Shannon Mattern argues that cities are not just sites of information access (and production) but a medium themselves. She writes, ‘our physical land¬scapes inscribe, transmit, and even embody information – about their histo¬ries, their state of repair, their potential uses, and so forth’ (2017: xii). In this vein, insurgent play inscribes new uses, unintended uses, covert uses. In this concluding chapter, I want to close with an account of the zenith of insurgent play, the spaces underneath flyovers. Flyovers are cast, and demanded, as a solution to density. Whether coveted or reviled, all flyovers have an under¬side. The underside of flyovers provides obscured patches for insurgent play. Concrete pillars, angled drains, supporting walls can all be utilised to make insurgent play space, along with fabricated ramps, bumps and pilfered street objects. The meshwork of built forms, waste, plants, animals and weather shape and reshape the underside of flyovers in ways unlike more visible spaces because the underside is the afterthought of elevated vehicular mobility. The underside is also the dark side, a space for the nefarious, the antisocial, the outcast. Rarely are these leftover spaces explored as play space. Yet globally, the best place to find insurgent play space is under a flyover. Seriously. Go and see.

I propose the spaces created under flyovers as an alternative to the open public space coveted in SDG 11, discussed in Chapter 1. The underside of flyovers is the insurgent parkland, the insurgent pitch or court, the insurgent playground. In some cities, the underside of flyovers is turned into open pub¬lic space for free use and/or designated use. However, in much of the world, the underside of flyovers is leftover space. Leftover space is used to build shel¬ter, to peddle goods, to dump waste, to park vehicles and to play. Given the ubiquity of the flyover as global urban form, undersides have the potential to be universal insurgent play spaces especially when fabricated using DIY techniques described in Chapter 3.

Despite the specious claims of opponents, New Women embraced mother¬hood, as evident in the poems in this chapter. Yet total absorption in mother¬hood, rather than pursuing other interests as well, concerned New Women seeking additional fulfillment. The poems herein, however, direct their focus to the joys of motherhood in the first section, followed by the deep pain wrought by the poverty that precludes proper care and, even more horrific, the death of a child. Many of the verses were written by Katharine Tynan, covering both the happiness and the heartache attendant upon motherhood.

The chapter leads with two selections by Tynan. In “Talisman,” the child's presence brings a heavenly bliss so powerful that the mother fears no harm shall come to her as she holds her child. “Baby's Song” compares the infant's utterances as matching the beauties of a blackbird's own song. Annie Matheson's “To a Little Child” likens the love projected to a religious expe¬rience for the doting mother. E. Nesbit's “Baby Song” is composed of two parts, with the first occurring while the infant sleeps under the guardianship of angels, and in the second segment the baby awakens to nature's beauty and a mother's love. Mathilde Blind speaks in “Motherhood” of the pain of the birthing process, but it is followed by the mother's unbridled love. In “A Child's Fancy,” Blind presents a child's view of nature as the mother encour¬ages him. Next come five poems from Augusta Webster's Mother and Daughter, an unfinished sonnet sequence. In “IV,” the child happily plays outdoors and calls for her mother to appreciate the budding flowers. The mother in “VI” admits that the child can be trying with her actions, but soon forgives the daughter that she holds so dear. The aging mother in “XVI” content¬edly realizes that her child's happiness is keeping her young.

The poems in this chapter castigate aspects of organized religion and its adherents. Christianity and the Bible consistently treated women as inferior, which served to justify their marginalization. New Women challenged male-governed ecclesiastical authority in their poetry and pointed to the problems with organized religion. In the chapter's opening section, the church and flawed “faithful” receive harsh criticism for corruption, apathy, hypocrisy, and selfishness. The next section explores agnosticism as articulated in mul-tiple ways by its adherents, both definitively and regretfully. The third group of verses raises questions that hold no answers for their speakers. The final section presents unconventional approaches to religion that offer alternative approaches to spirituality.

