For several decades historians of science have interrogated the relationship between empire and science, largely focusing on European imperial powers. At the same time, scholars have sought alternatives to an early diffusionist model of the spread of modern science, seeking to capture the multi-directional and dialogic development of science and its institutions in most parts of the globe. The papers in this special issue illuminate these questions with added attention to particular claims about the exceptionalism – or not – of Islamic societies’ approach to science, modernity and politics. Each contribution centres individuals and groups who engaged with science theoretically or practically, taking seriously their analytical categories and how they understood and grappled with the social, economic and intellectual transformations happening around them. Collectively, these studies make the case for Middle Eastern and Ottoman history as useful sites for furthering our field's understanding of processes of the globalization of science and how authority, politics and science have been and continue to be interconnected.

The need to engage students in thinking about the politics of law, especially in a time of escalating climate and other crises, is increasingly urgent. In this paper, we discuss a series of place-based teaching strategies designed to foster critical legal thinking, but also hope and a sense of agency. Inspired by a range of scholars – Bruno Latour, Doreen Massey, Henry Giroux and J.K. Gibson-Graham – we use context in an effort to cultivate what Giroux calls ‘educated hope’. Our starting point is what the law does (and also what law does not do and what it could do), not what the law is. Instead of taking a field of law and then using examples to illustrate how it works in context, we discuss three courses that start with the context of a particular place. Our courses cover a range of laws that work together to shape that place, spanning multiple fields, and emphasise their peopled and place-based specificity. After discussing teaching and assessment strategies that we have found productive, we reflect on implications beyond our courses, and the potential for broader place-based legal pedagogies.

Traditional approaches to teaching EU law can seem almost deliberately alienating; there is a lot of incomprehensible stodge that students are told they ‘just have to get through’ before they can really begin. So courses start with memorising technical terminology, institutional facts and then some principles that, without context, can just seem like more jargon. By the time they move on to case-law and legislation, the idea that these things are useful domestic tools has long since vanished. Instead, a contextual approach mitigates a trio of risks that have beset traditional EU law teaching – the risks of excessive positivism, excessive abstraction and excessive black-letter lawyering. Context requires critical engagement with, rather than simple absorption of, law; it makes the law accessible and applicable; and it involves socio-legal and interdisciplinary methods and materials. It is, of course, risky in different ways – but we should have a greater appetite for risks related not to cognitive stagnation, but to intellectual challenge.

In this paper, we begin reflecting on how ‘futures literacy’ – recently championed by UNESCO as a vital skill that allows people to better understand the role of the future in what they see and do – might be developed in environmental law pedagogy. Law and legal analysis tend to be absent from futures scholarship and we discuss various ways of engaging with environmental law as an important but underexplored site and means of future-making. We consider our shared teaching of an undergraduate module in which students examine historical legislation for what it says about past ideas of the environment's future and the action within the law necessary to safeguard it; and contemporary texts, including science fiction and poetry, imagining a future for the environment on and through which law operates. Futures literacy, we argue, is at its richest when ‘historical futures’ and ‘future futures’ are read together, or alongside one another.

This article relies on reports written by Swiss diplomats during the Cultural Revolution in Beijing to discuss how they experienced the Cultural Revolution, and how the violence and chaos that they witnessed in 1966 and 1967 affected their mental health. Switzerland's importance as a hub for China in Western Europe meant that the Swiss diplomats were not harmed by the Red Guards. As a result, the Swiss diplomats gained a unique perspective among Beijing's foreign diplomats, observing and documenting the Cultural Revolution in fascinating detail in their reports to Bern. However, while they were protected from outright violence, they struggled with the helplessness they felt in the face of Red Guard brutality, being forced to witness the suffering of their colleagues and employees, traumatizing some of them to such an extent that they had to leave Beijing.

Legal theory must not merely describe our world; it must also assist us acting in it. In this paper, I argue that teaching legal theory should show law students how to do things with legal theory. My pedagogical approach is contextual and historical. Students learn how to use theory by seeing how past jurists acted in their particular worlds by changing dominant concepts of law. Most introductory legal theory courses are organised by what I will call the usual story of jurisprudence. In this story, great thinkers in rival schools of legal thought attempt to answer perennial questions about the nature of (the concept of) law. In this story, the thick context of our world recedes beyond the horizon of theory. I argue that critical genealogy can let us critique this usual story and its unspoken assumptions of morality, politics and history. Amia Srinivasan's account of ‘worldmaking’ is especially compelling in its emphasis on critical genealogies’ capacity to transform our representational practices (and thus open up new possibilities for action). Critical genealogy also has certain pedagogical ‘uses and advantages’ for teaching legal theory in law schools. Here, context is method. The teacher must defend their political choices of context – choices that are naturalised and so beyond critique in the usual story of jurisprudence. By making these choices explicit, students are invited to both challenge the teacher's choices of context and critique their own common law education. This pedagogical approach also encourages students to experiment in ‘worldmaking’ themselves, and so cultivate a creative capacity to use legal theory to change the world through transforming their representations of it.

This essay takes up the question of what it is to teach international law ‘in context’, drawing on experiences of teaching undergraduate survey courses in the US and UK, and designing a new LLM module on Histories of International Law. The essay begins with an exploration of teaching as a particular context of its own – one with constraints which might also function as foils for creativity. It then sketches some aspects of what teaching international law ‘in context(s)’ might involve, including the ways in which contexts of different kinds put in question one's theory of law, and vice versa. It turns, finally, to an examination of the promise and limits of interdisciplinarity – particularly recourse to history as a discipline – in illuminating contexts.

