This article introduces the artistic and community practice of Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble (2022–2023) as emblematic of an ensemble-based MFA training model. Drawing on scholarship on community theatre, the article argues that a grassroots training model has the potential to bridge the theoretical division between university theatre and community partner.

This chapter analyses the failure of numerous ‘popish mortgage bills’ in late eighteenth-century Ireland. It contextualizes these legislative efforts not only within the histories of the penal laws and Catholic emancipation, but also within the histories of mortgage law in Ireland, England, and other parts of the British Empire. The bills demonstrated Irish lawmakers’ interest in guaranteeing sources of credit for landowners, and indicated at least some confidence in the protections that would be afforded Protestant debtors by the core doctrine of the equity of redemption. The widespread testing of that doctrine, however, raised new questions about creditor power that informed fears about Catholic power, and these became central to legal and political debate. The failure of these bills reflected common concerns about predation and fraud in credit relations, and particular unease about the ways in which mortgage law might contribute to constitutional change, undermining Ireland’s Protestant ascendancy.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, competing approaches to timekeeping raise questions not only about the nature of time, but about who has influence over whom, why and when. This article explores overlooked intersections between time-practices and politics of place, empire, class and technology which preoccupy Shakespeare in Dream.

In 1796, as Britain fought endless wars within Europe and overseas, one of the three leading theorists of the picturesque, Uvedale Price, contemplated the ideal relationship between landscapes and visual arts:

Living through the French Revolution and its aftermath, Price here suggests that the only semblance of stability could be found in the vindication of the established order. This is evident in his advocacy of the preservation and heightening of the features of a given landscape. The result is a blend of politics and aesthetic choices that necessitates framing one correctly in order to truly appreciate the other.

We review relevant concepts from and properties of the categories of sets and of endofunctors on the category of sets relevant to our work. We discuss representable functors on the category of sets, introducing our exponential notation for them, and we state and prove the Yoneda lemma for these with the help of an exercise. We then examine sums (or coproducts) and products of sets and functions through the language of indexed families of sets. In particular, we characterize products of sets in terms of dependent functions, generalizing functions by allowing their codomains to vary depending on their inputs. We study nested sums and products of sets, explaining how distributivity allows us to expand products of sums of sets. By lifting all of this material to endofunctors on the category of sets, and using the fact that its limits and colimits are computed pointwise, we set ourselves up to introduce polynomial functors as sums of representable functors in the next chapter. Throughout the chapter, we emphasize key categorical principles and provide detailed explanations to ensure solid comprehension of these fundamental ideas.

As ethnic competition gained momentum on the local level, similar developments occurred at the regional level. Decolonization in the postwar period involved constitutional reform and the slow development of African political parties. The British government used constitutional reform to ensure its political and economic interest to maintain the status quo, while emerging African political parties engaged constitutional reform to make various claims for self-determination. The British government insisted African political parties operate at the regional level and discouraged any efforts to form broad, multi-ethnic, cross-regional nationalist parties, such as the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) had aimed for. By 1952, broad nationalist sentiments had distilled into a regionally focused politics. In this context, ethnic majorities within each region had more power than their minority counterparts. The emerging regionalist politics informed the development of a minority consciousness among Niger Delta elites in the 1950s, and they engaged the constitutional reform process through their positions as minorities to claim the right to self-determination.

7.1 [472] His Excellency Julian has not only denounced the holy scriptures; he furthermore speaks so impudently and has gone so far in his love of casting blame as to reach a point where nothing we do escapes his slander. Perhaps he thought doing so would bring him a good reputation. But some might well say about people opting for this mindset, “their glory is in their shame,”1 as well, I would suggest, as that statement made in the voice of David, “Why do you, who are powerful in lawlessness, boast in wickedness? Your tongue has planned injustice all day long; […] you loved all the words of your deluge, your treacherous tongue.”2

What Trajectory for the Regulation of Transnational Corporate Responsibility?

The framework for transnational corporate responsibility along global value chains (GVCs) is in flux. While the legal mechanisms have generally become tighter in recent years, the development follows no uniform trajectory. With scattered, disparate, and overlapping initiatives and regulatory regimes currently coexisting, it seems an open political question which regulatory paradigm will prevail in the medium and longer term. This chapter zooms in on specific transitional moments in the regulatory evolution of corporate responsibility. The dominant narrative portrays this evolution as roughly two decades of linear progress from ‘voluntary’ (deemed ‘ineffective’) corporate social responsibility to ‘mandatory’ (and hence deemed more ‘effective’) instruments, with each stage reacting to deficits of the previous one by imposing tighter standards, leaving fewer gaps, and allowing stricter enforcement. While this sequential understanding of corporate responsibility with each stage implementing selective improvements indeed captures an important dynamic within corporate responsibility, it paints an incomplete picture. First, it stresses rupture over continuity and thereby distracts attention from shared and structural deficits of the regulation of corporate responsibility across its different ‘stages’. Second, it assumes regulatory discourses of corporate responsibility to be largely self-referential and isolated from broader regulatory developments in other fields. These two limitations have deflected the debate from exposing certain structural difficulties in regulating complex value chains, as well as the deeper political dynamics at play in framing regulatory ‘innovations’.

