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What is it to belong to, and yet be in distinction from, a broader environment? Recurring to earlier discussion of Mingei, this chapter discusses the aesthetics of form in relation to individuals and organizations, using examples of Gestalt theory (Kurt Goldstein), architecture (Peter Zumthor) and poetry (Rilke (via Rodin)), as well as craft workers Mary Watts, Gary Fabian MIller and Gertude Jeykll. It culminates in a study of Ethel Mairet’s weaving workshop The Gospels, and her sustained and arguably utterly original attempt to blend the biotechnic thinking of urban planners like Geddes and Mumford, the aesthetic sensitivity and skill of weaving and an enduring and vibrant small business venture.
This chapter highlights the relationship between celebrity, sexual identity, and a star’s “authenticity” in gay celebrity autobiography. Authenticity is achieved in celebrity autobiographies when the reader perceives they are receiving personal information about a star or, ideally, that the star is participating in this revelation of private details. For gay celebrities, this personal information includes a recounting of the star’s coming out as gay. Coming out is performative and personal; it establishes intimacy with the reader and adheres to expectations for a celebrity’s media-mediated “revelation.” The coming-out story establishes the gay celebrity as vulnerable and relatable to gay readers and allows heterosexual readers to connect to gay subject matter through the revelatory nature of confession. The autobiographical form gives the celebrity control over the coming-out story as he “outs” himself, earmarking the “revelation” as the star “being himself” for his readers, giving them an exclusive that exists outside of the hollow construct of fame. Gay celebrity autobiography represents an inclusive visibility for both the writer and the reader even as the confessional space of the autobiography itself may also be an illusion in which truth and authenticity are queered through the form of the autobiography itself.
In this chapter, the concept, necessity, call to action, and process of decolonial and anti-oppressive clinical supervision is discussed. Functions of Clinical supervision are innovated and updated. Practice strategies and implementation are offered for all levels and experience of clinical supervisions. By design subsequent chapters will overlap, deep dive, and offer multiple practice views of several concepts offered in this chapter.
Revival processes appear central to folk musics across different cultural and national traditions. Consequently, this chapter argues that, rather than perceiving revival as the exception, processes of revival and change should thus be perceived as a central feature of tradition. As is outlined here, revival needs to be approached from a much broader perspective. Falling back on case studies from England, Latvia, and Germany, this chapter further analyzes how acts of revival are entangled with themes of authenticity and nostalgia. Utilizing different claims of authenticity as elaborated by Denis Dutton, these waves of revivalism might be described as a defensive mechanism against eras of accelerated global change. Following scholars such as Svetlana Boym and Ross Cole, folk revivalism can thus be understood as an act of imaginative investment in the past and future, a nexus where nostalgia and utopia – as a counterpoint or solution to this sentiment of loss – meet.
This chapter argues that, in order to understand the association between protest song and the modern musical genre known as folk music, we need to contextualize it within a longue durée of protest song and popular politics. It does this by tracing the history of Anglophone and Germanic protest song from the later sixteenth century up to Bob Dylan’s 1965 appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, taking in labourers’ songs, the ballads of seventeenth-century revolutions, the anti-democratic theories of the ancient regime, the emergence of the idealised and self-aware labouring poet in the wake of the French Revolution, and the output of Chartists, Fabians,twentieth-century working-class movements and the Critics Group. These developments are placed within two contexts: the bottom-up struggle for a political voice, and the articulation of an ideology of Volk and folk. The result is to disrupt any implicit affinity between folk as a genre and political protest, introducing instead a more heterodox and responsive understanding of the evolving links between musical style, ideology, and a popular voice.
In medical ethics, there is a well-established debate about the authority of advance directives over people living with dementia, a dispute often cast as a clash between two principles: respecting autonomy and beneficence toward patients. This chapter, in highlighting underexplored issues of power and social status, argues that there need be only one principle in substitute decision-making: determining authenticity. This principle favours a substituted judgment standard in all cases and instructs decision-makers to determine what the patient would authentically prefer to happen – based not merely on the patient’s decisions but also on their present settled dispositions. Adhering to this principle entails that, in a significant range of cases, an advance directive can (and indeed ought to) be overruled.
This article offers new insights on Africa-China relations and discourses of authenticity and intellectual property by examining the trade and consumption of Chinese-made fashion goods in Mozambique from an ethics perspective. Ethnographic fieldwork in southern Mozambique between 2017 and 2024 shows that many traders and consumers see Chinese counterfeits as beneficial and desirable, enabling them to participate in fashion systems from which they have long been excluded. For traders and consumers in Mozambique, it is ethically right to supply and purchase functional, adequate-quality, and aesthetically pleasing counterfeits. These goods are evaluated less in terms of legality than through pragmatic, everyday judgments about quality, care, and access. The Mozambican case complicates dominant narratives of Chinese-African trade and global intellectual property governance, showing how ethics of access and quality shape everyday globalization.
