Several contemporary works of Afro-Asian fiction turn simultaneously to the past and the ocean to challenge ethnically exclusive, territorial models of national belonging in the present, generating alternative cartographies interlinking the Indian Ocean world. This means the past is not simply a background against which their narratives unfold—that is, their historical setting—but the past itself functions as an intertext through which an Indian Ocean world gets reimagined. The Introduction examines the rhetoric of loss and recovery in Indian Ocean discourses as a way to theorize the Indian Ocean as a spatio-temporal scale for analyzing literature’s relationship to the past. It explicates the term “anarchival drift” as a self-reflexive mode of addressing the past in Afro-Asian fiction. This historical orientation in literature is not driven by a nostalgic desire to recover the past but rather it serves to excavate the historicity of the present. The chapter illustrates this through a reading of romance and history in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992).

In Chapter 7 I discuss the consequences, as regards the theory of virtue, of Plotinus’ denial that ‘spirit’ (thumos) and ‘desire’ (epithumia) are parts of the nature of soul. This denial contrasts with Plato’s tripartition of the soul (which includes spirit and desire) in the Republic, where the tripartition serves to define the four cardinal virtues. However, Plotinus defines these ‘political’ virtues in a different way, as the knowledge and the measure and order brought by rational soul to the affects which arise in the living body. Plotinus introduces furthermore a higher level of virtues, the ‘greater’ virtues. I discuss the relation between these two levels of virtue, in particular as regards the nature of this scale. I argue that in Plotinus the lower (‘political’) virtues are imperfect if possessed without the greater virtues

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

The strength of multivariable analysis is its ability to determine how multiple independent variables, which are related to one another, are related to an outcome. However, if two variables are so closely correlated that if you know the value for one variable you know the value of the other, multivariable analysis cannot separately assess the impact of these two variables on outcome. This problem is called multicollinearity.

To assess whether there is multicollinearity, investigators should first run a correlation matrix. However, the matrix only tells you the relationship between any two independent variables. Harder to detect is whether a combination of variables accounts for another variable’s value. Two related measure of muticollinearity are tolerance and the reciprocal of tolerance: the variation inflation factor. If you have variables that are highly related, you can omit one or more of the variables, use an “and/or” clause or create a scale.

What makes music an enduring art that has withstood the test of time across so many cultural contexts? Here we review the literature on emotion and reward as it relates to music, grounding our review on multiple methodological traditions in neuroscience, as well as newer work that combines these tools with music technology and sound design. Key to these disparate lines of research is the idea that the reward system is functionally and structurally connected to the auditory system, giving rise to individual differences in the sensitivity and felt emotion for music. We conclude with implications of this research for the design and implementation of music-based interventions for improving cognitive and brain health, especially for those with neurodegenerative diseases.

Why do peat and peatlands matter in modern Russian history? The introduction highlights peatlands as a prominent feature of Russia’s physical environment and reflects on their forgotten role as providers of fuel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It discusses the invisibility of peat and peatlands in most existing historical narratives of the fossil fuel age and identifies peat as a lens to reflect upon Russia’s place within global histories of economic growth and associated resource-use. Situating the book at the intersection of modern Russian, energy, and environmental history, the introduction underscores why the planetary predicament makes the seemingly marginal history of peat extraction a topic of global significance.

Some of the key messages of this book are reviewed here in the format of ’reminders’ to clarify the concerns of past misunderstandings and to emphasize solutions to perceived challenges. The importance of basic fundamentals, such as visual assessment, awareness of assumptions and potential numerical solutions is described and then the complementarity of the many statistics and their bases is reviewed. The exciting potential of ongoing developments is summarized, featuring hierarchical Bayesian analysis, spatial causal inference, applications of artificial intelligence (AI), knowledge graphs (KG), literature-based discovery (LBD) and geometric algebra. A quick review of future directions concludes this chapter and the book.

Spatial analysis originated in a broad range of disciplines, producing a diverse set of concepts and terminologies. Ecological processes take place in space and time, and the spatio-temporal structure that results takes different forms that produce spatial dependence at all scales. That dependence has major effects, even when ecological data are abstracted from the spatial context. Not all dependence exhibits a smooth decay with increasing separation, but it can vary with scale, stationarity or its absence and direction (anisotropy versus isotropy). A key factor in spatial analysis is the ability to determine neighbour events for points or patches and we present various algorithms to create networks of neighbours. We discuss a range of spatial statistics and related randomization tests, including a ’Markov and Monte Carlo’ approach. The chapter provides a detailed conceptual background for the technical aspects presented in subsequent chapters.

This first chapter sets the context for the topics covered throughout the book by introducing the relationship between ecological processes and spatial structure, and by clarifying terminology related to both. These processes and spatial analysis methods are classified by several criteria, including static versus dynamic data and one versus several species. The concept of scale is applied to spatial, temporal and organizational contexts. The chapter provides a discussion regarding the background and motivation for spatial analysis in ecological research.