Across scholarship and legal practice, family law is widely recognised as a subject that is inextricable from the social and cultural forces that shape our understanding of how families work and how they are positioned within society. This paper argues that it is now time to build upon this by integrating an explicit awareness of political context into how we teach family law. This is because teachers of family law are now faced with an urgent challenge: the encroachment of neoliberal governance into all corners of family justice. Neoliberal ideas are far from new, but they are increasingly shaping dominant ideas about what family law is for, who should be entitled to use it and, even in some circumstances, questioning the very legitimacy of family law or legal processes as means for supporting families experiencing breakdown. In response to this challenge, this paper advocates the importance of guiding students to look beyond family law doctrine in order to consider how political initiatives, trends and debates have the power to shape the procedures and processes through which family disputes are resolved. It will argue that drawing this contextual awareness into family law studies is crucially important to ensure that the future development of family law as both a scholarly discipline and an area of practice is centred on the needs and lived experiences of families who need it.

The following article reports on a multimodal corpus study of English as if constructions. The results of this study suggest that formulaic and insubordinate as if constructions are prosodically chunked as clauses, with formulaic as if constructions uttered with significantly higher pitch and insubordinate as if constructions with lower pitch when being compared with subordinate uses. In addition, insubordinate as if clauses are occasionally accompanied by frowns. It is argued that, although both constructions convey an ironic interpretation, multimodal markers of irony play only a minor role in explaining the findings. Instead, it is argued that the non-verbal features are construction-specific and can reasonably be explained as cross-modal collostructions. As such, the present article provides a description of the non-verbal features accompanying English as if clauses and provides a theoretical explanation. In doing so, some modest evidence for a multimodal Utterance Construction Grammar is also presented.

The Rights of Nature concept not only breaks with the anthropocentrism of existing (environmental) law; it also recognizes that nature has private interests, in addition to being of public interest. That is, whereas in classic sustainability thinking, the use of certain resources is allowed as long as public interests are not systematically/systemically harmed, rights of nature facilitate the protection of nature before planetary boundaries are transgressed. This recognition of nature as having private interests enables the framing of disagreements around ‘nature’ as matters of corrective justice, which renders the application of private legal doctrines more easily conceivable and arguably even necessary.

The contributions to this Symposium Collection showcase the viability of the intersection of private law and rights of nature. Firstly, it is necessary to research how existing private law will influence the effectiveness of rights of nature. Such an exercise is undertaken by Björn Hoops, who carefully assesses what rights for the German Black Forest would mean in terms of German constitutional property law. The mirror image of this approach is to explore what impact Rights of Nature will have on private law. Such an approach is taken by Alex Putzer and co-authors in their article on the transformation of land-ownership regimes after the introduction of Rights of Nature in Ecuador and Uganda. A third line of scholarship assesses the significance of Rights of Nature for private law theory: Visa Kurki proposes a new concept of legal personhood, prompting us to think through the meaning of statements like ‘a river is a legal person’.

The Rights of Nature movement has recently achieved significant successes in using legal personhood as a tool for environmental protection. Perhaps most famously, the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand was accorded legal personhood in 2017. These kinds of development have attracted plenty of scholarly interest, but few have scrutinized a foundational underlying question: Can natural areas, such as rivers, or other non-sentient natural entities actually be legal persons?

The case of the Whanganui River is an example of the direct legal personhood model: it purports to grant legal rights to the river directly. Some other jurisdictions have set up legal persons to administer rivers, without declaring the rivers themselves to be legal persons: the indirect legal personhood model. This article offers legal-philosophical arguments for why legal personhood cannot be attributed to rivers directly.

Normally, legal persons can hold claim-rights and be legally wronged. Some legal persons, such as human adults, can also be held legally responsible and exercise legal competences by entering into contracts. Natural entities cannot do any of these things. Hence, they cannot be legal persons directly; rather, their putative direct legal personhood will collapse into indirect legal personhood. Hence, treating natural entities as direct legal persons amounts only to a legal fiction. Such fictions may be justified for symbolic reasons. However, if environmental protection requires setting up a legal person to protect a natural entity, such protection in most cases can be realized without claiming that the natural entity itself would have become a legal person.

Contemporary cinema and media studies are marked by a materialist turn that highlights material elements, such as objects, non-human agencies, the environment and places on and off screen, as well as the materiality of media productions and consumption. This article expands on the important scholarship of “materialist” media studies as well as existing ecocinema scholarship by stressing the materiality of digital landscapes in contemporary Chinese fantasy (or qihuan and xuanhuan) film and television works that have gained significant popularity in China and Hong Kong. Specifically, this article examines the animist landscape in film and television adaptions of Eternal Love, a fantasy romance television serial that loosely draws on Daoist mythology. Focusing on the material aspects of digital landscapes of Chinese fantasy cinema, the article develops the notion of the “cinema–ecology complex” to address the materiality of digital landscapes, the cinematic footprint of digitally enhanced landscapes through location shooting and the consumption of landscapes as scenic spots, including daka practices, in film studio cities and related film-induced tourism. Ultimately, this article calls for a textual–infrastructural approach in cinema and media studies, which tends to reorient to the infrastructural aspects of media production, distribution and consumption.