“Everyone has a price at which he sells himself”: Immanuel Kant quotes this remark in the 1793 Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, attributing it to “a member of English Parliament.” This chapter argues, however, that the context of the quotation in the Religion alludes to the arresting pedagogical practices of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who famously said that “different people sell themselves at different prices.” The chapter argues that there are two sides of Epictetus’ pedagogical strategies: a jolting side meant to expose self-deception and practical inconsistency; and an uplifting side meant to arouse the resources by which it is possible to progress towards virtue – specifically, our sense of kinship with the divine insofar as we are rational. This chapter argues that Kant develops a conception of self-respect in later practical works that plausibly draws on Epictetus, and his distinctive version of the traditional Stoic account of rational agency.

This chapter focuses on sensation novels including Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, Collins’s Armadale, and Rhoda Broughton’s Cometh Up as a Flower. The chapter argues that novels in this tradition help readers covertly manage their mood. These novels deal, in particular, with the management of socially pathologized emotions, with earlier novels focusing on addiction-induced excitement and later novels focusing on nervousness. After close-reading the novels, the chapter addresses readers who were accused of being addicted to popular literature and readers who have used fiction to interpret pathologized negative emotions in terms that are more flattering.

Are non-judicial approaches to remedying business-related human rights violations a good use of the resources invested in them, or a counterproductive distraction from alternative legal or activist pathways to remedy? This chapter outlines the book’s approach to exploring this divisive question, drawing on field-work intensive case studies of human rights grievances across three industrial sectors in Indonesia and India. This introductory chapter launches the book’s argument that while NJMs are seriously limited in their ability to deliver adequate human rights redress, NJMs can nonetheless make small but useful contributions to broader struggles for human rights remedy, never by substituting for binding state-led regulatory and redress processes, but rather by providing entry points through which workers and communities can sometimes mobilise additional resources or sources of leverage in support of their struggles for redress. These findings imply the need for a responsive approach to NJM institutional design and regulatory strategy, in which NJMs are mobilised more explicitly as part of a wider field of struggle to counterbalance some of the entrenched inequalities that buttress recurring patterns of human rights grievances around the world.

The Introduction presents a historiographical discussion of the main topics analyzed throughout the book. It begins by offering a summary of the history of the city of Chuquisaca during the period under study (1777–1809). Then, it examines the crisis of the Spanish-American order in historical perspective. It is argued that, taken together, the study provides an alternative narrative to a growing historiographical consensus that American territories were kingdoms ‒ like the European ones ‒ rather than colonies; that “imperial collapse” (the French invasion of Spain), not “revolution”, was the starting point of independence; and that in their opposition to Bourbon absolutism, the creole elite looked backward, seeking to restore an ancient Hispanic monarchical order. It is my contention that absolutism and colonialism were indistinguishable, that the demise of Spanish rule in the Andes was rooted in a longstanding historical process, and that the traditional language of monarchical legitimism couched modern, utterly subversive, concepts of representative government, free speech, elections, public opinion, and sovereignty. In addition, the Introduction focuses on two large historical themes: the conformation of a culture of dissent and the place of Chuquisaca in the age of Andean insurrection in terms of issues of race, honor, and coloniality.

In the preface to the diary, I have explained what I believe led to the Iraq war in 2003 and the sequence of events. In this epilogue, I conclude with two broad reflections.

The first has regard to the motivation for war. The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 is generally termed the ‘Iraq war’, but it did not have the aims that we often associate with ‘wars’ – to grab territory or move borders. Its aim was ‘regime change’, and such armed actions have commonly been termed ‘interventions’. In the history of interventions, what is the place and significance of the 2003 invasion?

Before the twentieth century, ‘intervention’ – like ‘war’ – was not subject to any prohibitory norm, and it was frequently practised. The term was used for armed territorial incursions with other aims than that of permanent acquisition of territory.

This chapter is the first attempt to incorporate the history of Liverpool FC Women into the previously male-dominated history of LFC. Using oral history, and a range of sources dating to the late nineteenth century, it examines the hidden histories of the women’s game on Merseyside, paying particular attention to the struggles of coaches, players, and adminstrators to overcome male hostility and indifference - including from LFC itself.

This chapter offers an introduction to UX writing and to the theoretical framing of the book. First, I outline my understanding of digital media as cultural-political artefacts, drawing attention to the fact that digital media are not neutral but inscribed with particular norms and identities. I establish this position by reviewing literature from digital discourse studies, media and communication studies, cultural studies of technology, as well as posthumanism, placing particular emphasis on software interfaces as designed sites where power is exercised. This brings me to the second part of my theoretical framing: how language is taken up as a resource in the design of software interfaces. In this regard, I orient to critical sociolinguistic scholarship on language work. I briefly outline my position in this field, aligning with scholarship that orients to Bourdieu’s conceptualization of capital and the linguistic marketplace. Additionally, I reflect on the status of UX writers as elite language workers or wordsmiths and how such (more) privileged language work hinges on its behind-the-scenes nature while nonetheless being instrumental in shaping social norms and values.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) raises ethical and social challenges that can be examined according to a normative and an epistemological approach. The normative approach, increasingly adopted by European institutions, identifies the pros and cons of technological advancement. The main pros concern technological innovation, economic development and the achievement of social goals and values. The disadvantages mainly concern cases of abuse, use or underuse of Gen AI. The epistemological approach investigates the specific way in which Gen AI produces information, knowledge, and a representation of reality that differs from that of human beings. To fully realise the impact of Gen AI, our paper contends that both these approaches should be pursued: an identification of the risks and opportunities of Gen AI also depends on considering how this form of AI works from an epistemological viewpoint and our ability to interact with it. Our analysis compares the epistemology of Gen AI with that of law, to highlight four problematic issues in terms of: (i) qualification; (ii) reliability; (iii) pluralism and novelty; (iv) technological dependence. The epistemological analysis of these issues leads to a better framing of the social and ethical aspects resulting from the use, abuse or underuse of Gen AI.

The only surviving student transcript of any of Kant’s course lectures on political philosophy, the Feyerabend lecture notes of 1784, provide Kant’s criticisms of Natural Law theory as well as a statement of Kant’s own developing theory at a time when he published very little on the topic. This introduction describes the nature of the course lecture and gives an overview of the contributions that follow.

This chapter addresses the interplay of invisibility, status, and power in UX writing. My aim in the chapter is twofold. First, I am interested in how UX writers understand and negotiate the (in)visibility of language in their own work. Tracing the semiotic ideologies of these professional language workers, I discuss how UX writers operationalize a discursive ideal of invisible writing in order to establish the value of their linguistic work vis-à-vis their colleagues, who typically privilege other modes of meaning making. Second, I examine how UX writers make sense of the linguistic and cultural-political consequences of this invisibility. In this regard, I suggest that the ideal of an invisible interface is a central media ideology that not only structures the work of UX writers but ultimately determines how ordinary users can(not) communicate with and through digital media. I conclude by linking my case study to broader discussions of invisibility in cultural studies of technology, arguing that communication with and through digital media is shaped not only by users’ perspectives but also by the semiotic and media ideologies of its producers.