Friendship is a consequential relationship for child development and well-being. This chapter examines recent research on three major themes related to children’s friendships. We begin by reviewing findings from several long-term longitudinal studies documenting the diverse and multifaceted impacts of childhood and adolescent friendship competencies and experiences on later adjustment. We also highlight how these long-term longitudinal studies have allowed researchers to test and refine theoretical perspectives about how early family and peer relationships facilitate the development of skills and understandings that set the stage for social competence and positive adjustment later in development. With this as background, we review theory and research on the processes and provisions that characterize children’s friendships, and then describe important contextual factors that affect children’s friendships, with a particular focus on the school context and how contextual factors can facilitate or undermine the development and maintenance of cross-group friendship.

This chapter surveys the implications of linguistic variation and diversity for language instruction. Sociolinguistic research amply documents the occurrence of regional and social diversity in all languages; variability is a universal property of human language. Everyone has implicit awareness of this in their native languages, and it needs focused attention in second language teaching and learning. It is a disservice to students to teach them a normative standard and neglect all else. Achieving communicative competence in a language requires some familiarity with dialect diversity, social and ethnic varieties, stylistic practices, and the social meaning of linguistic forms. It is important to teach basic facts about the social status of a language in the places it is spoken, and the presence of other languages: French is dominant in France, co-official with English in Canada, but mainly an L2 in ‘Francophone’ Africa; most Argentines are monolingual L1 Spanish speakers, but half of Bolivians speak indigenous languages as L1. Ongoing language change is important for learners to know about, both to comprehend the new forms, and to be aware of how they will be perceived.

This chapter reads Algerian novelist Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s best-selling novel Dhākirat al-jasad (Memory in the Flesh, 1993). In it, a circular bracelet, the authentic sign of the Algerian woman-nation, grounds the promise of a “true” Arabic in the postcolonial present. Mosteghanemi’s novel imagines a stark separation between the Algerian War – when men were honorable and language was utile – and the ruined Arab present, ruled by banalized words and corrupted men. Her novel adopts a transregional geography, weaving the topoi of Algeria and Palestine together. A self-conscious heir to the transregionalism described in this study, Mosteghanemi retains its Arab scale to great commercial success but gently critiques its collective, male Arab voice. Through the voice of her male narrator, Arab literary constructions of meaning over Algeria are revealed as homosocial exchanges between male intellectuals, bonding them across distance and rivalries. In Memory, literature’s interpretation of Algeria emerges as an autobiographical task, revealing and narrating an Arab intellectual subject to himself and his likenesses.

This chapter investigates the ‘bass music’ genres of dubstep and trap at massive North American festivals in the 2010s, an era in which DJ sets were characterised by a sensationalised moment known as ‘the drop’. It begins by demonstrating that the sense of rupture delivered by the drop is emmeshed with social and musical disputes (especially in online festival groups). The chapter then examines the gendered dimensions of the bass music drop. It ends by considering bass music’s #MeToo moment of reckoning regarding alleged sexual misconduct by the dubstep producer-DJ Datsik. In doing so, the chapter suggests that despite previous and ongoing associations with unity, transcendence, and escapism, EDM is sometimes unable to escape the divisions and ills of the world as it is. Rather than ignoring the dark sides of EDM culture through affirmative scholarship, our field would benefit from a critical turn and methodological innovation.

This introduction presents the volume’s premise and structure. It details why it is crucial to examine and harmonize the two worlds of law and knowledge to understand and amplify Indigenous guidance and wisdom found in treaty commitments. This introduction introduces the volume’s five parts, each discussing different aspects of understanding and implementing the various international, multinational, and nation-to-nation treaties to advance sustainable development and affirm Indigenous knowledge and rights in the various legal systems that we will explore.

Anglophone Arthurian films (including television) continually restage the triumphant break from the medieval that serves as the constitutive myth of origin for modernity.  The divinely appointed absolute monarch (Arthur) returns, but only to figure a sovereignty invested in the people.  Medieval Arthurian narratives explore the nature and exercise of political authority, providing ideological legitimacy for political institutions and defining the individual’s obligations within those institutions.  This chapter examines how modern Anglophone film and television remediate Arthurian legends, projecting contemporary notions of sovereignty back onto the Middle Ages.