This chapter begins with a re-reading of Henri Lefebvre’s theorisation of social space and representation in his influential volume, The Production of Space (1974). Since the appearance of its English translation in 1991, Lefebvre’s theories have proved to be foundational for much of the work on literature and space that has emerged over the previous few decades, particularly his distinction between representations of space and representational spaces. The chapter thus traces the impact of Lefebvre’s work upon various literary critics and cultural geographers, exploring the development of ideas of textual space, concepts of space and place, and the relation between material and metaphorical spaces. The chapter then moves to consider the concept of scale, an idea somewhat neglected by Lefebvre, but which has begun to gain traction with critics writing on, for example, world literature and modernism (such as Nirvana Tanoukhi, Susan Stanford Friedman, and the essays in the 2017 volume edited by Tavel Clarke and David Wittenberg). Thinking through the question of ‘what is the scale of the literary object’ (as posed by Rebecca Walkowitz) thus offers a new way to understand the complex relations between representation, literary texts, and diverse forms of social space (local, regional, national, transnational, global).

This chapter examines the lengthy history and usage of the terms "translocal," "translocality," and "translocalism," which have been crucial to humanistic and social scientific inquiry about issues of literature, culture, globalization, and territorialization since the 1990s. It recounts the evolution of these terms from seventeenth-century debates about religion through early twentieth-century ideas about politics, psychology, and artistic analysis. It then turns to the present, concentrating on the reemergence of these concepts during the 1990s among social scientists seeking to describe geography and space, human movement, migration, and boundary crossing (in the work of Massey, Appadurai, Clifford, Hannerz, Smith, and others). It describes how these concepts change scholarly studies of mobility, networks, and national and transnational identity (in the work of Kraidy and Murphy, Freitag and Oppen, Brickell and Datta, and Greiner and Sakdapolark), and then it recounts their impacts on literary, historical, and cultural methodologies, especially those involving European empires, poetry and poetics, and colonial and postcolonial literature (including Ramazani, Ballantyne, and Burton). Ultimately, this chapter suggests how literary and historical scholars might connect humanistic accounts of translocalism with social scientific notions of translocality to refocus scholarship on how migration and spatial scale have affected literature and culture.

This chapter argues that Western border thinking emerges concurrent with early formulations of conquest and labor management. Tracing an arc that begins with Spanish philosopher Juan Maldonado and concludes with African philosopher Achille Mbembe, the chapter discusses the utility of borders to the concepts of self, property, and freedom. It further argues that such conceptual work of borders has also been challenged and reconceptualized by contemporary poets and novelists including, most famously, Gloria Anzaldúa, as well as Sandra Cisneros, Alfredo Aguilar, and Eric Gansworth (Tuscarora). Each of these attend to the ways borders serve as generators of revenue for states and as abjection machines, but also as places of habitation, as processes, and as dense horizontalities, rather than as fixtures on a nested hierarchy of scales.

Modern slavery is an amalgam of legal concepts defined in international law united by a shared characteristic – they are all forms of unfree labour: one person deprives another person of their freedom for profit. The introduction explains how unfree labour involving migrant workers and supply chains is particularly troublesome for states to govern because these transnational vectors do not fit within the ‘default’ territorial format of legal jurisdiction and, thus, challenge traditional ideas of state sovereignty. It treats modern slavery laws, which combine international, national, and (sometimes) regional laws, as an example of transnational law and shows how, in this context, the nation state is but one among an assemblage of governance actors. It develops a multidimensional conception of jurisdiction to explore the transnational legal governance of unfree labour and to illustrate how modern slavery laws reconfigure traditional understandings of sovereignty.

The materialist turn in contemporary literary theory – comprising of multiple discourses such as new materialism, posthumanism, ecocriticism, speculative realism, affect theory, and others – has been deeply influential in the field of nineteenth-century American literature. However, one key tension within these materialist theories is the question of its politics: how does a turn to materialism, which privileges the actual physical matter of bodies and things over the ideological and linguistic categories of ideas, advance any political or ethical imperatives? Is a world of matter a world without human meaning? This chapter outlines both optimistic and pessimistic perspectives on this question in recent nineteenth-century American literary study. It then seeks to redraw the political impasse between them as one of scale. To that end, I examine two mid-century texts – the anonymously authored “The Ultra-Moral Reformer” (1842) and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Sphinx” (1846) – as depictions of the challenges (and opportunities) of scalar distortion. These texts suggest that the political and ethical impasse within materialism can be described within materialist terms itself, and that doing so offers a way of understanding the value judgments inherent in materialist methodological commitments as scale dependent.

Focusing on the role of the Australian charitable foundation Walk Free, an organisation connected to the faith-based abolitionist movement, this chapter traces the emergence of a global antislavery governance network and explores the role of philanthrocapitalists and public–private partnerships in it. It shows how Walk Free established an ethical business alliance that portrays slavery in global supply chains as resulting from market failure and depicts the control large transnational corporations have over their supply chains as an antidote to the limits of state sovereignty. Walk Free and the global antislavery governance network advocates for market-based solutions to the problem of modern slavery – such as supply chain transparency and mandatory human rights due-diligence legislation – that enlist transnational corporations located in the Global North to enforce international legal standards against contractors located primarily in the Global South. This chapter illustrates how scale and governance interact in ways that reconfigure sovereignty and shore up neoliberal capitalism.