education was a particularly powerful issue within the politics of decolonising Kenya. The limited educational opportunities provided by British colonial rulers to Kenya’s African subjects meant there was enormous demand and need for any opportunity to travel overseas to acquire a university education. However, the programme was also highly political. The chapter considers the role played by members of Mboya’s American network and how their participation was shaped by Cold War priorities. It also examines the personal experience of the students, with a particular emphasis on the financial hardships many faced as a consequence of the way the programme was deliberately structured.

This chapter presents a qualitative case study that explores the emotional experiences of a group of non-higher-education-based (NHEB) teacher educators, who are called Jiaoyanyuan (Teaching Research officers) within the Chinese context. Attention was paid to the critical emotional incidents they encountered, along with their reflections on such experiences as language teacher educators. The study sheds light on the multiple dimensions of their emotional experiences, which are mediated by various individual (e.g., personal beliefs, values, and past teaching experiences) and contextual factors (e.g., existing systems and ongoing educational reform). The findings further revealed that the participants employed a variety of emotional regulation strategies, often blending them to regulate both their own emotions and those of language teachers in difficult situations. The study offers useful implications for language teacher educators to examine the complexities of their emotions and explore potential regulation strategies to enhance their emotional well-being and improve their effectiveness in educating teachers.

It is not much of a hyperbole to consider today how much the lived experience of people within and beyond Britain and Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries consisted of not simply Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Revolution, but also his Ages of Capital and Empire. Romanticism as a period and as a literary impulse or collation of ideas is riven by assertions for radical emancipation as well as the witnessing of the predations of empire and dislocations of an ever-growing tangle of expropriating capitalist networks. It is an event and body of affect where the historical vertigo of the American, Haitian, and French Revolutions coexist together, along with the traumas of saltwater slavery and Western imperialism, as well as the antagonisms of empire as a collective but also heterogeneous historical force. In Romanticism, we find the emergence of modernity’s political vocabulary, in all its aspirations and contradictions, for both individual identity and larger national, and nationalist, formations. Both necessarily tied to but also distinct from questions of the historical and temporal, the reading of the political is perhaps where Romanticism and world literature have most recognizably met in interdisciplinary encounter, and where they continue to meet.

Work on racial capitalism and the wholesale financialization of the planetary commons has long sought to clarify the pathological nature of such acts of imperial expansion as land enclosure, expropriation, and the reification of life into the commodity form; so too, the degree to which these acts of state terror, which have insured the continued production of new commodity frontiers in the service of resource extraction, are bolstered by developmentalist narratives that sublimate genocidal campaigns of dispossession in service to the enabling myth of limitless plenitude on a finite planet. Antagonizing such fictions, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man and Helena María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus bring to life the otherwise “brute matter” of Chamoiseau’s plantation and Viramontes’ poisoned orchards. As argued in this chapter, both novels also demonstrate the affordances of disruptive temporal forms for interrupting the smooth contours of commodity chains in which enslaved persons are rendered – politically and materially speaking – as themselves commodities. Slave Old Man and Under the Feet of Jesus are anti-extractivist works that center critiques of racial and fossil capital, while also antagonizing the forward march of global capitalist production, which has long relied on the invisibility and disposability of the planetary poor.

This chapter explores the paradoxical relationships among literature, extinction, and the Anthropocene. Literature functions as a counter-extinction technology, preserving human memory and meaning against the natural flow of dissolution through archives, books, and digital media. Yet, this same impulse to store time and sustain humanity has contributed to the Anthropocene and the sixth mass extinction by reinforcing possessive individualism and extractive logics. From Milton and Wordsworth to contemporary works by N.K. Jemisin and Kim Scott, literature oscillates between imagining futures beyond catastrophe and perpetuating colonial, capitalist, and anthropocentric norms. The book form epitomizes this dialectic: a fragile material object that claims timelessness while enacting erasure and violence. Modern genres such as the novel have historically naturalized property, mastery, and world-making fantasies, while post-apocalyptic and speculative narratives interrogate these legacies, proposing counter-archives and distributed modes of memory. Ultimately, literature emerges as a pharmakon – both cure and poison – shaping humanity’s self-conception while accelerating ecological and cultural extinction. The chapter argues for a reflexive understanding of literature as a technology of time that both sustains and imperils life, opening possibilities for modes of existence beyond the book and the privatized human.

This chapter discusses Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital, which focuses on domesticity and labor aboard a space station during a twenty-four-hour period of circling the earth. It argues that Harvey builds the novel through a focus on four intertwined forms of labor: natural science experiments, space station maintenance, interpersonal talismanic-memorial labor, and the aesthetic-affective-emotional labor of metabolizing human-planet relationality. To focus on this last form of labor, the chapter examines Harvey’s use of myriad formal strategies that call attention to themselves as mediating technologies for encountering the earth’s surface. Furthermore, it highlights the novel’s primary socioecological affects: awe, anxiety, disgust, love, nostalgia, and precarity. To situate the assessment of how Harvey produces planet-scale affect, the chapter considers the overlap and divergence of the concepts planet, planetary, and planetarity. Ultimately, it argues that Harvey productively pressures the more conventional and anthropocentric concerns in the novel with her forceful centering of the earth as an object worthy of non-anthropocentric attention.

After elaborating in detail the cremation of Percy Bysshe Shelley, which results in the emblematic retrieval of the poet’s unburnt heart, Edward Trelawny concludes his account by noting how he “followed the practice of the Hindoos in using a funeral pyre,”1 something he presumably learned during his travels in India. One of the central narratives in English High Romanticism, one that preserves for later generations literally and figuratively the heart of one of its major poets, is thus enabled by, indebted to, a non-Western, non-European cultural practice that speaks to a realm of action, thought, words, and images that has become one of the most promising horizons shaping what now goes by the disciplinary name of world literature.