This chapter traces the historical evolution and terminology of the right to science within international human rights law, exploring its emergence post-Second World War and highlighting the pivotal role of UNESCO and the recent General Comment No. 25. It critically analyses essential terminology such as the scientific process, scientific progress and the benefits of science, both material and immaterial. Special attention is given to defining the scope of protected scientific knowledge, extending beyond traditional academic disciplines to encompass citizen science and Indigenous and traditional knowledge, while clearly distinguishing legitimate scientific knowledge from pseudoscience.

This chapter concentrates on two authors, two contexts, and two works: US schoolteacher Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1881) and British-Indian author Rokeya Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” (1905). Extrapolating the techno-social emergence of female ballooning in the nineteenth-century United States and India, the chapter argues that the two feminist utopias intersect social and environmental freedom. Lane employs the underground setting popularised by Bulwer-Lytton to house a techno-feminist civilization controlling the climate at will, while Hossain describes the diffuse, oneiric terrain of Ladyland in which climate control supports a garden world. Comparing the two different feminist utopias and contexts, both marked by feminist aviation and atmospheric interventions, the chapters showcase the socio-political character of anthropogenic climate change: Hossain’s climate utopia is caring, inclusive, and decolonial, whereas Lane’s is cynical, exclusive, and imperialist.

This chapter examines the first Argentine productions of Verdi’s Otello, including one starring tenor Francesco Tamagno. Expectations in Buenos Aires surrounding the Otello productions were heightened by the new media landscape and by the city’s changing urban and demographic environment, including plans for a new Teatro Colón. These shifts also generated scrutiny of the layers of cultural, geographical and technological distance between Argentina and Italy. Tamagno’s Otello emerged as a sticking point, however: an element considered fundamental to Verdi’s conception, yet the tenor’s powerful voice appeared to resist future reproduction. The material complexities of Otello as a work in performance and the opera’s depiction of a flawed military hero ultimately intersected in the figure of ‘Tamagno-Otello’, I argue: a figure poised between a heroic Italian past and a mechanical future, crystallising wider debates over operatic mediation in the Argentine capital. Turning to Italy I consider how Argentine perceptions of Tamagno’s uniqueness and of Verdi’s Italian status were ultimately internalised, pointing to the intertwining of national mythologies with new technological media.

In this chapter, Davis Schneiderman revisits William Burroughs’ “Playback Trilogy” – The Job, The Electronic Revolution, and The Revised Boy Scout Manual – as a critical lens for understanding the contemporary challenges posed by generative artificial intelligence, misinformation, and deepfake media. Arguing that Burroughs’ theories of language, media manipulation, and technological control anticipate core dynamics of AI’s influence on culture and perception, Schneiderman explores how Burroughs’ experiments with tape recorders and playback foreshadow algorithmic systems that operate with unintended, emergent consequences. Situating Burroughs’ techniques alongside cybernetic theory and the escalating crisis of automated media, the chapter assesses Burroughs not only as a prophetic figure but also as a practical theorist of language systems gone rogue. From deepfakes to AI chatbots inciting violence, Schneiderman demonstrates that Burroughs’ methods – cut-up, disruption, playback – remain urgently instructive for resisting the logic of control in the digital age.

This chapter uncovers the role of business in coproducing European standards during the 1992 Program. Building on the argument of Chapter 1 that the Commission strove to create a regional business environment in which firms would regionalize, it finds that the interests of European business and European policymakers converged around the issue of standards. The Commission promoted common norms as a means of market integration. While some European companies, executives, and BIAs were skeptical of the potential for standardization to function as a form of regulation, they also understood that standards were determinants of market access. Consequently, many worked to shape new regional norms to their advantage.

Chapter 2 focuses on the role and potential of technology in the mathematics classroom. You will be introduced to the TPACK and SAMR frameworks, which support effective planning and teaching with digital tools. This chapter demonstrates how technology can enhance engagement, feedback, personalisation, and collaboration, while providing guidance on selecting high-quality digital resources aligned with the cross-curriculum priorities. The integration of technology is framed to enrich pedagogical practice and support diverse learners.

