Chapter Three provides a thorough exploration of the multifaceted experience of being Qizilbash within the Ottoman realm and the consequential implications of such an identity within the intricate Ottoman–Safavid geopolitical landscape. By scrutinizing a diverse array of Qizilbash texts, artifacts, and ceremonial practices, the chapter elucidates the complex processes entailed in shaping and perpetuating a collective sense of belonging. Additionally, this chapter seeks to integrate a discussion of the Ottoman state’s surveillance strategies into the analysis of Qizilbash subjecthood formation within the empire.

Chapter 6 tackles the environment in which the social life of the image takes place. The image interpretation is situated within the immediate material environment where the image appears, which includes the medium, genre, and placement of the image. Then the interpretation takes into account the broader time and space surrounding the image, which includes the extended historical, social, cultural, and political context that the image exists within. The method of photo documentation is presented and applied on the case example of graffiti images.

For a long time, Greek sanctuaries were studied from a positivist perspective, that is, in terms of their spatial evolution and the typologies of their architecture and artefacts. At the sanctuary of Dodona, this perspective has also been applied to a great variety of structures and objects. The present paper offers new ways of looking at one of the most intriguing classes of objects found at the sanctuary, the lamellae on which were written the questions for and answers from the oracle. Consistent with the growing interest in the materiality of writing, we discuss the physical properties of the lamellae and the contexts in which they were used with respect to their adoption at the sanctuary during the Archaic period. We argue that the ease with which lead tablets can be inscribed, folded, and transported made this material more suitable for the context of the sanctuary than ostraca, another inexpensive medium often used for writing in ancient Greece.

The essay explores pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Dodona, in Epirus, through a phenomenological lens, aiming to reconstruct the experience of ancient pilgrims. The study highlights the significance of landscape, movement, and motivation, on the basis that Dodona’s natural features and architectural layout deeply influenced pilgrims’ perceptions. The phenomenological approach draws on landscape archaeology, analyzing human interaction with sacred spaces. The analysis examines not only motivations behind oracular activity, but also other purposes, such as attending the Naia festival, and emphasizes the interplay of visibility and movement as pilgrims approached the sanctuary. Although reconstructing individual experiences is challenging, common patterns in collective behavior, such as rituals, processions, and religious practices, offer insights into the ancient pilgrimage experience. In short, the study uses literary, epigraphic, and material evidence to discuss how Dodona’s sacred landscape shaped its visitors’ religious and emotional experiences, contributing to a broader understanding of Greek pilgrimage traditions.

Unlike previous approaches to sustainable investing, focused primarily on excluding companies from problematic sectors such as tobacco, the aim of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) integration is to incorporate the assessment of ESG characteristics within mainstream investment analysis. This aim has given rise to claims that ESG integration is not about value judgments but focuses only on neutral risk–return calculations. Against such framing, this chapter argue that various ethical concerns inevitably arise when considering the quantification process underlying the generation of data used in ESG integration approaches. Drawing on the literature related to quantification and commensuration, the chapter identifies four areas in which ethical concerns can arise: (1) the strong focus on financial materiality; (2) the aggregation of disparate and often incommensurable ESG data; (3) ESG measurement problems; and (4) the treatment of ESG data as a private good. The chapter shows how quantification processes in these four areas give cause for ethical concerns related to which aspects of sustainability are rendered visible or invisible; how power relations between different field actors are structured by quantification; and which organizations have access to the opportunities that prevailing processes of quantification afford.

Akbari describes what it means to have a human body in the digital age and argues that datafication has transformed the materiality of the body in its very flesh and bone. This transformation is especially dangerous in uncertain spaces, such as borders and refugee camps, where identity becomes crucial and only certain categories of human bodies can pass. The consequences to those experiencing datafication of their bodies at the border are harsh and severe. However, the deliberate unruliness of the border paves the way for these spaces to become technological testing grounds, as evidenced by the development of technologies to track fleeing populations for the purposes of contact tracing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Akbari’s text oscillates deliberately between academic thinking, autobiographical accounts, pictures, and poetry, thus clearly denoting the discomfort of the human being living in a Code|Body.