Authenticity has been a central concept in sociolinguistics and in the study of literary representations of dialect. This article examines the ideology of dialect authenticity in the context of literary fiction from the point of view of language users. Two Finnish reading groups comprising members with different dialect backgrounds read one Finnish novel, in which the Far Northern dialects of Finnish are represented in a partly unconventional manner. Thematic analysis was applied to two video-recorded reading group discussions to investigate how the groups discuss the novel’s dialect representation and its (in)authenticity. The analysis revealed that instead of adhering to a static and essentialist ideal of authenticity, the readers overlooked the unconventional representation of literary dialect and viewed authenticity as a dynamic process. The study contributes to theoretical discussions on dialect authenticity and employs an experimental approach to exploring language ideologies through reading groups.
This chapter tells the history of European urban heritage by evaluating its conceptual evolution, its relation to the major waves of urbanisation, and its role in shaping the historic quarters and the forms of urban governance as guiding indicators. The growing complexity of urban heritage integrates different types of expertise, social involvement and forms of governance. The urban growth of many nineteenth-century European cities led to their spread and to the replanning of their centres. Whereas many European city centres provided a privileged area for the political instrumentalisation of public remembrance, many became sites of industrial urbanisation. For the latter, deurbanisation usually accelerated after the Second World War due to the mass destruction or by faster industrialisation. From the 1970s, this tendency was reversed, with reurbanisation redefining these neighbourhoods. Although these processes do not entirely follow the same rhythm, they roughly determine four periods divided by the Second World War, the 1970s and 2000. Authenticity – as a historical reference, as a principle of heritage conservation, or as a constructive element of current identity-formations – remained the standard for safeguarding urban heritage and the conceptual bridge between the representation of the historic city and the urban realities in its place.
How we use dialogue to develop character and advance plot. Overcoming anxiety about dialogue; the dangers of avoiding dialogue. Reported speech lacks energy; dialogue enlivens a scene. Dialogue reveals character, indicates relationship and conveys information, but has to appear authentic. Strong dialogue combines multiple functions. Punctuating and attributing dialogue; adverbs qualifying tone.
How to make your story more vivid and more convincing. The purpose of research. Discriminating between useful and superfluous information: effective use of research. The usefulness of both fact and tone in eyewitness accounts. Individual facts are less important than an authentic sense of the world of the story.
This paper examines the recent rejection of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a formal geological epoch to explore how climate anxiety shapes scientific research. While there is broad agreement among scientists about climate change, political and legal action lag behind. Scientists bridge this gap by communicating their findings in ways that influence policy. This effort reflects the broader condition of ‘polycrisis’: multiple overlapping global challenges. I argue that terms like ‘Anthropocene’ and ‘polycrisis’ are not fixed truths, but strategies for taming uncertainty. Scientists, accordingly, are increasingly coming to replace legislators by encouraging certain kinds of present-day action towards more desirable futures.
Technical summary
This paper examines the Anthropocene Working Group's (AWG) effort to formalise a new geological epoch and interprets its 2024 rejection as a case study in the politics of polycrisis. Drawing on ethnographic research with the AWG, it shows how scientific observation is increasingly driven by anticipatory anxiety and a performative impulse to orient action towards uncertain futures. Through the concepts of the technofossil and procedural precedent, the article illustrates how geoscientific methods both generate and respond to normative expectations. The paper argues that polycrisis is not merely descriptive, but constitutes a second-order mode of engaging with the future, wherein political urgency animates what and how scientists observe. In the context of climate change, scientific actors are not only producing knowledge but also seeking to shape policy and social response by innovating within disciplinary protocols. Terms like ‘Anthropocene’ and ‘polycrisis’ are powerful abstractions whose utility lies in their imaginative capacity to narrate contingency and complexity, and imagine solutions by orienting action in the present towards desirable outcomes in the future, rather than in any fixed claim to objectivity.
Social media summary
Anxiety about the future is reshaping science, law, and the way we understand today's overlapping global crises.
This chapter analyzes Stages on Life’s Way as an extended thought experiment. Though it has some similarities with a literary work of art and is sometimes called a novel, I distinguish extended thought experiment narratives like Stages from literary novels. I will show how Stages, like Repetition, embodies and develops Ørsted’s core elements of variation, active constitution, and the pursuit of genuine thought. I will also contrast Stages as a “psychological experiment” with the field of empirical psychology emerging in the 1800s. Against increasing interest in empirical observation, Kierkegaard’s thought experiments direct attention to what is not outwardly observable.
This chapter explains why cognition (Erkenntnis) is its own kind of cognitive good, apart from questions of justification. I argue against reducing the work of thought experiments to their epistemological results, such as their potential to provide prima facie justification. As an apparatus for cognition, a thought experiment enacts the three core elements of Ørsted’s Kantian account: (1) it is a tool for variation; (2) it proceeds from concepts, and (3) its goal is the genuine activation or reactivation of mental processes. Cognition has two components: givenness and thought. I will show in this chapter how givenness and thought are both achieved through thought experiments.
