This chapter examines conservative attacks on social media, and their validity. Conservatives have long accused the major social media platforms of left-leaning bias, claiming that platform content moderation policies unfairly target conservative content for blocking, labeling, and deamplification. They point in particular to events during the COVID-19 lockdowns, as well as President Trump’s deplatforming, as proof of such bias. In 2021, these accusations led both Florida and Texas to adopt laws regulating platform content moderation in order to combat the alleged bias. But a closer examination of the evidence raises serious doubts about whether such bias actually exists. An equally plausible explanation for why conservatives perceive bias is that social media content moderation policies, in particular against medical disinformation and hate speech, are more likely to affect conservative than other content. For this reason, claims of platform bias remain unproven. Furthermore, modern conservative attacks on social media are strikingly inconsistent with the general conservative preference not to interfere with private businesses.

Chapter 10 approaches recent research on birth and infancy through a crisis-oriented framework. Birth and infancy are processes of transformations involving caregivers, kin, community, and the state. These take place in sociocultural and ecological contexts, which are many times also changing and adapting to known and unpredictable situations and possibilities. After introducing crisis as a pertinent concept for the study of birth and infancy beyond normative developmental frameworks, the authors describe works on notions of personhood, self, and attachments as processes involving lifecycle and non-lifecycle crises. The chapter approaches crises as disruptions that take place at different levels and temporalities, which are intrinsic to the understanding of birth and infancy contextually, highlighting long-term critical events that permeate societies and are intertwined with policy trends. The final section examines the crises of infancy, including attachment processes entangled in higher-order social crises, such as among socially and economically oppressed populations living with conditions of extreme precarity.

This introduction opens the volume by considering the inherent multiplicity of the idea of relief, which even in the limited purview of the visual arts crosses boundaries of material, form, technique, genre, scale, and style. As a technical term referring to art, moreover, relief is not an ancient idea but a modern one, which first emerged from specific discourses surrounding Italian Renaissance art. The introduction briefly surveys the significance of the historiography of relief in discussions of ancient art before turning to three case studies of ancient vessels decorated in relief – an Archaic Greek pithos from Mykonos, the Derveni krater, and the Townley Vase – which concretely articulate the complexity and variety of ancient relief practices. It then concludes by introducing and offering a synopsis of the ten chapters that follow.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is often called "The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet." This 1996 law grants platforms broad legal immunity against claims arising from both third-party content that they host, and good-faith content moderation decisions that they make. Most observers agree that without Section 230 immunity, or some variant of it, the modern internet and social media could not exist. Nonetheless, Section 230 has been subject to vociferous criticism, with both Presidents Biden and Trump having called for its repeal. Critics claim that Section 230 lets platforms have it both ways, leaving them free to host harmful content but also to block any content they object to. This chapter argues that criticisms of Section 230 are largely unwarranted. The diversity of the modern internet, and ability of ordinary individuals to reach broad audiences on the internet, would be impossible without platform immunity. As such, calls for repeal of or major amendments to Section 230 are deeply unwise. The chapter concludes by pointing to important limits on Section 230 immunity and identifying some narrow amendments to Section 230 that may be warranted.

The chapter examines how anthropologists can produce ethically engaged and scientifically rigorous results in their work with people living at society’s social, political, and economic margins. It builds on long-term participatory research with street-involved youth in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and elucidates affect-focused methodologies to build empathetic relationships with collaborators and to develop critical theoretical insights. The chapter argues against compartmentalizing the researcher’s affect, feelings, and emotions, which is thought to characterize a rigorous scientific approach. The affect, feelings, and emotions experienced in this challenging work are an invaluable source of ethnographic data, allowing greater theoretical insight into emotional economies, where street-involved youths’ careful arrangements of emotives in social interactions create attention, trust, concern, care, or cooperation. Affect, as forms of discourse and governmentality, can construct orders of feeling, found as emotives present in laws, billboards, and news headlines. These matter for discursive changes implemented by governments to sanitize cities of unwanted communities.

This chapter discusses the development of methods in cognitive anthropology. It documents how these methods developed from a focus on documenting shared cultural knowledge to a period where the person returned as a primary locus of cultural experience. The chapter’s discussion is organized into three overlapping historical periods. The ethnoscience period involved strategies for the elicitation of cultural domain taxonomies, componential analyses, and methods that allowed the identification of prototypical members of a category or subcategory. The cognitive schemas period used more structured data collection methods to document cultural schemas that organize items in a cognitive domain and statistical methods for modeling their interrelations. Cognitive anthropologists also developed ways to document cultural schemas in everyday talk, mainly using the method of semi- and unstructured extended interviews and life histories. The cultural models period used structured and unstructured data collection methods and quantitative and qualitative data analysis from the cultural schemas research period. These methods were used to connect culture to variations in individual experience.

