This chapter develops the theory of social categories, a new theoretical framework that offers a universal prism through which to understand all social groups. The theory builds on work in social psychology and sociology.

Many of the psychological topics we have discussed have focused on the mind of the individual, but humans are a fundamentally social species. Recently, the nature of our social interactions has transformed, through our new abilities to connect with people online. This chapter discusses psychological principles of social networks, and how to quantify social networks via graph theory. The chapter examines the small-world phenomenon and the role of social ties via these graph theory measures. We then look at the case of online social networks, what can be learned about you from your profile, and how their use impacts psychological measures. The chapter concludes by showcasing findings on social network representations in the brain, and touching on ethical questions related to social media privacy concerns and AI-based social interactions.

This chapter provides an overview of some of the key practice strategies that social workers use to try to challenge and arrest the massive social inequalities we explored in the previous chapters. The theory and practices of critical social work help us to devise creative and effective ways to contest and resist the harms created by oppressive social forces. Developing our capacity for critical analysis is an important first step that underpins all other practices outlined in this chapter: social policy analysis and development; social activism, allyship and participation in social movements; critical practice in organisations; and undertaking social research. These practices connect practitioners with discretionary spaces in which they can work towards social justice and emancipatory aims.

Exploration of planetary bodies beyond Earth is occurring at an ever-increasing rate. What used to be points of light in the night sky are now amazing, complicated, and intriguing objects of geologic study. For extraterrestrial bodies with solid surfaces – such as rocky planets, asteroids, and icy bodies – the study of planetary bodies as geologic objects includes careful scrutiny of their surfaces. Planetary exploration is an examination of geomorphology, as our interpretations of other planetary surfaces are largely guided by geomorphic studies done on Earth. At the same time, planetary landforms developed in different geologic conditions than on Earth – such as under different gravities, in different materials (like ice instead of rock), and beneath different atmospheric pressures or compositions.

This chapter illustrates that various geomorphic processes observed on Earth occur on other planets as well, and also how the resultant landforms contrast with those found on Earth.

The English language is generally discussed publicly with reference to an ideologically constructed correct form. Such discourses first emerged in the eighteenth century forming part of a long process of language standardisation, a process associated with major political imperatives. Standard language ideologies, articulated and maintained by powerful social groups, vary in different nations. Distinctive British and American ideologies are associated with critical points in national histories, and have the effect of disadvantaging specific social groups by disparaging their language varieties. Rather than being dismissed as examples of ill-informed misunderstanding of the nature of language promoted by powerful speakers for their own purposes, such ideologies can be considered more broadly as part of a larger set of perspectives on language articulated by language users, intimately connected not only with vested social and political interests but with explaining connections between language and the social world or describing its structure systematically.

This chapter explores the relationship between international organizations and the market. It starts by building a taxonomy of the types of relationships these organizations can establish with the market. The taxonomy distinguishes between two main types of relationships: the direct institutional relationship, where the market is part of the organizations’ institutional mission, and the indirect instrumental relationship, which arises as a consequence of the organizations’ instrumental activities, such as procurement. This distinction is based on indices that define the characteristics of each relationship, including function, market players and their roles, values and interests and economic impact. Building on this distinction, the analysis identifies the instruments – regulatory tools and practices – through which organizations impact the market and examines the issue of the organizations’ accountability within this relationship. It concludes that the current accountability tools are inadequate and create a temporal dissonance between international organizations and the changed ethos of public powers. The perpetuation of this dissonance is not only relevant to the legitimacy of organizations but also to their very existence. An awareness and understanding of the relationship between international organizations and the market is the first step in seeking an alignment of international organizations to the current public powers’ ethos.