Publicity created a central position for the politician in a transnational communicative space. The politician played a ‘personal’ role as a public persona. Competition forced commercial newspapers to focus on entertainment, which hurt political coverage but benefitted individual politicians. Particularly politicians with eccentric physiques and props profited from human interest journalism. Politicians’ ‘complex’ personalities, moreover, provided food for psychological analyses. Possibilities to visualize politicians and their private lives – literally in photographs; figuratively in character sketches – completed this personal appeal. Mass media favoured political personalities over abstract institutions. Newspapers projected family values onto politicians that enabled bourgeois readers to identify with them. This focus on politicians and their private lives made them ‘celebrities’. In celebrity reporting, monarchs enjoyed an advantage: they were famous by descent, provided entertaining pomp, and stood above partisanship. Yet journalists described charismatic career politicians, greeted by excited crowds on political journeys, in royal terms as well. These celebrities functioned as ‘brands’. A brand name buttressed a politician’s position but could also be exploited commercially. The media focus on the personal shaped expectations for politicians to become mediagenic and ‘special’ – to make the private public. The celebrity culture surrounding a brand-name politician finally underpinned the imagined community and widened the scope of politics.
By allocating their attention to pieces of content, algorithmic filtering shapes the daily behavior of billions of users when they interact with a digital platform. Beyond conditioning what we do, can recommendation algorithms influence who we are? This article suggests that they do. Specifically, I contend that recommender systems affect users’ capacity to be their authentic selves in both positive and negative ways. I start by offering an account of authenticity that builds on two central concepts: volitional alignment and self-understanding. I then explain how algorithmic filtering works and impacts authenticity. While recommender systems frustrate users’ second-order desires by relying on uninformative behavioral signals, they also facilitate self-understanding by inciting users to question their identity. I end by discussing how controllable and explainable recommenders would best enable users to be authentic.
In chapter four, Sean Williams illustrates the creative potential of music and dance for the development of revivalism up to the present day. During the early years of the Revival, beginning in the 1890s, Irish dance and music were governed by strict ideas about form and performance promulgated by such groups as the Gaelic League. Music and dance, in different ways, underscore the difficulties of remaining connected to traditional standards while allowing the introduction of modern or non-Irish elements in singing style, dance steps, and instrumentation. At each stage of the development of cultural revivalism, cultural authenticity is vitally important. Despite apparent ruptures in the traditions of music and dance, both have flourished on a world stage with their “Irishness” intact. Because of the inclusion of non-Irish dance and vocal styles, a contemporary spectacle such as Riverdance, while quite different from traditional forms of dance, remain connected to broader revivalist concerns.
In her chapter, Elizabeth Crooke examines the work of nineteenth-century antiquarian scholar George Petrie and the poet and archivist Samuel Ferguson, who were vital to the formation of a modern revivalist movement. The accumulation of knowledge about the Irish past is a condition of freedom, for it stands as a bulwark against false and degrading historical representations and frees Irish institutions to use the recovery of cultural artifacts to support the process of national Bildung. Museums connect the past, through present cultural activity, to the realization of Ireland’s national future. This connection motivates the early designers of museums and other cultural institutions charged with preserving cultural artifacts to regard authenticity as a quality of cultural objects, an aura that transcends historical conditions. During the Decade of Centenaries (2012–2022), Petrie and Ferguson became themselves a part of Ireland’s future in the form of commemorations, the visible signs of institutional memory.
Giulia Bruna, in her chapter, offers a comparative framework for discussing the different strategies of J. M. Synge and Emily Lawless for achieving an authentic representation of the otherworldly geography of the Aran Islands, which was so much a part of the folklore of the region. Synge’s The Aran Islands, often treated as a spiritual autobiography, offers a way of reading the West of Ireland that complicates our understanding of authentic Irishness. While he derives a sense of authenticity through largely documentary and ethnographic rather than fictional means, Lawless, in Grania, captures an authentic sense of rural Ireland through the formal arrangements of the novel. Bruna is concerned with identifying, in Synge’s and Lawless’s work, modes of plural and dialogic authenticity that recognizes the “parasitic” relation of culture to nature. Bruna concludes that their versions of authenticity, though different in methodology, serve the same revivalist purpose of shaping Irish cultures for future generations.
Bringing one’s authentic self to work is important to employees’ psychological well-being and performance. Although literature has examined how organizational factors influence authentic self-expression, it has largely overlooked the role of leaders. Drawing from leadership research, this study investigates the impact of perceived leader concern on authentic self-expression and its downstream effects on job attitudes. Findings provide empirical support for our predictions. Specifically, perceived leader concern is positively associated with authentic self-expression, which in turn relates positively to perceived self-concept-job fit. Regarding downstream outcomes, self-concept-job fit is positively related to organizational commitment and negatively to turnover intentions. Serial mediation analyses show that leader concern indirectly affects commitment and turnover intentions through authentic self-expression and self-concept-job fit. These findings highlight that leaders who show genuine concern foster open communication and authentic self-expression, enhancing alignment between identity and work, thereby strengthening commitment and reducing turnover. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.