In the first group of poems, May Kendall's “Church Echoes” expresses dis¬dain for privileged churchgoers who lack sincerity in their faith as well as com¬passion for impoverished faithful also in attendance. Her “Otherworldliness” derides individuals preoccupied with their own souls while neglecting to help others in need. Mary E. Coleridge emphasizes in “Our Lady” that God chose a commoner as Christ's mother rather than a wealthy woman. “In and Out of Church” by L. S. Bevington condemns the clergy for its preoccupation with riches and its predatory behavior toward the poor.

Starting the second section, Mathilde Blind reveals the speaker's regret in “The Agnostic” that in good times gratitude toward God cannot be voiced. “The Agnostic's Psalm” by Constance Naden suggests that spiritual forces nevertheless course through a doubter's being. A nonbeliever in E. Nesbit's “Cul-De-Sac” regrets that death will bring no understanding because of the conviction that an afterlife does not exist. The speaker in Coleridge's “Doubt” laments the lack of a disbeliever's bond with God.

Not surprisingly, considering the sweeping Darwinian presence in the late nineteenth century, New Woman poets incorporated evolutionary concepts and terminology into their verses attuned to science and to gender. The poetry undermined cultural presumptions of women's inferiority through its pronounced familiarity with scientific discourse and issues. In some instances, the poets revised the script of the evolutionary process, addressing matters that broadened the scope of other writings to focus especially on alternate interpretations regarding the course of events and their ramifications. The poems included in the following pages offer insights into evolutionary pro¬gression, satirize assumptions of human superiority, and point to scientific endeavors.

The opening section, “Narratives of Evolution,” brings Mathilde Blind's masterful response to Darwinian discourse on the origins and development of life on earth. The first of three parts comprising Blind's The Ascent of Man, “Chaunts of Life” traces the evolutionary trajectory, and especially pertinent excerpts from the account are presented here. A second description of evo¬lution, A. Mary F. Robinson's “Darwinism,” identifies unrest as an evolu¬tionary stimulus. Isabella J. Southern's “Evolution” relates the process to the development of the human sense of reason.

The next group of poems, penned by May Kendall, brings a humorous element to scientific discussion. Kendall's several verses in this vein ridicule the arrogant stance that considered all nonhuman life forms as irretrievably inferior and the illusion that evolution brought unremitting progress toward perfection to humanity. In part, the humor stems from nonhuman speak¬ers pondering the topic. “Lay of the Trilobite” presents the extinct creature comparing its simple existence to human strife, bringing dismay to its human listener.

Since the pandemic spread of the virus SARS-CoV-2 or “Covid-19” globally took place in 2020, life has become increasingly online. Schools and universities had to adapt their classes to distance learning platforms; restaurants and cafes shut down and started operating through take away only; physical business quickly shifted into online stores; families and friends who would often physically meet each other, had to remotely talk though video call apps. While big tech companies like Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon recorded their highest revenue rates, many people all over the world lost their jobs and/or had to reinvent themselves working from home. In this overwhelming storm of digital gateways, social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Reels, and Snapchat escalated their levels of use and abuse, capturing even more deeply our lifetime and attention as a commodity for distraction, addiction, control and manipulation. Why is it no longer enough to be in the offline ordinariness of the here and now?

Although within the public world, individual acts of philanthropy by women were generally considered acceptable as an extension of their domestic work. New Women, however, brought forth the issue of poverty on a much broader public scale with their poetry. Poverty, among other social concerns, was an important issue to New Women seeking a more caring society, creating soli¬darity with other marginalized individuals as well. Economic perturbations at the fin de siècle created grave hardships for workers barely earning subsist¬ence wages and struggling to survive in a harsh world. Children born into poverty lived in horrific conditions in sharp contrast to children who thrived in comfort and security. In far too many cases, comparatively wealthy indi¬viduals ignored the suffering of others and concerned themselves only with their own well-being.

The plight of workers enduring difficult and inhumane conditions con¬stitutes the first section of this chapter's poems. E. Nesbit's “A Last Appeal” features the voices of laborers who make wealth for others and seek their fair share, with the threat of vengeance for inaction. A second Nesbit poem, “In Praise of Work,” relates the sad situation of workers who are accorded only a few days annually in which to gain a measure of freedom. In “A Song for Women,” Annie Matheson describes the bleak conditions of a seamstress whose work seems endless. May Kendall's “Legend of the Maid of All Work” focuses on this laborer who on a rare free day sees a much brighter world than the one she inhabits. The male speaker of Kendall's “The Sandblast Girl and the Acid Man” finds consolation in his affection for the titular female and, despite his sparse earnings, believes that he is far more fortunate than others in even worse situations. May Probyn describes a disturbing scene as a family man expires “At the Workhouse Door.”