This volume focuses on American popular culture’s historical and cultural power as a transformative agent shaping national and world histories, values, and societies. Popular culture is broadly construed herein as “commercialized leisure,” a definition derived from social theories about work/leisure and the nature of industrialized societies. Not to be confused with folklore, it makes several supportive assumptions: popular culture is driven by mechanization, it defines audiences as consumers, it is a conduit for group identities, it is transnational, and it is always actively interpreted by its varied audiences. American popular culture is dependent on technological developments, from the 1820s print revolution to the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railroad to the domination of mass-media technologies ending with the rise of the Internet. The book is organized into three sections: nineteenth century, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and case studies where popular culture has been weaponized for sociopolitical domination or resistance.

This chapter provides an insight into the potential future progression for psychiatry and its treatments.

Chapter 9 examines how mental models shape attitudes toward artificial intelligence (AI), a rapidly emerging yet relatively unpoliticized technology. Initially, individuals with and without an Economist Mental Model (EMM) show no strong divergence in their baseline assessments of AI’s risks and benefits, likely reflecting the technology’s novelty. However, two survey experiments reveal that EMM-oriented respondents adapt their views more readily when presented with economic information about AI’s impacts on productivity, wages, or inequality. By contrast, those with Alternative Mental Models (AMMs) remain largely unmoved by the same data. In a second experiment using a conjoint design, EMM-oriented participants systematically adjust their support for AI adoption in hypothetical firms, raising support when gains outweigh losses and reducing it when the scenario shows net harms. Conversely, individuals with AMMs maintain fixed views. This responsiveness underscores the role of economic thinking in evaluating AI’s trade-offs and shaping policy preferences.

This chapter explores the significance of adopting a posthuman approach to placemaking as a strategy for cultivating hope and resilience amidst rapid global change. Drawing on posthuman theory, the author argues for moving beyond human-centric perspectives to embrace interconnectedness with other species, technology, and the environment. To strengthen a ‘psychology of place’, the author recommends recognising our kinship and deep psychological bonds with non-human entities and environments, embracing Indigenous knowledge systems, and fostering ethical relationships with technology. Practical strategies include designing places that encourage multispecies interactions, promoting local biodiversity, and integrating cultural rituals and ceremonies that reinforce communal and ecological bonds. Furthermore, fostering collective dialogues across communities to repair human and ecological relationships is emphasised. Ultimately, the chapter calls for a transformative approach to placemaking that prioritises ecological and relational repair, recognising shared vulnerabilities, and actively cultivating inclusive environments where diverse forms of life collectively can thrive.

Painful as it is for a Remain campaigner like me to admit, the EU has always been dire when it comes to policies for supporting innovation and technology. Even more painfully, things have worsened over the past ten years. Longstanding structural weaknesses in EU innovation policy date from well before the Brexit referendum in 2016. The European Union had dismally failed to create a regulatory environment conducive to technological innovation. As I found whenever I visited to Brussels as a No. 10 adviser under David Cameron, the policy instincts of European Commission officials were overwhelmingly rooted in market stability and risk avoidance – values that, while defensible in themselves, often produced unintended consequences for fast-moving sectors such as digital technology and life sciences. Take the EU’s data privacy rules, which were debated and developed for years before being finally implemented in 2018. As Cameron’s team repeatedly warned at the time, the compliance costs fell disproportionately on small and early-stage firms. Even before fines or litigation, the administrative burden for smaller organisations typically ran into tens of thousands of pounds.

This chapter approaches fashion as a technology of transition that modifies bodies and generates gender and sex – in the early modern period and today. It offers a broad and exploratory examination of trans fashion and fashioning in the early modern period as it intersects with premodern trans studies, suggesting “trans fashioning” as one method of understanding not only trans genders but also the construction and maintenance (in part through fashion) of all genders, especially the artifice and impossibility of stable cisgender sex. Read in a trans way, histories of fashion show the patterns and seams and stitches of styling sex and normalizing the fashioning of cis or binary gender. At once superficial and significant, changeable and permanent, the gendering technologies of early modern fashion undercut false modern binaries between “social” and “medical” transition, between what we call sex and gender or cis and trans, and between private and public bodies.