Dimitri van den MeersscheThis chapter traces the many entanglements between international organizations and private actors in the space of global security governance. By analysing the controversies surrounding the mandate of Europol and the contribution of private actors in countering terrorism online, it describes three modalities of entanglement: (i) private actors as sites of data collection and providers of sources of information that are increasingly relied upon by international institutions, (ii) enrolment of private platforms in the implementation of governance projects by international organizations, and (iii) alignment of such governance projects to the logic of tech companies and platforms – what Johns has described as a ‘lean start up’ mentality. Having traced these multiple points of influence, interaction and interdependence, the chapter proposes an infrastructural approach to the study of such public–private cooperation. This implies a recognition of how law and materiality are entangled in the production of social order and attentiveness to the role of digital infrastructures and socio-technical protocols in redrawing the public–private divide and constituting, mediating and materializing the exercise of international institutional authority. These observations crystalize in an urgent call to direct our thinking on rights and regulation towards these infrastructural formations and the political affordances that they entail.

This chapter explores an overlooked aspect of Bloomsbury’s contradictory relationship to embodiment, materiality, and empire: their simultaneous embrace of early twentieth-century nudity and their condemnation of undress when it is expressed by the lower classes and colonial subjects. By focusing on the Studland beach photographs archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, this chapter considers the wider cultural context regarding nude images, both in terms of historical representation and practices of nakedness asks. Ultimately, the chapter asks: how might we understand Bloomsbury’s fascination with both photography and nudity at a time when nakedness and race together influenced colonial thinking and civilizing imperatives? The chapter argues that a consideration of Bloomsbury’s relationship to nude photography cannot be severed from the history in which whiteness is the normative racial marker for early twentieth-century Britons.

This chapter provides an overview of manuscript production and reception in the OE and ME periods. It focuses on how manuscripts were produced, the cognitive copying practices of its scribes, the subsequent use of manuscript texts by their readers, and the implications these issues have for the texts and data that survive. It considers the methodological issues arising from working on manuscripts in both their physical and edited forms. The chapter argues for the importance of considering manuscript evidence – including material aspects of the text – when using such texts as data for linguistic enquiry, and the value of this overlooked material for increasing our understanding of diachronic change. Finally, the chapter highlights and demonstrates some fruitful approaches to medieval textual material from the disciplines of historical sociolinguistics, dialectology, pragmatics and philology.

What is classical relief? Can “relief” ever be spoken of as a single category? Is it a “medium” in itself? If so, what exactly does it “mediate”? And how does the notion of artistic medium (which art history tends to use in relation to materials) relate to the more theoretical concept of “media” as tools or channels for the storage and transmission of information? This chapter attempts to crack open such questions by examining the terminology that is applied to relief work in Greek and Roman texts, focusing in particular on the problematic term typos, which is applied to relief sculpture, repoussé metalwork, terra-cotta moldings, engraved gems and (perhaps) sculptors’ models. Developing J. J. Pollitt’s foundational chapter on typoi in The Ancient View of Greek Art, it explores how technologies of making, materiality, and dimensionality contribute to the particular instability of the typos as a category of object and, in turn, the peculiar ontology of relief as a category of ancient art.

A critical and empirical archaeology of pastoralism has already begun to rewrite some of the long-standing “grand narratives” of pastoralism’s role in shaping ancient urbanism, trade, polities, and landscapes.

This chapter looks at the work and critical reception of B.S. Johnson (1933-73), focusing on the influence that the development of the critical term postmodernism on his reputation by dividing it into three stages of two decades each: before postmodernism (1960-1980), during postmodernism (1980-2000) and after postmodernism (2000 to present). It argues that Johnson’s career was essentially proto-postmodernist, engaged in a struggle to undermine the realist hegemony of the 1960s, but that the theoretical concerns of postmodern writing were at odds with his own and it was never a term he used or had the opportunity to refute. As a result his work remained unassimilable while postmodernism held sway and only later- with the aid of a biography- could criticism get to grips with Johnson’s double-coded rejection of convention and commitment to his own brand of social realism.