Introduction

Although much has been written about the COVID-19 pandemic, relatively little has been devoted to reflect on this global phenomenon from a philosophical perspective. The bulk of the discussion seems to be focused on medical and virological experts say, or what political and social analysts say, tracing the causes of this virus and probing into the social and political origins and implications of the pandemic. While these discourses are no doubt important, they are by nature focused on the particulars and are unable to contemplate on the philosophical significance of the pandemic. This paper attempts to contribute to existing discussions about the pandemic from the perspective of Agamben's theory of biopolitics. The theory of biopolitics essentially argues that behind the particularities of modern bureaucratic politics is the expansion of a biopolitical paradigm which reduces human beings into “bare life.” This is a sort of governance whereby people are relocated within a zone of radical indistinction where they can be exterminated without committing murder. This is further expressed in the modern state through the concept of “state of exception.” This paper argues that Agamben's warning that biopolitics has become the dominant political paradigm of our time evidenced by government reactions such as the imposition of movement controls, mass surveillance, and even vaccine passports, which makes a farce of belief that we live in an age of liberal democratic progress. Although this paper adopts Agamben's theoretical frameworks, it also seeks to go beyond Agamben's radically pessimistic trajectories by considering prospects of a new political arrangement using Deleuze and Guattari's theory of the state.

Introduction

During a pandemic, the psychological disposition corresponding to hope proves to be one of the ways to react to the despair to which the terrible experiences of the past months have reduced human beings. In my analysis, I shall take into consideration some aspects of the Theology of Hope. My attention will be concentrated on some reflections on hope and faith expressed by Jürgen Moltmann in his work Theologie der Hoffnung. Untersuchungen zur Begründung und zu den Konsequenzen einer christlichen Eschatologie (Engl. transl.: Theology of Hope. On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology).

The Christian virtue of hope has multiple references according to Moltmann. It is hope in the individual resurrection, in the new coming of Christ, and in God's promise of a new kingdom. Creation has not been brought about once and for all. God's promise of a new kingdom is the promise of the new creation of a new dimension of the world which is completely different to the present conditions. In Moltmann's view, the Christian theological virtue of hope does not only concern the dimension of the afterlife. Christian hope is directed at a complete renewal of the world and produces a new orientation in the life of the believers. Hence, the birth of hope in the believer corresponds to a complete modification of the person: the person who has hope acquires a new orientation in life. Life is, thanks to hope, directed towards the future and the modification of the present. The believer knows through God's promise that the dimension of the present does not exhaust the whole reality because a new dimension, a new creation will come; the believer is not imprisoned in an eternal present. The promise of change entails that the conditions of the present are not an inevitable destiny. Hope in a future of change corresponding to God's promise entails the believer's will to modify the present.

This chapter opens with an assertion in the first person. I choose to open this way as this paper is a personal statement on how I see COVID-19 (henceforth Covid) impacting on educational delivery, and also on what I call the ‘pedagogical imagination’. The paper comes at a time when many lines of intellectual, cultural and personal inquiry are converging on a reading of the world, technology, education, consciousness and human action as coterminous in and across space and time. Such convergence is captured in Figure 1, and reminds us that the linear, temporal compass of modernity is exclusive, violent and totally inadequate when the world, and its viral messenger Covid, comes knocking on the doors of our luxurious but fragile mansion. This is an exciting, challenging and potentially overwhelming moment in human self-understanding. Now to the assertion.