This chapter takes up the complex and fluid topic of gender in relation to Arthurian romance. It explores the intersections of gender with chivalry, emotion and agency in the twelfth-century romances of Chrétien de Troyes and Marie de France and their fourteenth-century English reworkings; the gendered treatment of desire, constraint and identity in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale; and finally the formative role of gender across Arthur’s reign in Malory’s Morte Darthur. Engagement with gender roles, emotional experience and the place and predicament of women is built into Arthurian romance from its inception, reflecting courtly interests in the nuances of behaviour and feeling. Medieval Arthurian romances repeatedly treat women as wielding profound power, including through unorthodox means of magic, but they also address the constraints of gender roles for women. Malory’s Morte Darthur illuminates the crucial part played by gender in the narrative of the rise and fall of Arthur’s kingdom, and the conflict between heterosexual and homosocial relations.

This chapter discusses the sympathetic relationship between the gothic and sublimity regarding their serving similar social and political functions, emphasising their adaptability to the rhetorical interests of those in power in a given place and time. It then goes on to clarify their differences and consider whether they have a more ‘universal’ application than typically understood by taking a broadly historical approach, to examine the xenophobic and gendered origins of the sublime, and the ideological changes that come with the post-Kantian tradition. Rethinking the sublime as the differend identified by Jean-François Lyotard alerts us to imbalanced power relations and the demand for new idioms that give voice to the silenced, thus avoiding the sublime’s traditional claim to transcendence and therefore Western humanism. Similarly, a world-gothic sublime serves to witness the differend, the power imbalance between the ‘normal,’ who sets the terms of any tribunal, and the Other, who is silenced.

This book concludes with this Afterword that emphasizes the critical importance of integrating Indigenous knowledge and treaties into the framework of sustainable development. This chapter summarizes the conclusions we have brought forth throughout this volume and is centred on the wisdom and practices of Indigenous peoples that promote respect, reciprocity, and harmony with the natural world. The convergence of Indigenous knowledge with global sustainable development agendas is now widely recognized as a crucial step towards a more balanced and resilient future. As the world faces unprecedented challenges such as natural disasters, resource scarcity, and human rights violations, recognizing the strengths of diverse worldviews becomes essential. By examining case studies and comparative legal research, this book demonstrates the potential of treaties to foster sustainable futures that benefit all living beings.

This chapter argues that Scottish author Naomi Mitchison’s 1962 novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman is an exemplary critical feminist utopia. Touching on many of the literary utopian genre’s foundational tensions and ambiguities, Mitchison’s novel offers readers a world of freely accessible abortions, inter-racial and multi-gendered parenting, queer and alien sexual practices, and universal child-led education. Despite the obviously utopian contours of this speculative narrative world, however, Mitchison’s narrative uses the utopian society for its backdrop of spacefaring alien adventure. By creating a utopian society, only to leave it behind as her protagonists visits stranger alien worlds, the chapter argues that Mitchison manages to maintain a focus on the utopian missing ‘something’, even whilst depicting a feminist utopia. Rather than arriving at a static utopian locus, Mitchison’s eponymous spacewoman journeys in an ongoing process of utopian searching, in which many of the literary genre’s pleasures and dangers are laid bare. With its focus on a female scientist attempting to avoid the harm historically perpetuated on alien flora and fauna by British colonial scientific institutions, Mitchison’s text reveals the utopian prospect of an anti-colonial feminist science.

This chapter explores Scotland’s relationship with utopia, arguing that this relationship is complicated by Scotland’s perceived peripheral, and potentially oppositional, identity within the United Kingdom. Twentieth-century Scottish fiction has often been reticent to engage with fully developed utopian paradigms, instead focusing on quotidian experience. However, utopian communities are also positioned as an opportunity to look beyond the nation to examine questions of individual and collective desire. The chapter focuses on three main strands of Scottish utopian fiction from the post-war to the present: the unusual emphasis on death and cyclical return in key utopian texts; utopian novels that explore communal life and homosociality; and queer works that employ storytelling as a utopian act. The texts discussed in this chapter reveal that in Scottish literature utopia is not located in some far-off future but, rather, operates within the continuity created by shared narratives of identity, community, and desire. Examining these themes, the chapter concludes that Scottish utopian fiction is more varied than previous accounts have noted.