Chapter 3 explains how various early modern English governments and authors extended the medieval discourse of sovereignty to support claims to jurisdictional superiority and expansive unions. It begins with an overview of governmental claims, especially in relation to Scotland, and then assesses their impact on political writing through John Dee’s Brytanici Imperii Limites and Robert Persons’s A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland. The chapter subsequently examines historiographical and literary texts that echo or interrogate sovereignty discourse, using William Harrison’s Description of Britain and Edmund Spenser’s epic romance The Faerie Queene as examples. Harrison’s history reiterates governmental claims and dismisses any possibility of equal union with other polities. Spenser’s Faerie Queene also generally endorses English empire. Only his Two Cantos of Mutabilitie expose the discourse’s shortcomings and gesture, however tentatively, toward the possibility of a politics not shaped by competing narratives of conflict.

Chapter 5 begins by reading Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House as an experiment in cinematic projection, a phantasmagoric erasure of the means of projection. I compare Cather’s cartographic romance to that of Robert and Frances Flaherty’s Moana of the South Seas, the first film to be called “documentary.” Both the Flahertys and Cather mark US national space against the anachronism of the remote island. Spinning this view around, I tell the story of Fialelei, who served as producer and translator for the Flahertys in Sāmoa. She also accompanied them to the United States, and her voyage embodies the Samoan principle of the Vā, or “space-between.” This Oceanian counterpoint provides a new position for studying the role of cinematic fantasy in isolating the “primitive” from “civilized,” and projecting the former onto the “insular.”

The 1991 Madrid Conference marked a turning point in US-Israel relations and the broader Middle East peace process. After the Gulf War, the Bush administration, led by Secretary of State James Baker, pushed for direct talks between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Co-sponsored by the US and the Soviet Union, the conference aimed to establish a peace framework based on UN Resolutions 242 and 338, emphasizing land for peace. Tensions emerged between the US and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, especially over Israeli settlement policy and the makeup of the Palestinian delegation. The Bush administration linked US loan guarantees for absorbing Soviet Jewish immigrants to a freeze on settlement expansion, increasing pressure on Israel. The conference also exposed divisions within the American Jewish community over US policy and its implications for Israel’s future. This chapter explores the diplomatic maneuvering before Madrid, the negotiations over participation, and the conference’s impact on US-Israel relations. It places Madrid within the broader realignment of US Middle East policy under Bush and assesses its long-term legacy.

Salvadore Cammarano’s libretto is based on the historical novel The Bride of Lammermoor by Walter Scott and thus invites us to examine the real-life sources for Scott’s published work. In addition, as the Scott work was published in 1819, it follows on the heels of the more famous novel by Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus in 1818. Shelley’s gothic novel reveals a similar fascination with the sociopolitical environment of the early Enlightenment, as well as the spectres of madness, murder and the private lives of individuals caught up in vengeful forces beyond their control. Beyond the literary sources for the libretto, the opera also bears witness to the use of medical knowledge in defining the appearance and sound of a mentally ill young woman who has succumbed to hysteria. According to medical treatises of the time, hysteria was a disease that bore physical and emotional symptoms, the severity of which could be diagnosed with the relatively new invention of the stethoscope (1816). As Donizetti’s work premiered during a time of heightened listening, whereby audiences sought to hear within the notes of the music the inner world of the composer or the performer, the sound of pain or latent disease was now understood to reflect a lexicon of medically understood sounds that reveal themselves to the careful listener.

This chapter explores the significance of a bookshop set up in Bloomsbury in 1919 by the writers David Garnett and Francis Birrell. Drawing upon archival material at the Bodleian, Oxford – including catalogues, order histories, correspondence, and financial documents – it deepens and nuances the emerging understanding of modernist bookshops as private enterprises that were also public spaces of intellectual, artistic, and cultural exchange. The first part outlines the bookshop’s links with its Bloomsbury customers and, most notably, the Hogarth Press. The second part then turns to the international custom base and professional networks to show how the bookshop, like the Hogarth Press, challenges narratives of the Bloomsbury group as an insular clique. In considering how friendship and business mixed, the chapter therefore demonstrates two key features of modernist bookshops set out by Huw Osborne in his edited volume The Rise of the Modernist Bookshop (2015), whereby they exist “on the threshold of commerce and culture,” and where they are “locally fixed in cities and towns and yet tied into transatlantic and global networks” that complicate the very division between the local and the global.