Human beings are pattern makers. In turn, culture is the cumulative result of generations of such patterning. Patterning enables meaning which is narrative in nature and contains the logics that hold the world, any given reality, together. Understanding this helps me see our world and the role of education in it as a process of ongoing meaning making. Patterning is meaning making in this case. We can see that this patterning is linked to our agency (or lack thereof) and the way in which technology has enabled us to generate and even impose patterns that confirm our pattern biases as both collectivities and individuals. In the language of Yuval Harari these patterns sustain ‘imagined orders’ (2015). Or, if we go back some years, they are complicit in the ‘imagined communities’ of national identity that Benedict Anderson (1983) identified. Patterning is at the heart of myth, science, education, religion, cities, institutions and most certainly, our understanding of nature.

In the next two chapters, we will explore a subset of the twenty-first century revisionist Westerns that have embraced the extremities of savagery and violence, woven into the DNA of so many Westerns on screen for over a century, but which have been amplified with grim relish in the postmillennial era. This shift towards ultraviolence has of course been hugely affected by the domestic terrorism of the Oklahoma City bombing, the tragic school shootings of Columbine and Sandy Hook, and the horrors of the events of 9/11, 2001. The century began with an attack against not only the symbolic sites in New York and those who suffered and lost their lives, but also on the ideologies, myths and narratives they represented. Many artforms responded to the attacks of 9/11. This can be seen on screen in the increased violent content and tone of such seminal television shows which have been part of the shifting landscape of television generally; productions such as Breaking Bad (2008–2013), The Walking Dead franchise (2010–present) and Homeland (2011–2020) have been viewed in the light of post 9/11 American culture (Takacs, 2012).

The brutal amplification of this ‘new’ viscera in the twenty-first century is seeded in the final year of the previous century in Antonia Bird's Ravenous (1999), which is, importantly, a hybrid horror-Western which embraces Gothic and horror tropes to convey the bleakness of the trials of survival in wartime, and reconfigures established notions of bravery and nobility and the barbarous extent to which people will go to survive. It has been argued though, that cinema has a particularly apt capacity as a cultural litmus. Terrence McSweeney writes:

COVID has brought the realities of our material continuity and our unavoidable proximities to light in ways that are challenging the efficacy of traditional sociopolitical ideals of individualism and autonomy. Moreover, the stark reality that community is primarily regarded in economic rather than spiritual or ethical terms lies at the base of the problematic responses that we have seen (this is especially true from my U.S. perspective). For a post-COVID future to be anything but dystopian, the parameters of community and individuality will need to be rethought and a deeper awareness of our immanent immersive engagements fostered. There are resources both in Deleuzian philosophy and Posthumanism and New Materialist Feminisms that can be marshalled for imagining such post-COVID communities. I will argue that the new materialist view of the interconnectedness of matter (where materiality as such is understood as intra-active and entangled) is a crucially necessary shift in mindset – the obvious benefit is providing a basis and rationale for our moving beyond the rampant individualism that has evidenced itself – at least in the U.S. response. Post-COVID futures require the re-evaluation of the nature of ethical relationships, notions of subjectivity, and political imperatives in a post- COVID world. In what follows, I will address the following three issues: (1) The ‘I’ in the post-COVID era; (2) the social responsibilities of the citizens in the COVID pandemic; and (3) Post-COVID era and alternative futures.

The ‘I’, Post-COVID

If COVID has revealed anything to me, it is that we need a paradigm shift with respect to how we understand the ‘I’ (and I acknowledge that I speak from a particular location – as an American in the United States where what we have seen is an utter refusal to give up our rampant individualism, a doubling down on individual rights over the good of the community, and where there is any discussion of ‘institutions or collective goods’ decisions are being driven by neoliberal concern for economic prosperity – which is itself based in the liberal view of self-interest).

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality,” trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

It is almost five years since Arundhati Roy wrote these prophetic words (https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca) at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. We have already passed through the portal it opened and, largely speaking, we seem to have forgotten the rupture it created in our desperate desire to “stitch our future to our past,” to return to “normality.” However, the old world of normality to which we have attempted to return has returned to us only as a kind of caricature now and, on many levels, we must strain harder to believe it. On this side of the portal, the American empire has already passed through another two genocidal wars in a desperate attempt to re-establish its faded power through proxies and among the rubble its own weapons have created. Its leadership has also passed from a realm of lofty moral indifference into that of farcical Neronian caricature.