While we have already touched on several fields of practice throughout this text, this chapter draws on our own and other authors’ research and experience to go somewhat deeper in relation to three social work practice fields: aged care and working with older people; child protection; and men’s violence against women. We consider some of the current debates that exist within these fields and contextualise them within wider social and political contexts. We acknowledge the challenges for critical practice, particularly when it seems to be at odds with the dominant discourses and associated institutional structures and cultures.

This chapter traces the influence of Christianity on politics and society in the first two centuries of the American experiment. It offers an overview of the religion in the original colonies, the religious revivals associated with the First Great Awakening, the role of Christianity shaping the United States Constitution, the Second Great Awakening in an era of westward expansion, religious diversity, and the theological debates surrounding slavery and the Civil War.

The chapter investigates the complexities of defining the human right to family planning in regards to conflicts between collective and individual rights in the 1960s and 1970s. Various perspectives from such UN organizations as the Commission on the Status of Women, UNESCO, FAO, and ECLA are analyzed regarding responsible parenthood, state intervention in family planning, and the balance between individual rights and communal well-being. The chapter further investigates the relationship between aspirations of sexual liberation and the human right to family planning, the role of the Vatican and Catholic Church, and attempts by the Population Council to establish a form of human rights utilitarianism that justified grave violations of individual reproductive rights by promises of a better future for all. The document also discusses the political conflicts at the 1974 World Population Conference in Bucharest, emphasizing the complex interplay between individual reproductive rights, economic development, and global justice within the framework of human rights discourse.

Social work practice may be conceptualised in a variety of ways. Sometimes practice is referred to as ‘methods’. Some social work texts have tended to refer to different levels of practice: micro methods, including methods for working with individuals, such as casework, counselling and case management; methods for working with couples and small groups, such as family group conferencing, mediation and group work; and macro methods, which are more collective methods of practice, such as advocacy, community development, policy development and analysis, research and social action. Practice is also sometimes referred to in terms of the processes that characterise it from beginning to end – for example, engagement, assessment, intervention, termination and evaluation. This tendency to conceptualise practice in terms of ‘processes’ is mostly relevant for micro methods, and some have argued that this conceptualisation represents the imposition of ‘corporate management techniques’ and a ‘case management approach’ onto social work.

The linearized field equations for causal variational principles are derived, and their general structure is discussed.

Louise Farrenc grew up in Paris during the Revolutionary period that saw the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte and of different monarchies in France. These political changes impacted the Parisian musical scene and influenced Farrenc’s career and that of her friends and colleagues. Farrenc began her career as a virtuoso pianist-composer writing popular works like sets of variations on opera melodies and folksongs, but at the end of the 1830s, she changed her musical path. In the 1840s, like many composers in Central Europe at the time, she abandoned the virtuoso music of her youth to write chamber music with and without piano as well as three symphonies. She became known as a composer of serious music, an upholder of “German” traditions in France, and critics wrote about her compositions as representing the best new music of France. Her Nonet for Winds and Strings provides a culmination of the work she had done up to that point as a composer and performer devoted to finding a “middle way” between the Classical and Romantic traditions.

Chapter 2 studies Scottish responses to English claims, illustrating a shift in Scottish views of independence from parallel demonstrations of imperial sovereignty via historical narratives to more radical notions of consensual acknowledgment of equivalence. My discussion moves from political texts such as the Instructiones for Scottish lawyers at the papal curia, The Declaration of Arbroath, and John Ireland’s The Meroure of Wyssdome, to Andrew of Wyntoun’s Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland, to two romances, John Barbour’s The Bruce and the anonymous Knightly Tale of Gologras and Gawain, and ends with John Mair’s Historia Maioris Britanniae. While some texts assert Scottish independence through existing sovereignty discourse, others, such as Gologras and Gawain, innovatively focus on mutual recognition freed from precedent. The fact that this obscure romance features one of the earliest recorded expressions of what we would call the modern doctrine of recognition reveals the benefits of comparative study across disciplines.

An introduction to the broad subject with a graphical outline of the fundamental equations to be encountered is presented. The reader is informed of any necessary mathematical prerequisites and the structure of the notation to be used is explained.

Humanism, conceived as a worldview concerning, among other things, how we understand ourselves and our relationships with others, and science, conceived as a family of forms of inquiry into the world, are deeply interwoven over our intellectual and cultural histories. This chapter considers their co-evolution as a prelude to the present, reviewing formative aspects of Renaissance humanism and deepening associations of values central to the Enlightenment with precursors to modern science, en route to an arguably peculiar situation today. While some past, humanist conceptions of the aim of science seem intimately connected to the idea of making a better world – one featuring better and more widespread human and planetary flourishing – contemporary thinking seems largely devoid of normative discussions of what science itself is for. This chapter offers reflections on a possible return to a humanist conception of the role and promise of science.

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.