Chapter 7 considers how language change over short timespans can be examined using corpus-assisted methods. We present three case studies. The first study involves a corpus of patient feedback relating to cancer care, collected for four consecutive years. A technique called the coefficient of variation was used to identify lexical items that had increased or decreased over time. The second study considered UK newspaper articles about obesity. To examine changing themes over time, we employed a combination of keyness and concordance analyses to identify which themes in the corpus were becoming more or less popular over time. Additionally, the analysis considered time in a different way, by using the concept of the annual news cycle. To this end, the corpus was divided into 12 parts, consisting of articles published according to a particular month, and the same type of analysis was applied to each part. The third case study involves an analysis of a corpus of forum posts about anxiety. Time was considered in terms of the age of the poster and in terms of the number of contributions that a poster had made to the forum, and differences were found depending on both approaches to time.

The volume’s Introduction is divided into four parts. It begins by setting out the analytical framework animating this volume, namely “juristocratic reckoning," which builds on, yet critically modifies and reappropriates, Ran Hirschl’s (2004) notion of “juristocracy” in order to capture a broader process of transformation through which law and legal categories are invested with unusual weight and responsibility beyond their more conventional carrying capacity. Such over-freighting of law typically involves a “dialectics of reckoning,” through which law is first elevated during certain moments in time, which then give way to a second phase, a coming to terms with juristocracy’s failures marked by critique, skepticism, and eventual disenchantment. Within this larger dynamic, certain histories of juristocratic reckoning are imbued with what the Introduction describes as an “iconic indexicality,” in which their supposed historical significance itself enters into the process of juristocratic elevation and then unraveling. Against the backdrop of this conceptual exposition, the Introduction situates Reckoning with Law in Excess in the current conjuncture – an era of crisis and confrontation, characterized by growing debates, within academia and beyond, about the demise of the rule of law. Having located the overall analytical project within different historical, political, and academic contexts, the Introduction then traces the contours of juristocratic reckoning through the diverse and global range of case studies assembled in the volume, including some that are marked by an iconic indexicality and others that are not. It proposes three “taxonomies of reckoning,” which coalesce around concerns with “states of juristocracy,” “alter-legal reckonings,” as well as “juristocracies against the state,” attesting to the persisting centrality – if always contested, variable, and fragmented – of the state form. Last but not least, the Introduction examines the temporality of juristocracy, since viewing the case studies through their various temporalities reinforces the wider point that dialectics of reckoning must be understood through their empirical and historical heterogeneities rather than as exemplars of an abstracted sociolegal category. Revisiting the various case studies, the Introduction shows how the dialectics of juristocratic reckoning are associated with moments, momentums, and mobilizations in the living archives of law that often yield inconclusive or ambiguous results and remain open to multiple interpretations, directions, and futures.

There are three ways of becoming a shareholder: by subscribing to a new issue of shares in a company; by purchasing shares from an existing shareholder; or by transmission of ownership in shares due to the operation of law (for example, where shares are transferred to the beneficiary under a will). In this chapter, we focus on the first method: the issuing of shares and securities as a means of fundraising, commonly referred to as ‘raising capital’ or ‘equity raising’. The term ‘subscription’ describes the relationship where a company issues shares directly to a shareholder. The legal relationship between the company that issues and the shareholder who subscribes for new shares can be analysed using the contractual rules of offer and acceptance.

Our primary focus in this chapter is the issue of securities by public companies. Generally speaking, only public companies are permitted to raise capital by issuing securities to a broad cross-section of the public.

For the final thirty years of their shared life, Michael Field kept an annual, co-authored diary that they entitled Works and Days. While this remarkable text provides a documentary perspective on the personalities and places of the literary and artistic fin de siècle, it also represents a significant literary achievement in its own right. The diary offers its readers an inside look at Michael Field’s interpersonal and coauthorial relationship across its many seasons, while also offering its authors a giant canvas, reminiscent of the span of a Victorian novel, for the exploration of complex questions about authorship, gender, sexuality, and desire.