The loss of community is often seen as one of the reasons for the alienating experience of modernity. Community seems to allow for a civic-minded solidarity that counteracts the legitimation crisis of democracy by returning agency to citizens. Such a demand for a communitarian correction to liberal constitutional democracy is not without dangers, even when this demand is intended to stand in the service of a more democratic life. This chapter traces the fate of this communitarian desire in a broader transatlantic field, highlighting the uncanny connections among the philosophical debate about communitarianism, the antidemocratic and authoritarian drift in American conservative political and legal thought, and central aspects of European neofascism. These connections should make us suspicious about the democratic potential often ascribed to community. The ease with which arguments for a communitarian correction of democracy can be used against democracy suggests that community lacks an intrinsically democratic and emancipatory potential.

This chapter offers an overview of contemporary pro-oil mobilization in Canada and the United States. Through analysis of ninety-five organizations, the chapter looks at patterns in the scale, issues, and levels of transparency common among pro-oil advocacy groups. These data show that contestation today often happens at the state or provincial level and typically emphasizes multi-issue, long-term campaigns. Furthermore, many of these organizations demonstrate at least nominal financial transparency, with more than half naming sponsors on their websites. This level of revelation is largely absent on social media, however, with very few campaigns mentioning their sponsors on X or Facebook. Groups that are nominally finically transparent also employ misrepresentative coalitions, buried attribution, passive voice, and reputational laundering to make their funding sources harder to track in practice.

This chapter gives voice to the quiet crises and invisible transitions we rarely talk about – but that shape our lives in profound ways. Drawing from hundreds of Life Design workshops, we uncover five silent truths that often emerge only in private: the tension between passion and stability in choosing a portfolio career; the identity shifts of retirement; the hidden toll of social media on self-worth and clarity; the quiet yearning for deeper life satisfaction; and the common challenge of feeling “too busy” to act. Rather than offering quick fixes, this chapter helps name what has long remained unnamed – because design begins with awareness. It explores the concept of a portfolio career as a flexible, resilient path for those with multiple interests. It unpacks the emotional complexity of retirement, reframes social media’s subtle influence, and offers tools for microprototyping and strengths-based action. Through reflection prompts and Life Design methods, readers are empowered to turn silent doubts into starting points for change – toward a more meaningful, authentic life.

Much of the most commercially successful hip-hop of the 2010s reveled in the ephemerality and hype of digital cultures. This music jettisoned “street” poeticism for an improvised palette of garbled Auto-Tune experiments, hyperactive ad-lib flurries, and absurdly persistent repetition. This chapter offers a panoramic survey of the aesthetic development of this “mumble rap” in the context of streaming services and social media, briefly examining work by Lil Wayne, Future, Young Thug, Chief Keef, Migos, Travis Scott, Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti. Stylistic links are located across this dizzyingly diverse and amorphous genre, foregrounding rap vocals that assume an (in)authenticity fostered in “techno-human syntheses.”

Modern proponents of free speech maintain that the value of expression resides in its authenticity-making power, which generates political legitimacy. They simultaneously concede that the value of expression is not without abridgments, no matter how deeply felt or authentically fulfilling such expression may be. Given these commitments, how can free speech be valued for its authenticity-making power, and yet also conditionally regulated? This chapter explores a resolution based on an interpretation of Aquinas’s thought on speech and expression. First, Aquinas clarifies Aristotle’s distinction between vox (animal expression) and loquutio (logical discourse) as an irreducible relationship of explanandum and explanans: loquutio is uniquely disposed to comprehending what is just or unjust within what is pleasant or painful. Second, Thomistic loquutio is directed to truth while permitting false claims as logical-temporal constituents of discourse, requiring above all a “discursive situation” that avoids both contradiction and epistemically unjustified conviction. These characteristics of Thomistic loquutio are supported by his treatment of angelic communication, which is not revelatory so much as consultatory from a second-person perspective and clarificatory from a first-person perspective. Ultimately, this interpretive Thomistic account rejects the modern commitment of authenticity without absolutism, while affirming certain aspects of what makes speech politically valuable.

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 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 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.