Against this background, this chapter examines the example of reporting regulation as deployed to address different dimensions of corporate responsibility, including modern slavery. Among the substantive goals on the agenda of corporate responsibility, curbing modern slavery is arguably the most intricate. Intrinsically linked to and sustained by the business model of offshore capitalism, modern slavery forms a ‘viable management practice for many enterprises’ (Crane, 2013: 49).

As many have warned, the expansionism or ‘exploitation creep’ (Chuang, 2014) that characterizes discourses around ‘modern slavery’ has only succeeded in clouding the issue, both legally and politically, rather than rendering it more visible (see also Miers, 2003; O’Connell-Davidson, 2015; Quirk, 2018). As Chuang (2014: 611) explains, this ‘exploitation creep’ has entailed the consideration of an ever-broadening range of practices as falling under the ‘modern slavery’ umbrella term. Chuang centres her attention on two related paradigmatic shifts that have allowed this to happen: the reframing of all forced labour as trafficking and the labelling of trafficking as, by definition, slavery (2014: 611). ‘Modern slavery’ has therefore become a catch-all and highly malleable term, which can include practices as disparate as selling sexual services online, generational bonded labour in India, low-level drug distribution in the UK, and forced marriage.

This ‘exploitation creep’ has produced two broad policy responses. On the one hand, we have seen the emergence of a hegemonic position referred to in the literature as ‘modern slavery abolitionism’ (Chuang, 2014; O’Connell-Davidson, 2015). This locates the source of these ostensibly exploitative labour practices in deviant/criminal entities (organized crime groups and/or rogue multinational corporations). Under the abolitionism paradigm, preventative policies have included the banning or restriction of migration for ‘vulnerable’ populations, often women from the Global South (Kempadoo and Doezema, 1998; Doezema, 2002; Kapur, 2005; Andrijasevic, 2007; Agustín, 2007); the ‘rescue, protection and rehabilitation’ of individual victims identified in contexts of destination; and the prosecution of perpetrators. Abolitionism invests in moral crusades along an axis of evil, presenting ‘modern slavery’ as an exceptional problem to be driven-out (Bunting and Quirk, 2014) and characterized by methodological individualism (LeBaron and Ayers, 2013: 874). Conceptualizing ‘modern slavery’ as the result of evil criminals or rogue companies, abolitionist policies thus invisibilize the very conditions in which such exploitative and unfree relations thrive. This unnuanced, ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach fails to consider historically determined systems and relations of power that underpin exploitative and unfree labour.

This chapter surveys the role of quantitative methods in diachronic studies which investigate the past and present stages of English. We begin with simple bivariate analyses, such as tracing frequency developments, discuss inferential models and explain the advantages of multifactorial (including hierarchical) modelling. Moreover, we trace changing productivity, association strengths, lexical biases and collocational preferences within constructions. We also discuss methods for exploratory analysis of multidimensional data and provide a brief overview of methods drawing from machine learning and other scientific disciplines (e.g. word embeddings and agent-based modeling). To illustrate our methodological points, we include small-scale hands-on analyses on the variation between will and be going to constructions as markers of future-time reference from the ARCHER and COHA corpora.

The Bohemian spa town of Teplice (Teplitz) was not only a popular destination for recreation but also a well-known cultural center encouraging cross-regional exchange and artistic engagement through salonesque sociability. In this chapter, Bohemian salon culture is explored through the lens of two protagonists who stayed in Teplice during the 1820s and 1830s: the singer Maschinka Schneider (1815–82) and the writer Karl August Varnhagen von Ense (1785–1858). The private sources surrounding both figures reveal that key personalities in placing Teplice on the Central European music-cultural map were the composer, pianist, and Teplice mayor Joseph Wolfram (1789–1839), his wife Anna (née Himmelfahrt), and the local Bohemian nobility, the Clary-Aldringen family. I show that all participants – local and visiting, amateur and professional musicians, middle class and nobility – benefited from their involvement within this complex web of non- or semi-official engagements, whose cultural impact transcended the homes of the individual cultural agents and the borders of Teplice.

Throughout most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Habsburg court resided predominantly in Vienna. Consequently, the Habsburg monarchs of Bohemia rarely visited Prague, and visits of the entire court were even rarer because they were expensive both for the monarch and the city. Therefore, each coronation of a Habsburg emperor as the Bohemian king was a significant event reflecting both the immediate political context and more general cultural and historical trends, such as the role of music in court ceremonies and the relationship between Bohemian and Viennese musical practices. This chapter sketches the relationship between coronation music and music and operatic developments in Prague in general, particularly in connection to the coronations of Charles VI (1723), Maria Theresa (1743), Leopold II (1791), and Francis II (1792).